Customer experience and cloud contact center vendor Nice is accelerating its business collaboration with global system integrators (GSIs), and its new Chief Partner Officer Dorothy Copeland told Channel Dive that the company offers flexibility and clear collaboration rules that other vendors do not provide.

Nice is optimistic about the GSI channel and wants the industry to know it. Over the past year, the vendor's annual contract value (ACV) related to GSIs grew 3.6 times, with GSIs' share of ACV rising from 4% in the previous year to 14%. Capgemini recently signed a $679 million contract with a major UK institution to implement the Nice CXone platform, while Accenture and Deloitte were two major sponsors at this week's Nice World conference.

"Over the past 12 months, we have achieved significant results with GSIs, and there is a very strong pipeline of potential projects ahead," said Copeland, who took on the role of Chief Partner Officer four months ago.

As the company digests the 2025 acquisition of agentic AI and conversational AI provider Cognigy and its channel implications, Nice's partner program is evolving.

This move puts Nice in direct competition with point solution vendors that integrate AI agents into existing platforms. Nice aims to capitalize on channel conflict between system integrators (SIs) and the field deployment engineers (FDEs) dispatched by these point vendors.

Copeland noted that some vendors place FDEs in customer offices with the initial task of developing products. After a year and a half, these FDEs begin assisting with product implementation. These vendor engineers are taking on roles typically belonging to professional services firms, thereby taking away business opportunities from partners.

"Once they get into the GSI's customer base, business opportunities are siphoned away because AI point solution providers handle all professional services themselves," Copeland said.

Nice is actively advancing a joint delivery model with GSIs, in some cases even subcontracting professional services to partners.

"Compared to the past, we are shifting a significant amount of service work to partners and are currently building a joint delivery methodology between our professional services team and partners," Copeland said. "In many cases, partners need our professional services because they lack deep knowledge of our products; and we equally need partners because they have expertise in integrating third-party technologies and vertical market solution capabilities."

The Cognigy acquisition has also opened new business pathways for value-added resellers (VARs).

As the company recruits value-added resellers, Nice's North American channel is undergoing a structural shift. Historically, technology service distributors (TSDs) and technology advisors (TAs) selling on an agency model were Nice's primary channels, but SIs and VARs are expected to play more significant roles. According to Copeland, nearly 90% of Nice's international business is done through resale or co-selling.

"Our international market is much more tightly integrated with partners than the Americas market," she said.

Vendor drives ecosystem building

Nice is not the only CX vendor pushing for partner alignment. Zoom has placed greater emphasis on certified sales partners capable of implementing and managing its platform. This shift is challenging for technology advisors (TAs) without professional services divisions. Meanwhile, resellers also need convincing reasons.

Eric Ludwig, co-founder of Rise Technology Advisors, said VARs typically invest in original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) whose business scope extends beyond CX. With Nice's annual revenue of approximately $2.9 billion, the company and other vendors of similar size need to prove they are large enough to support an independent ecosystem.

"Take Cisco, Microsoft, and AWS as examples—they offer VARs multiple options for delivering and monetizing services, whereas vendors like Nice are more niche," Ludwig said. "VARs need to align on the delivery side because their investors are seeking more services revenue rather than traditional hardware and software sales."

Because scaling service practices across multiple vendors is difficult, VARs may need to take a more strategic approach.

"To grow, VARs need significant internal investment in people and processes, finding ways to extend adjacent opportunities in the CX environment to other areas of the customer's IT estate," Ludwig said. His company is a Nice technology advisor partner.

Nice is also actively attracting business process outsourcing (BPO) vendors as partners. In January, Nice's BPO sales team was placed under Copeland's management. This is a major shift for the company—historically, Nice treated BPOs (which provide outsourced staffing for contact centers) as customers rather than partners.

"They have always wanted to collaborate with us on go-to-market because when they win customers, they want us involved, and they work with many large enterprises," Copeland said.

As the channel landscape expands, Nice is also making progress in the independent software vendor (ISV) space. The company launched a native integration with Epic in April. Currently, Nice's ISV portal lists approximately 180 partners who have launched 80 integrations with the vendor over the past 12 months.