Longtime channel community members will remember Tiffani Bova. Eight years ago she was a top analyst from Gartner and a channel expert, frequently tapped for keynotes at channel conferences and events.
Bova left Gartner and the channel to blaze new trails at Salesforce where she served as senior vice president of Global Growth and as Innovation Evangelist.
But like many channel community members, Bova has returned.
She departed Salesforce in October 2023 and has been consulting as a sole practitioner under her firm name, Think Forward Advisors.
However, she’s about to broaden that mission. Now Bova will lead the effort to build out the channel analyst business at market research firm Futurum as Chief Strategy and Research Officer.
How did she end up there, and why is she back?
“The CEO, Daniel Newman, and I had been talking for six to eight months and we really kind of connected and had similar philosophies,” Bova said.
That includes bringing a level of structure and consistency to the research business, she added. Bova plans to expand the effort at Futurum to help vendors approach growth from a direct and indirect standpoint, by leveraging technology and through digital transformation.
Bova believes her eight years of experience at Salesforce bring in new perspectives that she can use to help not just channel chiefs but also the heads of customer experience and the heads of customer success and customer service.
Sure, she said, there will be discussions of the speeds and feeds of channel programs, but that’s just a piece of a much more comprehensive practice.
Tiffani Bova
While much of the channel business has remained the same since Bova has been away, there are new technologies and developments that are changing the game today and that will become part of Bova’s work going forward.
It’s not a surprise that one of them is AI. Artificial intelligence is changing how channel partners and vendors and channel chiefs do their work.
Second, digital marketplaces such as those from AWS and Microsoft Azure are changing how channel partners transact business.
Both of these developments are big trends that will shape the future of business in the years to come.
“Data may be the oil, but AI is the refinery and insights is the gasoline that powers the business,” Bova said. “You need all three – data, analytics, and insights. From a partner perspective, you can’t just be focused on AI, you have to think about data.”
