HUNTER VALLEY, NSW, 14 September 2026: Two hundred of Australia and New Zealand’s top technology providers put their laptops down at Rydges in the Hunter Valley last night, opening the largest partner conference Access4 has run.
Four days, under a theme doing deliberate double duty: “Unwind in the Valley: Conversations that Can’t Be Automated”.
Conversations that can’t be automated
Buyers now research with AI before they speak to anyone. Most would rather not speak to anyone at all. And yet, when the answer actually matters, they still pick up the phone and check it with a human being.
That tension runs through the week. The providers pulling ahead are not the ones automating fastest. They are the ones who can still build and hold a real relationship with their market, and do it at scale.
“Knowledge used to be the moat,” Access4 Chairman Scott Carter said. “It is not any more, because knowledge became abundant overnight. Information got democratised. Judgement did not. Trust is the new superpower, and our partners are sitting on more of it than they realise.”
Ten years, no price rise
Founder and CEO Tim Jackson opens Monday morning with two numbers most technology vendors would never put on a slide. Access4 has not raised its prices once in more than ten years, and has never taken a dollar of profit out of the business.
“We made a promise before we had the platform to back it up,” Jackson said. “Simple, safe and stable, whatever was happening in the carrier world underneath it. Ten years on, 600-plus partners can tell you whether we kept it.”
What is on
Working sessions, not slideware. The product and platform roadmap from the executive team, a keynote from Mike Adams on storytelling as a sales tool, a session from mental health advocate Diego Nievas, and the next stage of the APEX Partner Program.
Access4’s first Chief Marketing Officer, Charley Vokoun, is handing partners nine months of campaigns built twice over. Once to arm their own sales team, once ready to send to their customers under their own brand.
None of it happens on its own. The week is backed by platinum sponsor Enreach, gold sponsors Huntress and Inforcer, and silver sponsors HALO and Kaseya, with Commsplus Distribution, Rollring, Sherpatech, Dubber.ai, NetSapiens, Dijital Team and Roger365.io hosting the networking sessions between them, where a fair bit of the real work gets done.
Backing R U OK?
The second meaning of the theme is the more important one.
A blind auction closes at Tuesday night’s gala dinner: six seats on a scenic helicopter flight over the Hunter Valley, landing for a hosted lunch at Bimbadgen, with each winner picking which Access4 leader flies with them as their host. Every dollar bid goes to R U OK?
“This industry runs hot and people do not always say when they are struggling,” Vokoun said. “We wanted our own people in the helicopter, not just a cheque in an envelope.”
The Access4 Partner Awards are presented on Tuesday night across 13 categories, including Partner of the Year.
