The channel is facing a growing challenge, juggling more services and a growing portfolio of traditional and emerging vendors. In order to manage that challenge, Stephen DeWitt, former senior HP channel executive and new CEO of Work Market, predicts the channel will welcome a "next generation" of freelance workers. DeWitt predicted that in the next four to six years the trend will ramp up from only a few VARs today, to a time in the near future when some VARs' workforces are made up entirely of freelancers.

Here's why he thinks the trend is so important and what the opportunity is for solution providers with a freelance workforce.

What's so important about the freelance market?

This trend at a macro level is really going to be the defining trend of this generation – that is taking a new approach to bringing perfect labor to bear at the moment of truth where that labor is needed and not carry the cost of the labor unnecessarily on the balance sheet because we've all proven in the world of tech services that that's a recipe for bad outcomes.

What's the opportunity for solution providers around freelance workers?

If you're in the world of being a value added reseller, the definition of value add in the new world order implies bringing perfect labor to bear at the moment of truth... The traditional approach to labor doesn’t fit well into the rapidly changing landscape of value add... The typical VAR out there has made decisions over the last handful of years on whose product line am I going to wrap my growth around... We all know that the economics in break-fix type services organizations are pretty tight so clearly VARs and integrators in that space want to be able to do that service offering with as little friction as possible and have as low cost of a labor force as possible. Typically in that dynamic of labor, you're looking for more of an "Uber-ized" labor...If I'm a [traditional] VAR, I look at that go-forward frontier and how I'm going to match the skills of my company to that problem set when the skills of my company have been typically what the skills have been... Do I want to hire W2 employees....or would an alternative model make more sense?

Where's the value for the VAR business in this? What's stopping an end user from using freelancers directly?

Whether you're HP, or a VAR, or an end customer, I think there's going to be utility of on demand all over the equation. But, at the end of the day, value added resellers have played a role in every generation and they will provide a role in this generation. The difference is, their operating model will be more on-demand than fixed cost. If I'm sitting there at a VAR right now and my revenue has been $100 million...and I handle five vendors' product lines... Each year, I make a strategic decision to add [a new vendor]...I need to have the skills that will allow me to build that and then allow me to take that to my customers...

Within the next 10 years, the way a company like an HP, a Cisco or anybody, the way that they come up with a product, bring a product to market, service that product and end of life that product will be monumentally changed from the way it is today because we can do it better, faster, cheaper in an on-demand sense...It will take the better part of a handful of years, four, five, six years or so for this to become commonplace but that's the horizon we're talking about.