Eaton’s 2024 forecast: smooth sailing ahead

Dec 7, 2023

December always provides the perfect backdrop to reflect on the past 12 months – and get a sneak peek into what’s ahead in the new year. While 2023 represented a banner year for Eaton channel partners – headlined by the unification of our two legacy business lines – 2024 looks to be extremely promising. Partners should expect more opportunities to maximize the complete Eaton line, as no other manufacture can match the breadth and depth of our portfolio.

2023’s power couple: Eaton + Tripp Lite

In a decision two years in the making, 2023 saw us combine the Eaton and Tripp Lite brands to create a duo of complementary sales experiences designed to leverage the strengths of each. The new Tripp Lite series is now focused on high-velocity sales that accelerate conversion, with competitive upfront pricing, digital sales enablement and product availability among the key pillars. Eaton products, on the other hand, remain appealing to partners looking for a margin-rich model, characterized by product and software differentiation, tailored solutions, lifecycle management programs, solid deal registration protection and personalized field support. In an effort to fully support all of our channel partners, we also streamlined our commercial programs to provide deal registration across all product lines.

Overcoming challenges, embracing opportunities

Because your feedback from this new positioning and modified programs has been extremely positive, it encouraged us to continue this momentum in the upcoming year. Although 2023 was characterized by fears of a recession driven by record-high interest rates – leaving many customers wary of investing in new information systems – the resilience of the economy demonstrated by strong GDP growth throughout the year will likely put these fears to rest and ignite a new wave of investments in 2024. We know that you have already been busy deploying solutions that were impacted by supply chain issues over the past two years. As production and logistical bottlenecks are finally easing across the industry, you may have an overabundance of products to install and bill to your customers. While this could place the search for new projects on the backburner, we know this is only a transitional issue that will be resolved in the coming months.

Furthermore, we anticipate that market conditions for our connectivity and peripheral product lines will be improving, aligning with the upcoming refresh cycle of laptops purchased at the beginning of the pandemic. Overall, the market should accelerate after the softness experienced over the past year, in which customers were more focused on attempting to optimize the cost of sprawling cloud expenses than invest in new technology.

Navigating trust in a monetization era

We also expect to see more opportunities spurred by the hype around GenAI. As the trend begins to create real projects and deployments next year, Eaton partners will be able to leverage our new G4 rack PDUs to seize numerous data center upgrade opportunities driven by AI workloads and the need for increased power density in racks. By leveraging our new DITPM Performance Management software platform, partners can provide a complete infrastructure stack to customers hosting their workloads with a co-location provider, including rack enclosures, cable management, rack PDUS, KVMs, console servers, fiber or copper connectivity, patch panels, in-row cooling, containment and cages.
And within the key distributed IT segment, partners should be on the lookout for exciting new products to remotely manage endpoints with a focus on total cost of ownership. Finally, because our channel business model is based on mutual trust and long-term relationships, you can rest assured that we will steer clear of the extreme digital monetization that other companies are beginning to push. 

Growth on the horizon

As we prepare to usher in 2024, the outlook appears bright, filled with opportunities for our partners. As always, Eaton will be here to support you and provide the products, tools and commercial programs you need to be successful over the next 12 months – and beyond.