The channel will need to guarantee quality of data their customers use to drive AI-powered analytics and automation and customers will continue to turn to the channel for solutions that enable more intelligent automation and faster decision making, according to Michael Allen at Dynatrace.
With the ongoing boom of AI, in 2024 the channel will have a significant opportunity to help customers manage complexity and data that comes from AI. Security, sustainability, and ensuring quality of data will be a main focus for partners.
The key demand areas for Dynatrace channel partners in 2024 include:
- Digital service outages
- Visibility and control over data
- Sustainability and cloud cost-efficiency
- Productivity of developers
Channel will witness growing demand to help customers reduce the risk of digital service outages
This will happen as enterprises increasingly use generative AI to accelerate software development and innovation. Without proper guardrails, however, using generative AI in software development will lead to more poor-quality code in applications, increasing the risk of service outages. Customers will naturally turn to their channel partners to identify and resolve these problems when they occur.
This will be a major headache, as AI-generated code is poorly documented and difficult to untangle. As a result, the channel will need to find ways to prevent poor-quality code from getting into their customers’ applications in the first place.
These dynamics will create a new opportunity for the channel to build digital immune systems for customers enabled by AI and automation. These systems will protect customers’ applications from the inside by comparing new application code with the previous release and automatically rolling it back if it damages the user experience.
Channel will need to provide visibility and control over the data customers use to drive automation
In 2024, the channel will need to guarantee the quality of the data their customers use to drive AI-powered analytics and automation. Customers will continue to turn to the channel for solutions that enable more intelligent automation and faster decision making. However, as the volume of data continues to grow, it becomes increasingly difficult to ensure that it remains fresh and does not contain anomalies or duplicates.
This makes it challenging for customers to use AI solutions to drive automation safely and securely. In 2024, the channel will see a growing need to tackle this issue by offering solutions with built-in data observability capabilities. This will enable customers to easily identify what data is available across various silos and cloud platforms and understand the relationships and dependencies it contains.
As a result, they will be better able to ensure that the data they use to drive automation is of sufficient quality.
Sustainability and cloud cost-efficiency will be primary for the channel in 2024
In 2024, the channel will see a growing demand to help its customers improve their environmental sustainability and tackle the rising costs of cloud environments.
The increased use of AI solutions will increase cloud resource consumption as organisations use more computing power. This increased consumption will expand carbon footprints through scope 3 emissions created by cloud services.
By applying observability data to new use cases, the channel can help customers offset this impact and remain on track with their sustainability and cost-efficiency initiatives. For example, observability data can provide detailed insights into areas of inefficiency within cloud environments and can be used to optimise resource allocation automatically.
The channel can help customers avoid unnecessary resource consumption through these observabilities use cases, reducing their cloud environments’ costs and carbon emissions.
Customers will turn to the channel to improve productivity of developers
In 2024, organisations will increasingly turn to the channel to improve developer productivity to keep up with the speed of innovation. Customers will seek help from their channel partners to build internal developer platforms, IDPs that enable self-service by productising the tools and processes needed to deliver better quality software faster. Channel partners will, therefore, need to be proficient in platform engineering to build IDPs easily.
They will also need to unify these platforms into a single source of observability and security data to enable their customers to automate development processes accurately, based on a precise understanding of their digital service environments.
Channel will begin to see demise of SIEM solutions
In 2024, the channel will see more customers looking to replace legacy security information and event management, SIEM systems with next-generation threat intelligence and analytics solutions.
Organisations increasingly need to look beyond basic SIEM and log analytics tools to get the insight needed to respond to security threats quickly and decisively.
The channel will have an unmissable opportunity to meet this need by offering threat analysis solutions that combine multiple types of AI to surface detailed context from a broader range of data sources.