Edge Solutions: Solution Provider Community More Relevant Than Ever Before

‘All of our clients and partners that we work with on a daily basis are asked to do more with less. Less people, less money, less resources, less time, so the partner community is needed now more than ever,’ says Edge Solutions co-founder Michael Haley.

Julie Haley, co-founder and of CEO of Edge Solutions, an Atlanta-based solution provider, said that since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic it feels like solution providers are “drinking out of a firehose with a myriad of new vendors and a slew of very difficult challenges that are facing our clients.”

Haley, along with her husband, Michael, who is also co-founder of Edge Solutions, spoke at The Channel Company’s Best of Breed Conference in Atlanta last week about the state of the channel and where the market is pivoting.

“We wonder where do we focus our resources,” Julie Haley said. “And most importantly, how do we help our clients continue to make that transition from using IT as a back-office function to what we really should be doing, which is delivering it as a business driver.”

Michael Haley said it wasn’t long ago that he and Julie were sitting at a conference and were hearing about “the pending irrelevance of the solution provider community, that everything was going to the public cloud.”

He recalled hearing that it was going to solve customers’ IT complexities and was going to be much more cost-efficient.

“Fast forward to today and we see that the cloud has been great for the proper use case, but in most cases it has not made our clients’ lives easier,” he said. “In many cases, it has made it more complex.”

[Related: 4 Reasons Why Everything-As-A-Service Can Capture More Customers]

And because of the cloud, he said the solution provider community is more relevant today in solving IT challenges.

“All of our clients and partners that we work with on a daily basis are asked to do more with less. Less people, less money, less resources, less time, so the partner community is needed now more than ever,” he said.

Bob Carney, vice president of sales for ePlus Asset Finance Group, a finance solutions company based in Herndon, Va., liked the perspectives the twoexecutives gave.

“A lot of the channel discussion allowed me to [understand how to] better adapt, present and structure transactions that come our way,” he said.

Nathan Phinney, director of business development at DataPath, a Modesto, Calif.-based solution provider, said his company is heavily focused on public cloud desktops right now.

“There’s a strategic opportunity with Windows 11,” he said. “A lot of the existing hardware is aging out and we believe that cloud desktops with Windows 365 is a way to extend the new operating system and all of its features and benefits to existing hardware. It’ll also be good to be able to use that across platforms with whatever screen people happen to have available to them, which has become really important during a global pandemic.”