A new digital portal for partners, an AI apprenticeship program, and new research into the core technologies powering MSP growth were among the announcements at the TD SYNNEX Inspire partner conference this week, held in Greenville, South Carolina and attended by nearly 2,000 partners and customers.
A New Partner Experience
At the conference, attendees got a look at PartnerFirst, the new customer digital experience designed to bring together platforms and capabilities through a unified global framework. PartnerFirst will streamline processes for partners by integrating people, platform, and services, according to the distributor.
Previously, TD SYNNEX partners had to engage with the distributor through multiple portals. “What PartnerFirst has done is aggregated all that into a single experience, so that our customers can actually leverage everything we have available in a consolidated and integrated way,” said Ed Morales, North America VP of AI and high-growth technologies strategic business development at TD SYNNEX. “It helps operationally, it helps speed up engagement with them, it helps them adopt, and it adds value. So this is a really significant offering that we’ve offered the partners.”
The redesigned digital experience combines hardware, cloud, and renewals into one platform. This new cohesive approach includes commerce, education, enablement, and communities and aims to reduce friction and expedite business operations for partners.
The platform includes comprehensive management and insights with features to streamline purchasing, such as a centralized dashboard, intelligent search functionality, and actionable insights to help partners make quick decisions. PartnerFirst also provides access to solution exploration, training and enablement, partner health and fitness, community, and loyalty programs, and uses AI to offer personalized recommendations and identify opportunities.
PartnerFirst was highly requested by partners. During its pilot phase, more than 100 TD SYNNEX PartnerLINK members provided input on the features and functionality during development. The new features are available now for North American partners, with a global release to come.
New Research on Tech Trends Offers Key Insights
TD SYNNEX also revealed its Direction of Technology (DoT) report, which finds that despite economic challenges, blending AI initiatives with cybersecurity, deep specialization, and automation-enabled talent drives growth. More than 1,400 IT providers and resellers across 40 countries contributed to the research.
“As the technology industry navigates extraordinary change, our partners are facing evolving challenges,” said TD SYNNEX CEO Patrick Zammit, in a press statement. “This year’s DoT report shows that leadership comes from building resilience in core technologies, while leaning into next-generation technologies, services, and specialization. By structuring the report around regional perspectives and partner business models, we’ve created a sharper lens on how to deliver value across the global technology ecosystem.”
Core findings from the report include:
AI usage needs to advance to be a competitive advantage. With 75% of respondents identifying AI as critical or very important, it’s clear that it isn’t going anywhere. As AI adoption becomes more commonplace, partners will need to differentiate by offering more advanced services; respondents indicated that AI-powered cybersecurity (58.4%) or AI-driven automation (54.3%) will be most likely have significant impact on the industry.
Cybersecurity efforts are under attack by emerging threats. Cybersecurity remains a fundamental aspect of any MSP, but also has emerged as a leading growth driver for endpoint solutions over the last two years. Major concerns include emerging threats like AI-driven attacks (49.2%) and data breaches (41.9%), say respondents. AI-powered cybersecurity is anticipated to have the most significant impact on the industry.
Operating models must change in the AI era. Talent shortages are still a significant issue in the channel, with 69% of leaders concerned about the hiring and retention of critical team members. This directly contributes to the skills gap, which affects AI (43%), data and analytics (41%), and cybersecurity (39%) implementations. To bridge this gap, the report recommends that MSPs should stay scrappy and rethink their operations and workflows with AI in mind to drive efficiency.
An Apprenticeship-Style Solution to the Skills Gap
To address the chronic skills gap in the industry, TD SYNNEX also announced a specialized apprenticeship program, AI Pioneers, as part of Destination: AI. This apprenticeship program will foster students specializing in AI/ML, computer science, and data science, then connect partners with real-world AI use cases.
“Through AI Pioneers, we are investing in the next generation of innovators to address this knowledge gap, providing hands-on AI experience that will drive meaningful business impacts not just for us, but also for our vendors and our partners,” said Reyna Thompson (pictured above), president, North America, at TD SYNNEX, in a press statement. “This initiative marks an evolution of our AI strategy, showcasing that going to market successfully with AI requires strong partnership across the entire technology ecosystem.”
The first cohort of AI Pioneers, comprised of 16 students, have already developed use cases for AI. These include an agentic platform for hospitality and entertainment, an AI-powered platform that integrates enterprise data and routes inquiries to the correct knowledge source, and an agent-based emergency response platform that will accelerate incident response times and coordinate resources, protecting lives and property.
According to the DoT report, 75% of partners recognize AI as essential to their future, yet nearly half struggle to implement solutions due to talent shortages. The AI Pioneers program endeavors to alleviate this challenge as part of their Destination: AI initiative, allowing partners to tailor AI Pioneer use cases to their own data and regulatory needs.
“End customers that have been deploying and creating their own AI tool sets have been failing more often, because they haven’t defined the outcome. That’s where their issue is,” said Morales. “What’s been successful are things that have been purpose built for an outcome. These use cases we have are now purpose built to deliver an outcome. Instead of trying to develop something for their end customer, we can now position these use cases for discrete customer types, based on verticals and customer size, for them to be delivered to that customer. I think this is where the value comes in play.”
More News from Inspire
TD SYNNEX also announced their loyalty program has concluded its pilot phrase and is now available to all partners. The program is extremely customizable and can be tailored to your business. “We look at who the partner is, what are they trying to achieve, and then they can build their path within the loyalty program. We really make sure that it aligns with your business,” said Calhoun McKinney, VP of Go to Market, TD SYNNEX. “If you’re looking to upskill your team or yourself, there are different training offerings you can take advantage of. If you are taking on new vendors, there are different activations in there. But we also look from an enablement standpoint, where [you might be] proficient in one area, and [we can] give you guidance on other areas of our business and different enablement paths that could be a nice complement to your portfolio.”
Additionally, the distributer announced the launch of their new marketings-as-a-service offering, designed to help MSP partners sell more efficiently. This includes several notable features, including the new Reseller Marketing Portal, which can automate campaigns for resellers, and Marketing Consultation Services, which will help partners identify what’s working, what’s not, and what opportunities are available.
“We noticed that MSPs have the expertise, but there are skills and resource shortages [that hinder them] sometimes. [We wanted them] to be able to take advantage of the marketing resources a company of our size has,” said McKinney. “It really aligned with the feedback we got from partners who were having challenges scaling and taking their business into the digital age of marketing.”
Whether it’s leveraging AI use cases, optimizing operations, or tapping into new marketing resources, TD SYNNEX is putting the tools—and the intelligence—in place for partners to turn industry shifts into tangible advantage.
For more from TD SYNNEX, read about their recent collaboration agreement with AWS in our news roundup.
