Customer experience and cloud contact center vendor Nice has accelerated its business with global system integrators, promising flexibility and clear rules of engagement that other vendors aren’t providing, new Chief Partner Officer Dorothy Copeland told Channel Dive.
Nice is bullish on GSIs and wants you to know. The vendor expanded the GSI-attached annual contract value 3.6 times in the last year, and GSIs accounted for 14% of ACV, up from 4% the year prior. Capgemini recently scored a $679 million contract with a large U.K. agency to implement the Nice CXone platform, and Accenture and Deloitte are the two largest sponsors of the Nice World conference this week.
“We've had a lot of significant wins with [GSIs] over the past 12 months and have a really strong pipeline going forward,” said Copeland, who stepped into the new chief partner officer role four months ago.
The company’s partner program is evolving as it ingests its 2025 acquisitions of agentic AI and conversational AI provider Cognigy and the merger’s channel implications.
The move has thrown the company into competition with point-solution vendors that are integrating AI agents into established platforms. Nice aims to capitalize on channel conflict between SIs and forward-deployed engineers from those point vendors.
Copeland said vendors sent FDEs into customer offices with a charter to develop products. A year and a half later, FDEs started helping implement products. The vendor engineers are playing a role usually reserved for professional services firms, taking business away from partners.
“As soon as they get involved in this GSI’s customer base, the opportunity gets sucked away because the AI point solution provider does all the professional services work themselves,” Copeland said.
Nice is leaning into co-delivery with GSIs, even subcontracting professional services to them in some cases.
“We’re shifting a lot of our services over to partners more than in the past, and we're in the process of building out a co-delivery methodologies between our pro services and our partners,” Copeland said.A lot of times, partners need our pro services because they have the expertise in our products, and we need partners because they have the expertise in integrating with third-party technologies, as well as the vertical market solution expertise.”
Cogigny also opened a lane to value-added resellers.
Nice’s North American channel is primed for a shift as the company recruits value-added resellers. Tech services distributors and technology advisors that sell in an agency model were historically Nice’s primary channel, but SIs and VARs are expected to play a larger role. The company runs just under 90% of its international business through resale or cosell, according to Copeland.
“Our international market has been working with partners in a much more aligned way than our Americas market,” she said.
Vendors push ecosystems
Nice isn’t the only CX vendor pushing partner alignment. Zoom has put a higher premium on sales partners that are certified to implement and manage its platform. It’s a difficult motion for TAs without a professional services unit. There are also reasons resellers need convincing.
VARs typically invest in OEMs that do more than just CX, according to Rise Technology Advisors Co-founder Eric Ludwig. At $2.9 billion in annual revenue, Nice and other companies of similar size will need to prove they are large enough to merit their own ecosystem.
“Cisco, Microsoft and AWS, as examples, provide multiple options for a VAR to deliver and monetize services, while folks like Nice are more niche,” Ludwig said. “The VARs will need to be aligned from a delivery perspective, as their investors are looking for more services revenue vs. traditional hardware and software.”
It’s difficult to expand a services practice spanning multiple vendors, so VARs may need to be tactical.
“For this to grow, VARs will need to make significant investments in people and process internally, finding ways to draw adjacencies from the CX environment to other areas of a client IT estate,” said Ludwig, whose firm is a TA with Nice.
Nice is also courting business process outsourcing firms as partners. The Nice BPO sales team rolled underneath Copeland in January. It’s a major shift for the company, which historically treated BPOs — which provide outsourced staffing for contact centers — as customers.
“They've wanted to work with us around go-to-market because as they win customers, they want to have us engage with them and they're working with many of the large enterprises,” Copeland said.
As its channel footprint widens, Nice is making inroads with independent software vendors. The company introduced a native integration with Epic in April. Approximately 180 partners are listed in Nice’s ISV portal, and they have collectively launched 80 integrations with the vendor in the last 12 months.
