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Martin Vilaboy Editor-in-Chief martin@bekabusinessmedia.com Gerald Baldino Senior Editor gerald@bekabusinessmedia.com Percy Zamora Art Director percy@bekabusinessmedia.com Rob Schubel Digital Manager marketing@bekabusinessmedia.com Berge Kaprelian Group Publisher berge@bekabusinessmedia.com (480) 503-0770 Anthony Graffeo Publisher anthony@bekabusinessmedia.com (203) 304-8547 Beka Business Media Berge Kaprelian President and CEO Neil Ende General Counsel Corporate Headquarters 10115 E Bell Road, Suite 107 - #517 Scottsdale, Arizona 85260 Voice: 480.503.0770 Email: berge@bekabusinessmedia.com © 2020 Beka Business Media, All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in any form or medium without express written permission of Beka Business Media is prohibited. ChannelVision and the ChannelVision logo are trademarks of Beka Business Media Each year as we compile our annual Master Distributor Directory, the process itself can reveal some interesting industry insight. While compiling the additions and updates to the Master Distributors’ lists of underlying providers, the services and brands that are repeatedly added any given year tend to correlate directly with areas and technologies that have been buzzing rather loudly during the past 12 to 18 months. Perhaps that’s not surprising, but it is does provide a glimpse into which emerging technologies are gaining traction in the channel and which brands currently are grabbing Masters’ attention. Looking back at the past few years, the 2020 directory updates showed a continued interest among Master Distributors in niche-specific IoT applications, along with further headlong movement into UCaaS and CCaaS. Data center and colocation (Cyxtera, Flexential), meanwhile, continue to be added to provider rosters at a healthy pace, and SD-WAN (Ecessa, Expereo, Aryaka) remains decidedly hot, some COVID-induced supply chain issues notwithstanding. Partnerships also continue to be formed in wireless infrastructure, both satellite (Viasat) and terrestrial (Crown Castle), as well as in smart, international networking (PCCW Global, Colt). For 2020 in particular, there was noted activity among categories that have more recently been encouraged by the shift to “work from home” (WFH) – again, not surprisingly. We saw repeated additions of providers such as Effortless, Iron Mountain, LogMeIn and Retarus, suggesting Master Distributors are serious about developing opportunities within the channel to add managed and virtual desktop, remote access, security, records management, BC/DR and the like to the more traditional services sales. And considering most of these partnerships began form- ing well before the previous quarter, these now-scorching WFH applications likely already had significant momentum well before any shelter-in-place orders were put into place. Coming out of COVID-19 lockdowns, we expect this momentum to only accelerate further. If nothing else, the moves by Master Distributors, seen both in 2020 and for our past annual directories, illustrate the important role Masters play in bringing emergent and newly relevant technologies to the channel, while making sure their agents and sub-agents are in position to provide the types of services and applica- tions their customer are investigating and investing in. The Masters’ Market Decisions LETTER 6 CHANNEL VISION | May - June, 2020