Structured has been named a Representative Vendor in the 2026 Gartner® Market Guide for Partner and Ecosystem Relationship Management Applications.
In our view, the next wave of partner growth won’t come from the partners already performing. It will come from the much larger group most programs can’t reach today. That makes partner marketing, not just partner management, one of the biggest levers a channel leader has.
Managing partners and marketing through partners are two different jobs. Most partner technology is built for the first. Structured is built entirely for the second, and over the past year we rebuilt our platform from the ground up as AI-native. Channel teams at IBM, Microsoft, ServiceNow and Google run their partner marketing on Structured today.
Activation is the channel’s biggest untapped opportunity
Most partner programs are built around the partners that already perform. The largest get dedicated resources and hands-on marketing support. Everyone else gets a portal and is left to find the right content and launch it on their own.
Those partners don’t stall for lack of interest. They stall for three familiar reasons:
- Another login. Partners work with multiple vendors and already have too many portals to manage.
- Content that isn’t personalized. Static portal content isn’t typically tailored to a partner’s brand, market, audience or region, so it’s either not used at all or it takes manual work to edit before it’s approved and launched. Both partners and channel teams do not have the time and resources too dedicate to this essential work.
- No line of sight. Channel teams can’t easily see which partners and campaigns are engaging, so it’s hard to know where to invest.
None of these are content problems. They’re activation problems, and closing that gap is the work of the next generation of partner marketing.
Three shifts we see reshaping partner marketing
From portals to workflows. Partners don’t need another destination. We expect the partner portal to become less of a place partners visit and more of the engine behind the tools and AI assistants they already use.
From content generation to execution. Generating an email is becoming table stakes for AI. The real value is AI that understands the partner, recommends the right integrated campaign, tailors it to their market and helps launch it.
From partner management to partner activation. A portal login isn’t a business outcome, and neither is a content download. The question channel leaders will increasingly ask is simple: how many of my partners are actively marketing, and where are the gaps?
The programs that make these shifts first will turn more of their partner base into a scalable source of growth.
How Structured is building for what’s next
Partners already use AI assistants like Claude and ChatGPT to get work done. On its own, that AI doesn’t know your program or your brand rules. The Structured MCP Server brings partner marketing into those assistants, so partners can find content and program knowledge without logging into another portal, while approved content and brand governance stay in place for the channel team.
Inside the platform, AI handles the work that has traditionally slowed vendors and partners down: recommending relevant campaigns, tailoring content to each partner’s brand, audience and market, and launching it through the marketing tools partners already use. Channel teams see which partners are participating, which campaigns are gaining traction and where gaps remain.
We built Structured to serve both ends of the partner base: strategic partners with their own marketing teams, and thousands of long-tail partners that need a simpler way to put marketing in market.
“The biggest opportunity in most partner programs isn’t getting more from the partners already performing. It’s helping more of the partner base become productive marketers. That’s the problem we’ve been solving, and AI is making it possible to do that at a scale that wasn’t possible before.”- Stacey Epstein, CEO, Structured
Learn more
We’re grateful to the customers and partners who continue to shape what we build.
If you’re rethinking how partners go to market, we’d love to show you what that can look like. Book a demo or talk to our team.
Every Partner, Activated.
Source and disclaimers
Gartner, Market Guide for Partner and Ecosystem Relationship Management Applications, Guy Wood, Laz Gonzalez, Anne McClelland, 30 September 2026.
Gartner does not endorse any company, vendor, product or service depicted in its publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s business and technology insights organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this publication, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
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