Omdia published its 2026 telco go-to-market predictions this week. If you read the whole thing, there’s one number that changes the framing of almost every other conversation happening in the channel right now.

More than 85% of channel-led telecom service sales are expected to include attached IT services in 2026.

Not eventually. This year.

That’s not a technology trend. That’s a structural shift in how enterprise buyers are purchasing connectivity — and it has direct implications for how carriers price, package, and incentivize their channel partners. The agents and solution providers still selling telco as a standalone product aren’t losing because they’re bad at sales. They’re losing because the buying behavior underneath them has moved.

The Omdia Forecast

Devan Adams, Principal Analyst for Channel at Omdia, published the firm’s 2026 GTM predictions with a framing worth paying attention to: “actions over assertions.” The research firm isn’t forecasting hypothetical futures. It’s identifying behavioral shifts that are already underway.

The headline finding — 85%+ of channel telecom deals including IT components — reflects what enterprise buyers have been telling their procurement teams for two years. They don’t want a connectivity vendor and a managed IT vendor on separate invoices with separate SLAs and separate support queues. They want one provider, one contract, and one throat to choke.

Connectivity, cloud, cybersecurity, and managed services need to appear as a unified offering. The channel partners who figured that out first are already capitalizing. The ones waiting for carriers to hand them a turnkey bundle are going to be waiting a long time.

One Hundred-Plus Deals

The Omdia report also projects more than 100 mergers, acquisitions, and joint ventures in the telecom sector in 2026. That’s not a prediction of consolidation. That’s consolidation in progress.

The pressure is structural. Carriers are squeezed between hyperscalers eating enterprise share from above and cable operators eating broadband share from below. AI-native competitors who don’t carry the cost burden of legacy networks are entering segments that used to be protected by infrastructure moats. The only path to profitability for most operators is scale, portfolio depth, or both.

A hundred-plus deals in a single year means almost every major carrier is either acquiring, partnering, or being acquired. For channel partners, that’s not background noise — it’s the map shifting under your feet in real time. The carrier whose partner program you’ve built your business around looks different after a significant acquisition. The comp plan you structured your quota around can change. The relationship you’ve spent five years cultivating with a channel manager can evaporate when that person’s org gets absorbed.

This is the part of carrier M&A that doesn’t show up in the press release. It shows up in your commission statement six months later.

The Points-Based Shift

One of the most operationally significant predictions in the Omdia report is this: at least one large U.S. telecom or cable provider is likely to implement a fully points-based rewards system for channel partners in 2026.

Points-based programs have been a feature of IT vendor partner ecosystems — Cisco, Microsoft, HPE — for years. They’re designed to reward partners across the full customer lifecycle: lead generation, solution design, deployment, post-sale support. The implication is that carriers are now modeling their incentive structures on the IT vendor playbook, rather than the traditional SPIFF-heavy, transaction-focused telecom model.

For partners, this is a meaningful change. Under a points-based model, the economics of partner engagement shift. Carrying a customer through implementation and supporting them post-sale creates value that gets recognized on paper. Hunting for new logos but leaving customers under-supported leaves margin on the table. It’s designed to reward partners who behave like account managers rather than order takers.

Whether the carrier that implements this program follows through with the tools and support to make it operationally viable is a separate question. Points programs that aren’t backed by clean partner portals, transparent tracking, and responsive channel teams tend to create more resentment than loyalty. But the direction is right, and the first carrier to execute it well will have a genuine competitive advantage in partner recruitment.

The Billing Problem Nobody Wants to Talk About

Beneath all of this sits a plumbing problem that slows down every converged telco-IT deal: billing.

Telecom billing systems and IT services billing systems were built by different companies, in different decades, to serve different purposes. When a carrier tries to offer cloud, managed security, and connectivity on a single invoice, they hit a wall of technical debt that most of them haven’t fully resolved. The result is manual reconciliation, delayed invoicing, and billing disputes that damage partner relationships and customer satisfaction simultaneously.

Omdia flagged billing convergence as a major 2026 trend for exactly this reason. The IT-telco bundle is a great story to tell in a sales meeting. Getting it onto one bill without six hours of manual work per customer is the operational problem nobody wants to put in the forecast.

The carriers and distributors who crack this first — single-pane billing that covers telco and IT services without the reconciliation overhead — will have a structural advantage in the converged market. Partners will route deals to whoever makes their back-office life easiest. Always have, always will.

What This Means for Partners

The 85% figure is permission structure for conversations you may have been avoiding.

If you’re a telecom agent who’s been telling yourself that connectivity is a specialty, that managed IT is someone else’s lane, that bundling creates complexity without margin — those arguments are getting harder to make when the majority of enterprise buyers want the bundle.

The question isn’t whether the market is converging. It’s whether you’re positioned to benefit when it does, or whether you’ll be handing those accounts to a competitor who shows up with the full stack.

Matthew Ball at Omdia estimated that 79% of SME IT spending will flow to, through, and with partners this year — and that partner-delivered spending in that segment will grow 5.8%. The opportunity is real. The question is what kind of partner you are when the customer calls.

The View From Here

The Omdia forecast isn’t predicting a future that’s still several years away. It’s describing a market that’s already here and accelerating. Carriers are building the IT capability into their channel DNA through acquisitions, partnership structures, and updated program incentives. The partner programs are evolving to reward IT-attached behavior. The buyers are already demanding the bundle.

The partners who thrive in this environment are the ones who started repositioning two years ago. For everyone else: the window is still open, but it won’t be indefinitely.

Telecom-only is a sustainable business for a shrinking number of scenarios. The Omdia numbers just made that clearer.