AppXite is an Ecosystem Partner at Canalys Forum EMEA 2026, returning to W Barcelona on 6-8 October. We’ll be there for all three days - let’s meet in Barcelona and talk about what’s next for the channel.
The agentic economy has moved past the demo stage. Agents are now transacting, provisioning, and managing inside real customer environments - and as they do, they are quietly dismantling assumptions the channel has priced against for a decade.
The interesting question is no longer "what can AI agents do?" That argument is largely settled. It's the more awkward one underneath: when agents absorb the routine work partners currently bill for, what is left to sell?
Nobody has a complete answer yet, which is precisely why we're going to Barcelona.
This is where the pressure lands first.
Omdia's MSP Trends and Predictions 2026 puts managed services market growth at around 10% for the year - below historical rates, with only the most focused and differentiated providers expected to top it. Omdia also notes that traditional helpdesk and per-user services are now largely commoditised, and in its partner polling, 43% of MSPs are already evaluating an alternative to user-based pricing. On the security side, Omdia sees agentic tooling as a viable path to automating large portions of traditional SOC work, particularly the repetitive Tier 1 analyst tasks.
Taken together, that is less a story about AI adoption than about a pricing model losing its foundation. The billable unit for the last decade of managed services was human attention applied repeatedly - which is precisely what agents are good at.
The providers we expect to navigate this well are the ones already decoupling price from headcount, moving toward outcome, consumption, and platform-based commercials, and pointing their human capacity at the work agents can't do: architecture, integration, governance, and accountability when something goes wrong.
Which raises a practical point for everyone above them in the ecosystem. If MSP commercial models are changing this quickly, distributors and platforms need to be able to transact those new models - not eventually, but as they emerge.
There's a second shift we think Barcelona will only begin to open up, and it's more mundane than the agentic headlines suggest.
Most of the channel's digital infrastructure assumes a human at a screen. Catalogues built to be browsed. Quotes built to be read. Approvals built around someone clicking. Marketplaces optimised for a person with a budget and a shortlist.
An agent transacting on a customer's behalf needs something different: machine-readable catalogues carrying real, current commercial terms; entitlements that can be granted and revoked programmatically; metered billing that reconciles consumption nobody explicitly ordered; and an audit trail that survives procurement review.
Canalys expects at least 50% of hyperscaler marketplace transactions to flow through channel partners by 2027, rising to 59% by 2030 against total marketplace spend of $163 billion. The partners capturing that flow will be the ones whose systems can be read and acted on by software, not only by people.
None of this shrinks the opportunity - it relocates it.
Omdia's IT Opportunity data puts total revenue flowing through systems integrators at $950 billion in 2025, at a time when customer requirements are becoming harder rather than easier. Omdia's Partner Ecosystem Multiplier research shows partners capturing up to $7.13 in services and influenced revenue per dollar of AWS technology sold, $7.05 for Google Cloud and $6.26 through Microsoft Marketplace. And Omdia sizes the agentic AI services opportunity specifically at US$267 billion by 2030.
So the capabilities that matter compound rather than compete: solution aggregation, assembling pre-integrated multi-vendor outcomes instead of point products; ecosystem orchestration, enabling an ISV, an MSP and an SI to co-sell and co-deliver around one customer; and commercial flexibility - pricing and billing subscription, consumption and outcome-based models on the same platform, across countries, without rebuilding anything.
That last one is where AppXite spends its time: catalogue, CPQ, provisioning, subscription billing and channel management on one platform, so that when a commercial model changes, the systems underneath don't have to change with it.
Canalys Forums EMEA 2026 returns to the W Barcelona from 6 to 8 October, bringing together 2,500+ senior channel executives across 40+ analyst-led sessions. Nineteen editions in, it remains the most concentrated three days of channel strategy in the region - and the reason we keep coming back is less the keynotes than the conversations between them.
This year we're taking part as an ecosystem partner and sponsor of the Forum, which is a deliberate choice. The themes on the agenda - agentic automation, the future of the MSP, orchestration across an increasingly mixed partner base - are the same problems our platform exists to solve. Supporting the independent research that frames those debates, and being in the room when the channel argues them out, is more useful to us than any amount of talking about it from a distance.
So we'll be there for all three days, with our team on site and ready to listen more than present. If you're an MSP working out what agentic automation does to your pricing, a distributor building the platform layer underneath a more complex partner mix, or a vendor trying to reach several partner types through one motion, those are exactly the conversations we want to have. We're just as interested in where our reading of this is wrong as where it's right.
A few things we'll be putting to the analysts and to the people in the room:
If any of that is on your list too, let's find twenty minutes. You can book a slot with us in advance through the Canalys event app, drop by our stand, or just stop us in a corridor - whichever suits. Diaries fill up fast in Barcelona, so earlier is easier.
Book a meeting with the AppXite team in Barcelona →