EDGE 2024: Services, security top partner solution priorities for FY25

Partners are set to focus on managed services and security solutions during the 2025 financial year, analysis from Tech Research Asia (TRA) has claimed.

Presented at EDGE 2024, TRA executive consultant and industry analyst Mark Iles, said that partners, by and large, considered solutions involving managed services and security were top priorities in the new financial year.

Out of 16 different areas, managed services was ranked as the top solution to be partners’ first priority, followed closely behind security. As such, Iles suggested that partners would likely be offering managed security services over the financial year.

He also said that the result for security solutions aligns with customer expectations, having previously presented at EDGE 2024 that security is top of mind for most customers’ IT spending for 2025 in Australia and New Zealand.

“It totally makes sense to be leaning into cyber; it’s got a long runway, as we call it. It’s a great opportunity, don’t forget that,” Iles said.

After managed services and security came customer experience and AI and machine learning (ML). While Iles claimed that the result for customer experience was “a little low”, he said that there was still “quite a lot of opportunity there”, there is also the potential to combine these offerings with AI and ML.

Meanwhile, the solution areas that Iles said he was worried about were data and analytics and software-as-a-service (SaaS) and business applications, claiming demand for these two areas are underserved.

“Where I think we’re very undercooked at the moment as a broad representative for many partners [is that] we’ve not made the transition from infrastructure and storage, for example, up to data and analytics,” he said.

“We’re not quite making that jump yet but, at the moment, demand far outstrips supply in data and analytics for what what’s available in the channel.”

When it comes down to some of the greatest opportunities, Iles added, partners need to focus on the biggest imbalances between demand and supply.

“At the moment, AI/ML [has a] massive imbalance between demand and supply. Data and analytics [also has a] massive disconnect. So, these are all great opportunities,” he said.