The tech market is booming at a rate not seen in more than a decade. However, most channel partners believe their companies won’t grow as quickly.
Despite accelerating IT demand, 81% of partners believe they will underperform the overall market growth, according to Omdia polling of 25,000 partners globally.
Omdia chief analyst, channels, partnerships & ecosystems, Jay McBain, wrote in a recent LinkedIn post that partners feel squeezed by market forces, which is borne out in the numbers. Infrastructure is the fastest-growing segment of the global IT market, expanding at nearly 30% in 2026, yet much of that growth is effectively off-limits to most partners. Server spending alone is forecast to grow more than 40%, but it is hyperscalers and neocloud providers — not channel ecosystems — that are capturing the bulk of this expansion.
According to Omdia’s latest IT market outlook, North America is forecast to lead all regions in year-over-year growth, with regional IT spending increasing 12.6% in 2026 to approximately $2.61 trillion. This growth is overwhelmingly driven by hyperscaler-led investment in AI infrastructure and by rapid enterprise adoption of AI-enabled SaaS platforms.
The data from Omdia, Channel Dive’s sister company, shows that only 61% of North American IT spending in 2026 will be partner-delivered, the lowest proportion of any major region and a sharp decline from more than 70% just four years ago.
While partners still influence most enterprise technology decisions, an increasing share of actual spend is flowing directly to vendors. Hyperscalers are becoming the primary buyers and operators of infrastructure themselves, particularly for AI data centers, specialized servers and cloud capacity.
Vendor-delivered IT spending globally is forecast to grow at more than 18% in 2026, nearly three times the growth rate of partner-delivered spending. North America sits at the center of this transition, as hyperscalers concentrate capital investment close to their largest enterprise customers and regulatory environments that favor rapid buildout.
For the channel, this means that even as total spending rises, the addressable share accessible through traditional resale and infrastructure-led models continues to contract.
Where opportunities remain, it is shifting decisively up the stack.
Software and services as the most viable growth engines for partners in North America, particularly cloud application software, cybersecurity and managed services, Omdia said. Cloud application software is forecast to grow more than 20% in 2026, while cybersecurity spending will exceed $100 billion globally for the first time. These are areas where enterprise demand is rising faster than in-house capability, driven by the operationalization of AI, mounting security exposure and persistent skills shortages.
North American enterprises, in particular, are moving beyond AI experimentation into production environments. That transition is proving complex. Integration challenges, data readiness issues and security-by-design requirements are slowing deployments and increasing risk. As Omdia notes, the convergence around AI operationalization, cloud-native infrastructure and security-first architectures is reshaping buying behavior across industries. This complexity sustains demand for partners — but only those positioned to deliver high-value services rather than transactional fulfillment.
Even here, however, the channel is fragmenting. Larger partners with deep vertical expertise, cloud marketplace proficiency and managed services scale are capturing a disproportionate share of growth. Smaller partners face rising barriers, including vendor program consolidation, tighter supply chains and increasing dependence on hyperscaler-controlled routes to market. Omdia warns that ongoing component and memory constraints are likely to hit partners harder than hyperscalers, further widening performance gaps within the channel ecosystem.
