On 18th July a new forum for the channel in Italy called #DISTRICT was inaugurated in the trendy and recently renovated tech district of Milan – the initiator was G11 Media and Channel City, who invited CONTEXT to present our reseller and channel research and use the occasion to announce the distributor of the year awards for 2018.

Italy is the country, from our recent research, where resellers most like coming together at events. So in the Italian business culture it is clearly important for people to engage with each other, and keep up to date with the latest trends. The brains behind this new format, Marco Maria Lorusso, made it clear that the topics would be current, relevant, presented by experts, short in duration and long on exchange.

With that as the set-up, there was a clear hunger at the evening’s session to learn about what resellers are thinking through the results of the ChannelWatch survey. Italy is a model of engagement between distributors and resellers – it is the major European country where the participating distributors managed to achieve the highest number of reseller responses to the ChannelWatch survey – an impressive 1,610 responses. The distributors emphasised their interest in resellers expressing their voice. In a world as fragmented as the reseller community, it is important to have such opportunities, and in CONTEXT we are keen to develop the involvement of both distributor and reseller communities in all countries in this process of articulating what resellers are doing and thinking.

The results of the survey have been sent to the Italian distributors who participated in the survey – without their support it would not be possible to gain such powerful traction in the market, and we are grateful to them for this. The full ChannelWatch report will be published in early September and will be available for sale to all those interested in using this process to understand and engage with resellers in the technology industry.

Here is a link to the keynote given by Adam Simon, Global Managing Director of CONTEXT, at the evening on 18th July for those who want to have a sneak preview of the results!