The advent of AI promises many opportunities and rewards, but also brings with it some major threats. For a long time, companies have been looking for competitive solutions that will help them grow productivity at scale through new technologies. In 2025, they are now more likely to invest in tools to secure their infrastructures and workforce against the growing number of threats that are somewhat ironically - backed by those same technologies.
The investment in security and cybersecurity looks to be a top priority in 2025. This means companies of all sizes will turn to market leaders in security, as well as AI, storage, infrastructure, business applications, training providers, and more, to shore up their areas of weakness. In doing so, they will want to build critical partnerships, bonds that go beyond merely supplying services.
For marketers looking to engage with senior IT decision makers, the onus is on proving that they can go beyond the simple delivery of a project. Stakeholders are expecting complete buy-in, with shared goals and ambitions - ranking those qualities sometimes even higher than market positioning or experience.
Our survey carried out last year to over 700 respondents reflects this. Some of the takeaways from the responses:
- Partners ought to maintain ‘open lines of communication to address concerns, updates, and feedback promptly’
- The need for ‘open communication, trust, mutual respect; avoiding negligence and misunderstandings’
- A partner should ‘be a team player, and precise’
- The ability to ‘understand the needs and wants, pricing and being able to work together for the common goal’ is crucial
Another key consideration is how well they understand the assignment, and how clear they are on their objectives, and how trustworthy they can be with their ability to deliver. Many relationships will focus on long-lasting and critical development projects with many complex and moving parts and will require shouldering responsibilities, and creating spaces for openness and honesty. In their responses, responders have mentioned that ‘having the right understanding about the situation is very important, and that this understanding ‘depends on the criteria of a project’.
There are a lot of things at stake and considerations to take into account when the time comes to onboard a new vendor. For a lot of large corporations, this means there is an abundance of strategies for building their IT vendor eco-system, including IT service management (ITSM) software solutions, or contacting a Integration Service Provider’s system to manage multiple vendors, with key objectives balancing short-term needs and long-term strategy, responding to current challenges, effectively managing costs and risks, and remaining competitive. Despite the accrued importance of managing relationships, as per our research, the top 3 on the priority list for ITDMs remain product features, risk assessment, and pricing.
This is backed up by ITPro’s’s Future Focus Report 2025’, which found that IT leaders and their teams will still rely first on vendor-led content as a source of information when going to market; our respondents rated vendor-led content as most influential at 35% – almost double the next highest score of for analyst reports (16%). Their need for authenticity, authority, and trust is backed when looking at their choice of information outlets for new cyber security products, too, with respondents citing analyst reports, recommendations from peers, and webinars, as being of value
Any supplier looking to forge viable long-term business relationships, will need to think about what it can bring to the table, and its ability to add qualitative value to what it offers, in addition to an already strong existing product mix.
