Channel Trends in 2025 – Staying a Step Ahead as a Partner

The success equation requires that channel partners recognize, understand, and adapt to the trends affecting the channel for the next 12 months. No one wants to be caught off-guard. To help the global channel community stay a step ahead in 2025, we have identified major channel trends that will affect everyone in the industry, one way or the other. It’s best for IT solution providers that sell enterprise storage solutions to be prepared and develop the right strategies to deal with the following five 2025 channel trends:

1) Channel consolidation continues throughout 2025

2) Expansion of channel partners into services

3) Channel partners embracing hybrid cloud

4) Channel partners embracing AI and cyber

5) Continued pressure on profitability

[1] Channel consolidation continues throughout 2025

As IT solution providers expand globally and strengthen their capabilities, this year will see a continuation of consolidation within the channel. Channel partners will merge with each other to become more competitive and more efficient. Service providers will buy partners, and partners will buy service providers. Partners in one region will buy partners in another geographic region.

Synergies in business strategies and technical capabilities will drive much of this realignment within the channel. The need for channel partners to bolster their capabilities and find new market segments will accelerate creative thinking and the harnessing of new opportunities. Partners will seek to transform their revenue streams.

It’s a reality, and although some people can be skittish about change, it’s not necessarily a “bad thing.” From an end-user perspective and a vendor perspective, this channel consolidation is likely to strengthen the channel as a whole.

Infinidat has been and continues to be committed to the channel for the long term. We always work with partners through their evolution and continue to fuel their visions for success with world-class enterprise storage solutions to provide to their end-user customers. We are well-positioned to help partners through the various stages of consolidation and help ensure that enterprise customers using Infinidat’s enterprise storage systems benefit.

[2] Expansion of channel partners into services

In 2025, we expect to see a strong uptick of channel partners expanding into services, including cloud services, hosting and other types of services. This move to an expansion of services has been happening for a few years now, and the hybrid multi-cloud services is no exception. Rather than only sell systems and software solutions, partners have been increasingly realising that they need to sell services for both

on-premises environments and in the cloud, if they want to increase their business or, in some cases, even stay in business.

There is a deepening realisation in the channel that selling software and systems no longer generates enough profit for them. However, by adding a strong services arm, channel partners can tap into the new revenue opportunities with cloud, cyber security, and AI.

To make it easier, partners can leverage Infinidat’s expansive portfolio of offerings for hybrid multi-cloud, cyber storage resilience, and AI. By partnering with Infinidat, IT solution providers who serve the enterprise market can take advantage of our InfiniSafe® cyber storage solutions, our RAG AI solution, and our support for hybrid multi-cloud environments in Azure and AWS.

Our new-generation InfiniBox® G4 family of enterprise storage systems provide capabilities that deliver a powerful underpinning for the new types of services that partners can offer to their customers. The Infinidat team would love to help you figure out what would work best for you.

[3] Channel partners embracing hybrid multi-cloud

Partners are increasingly seeing the importance of understanding hybrid multi-cloud and how to help end-user customers who are choosing to live and work in a hybrid world – a mix of both on-premises and in the public cloud. Enterprises are not running to the cloud and only doing public cloud. They are not all repatriating their data. They are looking to IT solution providers to help them navigate this hybrid multi-cloud universe.

Times have changed. In the early days of the cloud, channel partners were fighting it. Indeed, partners would grumble at the time, “Oh, we don’t need that cloud stuff.” However, so many partners have come to recognise that there are enormous opportunities for themselves in this hybrid multi-cloud world. They are realising that they can take advantage of the partner programs that cloud providers have established to enable traditional resellers to be able to sell cloud services.

Private cloud seamlessly scales to a public cloud, creating a hybrid multi-cloud environment. Being able to help enterprise customers deploy hybrid multi-cloud solutions will translate into significant revenue for partners in 2025. You don’t want to miss out. Embracing hybrid multi-cloud is the key to the modern services success factor.

Infinidat is on the leading edge of delivering hybrid multi-cloud solutions, equipping partners with our vaunted InfuzeOS™ Cloud Edition – which puts an InfiniBox in the cloud and makes it seamless to manage, as if it is on-premises – as well as providing the advanced tool for supporting a hybrid storage configuration in either Microsoft Azure or Amazon’s AWS.

[4] Channel partners embracing AI and cyber storage resilience

Forward-thinking partners are accelerating the establishment and progress of AI practices and cyber storage resilience practices with their own sales and technical teams as dedicated resources that understand these technology segments. They are setting themselves up to help end-users handle AI

workloads or deploy cyber storage resilience and recovery solutions. Embracing AI and cyber storage are great revenue and margin generators.

Channel partners have the benefit of new opportunities to sell AI and cyber storage solutions along with enterprise storage solutions. For example, not only can a partner sell a new-generation InfiniBox G4 system for higher capacity, but they can sell Infinidat’s GenAI-related RAG solution, as GenAI will need the higher capacity and higher performance of the G4 platform.

Likewise, not only are Infinidat’s award-winning InfiniSafe cyber storage resilience and recovery solutions included in the InfiniBox and InfiniGuard® platforms, but also can be seamlessly integrated with your customers’ enterprise data center-wide cyber security software deployments. You don’t want to ignore cyber resilient storage when developing or refining your comprehensive cyber security strategy. Whether you do AI or cyber storage resilience (or both), you need a powerful enterprise storage solution, which Infinidat provides.

In both instances, channel partners need to cross-educate their teams. The AI team needs to know the impact the right storage solution will have on AI workloads. The cyber team needs to understand the impact the right cyber resilient storage solution will have on providing their enterprise customers with a comprehensive cyber security strategy. Partners should not leave money on the table. They won’t if they sell AI storage solutions and/or cyber resilient storage together with enterprise AI and/or cyber security offerings. If you don’t sell both, a different channel partner will come along and sell storage to your same end-user customer.

[5] Continued pressure on profitability

Entering 2025, channel partners are dealing with serious pressure on their profitability. They are seeking new strategies and solutions to be more profitable. The IT ecosystem is changing dramatically, and partners need to be thinking about how to adapt – and do it, not only for higher revenue, but also profitably. Without question, they need storage solutions that drive cost savings for them to provide solutions and services to their enterprise customers at this higher degree of profitability.

This “profitability trend” ties back to the previous four channel trends that have been outlined in this blog. The continued pressure on profitability is a big reason why the channel is experiencing consolidation. They can't be profitable on their own, so they merge with someone else and pool the profits and the revenues together.

Selling services will allow you to make better margins than just selling a system or just selling standalone software. You can sell storage, servers, networking and software with services wrapped around them, particularly around AI, cyber resilience, and hybrid multi-cloud, as well as standard services. You can establish managed service engagements for recurring revenue streams. You can also evolve your business into being a cloud service provider, taking advantage of Infinidat’s automated enterprise storage solutions to enable you to do it more easily.

Infinidat specializes in helping partners to unlock higher profitability through new approaches to enterprise storage, including cyber resilience, AI, and hybrid multi-cloud. We have a combination of storage performance, capacity, and economics that no other storage vendor can match. Infinidat solutions will only become more in demand as more partners increasingly take action to improve their profitability.