Europe's largest technology distributor is arguing that the channel has overcomplicated itself. Mark Appleton, Group Lead Vendor Ecosystem Development at ALSO Group, says partners are spending more time navigating vendor programmes, commercial models, and certification requirements than they are serving customers — and that AI is about to make it worse.
ALSO Group connects more than 135,000 resellers to hardware, software, and services from over 800 vendors across 31 European countries. From that position the company sees both the breadth of what's available and how much friction sits between a partner deciding to sell something and actually being able to do it.
The argument Appleton is making is not new in the channel, but the timing has sharpened it. HPE's UK channel leadership recently called publicly for greater simplicity in the partner experience, a signal that the largest vendors are hearing the same thing. And AI is accelerating the pressure: delivering an AI solution in practice requires infrastructure, cloud services, cybersecurity, software, data pipelines, and specialist expertise, often sourced from multiple providers with different commercial agreements and enablement tracks.
Appleton put it directly: "The IT ecosystem has become incredibly powerful, but it has also become incredibly complex. Partners today have access to more technology, more vendors and more ways of delivering services than ever before, but choice only creates value if it is easy to navigate. We cannot keep adding new technologies and programmes to the ecosystem and assume that partners will simply absorb that complexity."
The friction shows up in a structural way: customers don't purchase by vendor category. They have a business problem and expect a partner to assemble the right combination of solutions. That makes the partner the integrator — responsible for stitching together multiple vendor relationships, commercial terms, and support models on behalf of each customer. Every additional layer of programme complexity taxes the partner rather than the vendor.
Appleton described where he thinks the industry needs to shift: "Customers don't think about technology in individual vendor categories. They have a business problem and expect their technology partner to find the right combination of solutions to address it. That puts partners in the position of having to connect multiple parts of the ecosystem on the customer's behalf. Vendors, distributors and technology providers therefore have a responsibility to remove as much friction from that process as possible."
For ALSO, this means moving its own emphasis from product access toward integration — helping partners combine technologies into deliverable solutions rather than simply listing what's available. Whether that shift changes the partner economics meaningfully, or becomes another programme layer on top of existing ones, will depend on execution.
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