COLUMN: Smart Technology Investments For A New Era

CRN’s Jennifer Follett says says now is the perfect time for solution providers to start to educate themselves on key technology areas that will help them differentiate their business in 2025.

Entering the last quarter of 2024, many solution providers are taking a close look at the technology investments they will make in the coming year as they anticipate and get in front of emerging trends.

Now is the perfect time for solution providers to start to educate themselves on key technology areas that will help them differentiate their business in 2025. Recognizing that security threats aren’t going away any time soon and that GenAI will not be ignored, here are a few suggestions to consider:

Data And Application Security: In an era where “data is the new oil” has become a catchphrase and ransomware-based data theft regularly makes headlines, one could argue that a business’s top priority should be securing its data. That’s why data security posture management, or DSPM, is becoming increasingly important.

The technology shows where sensitive data is housed, who can access it, how it has been used, how secure it is and when something seems out of place. A number of vendors including CrowdStrike, Palo Alto Networks, Rubrik and Wiz have offerings worth exploring.

In that same vein, application security posture management, or ASPM, is a related field that focuses on evaluating and managing whether a company’s applications adhere to security polices and can stand up to threats. Vendors such as Apiiro, Snyk and Veracode, along with several of the DSPM companies mentioned above, are playing there.

These are both areas of the security market that have yet to become commoditized, offering savvy solution providers an opportunity to bring fresh new offerings that go a long way toward shoring up customers’ defenses.

AI PCs: They’re new, they’re buzzy and they require a more consultative sales approach than regular old systems. Businesses have a lot of questions to answer when it comes to whether AI PCs are worth the extra cost (typically a 20 percent to 30 percent premium, according to research firm Circana), such as which employees really need them, what will those users be able to do with them, will they work with legacy applications and which vendor’s chips—AMD? Intel? Nvidia? Qualcomm?—should they have inside? Sales of AI PCs are expected to gain some momentum through the rest of this year before really taking off in 2025, so it behooves solution providers to get comfortable with them now and start developing use cases for what these systems can do, particularly when running AI capabilities like Microsoft’s Copilot+ features locally. There will come a time when there is no distinction between PCs and AI PCs—they will all be AI PCs.

Liquid Cooling: Speaking of AI—and who isn’t these days?—the rise of powerful accelerator chips like the Nvidia GPUs needed to support GenAI has created new demand for liquid cooling in the data center.

In particular, direct-to-chip liquid cooling vendors such as Accelsius, JetCool Technologies and ZutaCore are eager to team with channel partners to deliver solutions for both the data center and the edge.

The latest AI-focused components use a lot more power per socket and give off much more heat than their predecessors, which is why vendors such as Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Supermicro are also developing liquid cooling offerings of their own.

With direct-to-chip liquid cooling, the channel has an opportunity to build distinctive solutions that also have the potential to be more efficient and help data centers cut down on energy usage versus traditional air-cooling methods. How cool does that sound?

These are just a few up-and-coming areas for solution providers to consider as they map out their 2025 technology strategies. What’s important is recognizing that standing still will make it difficult to succeed amid the fast-paced changes that are upon us and which are showing no signs of slowing down. Solution providers need to update their technology stacks to stay ahead of the curve.

The worst thing you can do is wait.