(Note: This story was originally posted on CRN.com Aug. 3.)

If your company tethered to legacy technologies while others move forward with more modern solutions while building recurring revenue?

The emergence of born-in-the-cloud partners and the convergence of the telecom channel mean that traditional VARs and MSPs must place more aggressive bets on emerging technologies, a group of channel chiefs told a gathering Tuesday at CompTIA's ChannelCon 2016.

The legacy IT channel has, in recent years, shifted from aggressively making investments in one-time leading-edge technologies that have already hit the market to trying to get out in front of the latest technology trends, said Frank Rauch, vice president of VMware's Americas Partner Organization, during panel discussion at ChannelCon, held this week in Hollywood, Fla.

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"When you forward invest, you're not going to be able to put chips on every number on the roulette board," Rauch said. "You're going to have to make strong bets, you're going to have to make bigger bets, you may have to narrow down the line card."

Traditional on-premise solution providers often find themselves in for a rude awakening as they attempt to adopt a more cloud-centric business model, said Neal Bradbury, co-founder and senior director of business development for Intronis. That's because their born-in-the-cloud counterparts have already mastered the high-volume, low-margin ways of the cloud. 

"They have to learn to be efficient. They have to learn to automate," Bradbury said. "They have to have less employees and service more customers."

Private equity firms and larger solution providers have played a pivotal role in increasing the visibility of new channel models, Rauch said, as both have taken to acquiring born-in-the-cloud, born-in-mobility or born-in-security partners and consolidating them into their existing IT services practices.

"You can buy the attributes," Rauch said. "You don't necessarily have to build them."

VMware needs to lower its barriers to entry to make it easier for channel partners of all shapes and sizes to become part of the vendor's ecosystem, Rauch said. 

Today's born-in-the-cloud partners are coming to market with a deep understanding of subscription-based models and experience in generating recurring revenue, said Rafael Garzon, managing director of Citrix's Americas channel organization. But given the complexity of the Citrix offering, Garzon said end users still need traditional partners to help them address pain points.

Garzon said Citrix's new partners need to become more savvy and technically adept at addressing customers' existing problems, while the vendor's legacy partners need to adapt to more of a subscription-based business model.