The New ‘Frontier Partners’: Selling Change, Not Technology

‘We don’t sell technology. We sell change. Some business does something one way, and one day we show up with some new technology and ask them to do it differently the next day. Change is really hard. Change is hard personally, and it’s hard in an organization. Change is expensive and it takes a long time, and people have scars from change,’ says Tiffany Bova, chief strategy and research officer at The Futurum Group.

IT distributors and vendors looking for success in the fast-moving world of AI will need to connect with a new breed of channel partners who are not focused on selling technology.

Tiffani Bova, chief strategy and research officer at The Futurum Group, an Austin, Texas-based analyst firm, told distributors and vendors at last month’s GTDC Summit in Oceanside, Calif., that the IT industry is moving from a focus on how deploy and integrate technology to what is the intelligence a business can get from it.

“We don’t sell technology,” Bova said. “That’s going to sound funny, but we don’t sell technology. We sell change. Some business does something one way, and one day we show up with some new technology and ask them to do it differently the next day. Change is really hard. Change is hard personally, and it’s hard in an organization. Change is expensive and it takes a long time, and people have scars from change.”

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Many years ago, IT providers might ask clients to do two to three digital transformations a year, and now that’s up to 10 or 12, which is a lot of change for organizations to absorb, Bova said.

“As vendors, you are saying we need you to buy more, that this is the latest and greatest,” she said. “And then as solution providers and channel partners, we’re saying we need you to buy more, and we’re going to help you do it and help you understand it, and the customer is overwhelmed, right?”

To meet this challenge requires a new type of channel partner Bova called the “frontier partner.”

“They’re really pushing the envelope on frontier AI, on agentic, on intelligence,” she said.

The phrase “data is the new oil,” which has been around for a long time is interesting, but not totally relevant to how business works, Bova said.

“You can’t pull up to an oil rig and fill up your car with crude oil,” she said. “It has to go through the refinery. The refinery, in this case, is analytics. The gasoline and petrol that powers the business is insights and intelligence. So I just said, we’ve moved from integration to intelligence, and so we have to move from just thinking about the gear or the technology or the hardware and even the software and say, how does that help us make better decisions at the moment that matters, when we’re sitting in front of our customers.”

The challenge for solution providers, distributors, and vendors, is how this technology and intelligence can be used by businesses to make better decisions as they move along this next wave of transformation, Bova said.

“These frontier partners are as disruptive as the born-in-the-cloud partners were,” she said. “Remember, distribution didn’t have a way to onboard an ISV if they were selling something they built. What did you have for them? They didn’t need financing. They definitely didn’t need, I’m going to over generalize, ‘pick, pack, and ship,’ right? They didn’t need training. They were developing their own applications. They were integrating multiple clouds. Where was your value?”

Distribution and the channel needed a marketplace strategy as a way to introduce those ISVs into a broader ecosystem, something that the hyperscalers now do in a bigger way, said Bova (pictured).

“These frontier partners are agentic first, very talent-heavy,” she said. “You’re seeing the same thing happen which happened the last time with born in the cloud, with the Accentures and Deloittes of the world buying these born-in-the-cloud companies like Cloud Sherpas or Appirio [in the past]. There’s new ones that are being acquired by these companies in order to get that talent really quickly. And make no mistake, they may or may not see value in what we all provide.”

In the past, IT companies launched some new products every 12 to 18 months, and then SaaS companies showed how to do that more frequently, Bova said.

“And now, every week, one of the big AI companies is launching something,” she said. “They’re going to wipe out some industry, right? This week they’re going to wipe out the analyst firms. Next week they’re going to wipe out SaaS companies. I’m like, good luck. When I when someone says that to me, I look at them and in my head I go, ‘Am I really having a build-versus-buy conversation again for 2026?’ But sure enough, yes, we are.”

Build-versus-buy is a tricky slippery slope, Bova said, because companies need to focus on their core business.

“Are you a CRM company?” she said. “Or do you make widgets? If you make widgets, are you going to use Claude or Vibe to create your own CRM? There’s 1,000 reasons why you shouldn’t do that, not just because I used to work in Salesforce. It’s bad idea.”

With these newer companies launching new things every week, the challenge for distribution is to be dexterous, Bova said.

“You have to continue to make money today in the same way you are with the same group of partners that you have, while at the same time, you’re putting an eye on the prize of these frontier partners that are going to have very different needs,” she said. “They’re going to be very data-intensive. They’re going to be very analytics-driven, and they’re going to be agentic first.”

And just making AI a part of one’s business is not enough, Bova said.

“We’re moving away from it being individual to now we have this sort of model orchestration, because there’s not one model,” she said. It’s multiple models. Some of you may have platformed on one model, whether that’s Gemini or OpenAI or ChatGPT or Copilot, whatever it is. But it’s mostly going to be model orchestration where people are using multiple models because you can. But the entire thing is dependent on data.”