Crayon Connect 2026: Mat Howard on the evolving role of the partner

The ANZ channel general manager explained how partners are changing, and how the distie is evolving with them.

As customers have far greater access to information than they’ve ever had before, they are looking to the partner for help in different areas within their digital transformation journeys.

This means distributors need to evolve to assist partners in this new role.

Mat Howard, general manager, channel sales ANZ at Crayon told CRN Australia, “Access to information is certainly a key shift.”

Another shift Howard has noticed is the access to tools their customers have such as automation. Howard noted that if partners have greater access to information, they have greater access to tools.

“Where do they lean into partners today to help them with, and it's to navigate their way through that complexity,” he said.

He added that it is not about the project, but giving advice and guidance to make those technology investments in their customer’s organisation.

"Make those smart decisions early, link those projects to actual business outcomes in the organisation, wrap the governance around it, wrap the security around it. That's where they need, they need help,” Howard explained.

“Partners today, if they're going to play in this world of AI, are looking at their own capability and go, well, what do we have today? See what is missing.”

Read more of our exclusive interview with Mat Howard below.

CRN: In your keynote, you discussed how the role of the partner is changing. How does this impact Crayon as a distributor?

Mat Howard: We're also going on our own transformational journey. Crayon looks intentionally very different from any of the traditional distributors that you have in market, and it's by design.

We have this two-tier model that we go to market with a professional services business, the legacy SoftwareOne business, Crayon have a direct business as well, professional services business. That was about building experience in delivering large scale professional services, managed services, right up to some of the largest organisations in the world.

How can we use that experience to deliver some of those offerings through scale, through channel, and our channel business is incredibly large within Australia. Sometimes you deal in with organisations end user customers, it might be 10 seats, they're not the Westpacs of the world, but even the 10 seats are still figuring out what AI means for them, and they don't have access to tech teams like a big tier one bank would have.

They have to rely on their partners to help figure out where they should make investments with the limited capital they can, they really need to invest wisely, leaning on that partner capability is important. We continue to add capabilities, transform as a business, try and stay ahead of the market, and that's because we see a big shift happening in the market at the moment, and the more capability we can bring to our partners to help them navigate their own way through the change, the better.

CRN: How is the changing role of the partner impacting the channel as a whole?

Howard: Traditional distributors have got really got to look at their business today and you know what value they can continue to offer through to their partners. We want to be a distributor that didn't just acknowledge the fact that margins are compressive in the market, but how do we rebuild margin back into the business? How do we build profitability? How do we help them create new lines of business or new offerings that they can take out?

Those offerings create sticky relationships with their customers, so that's on the distribution side. We're along in this journey with our partners. If you look at traditional MSPs, we've got a lot of those that we deal with. I spent some time in the last three months of last year.

I met with 100 CEOs of MSPs in Australia. I did the meetings face to face, and I wanted to understand more about their businesses. They all started 20 years ago, there must have been something in the water. I was asking questions around why did they start, and what were they originally offering, and have they transformed at all over the years, and where do they see the shift moving forward, and they all see the need to transform and add. Most of them are looking to get involved much earlier in the things that they can influence. From a strategy perspective, how can I influence what the cloud adoption may look like, and their security strategy, or their AI strategy within their customer base.

That's where the sticky relationships are going to be created. If they help create that strategy and help execute that moving forward, that's real, where value will be delivered moving forward. The MSPs that are traditionally managing SLAs and managing tickets, they are really looking at a fundamental shift in their business moving forward.

Realistically, resellers that are out there that have made their income on purely selling licenses before, the margins are declining, they are looking at ways that they can transform their business, and services comes into play a lot.

We've seen that, particularly in the LSP market, not just within Australia, but globally, where most of those organisations that were even pure resale organisations before, now the majority of their business is professional services, so it's a significant shift, and it's not all AI driven. The margin compression started 20 years ago, but AI is certainly speeding up the need for transformation.

CRN: How are you as a distributor helping partners become a value-led partner?

Howard: The first thing that we all need to figure out is and realise that we can't do everything ourselves anymore. There used to be a point in time, and I've worked for businesses too. There was this reluctance to partner. That's a very old way of thinking now, and there is no single organisation that can deliver transformation alone.

You need to be able to partner, and for our partners is to pick partners that can truly add value to them, where we have chosen to make those investments ultimately, so our partner doesn't have to make all these investments themselves, that's in pre-sales capability that we have. We've got some of the largest pre-sales, not only from a people perspective, but from an experience perspective.

The services capability that we have, if they've got customers coming to them today and say, look, I'm finding opportunities in here, whatever it might be. If those things could end up being quite transformational, do they want to ignore that opportunity? I suggest that wouldn't be what I would do.

To say, ‘this is not core to what I do, therefore I'm not going to help you out on that’, that's probably a viewpoint that's changing a lot in market. You can build the capability yourself, and we have partners that are currently building that capability, but before you go and do that, you want to have a good understanding of the addressable market before you go hire a whole bunch of very expensive Australian resources that could end up sitting on the bench for a period of time.

I always say the path of least resistance is to partner first, and we have made these investments. Crayon’s been delivering AI services for 10 years, it's not new to Crayon. We have all the capability there to support our partners that are starting on that journey.

CRN: Are you seeing your partners being open to evolving into a ‘value-led’ partner?

Howard: Most of the conversations I've had, they've been very open to it. They're either on that journey already, or can see that the need to. Very few are going, ‘no’, completely, but the ones that are doing particularly well in this marketplace are those that are adopting them.

Distribution business is a great business to be a part of, because our business only grows if our partners grow, so everything that we are working with our partners on is trying to help them grow their business, because if they do, our partnership grows along the way. We have an interest in seeing them succeed.

CRN: What do you want your partners to know about Cloud-iQ?

Howard: We have invested heavily into Cloud-iQ, and we launched that new platform. To me it goes a step further to a lot of the platforms that are out there. It's not just a billion agent, it's not just a procure procurement tool, it's not just a tool where you can get reports from. Yes, does all that as well, but it's the insights that it gives partners.

When we were building this platform, we looked at where can it truly deliver value and growth opportunities for our partners. We want to make sure that they can generate whatever reports that they need to understand spend, but it's the analytics of that spend to uncover opportunities for them. What are some of the upsell conversations that they could have with their existing customer base. Where might there be opportunities for them to optimise, because an optimised customer is a happy customer. This is a big shift that I've seen in the market over the last probably four or five years, even those partners that may at one point in time being reluctant to drive optimisation because they thought it meant a decline in their own revenue.

They've realised that when you drive innovation off the back of that optimization, you create much stickier relationships with those with those customers and long-term relationships. We want to give insights into opportunities to optimise, opportunities to for growth, new genuine opportunities that come as a result of that data analysed.

CRN: Finally, what is your message to partners?

Howard: Lean in and be open to the opportunity of partnership. No partner can drive transformation themselves, and to deliver the value your customers will be asking, you're going to have to be very open around partnerships. Form a good team of organisations out there that can help drive the outcomes for your customers. For me that is the biggest shift, and lean into organisations like Crayon.

We've got some amazing, not only just from Crayon, but Software One coming together as well. This is a powerhouse in terms of capability that we have local, global capability that our partners that can lean into to us for.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

CRN Australia was the exclusive partner media partner for Crayon Connect 2026 in Melbourne.