Global President of Arrow’s enterprise computing solutions business, Eric Nowak was featured in a recent CRN article, where he shared his perspective on the current distribution landscape and how vendors and channel partners are impacted. The following is an excerpt of the article.
What are some of the biggest issues that your channel partner customers are facing, and what is Arrow doing to help mitigate them?
For the legacy partners, their biggest issue is to make their journey to the cloud. Basically, they need to completely change their business model. They need to change the way they work. They need to change what they are doing with their customers. What we are doing is basically everything around the platform. We are providing a platform that allows every partner to do whatever they need to manage their subscriptions in the cloud, including the deployment, the management, the orchestration, and so on. These guys cannot develop their own platform. They cannot scale. They cannot connect directly to 10 or 15 suppliers. They need to have solutions to complete what they are selling to their customers. Customers want complete solutions. So we are also bringing to our platform some managed services partners can use to complement their own services. So basically, we are trying to help them build their own solutions in the cloud. The platform is AI-enabled. It’s just a question of scale. We can do it because we have thousands of partners on the platform. They cannot because they don’t have the scale.
Do you still see any partners resisting that move?
Some partners may choose to stay in the infrastructure business. They know, once again, not everything will go to the cloud, and so you still have some people that will need to install security stuff, networking stuff, compute and storage. And so some partners continue to focus on what they know, meaning the infrastructure and on-site. ... Nobody is buying a new solution now in the mid-market for on-prem, so they need to go to the cloud.
What else is Arrow doing to address channel partners’ issues?
We need to continue to invest massively in our platforms. This is a big investment that we are doing. We need to help and enable the channel, the partners, and it’s a lot of work to make sure that we have the enablement in place. And one of the issues that we have is balance because basically it’s not easy to find the right talent today to do all the migrations from on-prem or to do this AI stuff. Finding the right talent is tough.
What is Arrow doing in terms of helping partners transition to an AI focus in their business? Are you doing a lot of evangelising, explaining to partners that they need to do it, or do you focus on helping them do it?
Both. So first, we are building an AI offering on our platform the same as we did some years ago when we built our cloud offering so we try to convince new players to be on our platform and so that we can promote and sell this. And we are selling all the AI offers of all [important] vendors: IBM, AWS, Microsoft and so on. And then we are building agentic capabilities on the platform so that the partners who are using our platform don’t have to develop their own solutions. They can use the platform, and the platform is already AI-enabled. And that is very important for scale. We can do it because we know that hundreds and thousands of partners will come to the platform, and we can spend the time, the resources, the money to develop it. Most of the partners do not have the capabilities, the competencies and the time.
Read the full article that was published on CRN on 2 March 2026. Connect with your local Arrow team to explore all the ways we can lend our expertise and help you grow.