Peter O'Neill here. I’ve been invited to speak, again, at the annual Distree EMEA event in Monte Carlo next week. Now in its tenth year, Distree gathers together top executives from tech industry vendors and distributors plus, in recent years, retailers from around EMEA for three days that include a trade show, presentation sessions, and meetings to discuss industry-specific channel topics. The 2011 event drew 950 delegates from 127 tech vendors and over 400 distributors. One of the event highlights for everybody is a process to request and set up formal one-on-one meetings between the various players, similar to our own one-on-one sessions at the Forrester Forums (only their software is better). A total of 5,000 such sessions are scheduled: some at tables in larger rooms around the trade show, many others in private meeting rooms elsewhere in the conference center.  I still have some slots open for those of you who are interested and are going to the event.

My keynote presentation continues on from my speech last year (still being watched on YouTube, I am told) where I described what changes we see happening in the channel due to recent industry trends.  The title is "The Emerging Engagement Channel Model” and leans heavily on Tim Harmon’s October reports with his permission. I will discuss the effect of industry trends such as cloud, consumerization of IT, app stores, and “Apple takes a bite at B2B business” (see below for the agenda).  

I will also show some proof points of our observation that, while many tech vendors still treat the channel as a low-cost, low-capability sales channel, that's changing across the industry. The successful vendors are transforming their sales channels into engagement channels. 

Agree? Disagree?  Need more details?  As always, I’d love to hear from you on this and other topics.

 Always keeping you informed! Peter