Every few months a software company figures out what the rest of us already knew: the TSD channel is a serious machine.

This week it was Front — the customer operations platform that crossed $100 million in ARR last September — announcing partnerships with Avant, Intelisys, Sandler Partners, and Telarus. As of Wednesday, the thousands of agents and technology consultants those distributors work with can add Front to their portfolio.

That’s a meaningful announcement. Let me tell you why.

The Agent Was Already Closing Front Deals Somewhere Else

Meagan Thai, who runs contact center and UC solutions at Telarus, said the quiet part out loud in an interview with CRN: “Quite frankly, we were losing opportunities because agents could get Front elsewhere, and we didn’t have them in our portfolio.”

That’s the thing about a product that sells itself. It doesn’t wait for distribution to catch up. Agents were already bringing Front into deals, getting clients excited, and then hitting a wall when the paperwork didn’t have a path through their TSD. Some of them figured out a workaround. Others just moved on.

The partnerships fix that leak. Now the infrastructure exists. Agents at Avant, Intelisys, Sandler, and Telarus can run Front through their standard quoting and commission flow instead of treating it like a one-off exception.

What Front Actually Does

Front positions itself as the layer between your ticket system, your UCaaS stack, and your CRM — not a replacement for any of them, but a coordination layer that ties them together. Their pitch is that modern customer service involves too many tools talking past each other, and Front builds the workspace where teams see everything in one place.

They’ve got 9,000 customers. They raised $65 million in a Series D in 2022 and acquired Idiomatic (AI-powered voice-of-customer tech) in November 2024. The $100M ARR milestone in September 2025 means they crossed from “interesting startup” to “real business with scale.”

The channel angle is the UCaaS/CCaaS convergence play. Ben Edwards at Sandler put it well: agents who’ve been selling comm stacks for years already know the customers who are running customer service operations across too many siloed tools. Front is the answer to a problem those customers are actively complaining about. That’s a different conversation than cold prospecting.

It’s the same dynamic pushing UCaaS and CCaaS together — customers don’t want to buy communications infrastructure in five separate conversations with five separate vendors. Front benefits from that fatigue.

Mike Kane Knows What He’s Doing

Front hired Mike Kane as SVP of Global Channel Sales in December. Before that he spent nearly nine years at Dialpad as SVP of Global Partner Sales, with international sales layered on top. Before Dialpad, stints at Ping Identity, Softchoice, and Insight. The guy has seen the inside of this industry from multiple angles.

When a company in growth mode hires a channel chief with Kane’s background, they’re not exploring the channel — they’re committing to it. Kane has spent the early months of 2026 assembling a channel team. The Avant/Intelisys/Sandler/Telarus announcement is the opening move, not the full play.

The question agents should be asking is: what does the partner program actually look like? Training, enablement, marketing development funds, deal registration — that’s where the partnership turns from a press release into a real selling opportunity. For context on what separates good TSDs from great ones, see our best TSDs for MSPs in 2026 ranking.

Kane said in the CRN interview that Front plans to continue investing in partner training, joint marketing programs, and ecosystem expansion throughout 2026. That’s the right answer. Whether it materializes into something agents can actually use is the thing to watch over the next two quarters.

The Timing Is Smart

The announcement landed during a week when AI in customer service is at peak conversation volume after the Enterprise Connect news cycle. Front’s CCaaS-adjacent positioning benefits from every dollar spent on that awareness by bigger vendors. When a buyer shows up at a CCaaS demo and realizes the product doesn’t solve their coordination problem, they’re already receptive to something like Front.

The agent channel catches those buyers. That’s exactly why Front needed to be in the TSD ecosystem before the wave hit, not after.

For agents in the UCaaS and CCaaS space: this is worth a look. The product has traction, the channel chief knows what he’s doing, and the entry point into a $100M ARR business with a real partner program is a better conversation than fighting over the same legacy CCaaS renewals everyone else is chasing. Understanding how residual commissions work will help you evaluate Front’s comp model against what you’re already earning.

As always, send me your Front stories once you start selling it. The real education is always in the field.