On site at SAS Innovate: global channel chief John Carey on the shift to indirect, the TD SYNNEX bet, and the case for the transparent box

Robert Dutt: Hello, and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca, and your host for the show.

Still coming to you this week from Grapevine, Texas, from SAS Innovate 2026. If you caught our last episode with Ryan Macdonald, leader of SAS Canada, you heard the view from the Canadian perspective: the AI maturity story, OSFI E-21, and the mid-market channel opportunity. This time I’m going a level up.

My guest today is John Carey, senior vice president of global channels at SAS Institute. John’s about four years into the role, and he came in with a specific mandate: to rethink what partnering looks like for a company with a long history of advisory and delivery through partners, but limited co-sell and essentially no resale motion. Four years later, the picture looks pretty different. There’s a clear market segmentation model, a distribution partnership with TD SYNNEX, an active project underway right now to migrate direct customers to indirect, and a 30% channel revenue target that’s already evolving into something even more ambitious.

We talk about all of it: what he found when he arrived, how the direct-to-indirect transition is actually landing with customers, what the partner economics look like for a new SAS partner in 2026, how this week’s AI Navigator and agentic AI announcements change the channel opportunity, and what he thinks the SAS channel looks like in three years if things go well.

Let’s get right into it. My chat with John Carey.

John, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it.

John Carey: Appreciate it. Good to be here, Robert.

Robert Dutt: You’re about four years into leading channels for SAS if memory serves and I’m able to do the math—both of which are somewhat suspect. Can you tell me a little bit about what you found when you got here and the quick version of the journey in building the channel from your point of view?

John Carey: Got it. Well, first of all, you absolutely did get it right. It is, come June, four years since I joined SAS. Now, the first thing—I was brought in by the ELT, with an ELT remit to rethink partnering for SAS’s future. So we had a history of partnering. If you think about where SAS came from, a lot of advisory engagement, a lot of delivery through partners, but not necessarily a lot of co-sell and certainly no resell.

So one of the remits coming in was to assess the business, understand what the opportunities were, and build a program that allows us to create a growing business that is driven by partners and owned by partners. And we get the acceleration and the leverage of the partner community that all software vendors are seeking and hope to take advantage of.

When I came in, I would say we lacked maturity in our partnering in some areas. We were definitely mercurial in a way that wasn’t helpful. Partners didn’t have consistency, and we weren’t persistent in holding ourselves and our partners accountable. There was a lot of, “If only… it’s not me, it’s them.”

So phase one: get to a single source of truth. So we introduced undisputed channel revenue. Let’s agree and measure together the value of the channel in our business. The other thing we did is we segmented, for the first time, our market. We had historically looked at our install base as a quadrant, an ABCD, thinking about propensity for growth and saturation. And we moved to the more traditional pyramid, but with a binary segmentation. So above the line: enterprise; below the line: channel.

And that allowed us to prioritize routes to market. So in the enterprise, it’s very much a co-sell partner delivery model. GSIs are a very strong focus. Technology partners are a very strong focus up there. And then certain regional boutique consulting partners continue to be high value, particularly in our vertical industries—FSI, public sector, life sciences.

Below the line, the story was: how do we give this business to the partners, give partners autonomy, and allow them to determine their own future? So that was really about taking business that was historically direct and making it indirect. Actually, this year, we have a whole project where we are moving our channel direct install base to indirect. So, communicating with the customer about why it’s good for them, communicating to the partner of what they need to do to be ready, and then putting that fuel into an engine that we’ve been building over the last few years with partners with strong SAS skills, but who were traditionally services partners and have had to build something of a resale muscle.

We’re also starting to recruit some more traditional high-powered solution providers, as well as really focusing on managed service provider opportunities with partners who not only can sell the solution, but they host and operate the solution for the customer. And the nexus of this was finding ways to bring the enterprise value of SAS to the non-enterprise client base, and to do that through our local superpower, which is our partner community who understand those customers and their pain points in a way that we just don’t have the resources to do, and to make sure they’re empowered with the kind of tools and the right cost structure to be able to give that enterprise value at a non-enterprise price point.

Robert Dutt: How has that direct-to-indirect transition gone? How does that land with customers? It’s got to be a bit of a communication challenge because you want to make sure you’re not positioning it as “we’re stepping away from you,” even if you’re introducing a partner into the mix.

John Carey: Yeah. So this is what we’re going through right now. So first of all, there’s the angst as a vendor of saying, “I’m about to go to a customer and say our transactional relationship is going to change.” But really, our contractual relationship remains intact. The contract between the end user and the vendor stays in place. We are responsible for delivering on the value of the platform or the solution provided.

What we’re doing is we’re rerouting the transaction through a partner, which means we can support more currencies. We can support different pricing conditions and payment terms that, as an enterprise, we’re just not able to entertain for anyone but the largest customers. And so our positioning is: it gives our customers far more flexibility and more intimate engagement than being part of a long tail of customers for a large enterprise that end up in this pool that you call “programmatic”—which we all use the words, but none of us like those words. And a way of avoiding that is to say, “This isn’t programmatic. This is channel-managed,” because this is where the partners are stepping in to make sure that that customer feels like the most important customer of that partner, rather than the not-most-important customer of a large vendor.

Robert Dutt: Can you tell me a little bit more about the managed services motion and how you see that evolving, especially as SAS overall has become much more open in terms of the whole structure there—getting into MCP and acknowledging that a lot of times customers are going to be consuming SAS’s insights and abilities through the chatbots and other channels, for want of a better word?

John Carey: Well, look, first of all, I’ve certainly lived through enough inflection points to recognize one as it comes along. And this is an inflection point where there’s opportunity and risk. When I think about the philosophy from the channel, certainly with channel customers, I want those customers hosted by partners. Why? Because a big part of their TCO challenge is just giving them access to software doesn’t mean they can afford the resources to operate and maximize return on that software.

If they can be supported by a managed service provider, by a solution provider who’s hosting on their behalf, now they have access to actual educated, certified SAS resources who are dedicated to making sure they maximize the return on that investment. And so with that underpinning, you then think about the integration of the chatbots—the Anthropic’s, Copilot, Gemini integration. It’s pretty scary for mid-sized customers to be thinking about this. I mean, do most people know that if you put your data up on those things that it’s no longer privileged? Do most people know that there’s an element here which feels like social media, that we’ve since learned who’s being monetized here? This feels free, but actually I’m feeding this model all of my proprietary data to get a presumed efficiency which may or may not turn up, in the hope that it doesn’t hallucinate.

Well, when I look at that and I think about SAS making data ready for the AI lifecycle, SAS having a governance infrastructure that allows us to identify bias, to make sure—now, as you heard announced yesterday, the AI Navigator that allows us to track these agents and ensure that we understand whether agents are behaving in a way that is copacetic with the intention of the business user. And if one fails or starts to behave in a way that is not aligned with the organization, you’re able to flag that. You’re able to communicate that to other connected agents so that you can source the problem and solve the problem.

I think when we think of it in that way, this is a real opportunity for the channel to step in. These moments of “How do I bridge the technology into value?” is the perfect space for resellers, service providers, solution providers to step in, navigate that complexity for the customer, give the customer confidence with the technology choices that they’re making—that they are safe and secure with SAS.

As I frame it, we’re a 50-year-old vendor who’s been in the most regulated industries. Others out there turn up with an easy button and a black box. We turn up with a transparent box and a governance framework that means we acknowledge nothing’s easy, but once you engage in this, you will survive audit. You will be able to understand where problems occurred and why, and you will be able to remediate.

Robert Dutt: A few years ago, maybe about three, you guys signed on TD SYNNEX. I think that’s the first major global distribution partner for you guys. What was the hypothesis behind that move, and how has it worked out?

John Carey: So the general hypothesis was—and again, I’ve been in the industry a long time. I think every year we hear the headline, “This is the year distribution is no longer relevant.” I actually did a column on that not too long ago.

Robert Dutt: There you go.

John Carey: And meanwhile, they continue to provide new and incremental value. One of the hypotheses was as we moved to indirect, there is obviously—from going from thousands of customers to hundreds of partners, going from hundreds of partners to one distributor allows us to get that leverage effect through quotes, transactions, credit. Something that provides a security to us as a vendor that allows us to lean in, but also provides structure and options at the partner level that they need, but are not a priority for us as a vendor.

So TD SYNNEX offers financing terms. They will invoice on behalf of the partner. They will put together creative fiscal options that allow customers to stretch. They’ll even offer to assess credit based on the end user’s credit rather than the partner’s credit. Those are fantastic services that just, frankly, as a vendor, aren’t our core business. So what we’re able to do is to address more customers through more partners and do the thing that we’re really good at: solve their data and AI problems through Viya and our solution stack and bring value to those businesses.

Robert Dutt: Given all that, a while ago the goal was set for 30%, I think, of revenues through channels. Where does that sit today? What’s the momentum looking like? And what do you see as sort of remaining obstacles along the way to that goal?

John Carey: Yeah, so great progress. So if I think about segments—the channel segment, which is 100% indirect, is between 10% and 15% of our business. In the enterprise, there’s a lot of channel fulfillment and engagement. And so overall, we are very close to that 30% of the total business being with or through a partner. But we want to—the new goal is, as all goals change: I want to be 30% of the overall business with that channel segment. With that segment of customers that are exclusively partner, and therefore be a strong contributor into the enterprise accounts with partner co-sell, partner fulfillment, and partner delivery. So future’s bright. All goals, as they need to, change over time and the bar increases. And we are doing a great job of forcing that bar up every year so that we have to ask more of ourselves and our partners so that we make sure we focus on delivering value to our customers.

Robert Dutt: Let’s talk about what it looks like to be a SAS partner today in terms of the economics and all that kind of good stuff. What does success look like economically for a partner today? And how is that story changing as the product portfolio and the goal shifts?

John Carey: As you say, goals are made for changing. And especially in this industry, things change fast. So maybe a good way of thinking about this is: what’s the conversation with a new partner that we’re onboarding? And one of the things we’ve tried to do is to say, “Hey, look, we will have the packaging so that you can focus on sales readiness first and build a book of business with us.” So that’s where we leverage package service offerings from our SAS consulting organization that are resellable by partners.

We are rationalizing our product portfolio for the SMB market to be far more prescriptive. We know what works, but we still have the full enterprise list of offers, and frankly, it doesn’t add value. It adds something of a confusing layer of options that aren’t really relevant for many of the use cases and customers that we and our partners specifically deal with.

So phase one: build an annuity business on the resale model. As you become—and as it makes sense in your business—to invest in services headcount, then those package service offerings get replaced by your own services. And it is a services-rich business. The great thing about a data and AI platform is once you start answering questions and you’ve built that trust with the client, more and more questions occur. And models need to be refined; models need to be promoted. And as a partner, if you are doing this in a regular cadence, you are building a scenario where that customer trusts you as their trusted advisor and comes to you for those service elements.

So the baseline is—and we pay more on New than we do on Renew. There’s an annuity business build out there that is driven by sales enablement and sales focus and strong investment in demand generation on our channel marketing center platform, where you can run co-branded campaigns and drive real top-of-the-funnel demand. We’ll work with you on getting that down into closed business, and we know how to do that very well.

As it becomes reasonable for you to make investments in technical resources where you know you have a book of business, you can apply those resources too. That’s where we ask partners to lean in. And at that point, they are now attaching services, and that grows their—and we know that services are more profitable than the resale. So it’s table stakes: build a book of business that’s got an annuity associated, and then use that to catalyze investment in more profitable services over time, which is something of a sea change. When I came in, there was a lot of investment required before a partner was allowed to sell. And we’ve inverted that to say, “I want it to be easy for you to sell and we’ll support you.” And when you’ve got the right amount of business behind you, then it makes logical sense for you to invest. And that investment is the outsized return for you as a partner.

Now, for our existing partners, it’s the inverse, right? They were already doing a lot of delivery. They know how to do the services. This now gives them a vehicle to attach those services to that’s more autonomous and less dependent on a SAS seller to pull them in after. And so with that, they’ve made great investments in sales functions within their organizations for product sale and attaching their own services straight out of the gate.

Robert Dutt: Big announcement week this week with AI Navigator on governance, the new agentic AI capabilities across the board, the industry accelerators. From a channel strategy standpoint, do these announcements change who you’re looking for in terms of partners, or is it an opportunity to do more and different things with the base?

John Carey: I think the honest answer is both. If I think about our GSIs, the accelerators, the models, the agentic capabilities are incredibly attractive to our global systems integrator partners. And it gives them a reason to lean in even more with us around account telemetry, account planning, and moving out of that advisory engagement into delivery engagement with them. And we are now a very modern platform that has been very considerate of where our customers are.

We’re a company who reflects the personality of our founder. I think of that Teddy Roosevelt quote: “Walk quietly, but carry a big stick.” Well, we walk quietly, but with our platform and our solutions, that’s a very big stick. It makes a lot of noise. And I think what you saw at this Innovate was kind of something we’ve known for a while, but now the market is starting to recognize is that there’s a lot of significant growth value there for existing customers as they move to Viya and the Viya solutions with the agentic AI integrations, with the accelerators.

So that’s happening, I think, on the other side. We are now at a point of inflection where enterprise capabilities are expected at non-enterprise accounts. And how we execute on that is through partners and through prescription and optimization, so that when we engage, we give those customers a very clear message of what they can do and what they can achieve and what it’s going to cost them. And that is all within their budgetary expectation, and we execute on that relentlessly and consistently with our partners.

Robert Dutt: When I chatted with Ryan Macdonald, who heads up the Canadian operations, a bit earlier, he talked about—especially in competitive situations—what he called a “hidden SAS situation,” where organizations will find that they’re running business-critical decisions on stuff, on SAS, that they’ve almost forgotten about. It just kind of sits there, it just works. And the conversation becomes about: how do you upgrade and grow from that foundation? How do you find that conversation showing up in the partner community? And if it is, in fact, a partner conversation, how are you equipping partners to realize that opportunity?

John Carey: Yeah, so I think that’s very much a conversation with our established enterprise industry accounts. And so how I think that shows up is our conversations with our global systems integrator partners. They’ve made investments in assessment tools and accelerators and migration pathways that help a customer understand how they are currently using their SAS estate and what critical functions are being run on that estate, so they can help a customer understand the actual relevance.

It’s like, I live in Florida, right? I only notice the air conditioning when it doesn’t work. But you don’t switch off the air conditioning unless you’ve got an alternative ready to go. And their job is to make sure customers, when making strategic decisions, understand the impact of decisions they may make. And that, I think, creates an opportunity for how we’re talking about: “We’re going to actually upgrade you so that you have better climate control, right? You have new options. It can be more cost-effective as it scales and it can meet more of your needs. And you don’t lose the critical foundation that you’ve been building your business on.”

I think there’s some of that recognition that we’re a relatively humble organization, but I’m starting to hear more of our customers acknowledge, more of our partners talk about, “Hey, let’s not shy away from the fact you’re running your business on SAS.” This is critical functionality. We hear billions being managed. When we think about our price book, we talk about billions of assets under management. I mean, that’s the order of magnitude of what we’re managing from a risk or a fraud perspective. And we want to make sure that we can meet customers where they are and make sure they make decisions that are good and solid for their business.

Robert Dutt: Another one that came up with Ryan was the idea of increasingly seeing GSI plus niche specialist partner and kind of the ecosystem play. I’m curious if that’s a deliberate strategy. Is it something you’ve observing and adopting to?

John Carey: For me, I think it’s always been there. I think GSIs have always really effectively subcontracted in specific expertise and niche value as needed when doing delivery. I think what’s happening now, again, with disruptive inflection points—what I believe we see happening is things that were already happening become very visible. So I think what we’re seeing right now is, rather than that being a subcontract relationship, it’s a more explicit contract with GSI, contract with boutique partner with very specialized expertise. And it’ll settle over time, and it may even go back to more of a subcontract model. But I think that’s great. We’re all acknowledging that there is value in industry expertise, and even within industry expertise, there is real value in some very niche expertise that requires that level of investment. And you should be paying to make sure you get the right value resource working on your project.

Robert Dutt: If I’m a Canadian reseller or a system integrator who hasn’t worked with SAS to date listening to this and thinking, “All right, they have an interesting story, they’re in an interesting place.” What’s the right profile for a partner for you right now? What are you looking for? What do you actually need more of in the market?

John Carey: I would say I’m looking for solution providers. So I’m looking for partners who can address mid-market organizations’ needs across data and AI. With a strong relationship with TD SYNNEX, great credit, skills in infrastructure, security, data, who are looking to an adjacent expansion where bringing in SAS as a way to modernize that data for the AI lifecycle and turn that data now into insight and from insight into workflow integrated with agentic capabilities. If that’s your bag, don’t just knock on the door, knock our door down. We want to talk to you.

Robert Dutt: Fair enough. Final question: what does the SAS channel look like in three years if things go well and there aren’t additional changes along the way? What would you point to and say, “That’s the thing we’re building towards”?

John Carey: I think the service provider in the mid-market and below will become a far more dominant motion. I think in the enterprise, we’ll see even more integration of partners from a fulfillment perspective as customers start to push vendors to engage with them through the advisors who have guided them through this transformative period.

And I think as a vendor, you just have to acknowledge that the customer is going to tell you who they want to buy from. The customer is going to tell you who they want to work with. And as a vendor, what you want to say is, “Well, if they have the skills, we should lean in. If they don’t have the skills, we should be really honest about the fact that we think you could be better served by a partner that looks with this profile and skills, and here are some we would recommend.” But again, the customer is ultimately going to make the trade-offs.

But I would say managed service providers are increasing, and partners building their own value on top of the Viya platform in industries where we have yet to unlock use cases are becoming more and more the norm.

Robert Dutt: Especially since so much of the audience is in that MSP space, I think that’s going to be one that hits home. Well, John, I appreciate you taking the time on what I’m sure has been a very busy week.

John Carey: I appreciate it, Robert. Thank you for the time.

Robert Dutt: There you have it—John Carey from SAS Institute. I’d like to thank John for his time and thank you for listening.

Few things I’m taking away from this one. First, the framing I kept coming back to is the transparent box versus the black box. Others turn up with the easy button and a black box. SAS turns up and says nothing is easy, but when you engage with us, you’ll understand where problems occurred and why, and you’ll be able to remediate. In an environment where AI governance is moving from a theoretical concern to an operational requirement, that’s a differentiated position and for channel partners, it means the conversation is not just about selling software. It’s about being the guide that helps the customer make confident technology choices.

Second, the direct-to-indirect migration is live right now. The contract between the end user and SAS doesn’t change. What changes is the transaction route, and the pitch to customers is that instead of being part of a long tail at a large enterprise, you become the most important customer of a partner who’s dedicated to your success. It’s a strong repositioning and the kind of opening that partners who have not been in the SAS conversation before should be paying attention to.

Third, John was pretty clear about where the next three years go. Managed service providers building up their own value on top of the Viya platform in industries where use cases are still being unlocked. If you’re an MSP with deep vertical expertise and data, security, or infrastructure skills, this episode makes the case for why you should be knocking on SAS’s door.

We’ll be back on Monday with more from SAS Innovate as we hear the practitioner side of the story: my conversation with Nat D’Ercole from Deloitte Canada on what AI transformation actually looks like from inside a major Canadian enterprise engagement.

If you found this one useful, follow or subscribe to the ChannelBuzz.ca podcast. We’re on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and most of the major directories. Ratings and reviews are greatly appreciated, especially when they have five stars.

Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.