Channel and Vendor-Partner Dependency in IT Services M&A | SHOOT THE MOON

Platform partnerships built much of the IT services industry, but the balance of power has been shifting for two decades. In this episode of Shoot the Moon, Mike Harvath, Ryan Barnett, and Matt Lockhart unpack channel and vendor-partner dependency: why buyers treat it like customer concentration, how verticalization lowers the risk, and why the partner's future is the final-mile implementation and service layer. As the model shifts from software as a service toward "services as software," they argue the next era may be the biggest opportunity channel partners have ever had.