Partners weigh growth pressures at Crayon Connect 2026

The message partners heard from one of the speakers at Crayon Connect 2026 in Sydney yesterday was blunt: "Margin on licence is going down, the customer spend on advice and delivery is going up."

Licensing opportunities were nevertheless part of the agenda yesterday, but, as partners have heard for many years, the underlying message was that partners need to expand beyond “transactional” business.

As one large partner put it: “In the Microsoft ecosystem it's always been about maximising your Microsoft investment, configuring Defender, security compliance, configuring all the capabilities within a SKU we sold to the customer. It's now shifted – that's very old school in my opinion.”

Some might say the timing was apt - another round of Microsoft 365 price changes take effect a little more than a month from now.

Yesterday was a chance to hear from partners that provide more strategic services in partnership with what has been called one of Microsoft's largest partners in the world – the combined Crayon and SoftwareOne.

The acquisition of Crayon brought the distributor together with a global cloud solutions partner with more than 13,000 people in 70 countries. One question for partners has been what that means for them.

We heard one partner talk about the potential upside they saw from taking advantage of SoftwareOne’s experience helping clients harness data.

“They’ve got agents, they've got projects, they've got Fabric that's already rolled out and they've got that expertise. It's those use cases and really knowing strategically what's worked and what hasn't, and how that can be taken to the SMC market,” they said.

“In theory, they should be able to bring huge weight to that whole side of my business.”

Attendees heard how BlueAPACHE, despite having a significant team, had seen a use for Crayon services to help it scale to deal with significant concurrent client engagements, including with a major multinational client with a large, complex cloud estate.

They also heard how Sydney managed services consultancy Real World Technology Solutions had used Crayon and SoftwareOne to extend testing services for enterprise customers.

Bigger bench

Yesterday’s event in Sydney also provided a chance for partners to hear more from the combined Crayon-SoftwareOne’s leaders about how they see the integrated organisation helping partners.

The organisation has “greater capability than any other partner in market, particularly on the services side", according to Mathew Howard, general manager of Channel ANZ Sales at Crayon, a SoftwareOne Company.

“We are looking at how we can scale that through channel, so there will be new offerings that we will be able to deliver through channel over the coming 12 months that we haven't been able to deliver before.”

Howard noted that much of SoftwareOne’s activities, particularly in Australia, are professional services and managed services, traditionally focused on the enterprise market. 

“I want to be very clear, the SoftwareOne business is not here to at all compete with our channel business, it's there to complement," he stated.

“We remain channel-first, partner-first in everything that we do, and the professional services business of SoftwareOne is there to complement.” 

The combined business comprises SoftwareOne; Crayon, handling channel distribution and partner enablement; Parallo, providing managed services for software companies; and emt Distribution, offering cybersecurity solutions in Australia, New Zealand & APAC. 

It has five key practices with productised services “ready to sell” covering modern workplace and AI; cybersecurity; cloud services; data and AI; and business applications. 

It has about 100 specialists in these domains “on the bench” across Australia and New Zealand and partners were encouraged to make use of them.

“The point is you don't have to build and hire a bench yourself,” said Alexander Becker, VP channel and presales ANZ at Crayon, a SoftwareOne company. “We have proven specialists or human services that we can build with you and for you. You wrap margin around it, you take the lead.”

The company is also in the process of migrating partners to its partner procurement platform Cloud-iQ. It connects such functions as procurement, customer management and analytics.

“You'll be able to see growth opportunities, you'll be able to highlight upsell opportunities for you,” Becker said.

techpartner.news is the official media partner of Crayon Connect 2026 Sydney.