GTIA looking for membership growth

It has been around 265 days since the decision was made to spin-off the CompTIA training business and establish the Global Technology Industry Association (GTIA), a non-profit organisation to promote the channel.

The focus fell on the GTIA this week as it pulled together its members at ChannelCon to update its progress and the ambitions for the year ahead.

Dan Wensley, CEO of GTIA, has the sights set on growth in 2026, both from a member volume point of view as well as increasing the reach of the organisation geographically.

“We’ve really looked at more value for more members to increase the value to current members as well as increase the number of members globally. Growth is a key theme, both geographically as well as the number of IT service providers and overall members around the globe. The other [theme] is to increase the utilisation of the assets and the exposure of the assets and resources that we provide,” he said.

“We’ve had an incredible transition year. We’ve grown this year as well. We’ve really set the foundation for GTIA,” he added. “We’ve gone through all of the executive councils throughout the world, understanding their needs, wants and desires. They’re on board to help us as well. So, we’re going into 2026 and very well-positioned to be more impactful.”

He said that the ambition was to grow the community and include a wide range of channel businesses to gain multiple viewpoints and access to a broad base of expertise.

“We need all the vendors. We need the emerging vendors. We need the incumbent vendors and their technologies and their innovations. We obviously need the IT service providers, but we also need the other peer groups,” he said.

MJ Shoer, chief community officer at GTIA, said that the organisation was focused on making it easier to onboard members and then work with them to promote the benefits they could tap into once they had signed up.

He said there was an opportunity to significantly grow the membership base without sacrificing the quality of support the organisation could provide: “There’s a huge market of members that we should be providing benefit to.”

The interest in an organisation that champions the channel without the need to bow to sponsorship or limited vendor loyalties means it has the ability to provide support that does not exist in the same form elsewhere in the channel.

Wensley said that there was a need for a community that shared best practice, knowledge around emerging technologies and enablement to help members improve their businesses.

“We centre all of those around the renewed sense and requirement of community we truly believe,” he added. “There’s never been a more important time, perhaps, to be a part of peer group or be a part of the community in the IT services industry because of the pace of change.”

“The rate of change is so fast now that that the only way I think you can stay competitive and ahead of it is to stay open and communicative with your peers and with the industry, and we want to be the facilitator of that, and give them that the platform to do that,” he said.

Wensley said that the sale of the certification business to private equity has given the GTIA the opportunity to operate as a non-profit champion of the channel.

“We have enough money to run perpetuity, doing and growing and continuing to invest more year over year with the with the funds that were received, and the endowment. And that’ll allow us to both operate the membership programme, the association, as well as our charitable foundation, for many, many decades to come,” he said.

“We’re completely agnostic. We were the only nonprofit fully funded organisation on the planet. I no longer need to rely on any revenue-generating activities thanks to the endowment, and to be guided by any of that is [about asking] what can we do best for the channel? How can we give them more?” he said.