Technology markets don't start complicated. They get that way.
I got into wireless in 1989, and by 1990 I was at NYNEX, where I had two relationships to manage and both of them were personal. On the customer side I kept a bell on my desk. You rang it if you wanted a phone, we ran your credit through an Equifax machine that printed on dot matrix paper one slow line at a time, and if you were lucky, had your seven-pound brief case and roof top magnetic antenna in approximately a week. On the vendor side there were primarily three manufacturers who made the product, Motorola, Ericsson, and Nokia, and reps who knew my name. No tiers. No certifications. Nobody had said "market development funds" out loud yet, because there was nothing to develop.
Over the next fourteen years I watched one of those two relationships get industrialized. NYNEX joined the baby Bell’s, now known as Verizon Wireless. Scale brought structure: partner programs, certification tiers, co-op dollars, approval paths. The customer relationship never changed. People still buy from people they know. The vendor relationship became a process.
Then I moved into IT and watched it happen all over again, faster. That's the part worth paying attention to, because it isn't a wireless story or an IT story. Every technology market starts the same way, and every one of them industrializes the vendor side as it grows.
Say the word "partner" in a room of IT executives and watch what happens. One hears VAR. One hears MSP. One hears MSSP, systems integrator, ISV, technology advisor, cloud practice, PE-backed roll-up, agent under a TSD. Everyone is right, and that's the interesting part.
The shift wasn't cosmetic. It was economic.
Value-added resellers built businesses on hardware margin plus configuration and support. When that margin compressed, the smart ones moved. Remote monitoring tools gave them a path out of break/fix into recurring revenue. VARs became MSPs. MSPs added security and became MSSPs. Some went vertical, some cloud-native, some never left infrastructure.
Channel Futures (now Channel Dive) asked executives to define the modern channel partner a couple of years ago and got a shrug. One MSP CEO described running managed services, break/fix, and telco resale at once. Not long ago partners identified cleanly. You were an IBM shop or a Cisco shop, and everyone knew what that meant.
Nobody is one thing anymore. A 12-person MSP and a 900-person integrator are both "partners," and operationally, they share almost nothing. That variety is the channel's greatest asset, and what our funding programs haven't caught up to.
Here's what gets lost in this conversation: vendors are not the problem.
They allocate real money, market development funds, co-op dollars, campaign programs, and packaged demand offers. That machinery didn't exist when I started, and building it was a genuine advance. And they know exactly why they built it. No vendor, at any size, can sell into a mid-market manufacturer in a second-tier city the way the firm three exits down the highway can. They can't reach that buyer without the partner who has the relationship, the reputation, and the cell number of the person who signs.
That's not charity, it's strategy. Local trust is the one asset a vendor cannot manufacture, and every good channel chief I've worked with knows it.
So the intent is right, and the dollars are real. The friction sits elsewhere, in the operating capacity required to reach them.
The Channel Company's State of Partner Marketing 2025 research found smaller partners rely on part-time or shared marketing resources 52% of the time, with fewer than a third having dedicated staff. Many lack the scale, certifications, or sales volume to qualify for MDF, and when they do, the process is slow and locked to pre-approved activities that don't match how they go to market.
Then there's the requirement stack: a proposal somebody has to write, creative that meets brand standards, a locally relevant campaign destination, execution across channels the team doesn't run daily, documentation to spec inside a 30-to-60-day claim window. Each reasonable on its own. Stacked together, for a six-person team, it's a second job.
And it compounds. Unused funds don't just expire. They signal the partner didn't need them, so next cycle's allocation shrinks. Add spend-first reimbursement, and the cash-flow risk lands on the company least able to carry it.
None of that is anyone's fault. It's what happens when a program built for the largest partners meets a channel that no longer looks like them.
This is where the fix lives, and it goes back to those two relationships.
Vendor programs are written in one language: eligibility tiers, activity codes, brand standards, proof-of-performance schemas, and claim windows. Partners live in the other one: the customer who called Saturday, the renewal in March, the plant manager who trusts you because you fixed something at eleven at night two years ago, and never made a thing of it.
Both languages are legitimate. Almost nobody is fluent in both.
You can see it in the results. The partner fluent in compliance often produces the campaign that sounds like the vendor wrote it, because functionally, the vendor did. One solution provider received the identical email from three partners: same words, different logos. The funding worked perfectly and produced nothing anyone would remember. Meanwhile, the partner fluent in their own market, whose relationships made the vendor want an indirect model at all, can't get the claim approved.
What's missing is rarely talent or hustle. It's translation, someone who reads a program guide and a local market at the same time, and builds one campaign that satisfies both without flattening either.
That's the work I've spent my career on, and the gap we built MarketDesign to sit in. Not because partners can't market, but because most shouldn't have to build the machinery required to reach money that's already theirs.
Not more funding. Better operating capacity around it.
Vendors: Audit MDF utilization by partner size. If your smallest tier leaves money unclaimed, that's not disinterest. It's a sign the process is sized for someone else, and it's fixable.
Partners: The funds are real and most competitors aren't claiming them. Start with one vendor and one campaign, and build the documentation habit before you scale.
Everyone: The channel's variety is its advantage. Funding it like a monolith wastes what makes it work.
Often yes, but criteria are usually tied to sales volume or certification level, and the application assumes a marketing function most lean partners don't have.
Rarely budget. Usually bandwidth, documentation, spend-first reimbursement, and claim windows that close faster than partners expect.
One vendor, one campaign, end-to-end with proof-of-performance built in from the start. Success in one program is the credential that unlocks the next.