If we are, as history would indicate we are bound to sooner or later, going to slip into tougher financial times, things may not look so bad for solution providers that stay on top of current technology trends, said Peter Larocque, president of North American Technology Solutions at Synnex.

Larocque, speaking at the distributor’s annual Synnex Inspire Canada event in Toronto recently, said that “good GDP or bad GDP, IT’s a a good place to be.” The big driver here is digital transformation, one that’s forecasted to take IT spend from about $5 trillion (U.S.) worldwide today, to $14 trillion by 2030, at which point IT will represent as much as 10 percent of GDP for heavily-invested nations.

And it’s not just that more money is being put into IT, Larocque said. It’s that investments in IT are becoming much more investments in the business — decisions being made at a CEO and CMO level rather than the CIO level, and the role of those investments is about driving up value or organizations and improving stock valuation, rather than the “keeping the lights on” discussion typical of the IT department. 

“You’re going to continue to see that with markets like cloud, mobility, IOT, and adjacent marketplaces like security,” Larocque said. “The future is bright, and we’ve been feeling that for the last few years and have invested as such.”

So what can solution providers expect from Synnex to help make those big numbers happen? Larocque provided some hints.

First of all, he noted, despite all this talk of new areas, “the legacy business we all have is still significant,” and he said that Synnex and solution providers alike have to “keep our eyes on the road” while also building out in new directions with new technologies and new selling motions. He said that in this space, Synnex would focus heavily on the alignment of products and services into solutions, going to the extent of having each product team working with a corresponding services team “on the services that will drive the business.”

To support this business, distribution will have to be more efficient than ever, Larocque said, and will “have to continue to lower the cost to serve.” He stressed the importance of being close to the company’s resellers, and the distributor frequently notes that with six distribution facilities across Canada, it has more local presence than its peers.

“The business here [in Canada] is strategic to us, it’s a big business, and we’ve invested heavily in local operations,” Larocque said. “We have a strong belief in the Canadian economy, in the IT business, and in all of us in this room.”