It was a time when sales began in the machine room. Engineers wore suits, technicians shook hands, and every deal meant something was built from scratch. In the 1970s and early ’80s, the IT world was small, focused, and fiercely personal. IBM, DEC, Hewlett-Packard – they weren’t brands, they were universes. Whoever bought, bought directly from the source.
Sales was personal. Technical. Almost intimate. IBM sent its own engineers to clients’ offices to design entire data centers. Account managers weren’t sellers – they were architects. They understood what a customer needed long before the term “solution selling” even existed. Service wasn’t an add-on. It was part of the manufacturer’s DNA.
DEC talked to universities, HP to laboratories, IBM to governments. Nobody asked about partner programs, margins, or distributors. The vendor delivered, installed, and maintained – everything from a single hand. Technology wasn’t a product; it was a promise. You didn’t pay for speed or gigabytes; you paid for trust.
But as the machines got smaller, the market got bigger. The PC changed everything. Suddenly, vendors couldn’t be everywhere at once. Between engineer and customer, space appeared – and in that space, a new class emerged: distributors, resellers, integrators. They built bridges between the factory and the office, between innovation and application.
What once was a handshake between two engineers turned into a process involving five companies. Vendors had to learn to let go. Sales was no longer about control – it became collaboration. The customer remained the goal, but the path to them now ran through partner networks, rebate systems, and certification frameworks.
Cisco was among the first to understand the game. Instead of delivering everything themselves, they created an ecosystem – partners became part of the brand. Microsoft followed, HP professionalized the channel, IBM evolved from monolith to integration giant. Power shifted. Vendors were no longer the lone heroes of the industry – they became part of an ensemble.
And yet, a faint echo remains – a memory of the time when things were simpler, when relationships were built on expertise, not on frameworks. Today, the channel is a perfectly tuned system, a global web of certifications, margins, and training tiers. It’s precise, efficient, and scalable.
But somewhere between workshop and web portal, between an engineer’s conversation and a partner contract, something else has emerged: a new understanding of collaboration. What once was exclusive is now connected. Individual players have become communities. Competition has evolved into co-innovation. Sales has grown up — and with it, the industry itself.
