Deep Dive · AVANT · August 2026 Some Parts of the Channel Were Never Going to Be Self-Service I've watched a lot of distribution models get built, rebuilt, and declared obsolete over thirty-plus years in this business — UNIX systems at AT&T Bell Labs, the PC clone wars, LANs going Token Ring to Ethernet to WiFi everywhere, on-prem software becoming SaaS. Every one of those transitions produced a wave of people convinced the old way of selling technology was about to disappear entirely, replaced by something faster and more self-service. And every one of those transitions also proved something else out at the same time: for a meaningful slice of buyers, technology decisions are relationship decisions, not catalog decisions. Someone has to sit across the table, understand what the business actually needs, and stay accountable after the contract is signed. That role never went away. It just kept finding a new form. AVANT is ...
Deep Dive · AppDirect · August 2026 Consolidation Is What a Market Looks Like When It's Maturing I've been in technology long enough to have watched this pattern play out more than once. I was working on UNIX systems at AT&T Bell Labs when the first version of “the internet” was still an internal research network, not a product. I watched the IBM PC clone wars spawn an entire industry — Dell included — out of what looked at the time like commodity chaos. I watched LANs go from Token Ring to Ethernet to the WiFi-everywhere world we now take for granted. I watched on-prem applications become SaaS, and I've spent the years since watching security, backup, and infrastructure follow the same arc. Every one of those transitions had a phase where a handful of companies went on an acquisition run to assemble a full stack faster than they could have built it organically. That phase always looks messy from the outside...