AI, security, and connectivity are converging fast—and the advisors who see the intersections are the ones winning big.
By Dan Foster, Chief Revenue Officer of Telarus
Our market is expected to reach $6 trillion 🡥 this year, growing at nearly 10%. But the real shift isn’t the size of the opportunity. It’s how customers are buying.
For the past decade, customers asked a familiar question: What platform should I buy? What technology should I buy?
That question is changing. Today, it’s about outcomes. How do I improve customer experience? How do I reduce cyber risk? How do I enable a flexible workforce?
The modern technology advisor isn’t defined by the platforms they sell anymore. They’re defined by the problems they solve.
That evolution is exactly what our team unpacked on a recent Telarus Tuesday HITT call, and I want to share the key takeaways with every advisor in our ecosystem.
Six Forces Shaping 2026
After analyzing over 5,000 partner and end-user interactions last year, six themes keep rising to the top.
1. The Shift from Products to Outcomes Is Accelerating
Our data shows outcome-driven conversations have overtaken platform-driven ones at a pace few predicted. Customers aren’t coming to you asking for a specific SKU—they’re coming with KPIs and business goals.
That’s a massive opportunity for advisors who can connect the dots across the technology stack.
2. AI Is Everywhere, But Its Impact Is Uneven
AI is moving fast in automation, analytics, and CX. The global AI-in-CX market sits at roughly $15 billion today, with forecasts projecting it to reach $147.62 billion by 2035 . But adoption across the broader enterprise remains uneven.
As Sam Nelson, VP of CX and AI for Telarus, put it on the call, “CX is the front door—but what’s keeping the house up?” The network, security, and data quality behind that door matter just as much. AI is only as strong as the infrastructure supporting it.
Many mid-market CIOs are still figuring out exactly where AI fits inside organizations. The real opportunity is expanding AI conversations beyond the contact center and into operational efficiency across the entire business.
Micro-agents—small, task-specific AI workflows that process documents, trigger outreach, and coordinate internal handoffs—are already delivering quick wins.
But every quick win exposes the next constraint. Data governance. Security posture. Network performance. One AI use case becomes a broader modernization discussion when you approach it right.
3. Convergence Is the New Architecture
SASE, SD-WAN, and Zero Trust aren’t separate conversations anymore. They’re the architecture behind the modern enterprise. As our Principal Solution Architect, Jason Kaufman explained, everything is getting more distributed. Users are accessing critical applications from mobile devices, home offices, and the road. And the network has to meet them wherever they are.
Designing for that reality means thinking about where users gain access, what they access, and how to make that experience efficient, robust, and secure. When companies move to fully remote workforces, on-premise firewalls drop out of the equation, and cloud-delivered security models like SSE—the security component of SASE—take center stage.
Advisors who understand these intersections aren’t just selling connectivity. They’re influencing enterprise architecture decisions that compound over years.
4. The Rise of Managed Everything
CIOs and VP-level IT leaders are fatigued by complexity. They want fewer vendors, more accountability, and predictable outcomes.
We’re seeing managed services uptake in areas that would have surprised us just a few years ago—not just network observability and endpoint management, but AI model management and co-managed security operations.
Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus, shared a story from a recent call with a manufacturing CEO who wanted to layer AI onto his front-end operations for better data visualization and faster decision-making.
The problem? He was running a legacy ERP, an ancient Microsoft platform, and AS/400 at the core of his infrastructure with outdated endpoint protection. He was one to two years away from the modernization needed to implement AI the way he envisioned.
That’s not unusual.
Many customers have gone through IT staff reductions and need to do more with less. They’re leaning into outsourcing and co-management—not to replace their teams, but to augment them.
The MSP conversation has evolved from “hand over the keys” to “help us scale without hiring.” That shift creates long-term advisory opportunity, not just short-term services revenue.
5. The Infrastructure Behind the Innovation
None of this runs without the right foundation. And the foundation—data center capacity and power—has never been more constrained.
The AI buildout has consumed enormous amounts of energy, and we’re seeing creative solutions emerge fast.
Boom Supersonic, originally a company building turbines for next-generation supersonic jets, is now filling orders from data center providers for 42-megawatt modularized gas-fed turbines that can be deployed in a data center parking lot. One provider has 40 of these on order, with testing expected later this year and production scaling into 2027.
Beyond turbines, conversations around small modular reactors (SMRs) and nuclear continue to gain momentum.
Can advisors sell turbines today? Not exactly. But our engineering and supplier management teams are constantly working to monetize the infrastructure layer. We see power and capacity as a limiter, and we’re committed to bringing new options to you as they become available.
6. The Advisor Edge: Insight Over Quotes
We’ve analyzed thousands of partner interactions, and the differentiation is clear. It’s not who gives the best quote, it’s who brings the best insight.
Jason Kaufman shared a pattern we see all the time: a customer sends an email before a call asking for a list of OEMs and vendors, expecting the usual catalog experience. Then the advisor gets on the call and asks, “What are your goals? Where are your biggest challenges?”
The customer pauses, surprised. Nobody else is asking them that.
The large system integrators come in and say, “Here’s what’s on the shelf.” But an advisor who brings strategic insight, de-risks the decision, and makes the buyer look strategic internally? That’s a relationship that compounds over time.
Sam Nelson summed it up well: when someone asks, “Who are your AI suppliers?”, the right answer isn’t a list. It’s a conversation about use cases.
Use case first. Supplier second. Strategy always.
What This Means for Technology Advisors in 2026
The technology is flashy, and it’s advancing on a curve that would make Moore’s Law blush.
But success still comes back to the basics. Customers need database modernization, secure endpoints, and clean data pipelines before they can unlock the AI-driven outcomes they’re chasing. Many are behind the curve, and they don’t know how to navigate the journey on their own.
That’s where you come in.
Ask the unexpected questions.
Understand the business outcome, not just the technology request.
Recognize that your customer probably doesn’t have a connectivity problem or a security problem or a data problem in isolation—they have a business problem.
And the solution isn’t one product. It’s a bundled approach: CX layered with secure connectivity, supported by a sound data strategy, with AI providing the insights on top.
The advisors who win in 2026 won’t be the fastest to quote. They’ll be the fastest to understand.
Reverse-engineer from the outcome. Embrace convergence. Leverage Telarus’s engineering depth and resources.
The opportunity has never been bigger. But insight—not inventory—is what converts it into revenue.