There’s a story distributors love to tell about themselves.

It goes like this: We’re not just moving boxes anymore. We’re a solutions company. We have engineers! We have training programs! We have a cloud practice! We’re your strategic partner in this journey.

You’ve heard it before. Most of the time, you tune it out after the first slide deck. Because most of the time, when you trace it back to reality, what you find is a warehouse that also has a website with some training videos on it.

D&H is not most distributors.

Their 2025 results — announced last week and worth actually reading — show 70% growth in Cloud IaaS, 35% in Cloud SaaS, 63% in Security, and 68% in ProAV. Their endpoint business hit a record 63% market share. They added 3,200 new MSP customers in a year. That’s not a press release number — that’s the kind of thing that gets independently tracked by IDC.

For context: IDC’s North America Distribution Tracker says the broader IT distribution market grew 6% in Q4 2025. D&H grew 70% in cloud. That’s not keeping pace with a trend. That’s betting on the right horse several years before anyone else wanted to bet.

The Number Nobody Talks About

Three thousand two hundred new MSP customers.

Not upsells. Not renewals. Not VARs who were already on the books who got a new product line. New MSP accounts — businesses that weren’t in D&H’s ecosystem before and are now.

I spend a lot of time at industry events. I talk to MSPs. The persistent complaint about distribution is that it’s built for VARs: project-based, hardware-heavy, one-time transaction oriented. The MSP model is different. You’re building recurring revenue, managing complex multi-vendor stacks across dozens or hundreds of customers, and your margins depend on operational efficiency, not deal markup.

Most distributors say they love MSPs. Most distributors still price like they love VARs.

D&H has been rebuilding around the MSP motion for three years. The Go Big AI initiative trained over 5,350 partners on AI readiness and PC refresh. Their Advanced Solutions+ business unit was built around managed services economics. The 3,200 new MSP accounts are the receipts — that’s the market responding to a distributor that figured out what MSPs actually need.

NEXT+ Is a Different Kind of Conference

In June, D&H is hosting NEXT+, their inaugural Advanced Solutions+ conference in Austin. June 3-5.

The pitch is one-on-one time with D&H leadership, coordinated vendor alignment, and structured sessions on deal strategy, services integration, and go-to-market execution. Small breakouts, specific conversations, practical focus.

I want to be honest: I’ve been to a lot of “partner conferences” that are mostly vendor showcases with breakout sessions that amount to 45-minute commercials. You know the format. You go, you get the T-shirt, you come back with a binder full of marketing collateral that sits on your desk until the next conference season.

NEXT+ is designed differently — or at least, D&H is saying it’s designed differently. The framing is execution: how to sell advanced solutions, how to build services around hybrid IT and cybersecurity, how to structure deals in a market that’s getting more complex. If they deliver on that, it’s worth the trip.

The tell will be in the agenda. If NEXT+ publishes a schedule full of vendor keynotes from partners who paid for speaking slots, it’s just another conference. If it’s actually oriented around partner deal strategy and go-to-market execution — with real content from D&H people who’ve seen what works and what doesn’t — then it’s something different.

I’ll be watching.

Why Distribution Is Getting Interesting Again

There’s a version of the distribution story where distributors become irrelevant. Vendors go direct. Hyperscalers become their own distribution channel. PE firms buy the MSPs and consolidate purchasing power. The middle layer gets squeezed out.

That story has some truth to it for the old distribution model — the one built on warehouse economics and price arbitrage.

The new distribution model is different. Complexity has increased faster than partner capacity to handle it. Customers want managed services across hybrid cloud, security, networking, and AI readiness. Most MSPs can’t build vendor relationships across all of those categories on their own. They don’t have the purchasing leverage. They don’t have the technical enablement resources. They don’t have access to early product information.

That’s the gap a distributor like D&H fills, if they do it right. Not just procurement routing — genuine technical enablement, vendor alignment, and the operational infrastructure to help partners scale services businesses they couldn’t build alone.

Senior VP Jason Bystrak said something at the announcement worth holding onto: “Partners are navigating increasing complexity across infrastructure, security, and compute. NEXT+ reflects our focus on providing clarity, alignment, and practical engagement that supports how partners sell, deliver, and grow.”

That’s a different pitch than “we have the best prices.” Whether D&H executes on it — that’s the June test.

The Part That Matters to You

If you’re an MSP in North America and D&H isn’t on your distributor shortlist, the 2025 numbers are a reason to look again.

Not because the numbers are impressive (though they are). Because the things driving those numbers — AI readiness training, cloud services focus, MSP-specific support infrastructure — are the same things that make a distributor actually useful to a services-led business.

The distributor relationship is often the last place MSPs look for a competitive edge. It shouldn’t be. The right distributor gives you better vendor terms, better technical access, and better market intelligence than you’d have on your own. That’s leverage.

D&H has been building toward something. The 2025 results say it’s working. NEXT+ in June is the next proof point.

I’ll report back from Austin.