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Carrie Hopkins, senior director of business development and sales for Exclusive Networks Canada Exclusive Networks describes itself as a specialist distributor — hyper-focused on cybersecurity and advanced networking, deliberately not trying to be everything to everyone. As the company makes a serious push into the Canadian market, In The Channel sat down with Carrie Hopkins, senior director of business development and sales for Canada, to talk about what that actually means in practice for Canadian partners. Hopkins walks through what Exclusive is building in Canada specifically — in-country finance and operations, and a prescriptive approach to partner recruitment that goes beyond adding names to a portal. Rather than waiting for partners to come to them, Exclusive analyzes what existing partners buy, what they conspicuously don’t buy, and builds outreach strategy around those gaps. We also get into Ignition, Exclusive’s newly launched cybersecurity channel incubator, which arrived in North America earlier this year. The program is designed to bring emerging vendors to channel partners with the vetting and enablement baked in — addressing a real problem for MSPs and VARs who are being pitched constantly by early-stage vendors and don’t have the bandwidth to evaluate them all. And then there’s the Westcon thread. Hopkins spent years at Westcon and Comstor before moving through vendor-side channel roles at Ixia, Infoblox, and Sisense. When asked whether Exclusive feels like the evolution of what Westcon was doing before North American distribution consolidated, her answer is worth a listen. – UPLOAD AUDIO Read Full Transcript ROBERT DUTT: Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca and your host for the show. If you’ve been paying attention to the distribution landscape in Canada, you may have noticed that Exclusive Networks has been quietly building something. Exclusive is a global cybersecurity specialist distributor, and the emphasis on “specialist” is deliberate. They’re not trying to be everything for everyone. They focus specifically on cybersecurity and advanced networking, and they’re making a real push to make that model mean something in the Canadian market. My guest today is Carrie Hopkins, senior director of business development and sales for Canada at Exclusive Networks. Carrie’s background is worth noting. She spent years at Westcon and Comstor before moving through a series of vendor-side channel roles, and she brings that perspective to bear on what Exclusive is trying to build here. We talk about the state of play in Canada, the distributor’s recently launched Ignition cybersecurity incubator program, and whether what Exclusive is doing today is the evolution of what the specialist distributor used to look like in the market, or something genuinely new. Let’s get right into it. My chat with Carrie Hopkins. ROBERT DUTT: Carrie, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it. CARRIE HOPKINS: Thank you, Robert. Great to see you. ROBERT DUTT: For listeners who may not be familiar with Exclusive Networks, how do you describe what you do differently from the broadliners? What does specialist distribution look like in practice, especially in a modern context? CARRIE HOPKINS: Yeah. So, Exclusive Networks Canada is hyper-focused on a very curated line card. We’re able to provide the right support structure to scale faster and win faster for our partners. We have programs both for our core vendor lines, as well as our new Ignition vendor lines, that will provide combined deep channel expertise, as well as hands-on enablement through our engineering team. ROBERT DUTT: You joined Exclusive, I guess, coming up a year now. What was the pitch that brought you in, and what were they asking you to build in Canada? What’s kind of the big goal? CARRIE HOPKINS: So, the big goal, obviously, with any business is revenue generation, but it’s also to improve our footprint geographically, nationally. We are also from an in-region support perspective, as well as improving the number of vendors that are selling into our partner community. To do that, we have to bring our partner community to the right vendors that will help them grow their business. So, that’s really what we’re focused on. ROBERT DUTT: You touched on geography and that. What were the gaps, both geographical and otherwise? Like, what did the Canadian market look like for Exclusive when you showed up? What were the gaps, and where has your focus been in this first year? CARRIE HOPKINS: Yeah, I think the biggest gaps were really more vendor alignment. Geographically, we do have people based from Montreal out to Calgary. So, we do have physical presence there to help our partners with feet on the street, but we tended to be a little bit more hyper-focused on a few of our top vendors. I think for the whole team, and what we’re seeing, is that by curating a better cybersecurity and network security vendor list, we’re able to give our partners more. We’re able to reach new partners that we haven’t talked to in the past because maybe they weren’t aligned to our top vendors. So, growing that vendor list has really helped us expand across the country. ROBERT DUTT: You spent quite a bit of time at Westcon and Comstor, which is probably the closest model I can think of to what Exclusive is doing that’s existed in the North American market. When you look at Exclusive now, do you see it sort of as the evolution of that model, or is it something genuinely different given the changing times? CARRIE HOPKINS: It’s actually funny that there’s a number of ex-Westcon-ers here now, and that’s what brought us all together, is that this is — it feels like the Westcon of the mid-2000s aughts. When we all were working there before 2010, it was just such a great vibe. We had great people that were aligned to vendors and to partners, and we all worked together really collaboratively. That’s what I’m seeing now. While Exclusive Networks Canada is our own entity — we have Canadian footprint, we have Canadian finance, we have Canadian operations and sales — we do work really collaboratively with our North American team, which includes people like Heather Allen and Andrew Warren, who are also ex-Westcon. We’re able to really remember the great times of building up that business and then to also bring it into this new era with all these great new vendors who are bringing something new and innovative to the market, as opposed to just the old traditionals. ROBERT DUTT: It’s not every day you get a chance to run it back, as it were. Keep it in that lane. Westcon obviously got absorbed into broadline here in North America, at least. Do you think the market lost something when that happened? And is what Exclusive is doing filling that gap? CARRIE HOPKINS: Agreed. I think so. I think with the broadline, of course, there’s some great people still there today who are really great at holding those relationships. But what happens with the broadline, of course, is you have so many vendors and you have so many partners, and you can’t possibly give the same level of touch and care and commitment that we can here when we’re keeping it under that 20-vendor mark. We’re able to really go after our partners with the right mix of vendors that aren’t over-distributed, I would say. ROBERT DUTT: So to that point, one of the fun things you’re able to do in the specialty distribution mode is embrace vendors who are a little bit earlier in the game, which brings us to Ignition, which just launched in North America. Cybersecurity channel incubator. Can you walk me through what that actually means? What does a vendor get out of being in Ignition, and what does a partner get access to? CARRIE HOPKINS: Yeah. For the vendors, we’re giving them — again, we’re giving our vendors a team of highly skilled distribution people that knows the market. Most of my employees here have been either in distribution or in service provider and resale in Canada for anywhere from six years to 15, actually, or more, for a couple of us. And so they’re getting a strong team. They’re getting a team with the right support structure. They’re getting dedicated SE support. So we have dedicated SEs aligned to each one of these vendors. And then they’re also getting an integrated hyperscaler pathway as well as we build out our hyperscaler go-to-market motion. So the partners that we align with, we will help them nurture, grow, and scale well, and also enabling our channel partners to differentiate because they’re bringing on something really cool and unique to be relevant and bring new value, whether it’s from vendor platform visibility or network detection and response, but done in a more unique way. We’re hoping that we can bring them that value. ROBERT DUTT: Looking at the initial North American cohort with ExtraHop, Zluri, Docker, Sendmarc, PagerDuty, Meter — that’s not all pure-play cybersecurity in the traditional sense. I’m curious, how are you defining the scope of what Ignition is about? CARRIE HOPKINS: Yeah. I think it has to fit with our partner mix as well. In Canada, our partners are possibly not as verticalized as in some other larger regions. In Canada, most of our partners, if they’re selling networking, they also will sell security, or they’re looking for that vendor that’s going to bridge the gap. So even though a vendor, for example, like ExtraHop — you might think of them as network detection and response, but there is a security play in there. There’s a security SOC play that works really well, and it helps our Canadian partners who are talking to the network team introduce a vendor that also connects them with the SOC. That could be said for Sendmarc as well. Again, you think of that as email demarcation points, which could lean into the networking team, but we need to talk to everybody. Our Canadian partners are talking to both sides of the fence, so we need to give them those vendors. ROBERT DUTT: Well, and yeah, it speaks to the moment too, in that security is part of every sale, but particularly every networking sale. CARRIE HOPKINS: Exactly. Yeah. ROBERT DUTT: From the Canadian partner perspective specifically, what does Ignition mean for them? Is it about giving them earlier access to emerging vendors, de-risking those bets with players who may be less familiar, something else? CARRIE HOPKINS: I think you hit the nail on the head. We’re doing all the research for them. I was speaking to a partner just yesterday at the Winnipeg Western Canada Information Security Conference, and he was saying that his inbox for his LinkedIn is filled with vendors reaching out saying, “Please, sell us.” How does an MSP or service provider decide which vendors they should engage in? We’ve done that heavy lifting for them. We’ve researched, we’ve determined that these are the right fit for the Canadian market and the US market, and we’re happy to bring them a more curated list. Again, let us do the heavy lifting. We also are getting our engineers trained, so it’s not just a team of people sitting in a room deciding that monetarily this is a good fit. These are our engineers who can speak to their engineers and show them exactly how this fits with what they’re selling. It also provides our partners with a really unique differentiated approach. They’re not selling that one vendor, they’re selling a combined solution. ROBERT DUTT: Yeah, I was going to say, how prescriptive, how in the weeds do you guys get in terms of, “Dear MSP, think about this vendor along with this vendor,” piggybacking the core vendors with the Ignition folks? CARRIE HOPKINS: That’s exactly the play. We’ve done extensive research on what are our partners currently buying from us, but also what aren’t they buying from us, maybe because we don’t sell it or they’ve chosen to go a different direction. What are their websites saying that they sell? We’ve taken all of that information, we’ve compared it with the new vendors that we’re bringing on, so we have an extensive list of top-priority partners that we feel are a great fit for multiple of these vendors. Then we have the next level down, so we’ve completely curated a target list of partners that we’re going to reach out to say, “We know you’re a business, we understand it. We think that Docker is the right next step for you,” or, “We believe that Zluri really fits when you’re selling A, B, and C.” ROBERT DUTT: This is North American in scope. How are you getting in front of those vendors and assessing where they are at currently in Canada and where you can step in, make introductions, ease path to market, those kinds of things? CARRIE HOPKINS: That’s one of the things that we find with the Canadian market is there’s not always feet on the ground with new vendors. That’s, again, where we step in. We do have feet on the ground. We’re learning about their solutions, so if they don’t have a local CAM, that’s us. That’s our job is to help them build their business and help them build the right business. Recruiting a lot of partners isn’t always the right first step. It’s recruiting the right partners who will embrace the technology, learn the technology, and help it lift. Then we can see what is the right number of partners for the technology in Canada today. We don’t want to flood the market. We want to make sure that all of our vendors have the right partners to properly serve the market. ROBERT DUTT: I’d imagine that dynamic’s also working in the other direction, in so much as you say, MSPs and other solution providers are being flooded with new vendors, especially in the security space. The fact that you guys are, to a degree, backstopping them — that you’ve done the vetting and you’re standing behind them — has to add something. CARRIE HOPKINS: Exactly. Yeah. ROBERT DUTT: Beyond Ignition, what can you tell me about the broader push for Exclusive in Canada right now? In terms of, you said you want to stay pretty strategic on vendor lines. What are you thinking about partner recruitment, headcount? Basically, where are you building right now? CARRIE HOPKINS: Yes. Building with headcount. Where we’re adding right now — in fact, this morning, we’re adding to our quoting and order management team because we never want to lose sight of one of our biggest values, which is our speed and efficiency and accuracy of our quoting. When it comes to distribution, you have to do the basics really brilliantly. We do that here. Sub-[time] turnaround on quote request, sub-[time] order management process. We are quick and efficient, full stop. We’re going to keep doing that. We’re going to add headcount to that. We’re opening up headcount in the second half of the year to help us really embrace all of the new vendors that we have on board. In the last six months, we’ve also onboarded vendors like A10 and Infoblox who are going to make a big impact in the coming year. We’re fully supporting them with extra headcount. ROBERT DUTT: What’s the long-term vision for structure? I know distributors in particular tend to vacillate somewhat over time between a heavily North Americanized model and independent Canadian. Just curious what the long-term thinking is there for you guys. CARRIE HOPKINS: Long-term is that we will always have feet on the ground here in Canada. That gets reinforced to me, and I reinforce it with my leadership every time, every chance I get. I am also a big advocate for having in-country vendor business managers so they can have those channel business conversations. They’re talking to the peers who know the market. They know the FX challenges. They know that we’re provinces instead of states. It’s like that. The great news is with our Ignition team is that the leader of that team, Michael Compizzi, he’s located just in Rochester, New York, which is a short two-hour drive from where I’m based. He will be in Canada quite often as well. We will have North American support, but in-country dedicated resources. ROBERT DUTT: I would add he’d be closer if it weren’t for a rather inconveniently placed lake. CARRIE HOPKINS: [laughs] ROBERT DUTT: Canadian partners have a lot of choices in terms of distribution, maybe not quite as many as 10 years ago, but still there’s a number of choices there. What’s the honest pitch for why a Canadian MSP or VAR who isn’t already working with Exclusive right now should take a look at you guys? CARRIE HOPKINS: Our partners will never be lost in the shuffle. They will have dedicated support. They will have quick and efficient turnaround, and they will have a vendor line card that supports their business. Simple to the point. ROBERT DUTT: That works. The last one for me: what should Canadian partners be paying attention to over the next six to 12 months, either from you guys exclusively or in the market more broadly? CARRIE HOPKINS: I don’t think that a podcast about technology can end without saying the word AI. [laughs] Didn’t get your [nerd/name] achievement unlocked. ROBERT DUTT: There you go. CARRIE HOPKINS: I think that it’s important to note that there’s so many vendors and so many technologies coming out saying that they support AI, saying that they support different security functions around AI. It’s important that you work with a distributor who’s going to take the time to research each of those vendors on your behalf and have a fully engaged engineering staff who can speak to what it’s doing. Do you need it yet? Is it something that’s going to actually sell to the Canadian market? We’re going to make sure that our Canadian resellers have fully vetted solutions, that they’re not chasing rabbit holes. The number one important thing is that they know their business, they know their customer’s business, and where all those assets are. What does your Canadian partner need? We feel like we have the line card to fulfill that. ROBERT DUTT: Well, look forward to seeing how things roll out with the initial Ignition cohort and beyond, as you continue to develop Exclusive here in Canada. Carrie, thanks for taking the time. CARRIE HOPKINS: Thank you so much, Robert. I appreciate you. [Music transition] ROBERT DUTT: There you have it. Carrie Hopkins from Exclusive Networks. I’d like to thank Carrie for her time today. It was a genuinely good conversation, and I appreciated that she was willing to get beyond the talking points and into what the model actually means in practice for Canadian partners. If there’s one thing I take away from the conversation, it’s that the specialist distribution model Exclusive is building — and Ignition is probably the clearest expression of this — is trying to solve a real problem. Canadian MSPs and resellers are being pitched by an enormous number of emerging vendors, and they don’t have the bandwidth to vet each and every one of them. What Exclusive is saying, essentially, is: we’ll do that work. We’ll bring you the vendors we believe in. We’ll backstop the relationship. You focus on your customers. Whether they can deliver on that promise at scale is something we’ll be watching, but the thesis is certainly sound. The Westcon thread that came up in the conversation stuck with me too. There was something that worked about that model before consolidation rolled through North American distribution. It sounds like at least some of the people who built it think there’s a second act here. Thanks for listening. If you’re finding the podcast useful, please follow or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. We’re on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and most of the major directories. Ratings and reviews are always appreciated and really help other people in the channel find the show. Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel. [Music] A couple of quick flags: “Sub-[time] turnaround” – I couldn’t decipher the exact numbers she threw out there. Worth a quick listen on your end to fill in the blank. “Didn’t get your [nerd/name] achievement unlocked” – MacWhisper clearly mangled this. Sounds like some kind of gaming joke about saying the word AI on a tech podcast. “Nerd achievement unlocked” is the most common internet phrase, but if you remember what she actually said, drop it in. “monetarily” – I left it as-is since it could be correct, though it scans a bit awkwardly. Could also be “more than merely” if you want to give it a listen. Otherwise this should be ready to go. Good batch recording session?

Today’s headline news for Canadian IT solution providers: OpenAI Partner Network: OpenAI‘s inaugural Partner Network is officially live as of July 15, with vice president of strategic global partnerships Colleen Kapase confirming the three-tier program is backed by $150 million in channel investment. Partners can progress through Select, Advanced, and Elite tiers while earning specializations in areas like Codex, cybersecurity, and AI agents. OpenAI says it aims to train 300,000 certified consultants by year-end and is recruiting solution providers of all sizes that can put AI systems into production. OpenAI Carbon60 MSP 501: Carbon60, a Toronto-based managed cloud services provider, has been named to the 2026 MSP 501 at position 206, ranking among the world’s top managed services firms by revenue and operational discipline. The company has built a differentiated practice around Canada-first sovereign cloud and Azure expertise, and the ranking follows a broader push by Canadian MSPs to demonstrate global competitiveness in compliance-heavy verticals. Carbon60 RecordPoint channel-first: RecordPoint has launched a global partner program that CRN describes as a channel-first move, enabling resellers, consultancies, and systems integrators to resell, co-sell, and refer its data and AI governance platform. Partners will receive enablement, joint sales support, and platform access to build practices around data retention, compliance, and AI-ready data classification. Channel Insider Blackpoint Cyber 2026 threat report: Blackpoint Cyber has released its 2026 Annual Threat Report, finding that attackers are increasingly exploiting trusted IT tools rather than using perimeter breaches. The report highlights abuse of remote monitoring and management platforms, VPNs, and identity credentials as primary vectors. ChannelPro Network Managed security market growth: Acronis and Omdia project the global managed security market will grow from $93 billion in 2025 to $106 billion in 2026, a 14.4 percent increase. The growth reflects sustained demand for outsourced security operations among mid-market organizations that lack internal SOC capacity. RAMageddon pressures PC refresh: Industry analysts and OEMs continue to signal significant PC RAM price increases through 2026 due to the ongoing memory supply shortage. Channel partners should advise clients on refresh timing and alternative configurations to manage budget impact. CNET Exabeam MSSP licensing: Exabeam has expanded its APEX partner program with pooled and federated licensing options designed specifically for MSSPs. The new framework is intended to reduce onboarding friction and simplify compliance across multi-tenant security operations centers. Security Brief Read Full Transcript Welcome to The Buzz from ChannelBuzz.ca, I’m Robert Dutt, today is Thursday, July 16, and here’s what’s happening in the channel today. OpenAI’s inaugural Partner Network is officially live as of yesterday, July 15, with the company backing the three-tier program with $150 million in channel investment. Vice president of strategic global partnerships Colleen Kapase confirmed the program is open to solution providers of all sizes, not just global systems integrators. Partners can progress through Select, Advanced, and Elite tiers based on sales performance, technical capability, and deployment experience. The program includes specializations in Codex, cybersecurity, and AI agents. OpenAI says it aims to train 300,000 certified consultants by the end of 2026, and is actively recruiting solution providers that can put AI systems into production. Philip Larson, senior director of the OpenAI Partner Network and a former Google Cloud channel leader, said the program is designed to reward partners for the value they create with customers. Canadian VARs and MSPs with existing AI practices should evaluate the program alongside their current AWS, Google, and Microsoft partnerships, as the specializations in Codex and AI agents may create differentiation in automation-heavy verticals. Carbon60, a Toronto-based managed cloud services provider, has been named to the 2026 MSP 501 at position 206, marking the company as one of the world’s top managed services firms by revenue and operational discipline. The ranking, published by Channel Futures, evaluates financial health, operational maturity, and recurring revenue growth. Carbon60’s inclusion follows a broader trend of Canadian MSPs demonstrating global competitiveness in specialized infrastructure and compliance-heavy verticals. The company has built a differentiated practice around Canada-first sovereign cloud and deep Azure expertise. As Canadian public sector and healthcare clients face stricter data residency requirements, sovereign cloud capabilities are becoming a key differentiator for domestic MSPs seeking to compete with larger global firms on government and enterprise contracts. RecordPoint has gone channel-first with the launch of a global partner program enabling resellers, consultancies, and systems integrators to resell, co-sell, and refer its data and AI governance platform. The program arrives as AI adoption drives a surge in demand for data governance across regulated industries. RecordPoint says partners will receive enablement, joint sales support, and platform access to build practices around data retention, compliance, and AI-ready data classification. CRN reports that the move represents a strategic shift for the company. Canadian partners serving regulated industries like finance, government, and healthcare may find particular opportunity as clients confront unstructured data sprawl ahead of AI deployments. In Brief – OpenAI commits $150 million to launch its inaugural Partner Network with tiered AI specializations. Acronis and Omdia project the managed security market will reach $106 billion in 2026. Blackpoint Cyber’s 2026 Annual Threat Report highlights attackers hiding inside trusted IT tools and RMM platforms. RAMageddon memory shortages continue to pressure PC pricing and enterprise refresh cycles. Exabeam adds pooled and federated licensing options to its APEX partner program for MSSPs. Full details and links in the show notes or the blog post. Later today on In The Channel, we’re talking specialist distribution in Canada with Carrie Hopkins of Exclusive Networks. We get into the Ignition program, what broadliners can’t deliver, and why the model might feel familiar to channel veterans. And if you haven’t heard it yet, yesterday we wrapped our HPE Discover 2026 arc with HPE vice president of North America channels Jeremiah Jenson. He talks about the quote-cycle win, the Canadian angle on data sovereignty, and what partners should stop doing. That’s how we’re seeing the headlines today. I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, thanks for listening. Have a great day.

Jeremiah Jenson, vice president of North Amiercan channels at HPE In The Channel has gone deep on HPE Discover 2026 – from Justin McGarry’s walkthrough of the compute and AI infrastructure story, to Ben Fallon on the networking pivot and partner program overhaul, to front-line perspectives from Canadian partners CompuGen, Powerland, and Long View. Today, we’re closing the arc with HPE vice president of North America channel and partner ecosystem Jeremiah Jenson, recorded on the final afternoon of the show. Jenson says the temperature on the floor is “white hot,” driven by the clarity of the message and the proof points HPE brought to partners this year. The 30-day quote validity and expanded credit terms – announced at Partner Growth Summit – got what he called the strongest reaction in the room, and he credits Canadian partners specifically as “by no means the quietest voice in the room” in making that change happen. On networking, Jenson says he’s reset targets higher for data center networking and wants the Canadian channel to lead the charge. He points to partners historically from the Juniper and Aruba sides now expanding into HPE’s Private Cloud AI business, and to data center partners adopting Marvis and the data center networking stack to take share from Cisco. He also walks through what he calls the “great VM reset” – HPE’s push around Morpheus Enterprise and VME as alternatives for partners and customers facing Broadcom‘s VMware changes – and sets an aggressive target for North American partners to lead globally on VME certifications. On the Canadian front, Jenson highlights conversations around provincial government opportunity and data sovereignty as distinct from the broader North American channel, and offers a direct message to partners: stop worrying about what HPE used to be, and start picking a clear point of view on where the portfolio fits your customer base. Read Full Transcript Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca and your host for the show. Since HPE Discover 2026, we’ve been all over the subject. You’ve heard from HPE’s Justin McGarry on the compute and AI infrastructure story, from Fallon McCarthy on the networking pivot and partner program changes, and from three Canadian partners, Compugen, Powerland and Long View, on what HPE’s strategy looks like from the front lines of the Canadian channel. Today we close the arc as we sit down once again with HPE’s Vice President of North American Channel and Partner Ecosystems, Jeremiah Jenson. It’s a conversation that takes the temperature of the show floor after three days of partner meetings, looks at where the biggest margin opportunities actually are for partners, and asks what one thing Canadian partners should stop doing and start doing as they head into the second half of 2026. Let’s get right into it. My chat with Jeremiah Jenson. Interview: Robert Dutt: Jeremiah, thanks for taking the time. Once again, good to catch up with you. Jeremiah Jenson: Yeah, great to see you, Rob. Thanks. It’s Wednesday afternoon at Discover as we sit down, and the good news is you’re still standing. That’s a win in its own right at this point. You’ve now sat in a lot of rooms with partners who have heard the full story that we talked about in the previous podcast we did together. I’m curious your thought on the temperature, the reaction, what’s landing differently in the conference room than it did on the keynote stage, that kind of thing. Jeremiah Jenson: I mean, the temperature is phenomenal. There’s so much excitement about… There were a lot of announcements this week, but the clarity of message, while I say it this way, we’ve packed a full month into this week, but the clarity of that message and how it’s being very clearly communicated, clear opportunity for partners to go execute on and take advantage of that very real opportunity that we have right in front of us. So I think it’s landing really well from a temperature standpoint. I mean, white hot, I mean, there’s just a tremendous amount of excitement. Robert Dutt: I want to start with a thing that I felt got one of the strongest reactions on Monday, the 30-day validity terms announced. Now the partners have a few days to process that, as well as the quote-to-cash stuff and the expanded credit terms. Is it changing the feel of the deal conversation or is it still a, you know, we have to see it roll out before it does? Jeremiah Jenson: I think it changes the feel. It did get a very strong reaction. It got the strongest reaction in the room. I think one thing that it says, it’s a very clear proof point about how we’re very in tune with the market. We know that it’s been a very difficult situation with what’s going on in the industry with rising commodity costs and things along those lines. And it’s a very clear proof point around how we’re listening to our customers, how we’re listening to our partners, and changing how we can help support them through this time. So I don’t think it’s a wait and see. We have a very clear proven track record of building and earning trust with our channel community. And now we’re executing. So we are what, two and a half days later, a day and a half later, and executing. Robert Dutt: On Monday, on the podcast we ran Monday, you asked partners to go one more mile to consider bringing, you know, one more HPE product line to their customers. Three days later, are you seeing an appetite for that? And that was certainly also a theme throughout the event is the idea of cross-selling and representing more of the portfolio. But I’m curious what you’ve seen in terms of appetite for that, or is it still a heavy lift in a situation where a lot of partners are trying to go deeper and do better in single areas? Jeremiah Jenson: Yeah. So a little bit more about that for your listeners and for those of you who have not met personally, I use the one more mile thing. I’m known as long distance runner. It’s my hobby. It’s something that I’m passionate about and I’m happy to get distracted talking about. But the analogy lands really well. Can we just do one more? And again, back to how clear the message has been, how clear the opportunity is right in front of us. And we are seeing partners adopt that cross-sell motion, but it’s also beyond just cross-sell or upsell or something along those lines. It’s a very clear opportunity to help them grow their business. It’s not just, okay, would you like fries with that? It’s you’re really good in the data center. Now you have a data center networking opportunity that not only can you take that to your existing customer, but you can build your business around that expanded opportunity that we now offer you. And that is very real. So love for you to run another mile with us. We had our inaugural 10K run this week as well. But at the same time, we want to help you grow your business in yet another direction. Robert Dutt: What’s the signal it tells you that partners are buying into that and are succeeding in expanding beyond? Whether it’s adding networking, if they’re a traditional compute and storage house or whatever that expansion is. Jeremiah Jenson: We see a very clear signal, a very strong signal in how partners are adopting the Partner Ready Vantage Triple Platinum Plus framework. We are seeing partners move up that stack and across the portfolio in a very meaningful way. That is a very clear proof point, not only in the opportunity in the market, but how we’re supporting partners to take advantage of that opportunity. Robert Dutt: And that’s Triple Platinum Plus is a big ask. There’s a lot behind it, but it sounds like there’s some real momentum too. Jeremiah Jenson: There is real momentum. It is a big ask because there’s a lot of very real dollars, but I would also say don’t get consumed with, “Oh my God, I’ve got to get to Triple Platinum Plus.” The framework around how that program lands around the different centers is very attainable to help you grow. Again, back to the mile analogy, one more mile at a time. No one goes from running a 5K to a marathon. We’d love to help get you there. And at the same time, let’s go through the right training, the right enablement, and the right support process to get you there. Robert Dutt: All right. What’s the conversation you’ve had this week that surprised you? Not the one that you expected you have, but the one that partners are bringing to you that maybe caught you a bit off guard or just weren’t expecting to be as big a focus as it has been. Jeremiah Jenson: Yeah, I mean, networking is front and center. I don’t know that I want to say that I was surprised by that, but I will say the energy and excitement around networking, HPE networking, how the progress we have made over the last year has just been absolutely phenomenal. So that’s first and front and center. And it really starts with how we’re integrating and accelerating our efforts there. Another thing that I would say that is really just an equal amount of excitement is the Great VM Reset. So some of the announcements we’ve made around Morpheus Enterprise, VME, how we’re working with partners to take advantage of the Great VM Reset. Look, no one’s looking for a greater expense. So the 90% cost savings opportunity that’s out there, there’s just a lot of momentum in a couple of these very, very strategic areas. And to put a finer point on it, sometimes historically, you get through the base of the business and then you try and work into some strategic areas. We are starting from the strategic areas. We’re starting from networking. We’re starting from Morpheus Enterprise and VME. We’re starting from storage and then bringing the rest of the very strong pieces of the portfolio along with us. Robert Dutt: Canadian partners are a specific cohort and usually aren’t terribly shy about sharing their opinions on things. I’m curious what you’re hearing from the Canadian contingent that feels distinct from the broader North American channel. In terms of data sovereignty, in terms of market relevance, those kinds of things. Jeremiah Jenson: Yeah, I mean, I’d love to meet a shy Canadian partner first and foremost. I mean, they have a very clear voice and a very clear, passionate point of view around what is important to the Canadian market. So certainly there’s data sovereignty. Data sovereignty is really important to them, but then there’s also other pieces around what’s going on with things like provincial governments. I’ve had a number of conversations around what’s going on with what I will call broadly the public sector space in Canada. We had a very deep conversation around provincial business and how we can work together with partners to help capture that. And that was very distinct and a very, well, certainly a new opportunity and an area for us to grow, but also had a very clear point of view that comes from a Canadian perspective. And then of course, there’s data sovereignty. There’s the requirements of how Canadian partners are helping Canadian customers. And I always love the Canadian cohort, just their passion, their commitment to their country and to their business, and the fact that doing business locally is important. And that’s where, just from my standpoint, they have a level of intimacy with their customers that I could never… We as HPE don’t intend to and don’t want to replace. We simply want to help and accelerate that because they have a level of knowledge that I will never understand. Robert Dutt: Fidelma Russo framed the enterprise AI shift this morning as moving from pilots to production systems. For a partner listening to this, what does the unlock look like practically and what do they need to get ready for? Jeremiah Jenson: I mean, the AI phenomenon isn’t a future opportunity. It is here right now. I’ve said that a couple of times. It is here now. So it’s not pilots. It’s how are we helping them just accelerate that with customers? And I say the word accelerate a lot, but to make it a little bit more real, what I would ask Canadian partners to do to get ready for is frame a point of view. AI is a very broad, amorphous topic. Agentic AI is very real, but there are pieces of this phenomenon that partners should have a clear point of view on, whether that’s getting the data structure in the exact right place, whether that’s the security angle and what we’re doing to help with our software components around security for AI, or whether that’s what we’re doing around agentic AI and having the right governance and control. But it all starts with what is the customer business problem that we’re trying to solve and then working backwards from that and how we enable the partner to help solve that business problem. But it’s incumbent upon the partner to have a very clear point of view. And we will underpin that and enable that with our programs, with our technology and with our capability in partnership with them. Robert Dutt: Similar idea, but from a partner financials point of view, where do you see the biggest actual margin opportunities for partners in the AI and the agentic AI shift right now and into the near future? Jeremiah Jenson: I mean, directly the largest margin opportunity is in the services aspect. So partners that have a very mature or have built out a services practice, whether that’s professional services or whether that’s managed services practice customers are looking for a partner who can help them make that requirement to insert AI into their business. They’re looking for them to help that become a reality. So that’s the first part. So we’ve got a number of capabilities, whether that’s partner branded services or things along those lines, but services is always the most profitable piece of the business. Beneath that, I think it’s really important for partners to understand where is their business, where is their business, who is their customer base and what are they looking for and whether that’s our networking business, whether that’s our cloud business or whether that’s our AI business. So we have award winning programs to support that. We’ve announced a number of new things, whether that’s NBO in the new business competitive takeout in the storage space, NBO for compute. There’s new business opportunity compensation on the networking side. So there’s a number of different places and it’ll depend on the partner’s business, but there’s a fantastic margin opportunity across the portfolio. Robert Dutt: There’s a lot of aggressive actions going on here. In terms of you’ve got a Cisco displacement opportunity, you’ve got the VMware migration opportunity, you’ve got some of the things you point out. I’m just, I guess I’m curious how you’re prioritizing those competitive opportunities within the channel and for a partner with limited bandwidth, where would you suggest they focus? Jeremiah Jenson: Yeah, I mean, I think it’s a difficult question to ask and the reason it’s difficult to ask or it’s difficult to answer is because every partner has a different go to market and has a different strategy. We, I wouldn’t prioritize any one area above the other because there are networking partners that have, I’ll give you a couple of examples and proof points. There are networking partners that have come to us from the Juniper side or from the Aruba side, what we now call HPE networking. That are now expanding directly into our PC AI business. I had a meeting this afternoon with a very sizable partner who historically has been from the networking side of the business that saw an opportunity to expand their business into our AI business and they’re leading with PC AI as an example. We see other partners who have historically been very strong data center partners and see an opportunity from networking and have are very strongly adopting our Marvis solutions and our data center networking solutions and are bringing that to their customer base and using that to take new market share with Cisco. So what I would say is partners have chosen a very strong point of view. They understand their customer base and they’re expanding with our portfolio to very strategic adjacent areas. Robert Dutt: I sat down with Brad Shapiro a little while ago from the HPEFS side of things and got the view of how things are going and what kind of struck me about that conversation was the way that they’re getting closer with the business units and being able to sort of better present the whole thing. I’m curious how you’re viewing financial services in the channel org and the opportunity there to remove friction, to make deals easier to do all the things that they’re going to. Jeremiah Jenson: Yeah. HPEFS is a strategic weapon and a strategic enabler of the business. Full stop. What they’ve done with that 90, there’s a current initiative called the 99 promotion that they have around how they’re helping customers overcome some of the financial hurdles to get to a full modernized hybrid IT infrastructure. And so their integration and the just interlock between the different business units to help unlock that opportunity for customers. It was very clearly an opportunity is very clearly a situation where we saw an inhibitor of the business HPEFS as a strategic partner to us to help unlock that opportunity. And I would just use that as an opportunity to say how leaders such as Brad Shapiro or any other leader of any other business unit are working together to solve for customer problems and help them get to where they need to go. It’s just a very clear proof point. So that 99 for your partners out there, have a look at that 99 opportunity and how we can bring that to customers sooner rather than later. Don’t use it as a diving catch. Get it in sooner. Make it a part of what you do day in and day out. Robert Dutt: By the time this episode airs, listeners will have heard from three Canadian partners that I talk to this week, Compugen, Powerland, Long View. Without knowing what they told me, what’s the one thing that you’d hope that they’re telling me about how they’re working with HPE right now? And maybe one thing you worry they might have said. Jeremiah Jenson: Well, I don’t know that I worry about anything that they would have said. Those are all very strong Canadian partners. They’re all very strong HPE partners, Hewlett Packard Enterprise partners. And we’re excited about our growth plan with each of them. They are all leading in different areas. So from a Powerland standpoint, I suspect there’s probably a conversation around GreenLake and how they’re taking GreenLake a little bit more broadly. They have headed back to what I said earlier. That is a partner that has a very clear point of view with their customer base and how they are using some of our more strategic pieces of the portfolio to really drive a strong customer outcome. You mentioned Compugen. Compugen love what they’re doing in Toronto and more broadly and how we’re working together with them to really… That’s a partner we really listen to in terms of what they’re seeing from a market standpoint, from a pricing standpoint, and how we can execute faster. And so they’ve been very tight with us in terms of how we need to frame some of our policies and how we need to accelerate based on real world customer feedback and work from there. And then from a Long View standpoint, I sat down with Dave this week. Great man. Love to see what they’re doing and how they are expanding their business across the portfolio. They’ve got a very strong, again, very strong clear point of view, what we want to do around storage and networking especially. And so again, they’ve understood the pieces of the portfolio that are very relevant to their customers. And we were just very explicit about what we are going to do together to help grow that piece of the business. So that’s what I… If you can learn from those three partners, if nothing else, have a very clear point of view. Robert Dutt: All right. One of the things that Canadian partners always raise is the issue of data sovereignty. The sense that being north of the border means different rules, different customer expectations, sometimes different product availability. Where does that show up in your priorities in the channel org in the second half of the year? Jeremiah Jenson: Well, I guess I would frame my answer this way. The rules are different. And that’s where Canadian partners are so valuable, not only to me, but to the broader Hewlett Packard enterprise. Though the partners that are in that market have a depth of understanding and a depth of knowledge of those requirements and are really helping to put the right, whether that’s, I want to say solutions, a word that is too often used, but at the end of the day, they are solving business problems around those requirements. You know, data sovereignty, product availability, what level of service is offered based on whether that’s location geography, whether that’s in the provincial government or whether that’s in a commercial customer, they have an understanding. And I think that that’s the piece that is so valuable about the channel is they have a level of understanding and a way to work with us to help satisfy the customer. So I’m hearing a lot about data sovereignty. I’m hearing a lot about pricing requirements and things along those lines. I mean, let’s be honest, some of the feedback that we heard from Canada was some of the loudest feedback that we heard in terms of, and that helped us make the change that we did around 30-day quote validity. So we made some very specific changes and Canadians were by no means the quietest voice in the room. And, you know, we’ve mentioned some people here today that were very clear in their escalations and what they needed to service their customers. Robert Dutt: All right. If you’re a Canadian partner listening to this, you know, what’s one thing that you’d like them to stop doing and one thing they should start doing? Degree of difficulty. The answers are not selling the other guys and selling HP. Jeremiah Jenson: No, yeah. You know, I don’t ever have the ask of stop selling the other guys. At the end of the day, we have the right products. We have the right program. And we are going to earn our place based on our channel heritage, based on our predictability and based on the trust we will earn. So I have a tremendous amount of confidence that when we work with channel partners, we will win based on our predictability, based on our trust, based on the quality of products and programs that we put in market. So I don’t have that ask of partners. We are going to earn our place very intentionally. So my ask of them, the one thing to do is, I say it a lot, but pick a point of view. There is a place in this portfolio where we can help one another and help your customer produce the business outcome that they want. Let’s identify what are those one or two things that we can do together to help go that extra mile. How can we run one more mile together? That’s my ask. The other piece that I would ask is to what not to do is, I think the past helps frame where we want to go, but we don’t have to worry about what used to be. We don’t have to worry about what used to be with HPE or going all the way back to HPE or to Compaq or things along those lines. I’ve been back at HPE for a year now and the past helps frame where we want to go. So my what not to do is we don’t have to worry about what used to be. What we do want to help do is where are we going. So that’s the way I would say that is it’s a new day. We are on the front foot. We are very aggressive about where we’re going and what we’re going to do. And come join us. Robert Dutt: Let’s talk about that future a little bit. Where do you want the HPE channel to be on January 1, 2027 that it is today? What are you kind of focused on for the back half of the year? Jeremiah Jenson: A back half of the year, just to be, if you will, a little bit more point in time. I have some very clear goals around our networking business and to make that a little bit more real, the data center networking business, our wireless business, our campus and branch business is performing very well. Our data center networking business is also performing very, very well. And so I’ve reset some targets higher than they were around our data center networking business. So I have some very high expectations around data center networking. So I would love the Canadian channel to lead that charge from a data center networking standpoint. Also our hybrid cloud business. So we have very clear expectations around VME certifications and things along those lines because customers are demanding a different level of outcome from their virtualized environments. I mean, let’s be honest, no one is looking for more Broadcom in their business today. There isn’t customers saying, I’d like some more of that. I want to be treated more like that. And we have a very clear solution. And so we’re looking at VME certifications and you see how we’ve put out the virtualization competency and then we’re helping partners use VME for IT so that they can drink their own champagne. So I want Canadian partners and I want North America to lead the way globally around VME certifications. So I have some very high expectations around our hybrid cloud business. That also extends to our storage business. Our storage business is growing at triple digits. It’s phenomenal with what we’re seeing there. And so storage is another piece. And then by no means last, but the third thing I would say is I have very clear goals around co-selling, what we call co-selling. How are we bringing the HPE Salesforce, which is a very different sales force now. It’s a growing sales force. It’s one, Phil Mottram, our chief revenue officer, is making investments in North America sales. How do we get our sales teams together with our partner sales teams and again, go to a new customer, a new opportunity, go take that extra mile? So it’s those three things. Robert Dutt: All right. Similar idea, but waking up January 1st of next year, what will be the metric or two that would tell you that Discover 2026 was a turning point for some of these important changes that you see coming? Jeremiah Jenson: Yeah. What’s interesting is just the conversation has at Discover or some of these sort of events, you always kind of start with the base of the business, the core of the business, and then you expand the conversation to some of the strategic areas. This year is very different in that we are working from the networking, the hybrid cloud pieces of the business, the software pieces of the business, and that has been the conversation all week, and it’s been really exciting to see. So waking up January 1, knowing that it’s real, we will have surpassed the raised expectations that I had around the networking business. We will have surpassed our expectations around hybrid cloud, Morpheus Enterprise, and storage. And then I also want to see us look at very strongly how do we accelerate our compute business, our AI business? That is, we’re producing very real customer outcomes. How do we take that to the rest of the market that hasn’t yet taken the first step around AI? So that’s the third thing I would put in there. Robert Dutt: Okay. Not so much a strategy question as a human one, but what’s one moment from this week that you’re going to, you think you’re going to remember six months from now? Jeremiah Jenson: Six months from now, what’s a moment? I will certainly remember the 30-day quote announcement. Six months from now, that’s more of a human moment. Also, I mean, just the connections that we’ve had, you know, as much as that’s maybe a straightforward answer, one thing my boss and I did, we had a, I mentioned running earlier, we had a 10K run for the first time that kind of came up as a thing. We had some Canadians join us. It became an international event. We had a South African that was there. We had a couple people from the UK. It just kind of organically grew, and it’s nice to see people really come together. That has been really nice. One other thing, you know, six months from now, the World Cup is ongoing right now. So just to call that out, it’s the first time I believe I don’t have the history that the rest of the world does with the World Cup. But just to see that happen and how that’s brought together, the fact that it’s in North America, and you can have some of those ancillary conversations and really frame some lasting bonds around some of that. You know, the tie for Spain or things along those lines. There have been things like that, and those common experiences that we have together are helping us build strong bonds from which we can grow the business. Robert Dutt: Working for HP, are you contractually required to be a fan of the Argentine? Jeremiah Jenson: I am not. I’m not contractually obligated. I personally, I love a good international competition, whether that’s the World Baseball Classic, the Olympics, the hockey, instead of doing the All-Star Game, you know, what they did with the Tournament of Four, this last. I love that sort of stuff. I’m not an Argent as much as Antonio might be upset about that. Nothing against Messi. I’m sure he’s a phenomenal player. At the end of the day, I’m an American. I’m going to cheer for the United States. But I also back the pack. So when it comes down to it, it’s going to be a, I’m going to cheer for the North America side of things, whoever that may be. Robert Dutt: There you go. Last one for me. When we talk next, whether that’s at Discover Next Year, hopefully sometime ahead of that, what do you hope we’re talking about? Jeremiah Jenson: I mean, I hope we talk about how we’re seeing compounded growth. We’re seeing acceleration in the business across the portfolio now. I hope we’re talking about how we compound that. How do we, you know, it’s, you know, growing at the pace that we’re growing to continue to that growth on a larger number would drive compounded growth. So I would love to see the pace, the percentage at which we’re growing be continued. I’d love to have that conversation next year. And we’re going to do that with partners. Robert Dutt: Good answer. And I don’t know how many partners are going to turn their nose up at the idea of compounding growth. So I think who wouldn’t love that end there. Good. Awesome. I appreciate your taking the time once again, safe journeys home. And thanks for thanks for helping us out so much running the channel over the last, the last couple of weeks. Jeremiah Jenson: You bet. Rob, thanks. Always good to talk to you. Show outro: There you have it, Jeremiah Jenson from HPE. I’d like to thank Jeremiah for making the time at the end of what was a very long week in Las Vegas and the candor he brought to the conversation that could easily have stayed at the level of talking points. A few things I’d like to take away from this one. First, the energy around networking isn’t just keynote rhetoric. Jenson is resetting targets higher for data center networking specifically, and he’s looking to the Canadian channel to lead part of that charge. Second, the 30-day quote validity landed because partners were loud about it, and Canadian partners were among the loudest. That matters. And third, the through line of this whole arc from HPE Discover is that the company is trying to shift from a base of the business story to a strategic front foot story. Networking, hybrid cloud and the VMware reset aren’t afterthoughts anymore. They’re the opening argument. If you’re just catching up on the full series, you can find all of our coverage from HPE Discover 2026 waiting for you on the In The Channel feed, partner interviews, product deep dives and day-to-day dispatches on The Buzz. Thanks for listening. You can find the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, most other podcast directories. If you like what you hear, a rating or review goes a long way to helping other Canadian IT professionals find this channel. Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca and I’ll see you in the channel.

Today’s headline news for Canadian IT solution providers: Microsoft July 2026 Patch Tuesday fixes 570 flaws, 3 zero-days: Microsoft released its July 2026 Patch Tuesday update addressing 570 vulnerabilities including 3 zero-days, according to BleepingComputer. The zero-day status means MSPs should prioritize these patches immediately for client environments. With 570 total fixes to stage, test, and deploy, Canadian partners managing regulated clients in healthcare, finance, and provincial government face a compressed vulnerability response window this week. Citrix Platform Flex opens a new services opportunity: Citrix is introducing Platform Flex, a persona-based pricing model that gives partners room to build consulting, workforce assessment, and migration services around how customers actually use the platform. According to ChannelE2E, the shift lets partners attach higher-margin services to each deployment by right-sizing workloads to user personas. The new model is particularly relevant in the Canadian mid-market, where virtual desktop and app delivery standardization has been strong but differentiation has been thin. AI compliance is becoming an operational blind spot for MSPs: AI compliance should not be treated as a policy exercise that happens once and then sits on a shelf. According to Terry Irons on ChannelE2E, the value for MSPs is operationalizing compliance around AI data handling, model access, and prompt logging. Canadian MSPs already navigating Law 25 and PIPEDA amendments will recognize the pattern: the regulation exists, but the recurring revenue opportunity lies in helping customers stay inside the lines as the technology changes. CMMC third-party audits paused but the opportunity isn’t: The Department of Defense has pressed pause on third-party audits for the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification, but the compliance requirements themselves remain in place for defense contractors. According to ChannelE2E, that gap creates an opening for MSPs and MSSPs to expand compliance services. Canadian partners serving cross-border contractors or aerospace supply chain clients should expect renewed advisory conversations. Progress confirms ShareFile zero-day behind Storage Zone shutdown: Progress confirmed a ShareFile zero-day flaw was behind the Storage Zone shutdown, BleepingComputer reports. Partners managing client file-sharing infrastructure should assess exposure and confirm whether affected Storage Zone configurations are in their environments. MSSP Alert Top 250 application opens for 2026: The MSSP Alert Top 250 MSSP list application process is open for 2026. ChannelE2E offers guidance on what judges look for and which mistakes could hurt a ranking. Changes in the Channel tracks leadership moves for July 6-10: ChannelE2E tracked leadership changes and shakeups across the channel for the week of July 6-10. Read Full Transcript Welcome to The Buzz from ChannelBuzz.ca, I’m Robert Dutt, today is Wednesday, July 15, and here’s what’s happening in the channel today. Microsoft released its July 2026 Patch Tuesday update addressing 570 vulnerabilities across the portfolio, including 3 zero-days. According to BleepingComputer, the zero-day patches should be prioritized immediately for client environments. The scale of the release means MSPs need to stage patch deployment carefully. With 570 fixes to validate and deploy, technicians are managing a large surface area without disrupting business operations. Canadian partners managing regulated clients in healthcare, finance, and provincial government should expect compressed vulnerability response windows this week. Law 25, PIPEDA, and sector-specific frameworks all embed expectations around timely critical patch management, and a July drop of this magnitude tests those service level commitments. Microsoft is positioning the release as part of its regular cycle, but the zero-day status means this is not a routine Tuesday. Partners should be communicating with clients now about maintenance windows and priority sequencing for on-premises and hybrid infrastructure. Citrix is introducing Platform Flex, a persona-based pricing model that moves away from one-size-fits-all licensing and gives partners room to build consulting, workforce assessment, and migration services around how customers actually use the platform. According to ChannelE2E, the shift lets partners attach higher-margin services to each deployment by right-sizing workloads to user personas rather than simply renewing seat counts. The new model is particularly relevant in the Canadian mid-market, where virtual desktop and app delivery standardization has been strong but differentiation has been thin. Platform Flex creates a natural entry point for partners to conduct usage assessments, recommend persona transitions, and bundle ongoing optimization services. It also gives partners a way to defend margins against pure license resale by making the consulting layer part of the renewal conversation. Citrix is positioning Platform Flex as a way to reduce customer shelfware, but the partner angle is that it turns every renewal cycle into a services engagement. AI compliance should not be treated as a policy exercise that happens once and then sits on a shelf. According to Terry Irons on ChannelE2E, the value for MSPs is operationalizing compliance around AI data handling, model access, and prompt logging. As customers deploy more AI tools, the governance gap between experimentation and controlled scale is widening, and MSPs that treat AI governance as a document creation exercise risk missing the continuous monitoring requirement. Canadian MSPs already navigating Law 25 and PIPEDA amendments will recognize the pattern: the regulation exists, but the recurring revenue opportunity lies in helping customers stay inside the lines as the technology changes. The piece suggests that MSPs who build AI compliance into their existing security operations center workflows, rather than treating it as a separate consulting project, will capture more of that spend. The shift from one-time policy to ongoing operational control is the same transition the channel has already made with security, and AI is now following that path. In Brief – CMMC third-party audits are paused but the channel opportunity isn’t. Progress confirms a ShareFile zero-day flaw behind the Storage Zone shutdown. MSSP Alert Top 250 application opens for 2026 ranking. Changes in the Channel tracks leadership moves for the week of July 6-10. Full details and links in the show notes or the blog post. Later today on In The Channel, we close out our HPE Discover 2026 coverage with vice president of North America channel and partner ecosystem Jeremiah Jenson, talking about the 30-day quote validity, Canadian partner influence, and the push for data center networking growth. And if you haven’t heard it yet, yesterday’s episode featured Curtis Dery from Xerox IT Solutions on HPE financing, GreenLake wins, and why AI is a digital goldmine for the channel. That’s how we’re seeing the headlines today. I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, thanks for listening. Have a great day.

Curtis Dery, executive vice president at Xerox IT Solutions Canada Curtis Dery, executive vice president at Xerox IT Solutions Canada (doing business as Powerland), has been living the HPE GreenLake story since before most Canadian partners knew what as-a-service infrastructure meant. At HPE Discover 2026, he joined In The Channel to talk about what this week’s announcements look like from the practitioner’s desk. Dery’s team won HPE’s Canada GreenLake Partner of the Year in 2022 and has kept the streak going, but he’s clear that the barrier to adoption was never the technology. “Customers are facing constraints financially,” he says, citing tariffs and geopolitical pressure. That’s why he sees the 90/9 financing offer and 150% credit line expansion as genuine deal-closing tools. “It helps open more doors and close deals even sooner.” He also sees the channel-only expansion of Private Cloud and Zerto as a deliberate strategy his team was ready for, thanks to deep ties with HPE’s advisory councils. The real differentiator, he says, is operationalizing customer processes so they can move from 20-30 projects a year to 50-70. Where Dery gets animated is AI. He calls the current moment “the most exciting time in any of our careers” and describes AI as a “digital goldmine.” His team runs internal hackathons to build reps with large language models, work that has already helped Powerland close four of the largest infrastructure deals in the world – all out of Winnipeg. But he’s also blunt about tokenomics: “The burn is real.” On sovereignty, Dery points to the Anthropic government oversight incident as validation for private AI. “If I’m a customer and I’m all in on that model, what would happen?” He sees HPE’s network optimization and Private Cloud AI stack as the hedge. Read Full Transcript Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor at ChannelBuzz.ca and your host for the show. We’ve been on a bit of an unscheduled hiatus, but we’re back. We’re going to get back into the swing of things right now, and we’re going to start that off by finishing our coverage of this year’s HPE Discover 2026. Today’s guest is Curtis Dery, executive vice president at Xerox IT Solutions Canada, which most of the channel still knows as Powerland. Curtis is based in Winnipeg. His team covers the country. He’s been living the HPE GreenLake story since before most Canadian partners knew what as-a-service infrastructure meant. His team won HPE Canada’s GreenLake Partner of the Year back in 2022 and has kept that streak alive. They were the first partner to sell a GreenLake deal in Canada, the first to sell VM Essentials, and the first to sell a cyber vault. But Curtis isn’t just a sales exec. He’s genuinely hands-on with emerging technology, running internal AI hackathons with his team, and has a perspective on the announcements from Discover that come from actually closing the deals, not just reading the press releases. He joined me on site at Discover to talk about what the new financing tools, the channel-only expansion, and the AI story mean for partners on the ground. Let’s get right into it. My chat with Curtis Dery. Robert Dutt: Curtis, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it. Curtis Dery: Absolutely. Thanks for having me. Robert Dutt: Before we get into this week, I have to acknowledge – just having been in this industry a while, you’ve got Xerox and what is formerly HP at a conference here. Slightly unexpected combination on the surface. Most people’s mental model of Xerox is still copiers, but you were running Powerland as one of the leading HPE infrastructure providers in Canada long before that. What does the Xerox relationship mean in practice for the IT business? Has it changed how you go to market with HPE, or does Powerland essentially operate in its own lane? Curtis Dery: You know what, that’s a great question. The way the market’s changing, the industry is changing, businesses are needing to change. That was the reason why Xerox looked at acquiring us – to help go through the realignment and the changes that they’re making as a business. Obviously, from a print perspective, looking at the industry challenges it was going through through COVID and post-COVID and just the market shift around that, having a focus around infrastructure and technology and driving those outcomes with our customers helped them amplify the customer base that they have across North America. Robert Dutt: You were doing GreenLake before a lot of Canadian partners knew what it was. You won the Canadian GreenLake Partner of the Year back in ’22, closing deals in the as-a-service model when it was still a pretty hard sell to customers used to buying it outright. Now HPE’s on stage talking about 90/9 financing and offering 150% expansion of credit lines. For someone who’s been engineering these deals since the beginning, what do these tools mean specifically? Do they change what’s possible for you, or are you already doing – you already have your system set up and ready to go? Curtis Dery: Yeah, I mean, being fortunate to be a little bit on the front edge of GreenLake, we’re fortunate to be Partner of the Year four years in a row, and from a North American perspective, Partner of the Year to make it five. What that created was just validation that how we’re going to market and how we’re executing it is a little bit more uniquely than others, and how we’re prepared to understand the customer, the outcomes that they want, and wrap that around operationalizing it through a GreenLake model. Having flexibility in some of these announcements helps with the challenges that we’re all entering – some of it unknown, some of it shortages, all these changes, and then you wrap that around obviously the disruption of AI. So having these flexibilities of what they want to do around credit is definitely needed because customers are facing constraints financially – just with the cost of, from a geopolitical impact perspective, tariffs, all these things are real. So HP coming to the table with new offerings helps open more doors and close deals even sooner than expected sometimes. So we’re always looking at making sure, yes, we have a foundational core that we can execute on with a rinse and repeat with a proven track record, but always making sure we’re aligned with the changes that they’re making and making sure we’re enhancing our offering with them, a walk and step together. Robert Dutt: It feels like they’re acknowledging that one of the barriers to GreenLake adoption isn’t the technology, the concept, or anything like that. It’s the customer’s budget cycles. And it sounds like you’re saying that’s the right diagnosis from what you’re seeing in the Western Canada market. Curtis Dery: Yeah, and I think also people sometimes think it has to be OpEx. There’s a balance that you can still capitalize GreenLake as well too, and then do a term top-up depending on the utilization they have, but also operationalizing it from a financial [perspective]. So that flexibility is still there. I just think sometimes that message isn’t out there at the street level. So that’s where our value comes in as a partner, right? To understand where that noise and friction is and remove the friction. Robert Dutt: Three products went to channel-only at Partner Growth Summit this week: Private Cloud, PC 3000, PC 1000, and Zerto. Last year it was VM Essentials. It seems like it’s clearly a deliberate expansion of that strategy. From where you sit with that infrastructure-heavy book of business, is channel-only a meaningful strategic signal for you, or is it about filling the gaps for customers who need DR and private cloud but haven’t had a clean vehicle to buy it through you? Curtis Dery: That’s a great question. I think, fortunate to have a strategic partnership with HP, we sold the first cyber vault in the country. And so same with VME, we sold the first in the country, and same with GreenLake. So there’s a theme there, right? Being so strategically aligned with them from executive level down to technical level, I’m on their advisory council from a GreenLake perspective. My pre-sales engineer is the ambassador on the GreenLake program. Because of that exposure, we get line of sight a little bit earlier. So then we’re already preparing on how we’re going to market to augment some of these announcements that they’re doing, and then wrapping around our own little secret sauce to that to be able to expedite the sales and making sure that we’re taking down the logos together. Robert Dutt: What is that secret sauce, in whatever depth you wish to share in this forum? Curtis Dery: Well, I think sometimes getting down to the nitty-gritty of what GreenLake really does, and that’s operationalizing the customer’s process to be able to allow them to be more agile within their own business. So instead of going to a traditional market and doing a traditional way of getting quotes, going to an RFP process, all those things take time, money, and energy. And when you do that, you then don’t have time to focus on the business to drive the outcomes you can do. Now, with our customers from a GreenLake perspective, that agility of being able to streamline that process – we have our customers that are able to go from 20 to 30 projects a year to now 50 to 70 projects a year. So then they get to see the benefits of how fast we can make their business move, get the outcomes that they want so they can start to accelerate further. Robert Dutt: You heard the partner branded services announcement this week. Curious what you thought of that and how it kind of maps with what you do in terms of, are you already running that services-led model, or are you looking for opportunities to have HP back you up but still go under your brand? Just curious how it hit. Curtis Dery: For us, it definitely hit. But yes, we also do it as well that way. But again, it’s the right tool at the right place at the right time. And sometimes we may need them, they may need us, or it’s an augmentation of both. And that’s the beauty that I love about HP is the investment to the channel, always staying aligned at the street level and making sure it’s very predictable on how you can make bets jointly with them. So it’s a flexibility thing. Robert Dutt: A hundred percent. Curious what’s driving the HP business for you right now. What’s kind of hitting, what are customers talking to you about, what’s driving it forward? I have to imagine AI is part of that. Curtis Dery: Yeah. And I think AI was a little bit of paralysis in the market, right? People were frozen of like, “What do I do? Where do I start? What type of technology? Do I go to a public LLM?” Or you hear this word, “sovereign,” and what does that mean? And I think the perfect storm is brewing. But the beauty is that HP has made the right investments, right? Acquisitions to now truly be ready for what the market is going to be hitting with right now. Which is, you look at the announcement of what happened with Anthropic last week. Government oversight, they said shut down that model. Well, if I’m a customer and I’m all in on that model, what would happen? And so this created that validation of why private sovereign AI with HP wrapping around customers’ data and giving them real hardened AI outcomes within their environment, and then choosing if they need to go into the public LLM. And so getting ready for that market condition is what’s going to drive success and velocity with HP in the market. Robert Dutt: Along with the idea of tokenomics, that idea of AI projects getting stuck in, and maybe hand-in-hand with tokenomics in fact, that idea of AI projects getting stalled out in the implementation or the proof-of-concept phase and not getting to full implementation is a theme that we’re hearing from HP and from just about any vendor who’s playing in the space this year. It seems to be one of the big catches. I’m curious how you’re seeing that reflected in your customer base, if they’re kind of getting to a point of doing POCs and then starting to discover, “Well, wait a second, this could get real expensive, real fast.” Curtis Dery: I’m 1000% [there]. Right? The burn is real. We have customers that knew that they have to start getting their battle scars and learning from the AI and understanding how does it work, how do we integrate it, how do we make sure there’s no hallucinating, how do we trust it, how do we do all these different things? My analogy I like to use is, at the end of the day, we all need refrigerators. But a lot of people probably don’t remember who invented the refrigerator. They just know they needed one, right? That’s the same with the public LLMs, right? You need the refrigerator when you need to go into it. What we do with our customers is show them how to take a Coke can and put it in the fridge and bring it out of the fridge. And so we help them navigate it so then tokenomics is not exposed as much, right? They can manage their cost, manage their environment, and choose where they want to put their data. I think the tokenomics is definitely a real thing and I think we’re going to find out significantly what that means in the next 120 days. Why? Because these companies are going IPO and you now know where the math is mathing, right? And so that’s going to show us a lot on what the true tokenomics looks like. Robert Dutt: You touched a little bit on the importance of sovereignty in customer discussions, but can you tell me a little bit more about how that’s showing up in terms of what customers are asking about and how you see that trending and evolving as an interest and a care about, both on the geopolitical front and, as you say, on an issue like Anthropic suddenly having to pull access to the latest model? Curtis Dery: Yeah, a thousand percent. I think when you hear the word sovereign, I always ask people, “What does that mean to you?” Because when you look at the World Economic Forum, for example, in February, what did they announce as the next pandemic, the cyber pandemic? Why? You’ve got scale of agents running everywhere. People don’t know what is a good agent or a bad agent, right? And if you look at the internet bandwidth since December till now, it’s increased over 12x of volume. Do you know how much traffic is now coming down? So now people are going to need to get prepared about how do you control your network, your data, your access, and sovereign that so that you’re secure so that if a bad day occurs, you don’t have the public exposure. And that’s why you hear from Antonio Neri and the focus around the network. How do you optimize that network? How do you secure that traffic and have the access to where you need to go and ensure that it can handle the scale? So that’s why this storm is brewing in front of all of us right now. Robert Dutt: Looking at your background, it’s clear that you’re not just selling infrastructure. You’re genuinely interested in AI and emerging technology. And it seems like you like to get pretty hands-on. As you’re at an event like this and you’re hearing the announcements and seeing what’s coming and what they’re talking about, what are you really excited to get your hands on and play with, and beyond that to actually get in front of your customers either now or down the road as it becomes more concrete? Curtis Dery: You know, I tell people this is probably the most exciting time in any of our careers because it’s the first time in any of our careers that it’s a level playing field, where it’s up to you to grab the baton of AI and understand how do you use it, apply it, and get the outcomes and innovation that you want to do with people. The tagline I like to use with my team internally is, we’re not underpinned by anyone anymore. We have the opportunity to dream, to build, and execute, and we can use AI technology to do that. And so I call it the digital goldmine. We get to go inside these LLMs and mine what we want out of that and be able to take advantage of what we can do with our customers. And that’s the one thing I enjoy the most is understanding, okay, what tools can I use, whether it’s from PCAI and apply our own private AI strategy around that. I’ve worked with a lot of advisory around a lot of the latest LLMs that are out there, but also some of these private ones like [Mistral AI] and understanding how it’s a puppet master to the public AI and how to optimize white space within a customer’s environment to show them where they have inefficiencies, profitability, when they can take the market in a different way. And that’s what AI does – allow customers to be agile, at edge, on time, and be able to really disrupt if they choose to. And I think it sounds a lot daunting for a lot of people, right, to understand how do I get proactive now with AI and not get disrupted by it, because you don’t know if you can wake up and all of a sudden your competitor is something that you didn’t expect. And so I think being able to just dive in and learn. A lot of people say, “Well, I don’t know much about AI.” None of us do. This is all the latest technology. So I tell people to speak to it, learn from it, and just start understanding how it works. So then at the end of the day, you can now augment it because it ain’t going away. If you think about from a generational perspective, we have kids that are going to be born in AI. They don’t even understand what that means. So it’s exciting times. And I tell people embrace it, because like I said, it’s the first time in history that nobody’s really walking in a room saying, “I got 10 years in AI.” Everyone’s like, “Hey, I’ve been working with it for six months. Cool.” Just like all of us. It’s how many people are putting in the reps with it. Robert Dutt: What are you pulling out of that goldmine so far at Powerland? What are you doing in terms of both – how’s AI changing both what you’re doing customer-facing, and internally your own operations and how you think about AI within the org? Curtis Dery: Yeah, absolutely. So I mean, we were fortunate being ahead of it from an AI perspective and understanding our domain strengths, using AI to be better prepared for our customers and think through strategies with them. And with that, we were able to build out blueprints where we were fortunate to close out four of the largest deals in the world with four different vendors out of a city called Winnipeg. And a lot of people came to me and said, “Curt, I don’t get it. We’re not doing this in New York, Toronto. You were doing this in Winnipeg. How are you doing this?” And I’m like, using AI to get better prepared to understand how do we simulate an environment to say, “This is the customer. What can we do to drive out these types of outcomes? And what does this look like from a strategy?” We get the blueprint and now we go and see the customer and go, “Does this make sense?” And they go, “Yes. Well, let’s go execute that with AI.” And so that’s the advantage that we get to do. And then from an internal perspective, I love having our own internal roundtable hackathons. What’s something we want to do? Throw it on the whiteboard. Everybody has their AI account and go, “Okay, how would you approach that?” So then our team is learning how to put those reps in to say, “Well, I would approach it this way.” And it’s a cool exercise to see how everyone thinks differently. And that’s the beauty about AI. We’re all going to prompt it differently. We’re all going to work with it differently and then take those unified approach of everyone’s pieces, put it together and go, “Okay, now we solve the puzzle together.” So I really enjoy the ability to be able to scale so rapidly with it. It’s an exciting time. I feel like we’re built for this era. Robert Dutt: And I’d imagine a lot of those ideas that are coming out in the internal hackathons are eventually going to find their way into what you’re doing with customers as well. So that’s a nice plus. Curtis Dery: Yeah, absolutely. Robert Dutt: As you point out, you’re in Winnipeg, presence across Western Canada. I’ve talked to a couple of other Canadian partners this week, and I’m getting this consistent theme that Canadian customers right now are in their moment – between sovereignty, between AI infrastructure refresh, between really starting to get AI in play rather than playing with AI. Does that map with what you’re hearing from your customers in the prairies and the West? And where do you see HPE fitting into that story for the balance of the year and beyond? Curtis Dery: Yeah, I think we touched on it lightly, right? The changes that happened with the government oversight last week, I think opened people’s eyes on what their approach is to public LLMs. And then also understanding costs, constraints, all these things that have been hitting our markets and hitting customers’ budgets and challenges. It’s a difficult time to be a CIO right now. When you’re sitting there and you have to protect them from a cybersecurity perspective, you have to have a future of understanding where AI fits into this, and never mind constraints around cost and all that stuff. It’s a tough time to be an executive for a business right now and understand how you can be profitable, scale all these things while you’re facing all these challenges in the market. So being prepared in Canada of how we’re going to our customers is understanding how to package what HP has done effectively well on the overall strategy around GreenLake and saying, “How do we now enter the customer and say, ‘You can now do on-demand AI in your environment predictably, cost-effectively, compliance and govern, and now you can choose how you want to scale that rapidly?'” I think finally, we’re starting to see that curve get around the corner where customers are jumping into wanting to do it this way. It’s just such a learning dynamic exercise right now, right? Because at first it was ChatGPT and then it was Grok and then it was Claude and it just kept going and going. People are not talking about the disruption that happened out of China too with their LLMs. So if you look at DeepSeek, Kimi and all these models, they’re doing exactly what Claude and these others can do at 75% cheaper. So when people start to realize, “Well, I can run that SDK natively inside my environment way cheaper than going to a public API Claude license,” people are going to look at that and go, “Oh, what makes sense now? Because the math ain’t math.” Robert Dutt: That theme is coming up in a lot of different places, isn’t it? Last one for me, whether it’s something we’ve already covered off or something else, what’s the one thing that’s really caught your attention here at Discover this week, the thing that you’re going to take back to the team and on Friday or Monday or whenever you’re first in there saying, “By the way, this is what I heard. This is what we got to get ready for.” Curtis Dery: Well, a few things. One is truly being prepared on the foundation of the network and understanding what does that mean to have an optimized AI network both internally and externally for the customer. I think there’s a high, high value in that. I learned that on the journey with cloud. Everybody wanted to go to cloud. Love the destination. Nobody talked about the highway to the cloud. Nobody talked about the cloud tax of egress coming out of there. So there’s a lot of lessons and best practices that came from the cloud journey that we can now reapply to the AI journey. So focusing on that is huge. And then understanding the intelligence layer and understanding [NVIDIA] Morpheus is an extremely powerful tool and understanding how does that fit into the entire reference architectural stack with PCAI and understanding how do we build on top of that. And that’s some of our secret sauce of what we’re doing, being able to do our own private SDK on top of PCAI so customers can truly control their own AI platform. And so that’s the focus that we’re going to do. And we’re super excited to get velocity going into Q4 with HP so that in 2027, I expect a big year. Robert Dutt: All right. Well, good luck on bringing that back to the team next week and good luck on that big year. And thanks again for taking the time on what I’m sure has been a very busy week. Curtis Dery: Absolutely. And I welcome the time and being able to share this conversation with you. So we look forward to doing it again. Robert Dutt: There you have it. Curtis Dery from Xerox IT Solutions Canada. I’d like to thank Curtis for his time. If you’re finding value in these interviews, I’d appreciate if you’d follow or subscribe to the show. You can find the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and most major podcast directories. Ratings and reviews are always welcome. A few things that stood out for me from this conversation. One is Curtis’s framing that the real barrier to GreenLake adoption has never been the technology, it’s the customer’s budget cycle. The 90/9 financing and expanded credit lines aren’t abstract partner program benefits. They’re deal-closing tools for partners who are already in the room with constrained CIOs. Another is his digital goldmine metaphor for AI. The idea that for the first time in our careers, the playing field is level and what matters is who’s putting in the reps. But he’s also refreshingly blunt about the burn on tokenomics and the need for partners to help customers manage costs as AI moves from proof-of-concept to production. I appreciated his point about sovereignty not being theoretical anymore. The Anthropic incident gave customers a concrete reason to ask hard questions about public LLM dependence. Finally, it’s worth noting that the company is closing some of the largest infrastructure deals in the world out of Winnipeg. The Canadian channel is not a Toronto-only story, and this is a reminder of that. Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.

Today’s headline news for Canadian IT solution providers: Barracuda acquires Evo Security: Barracuda is integrating Evo Security‘s IAM and PAM tools into BarracudaONE, giving MSPs more ways to build identity security services beyond MFA. ChannelE2E reports that the move unifies email, network, and identity protection under one stack, which matters for Canadian technicians already managing multiple dashboards. The deal size was not disclosed. Rewst rebuilds its platform around MCP and AI agents: Rewst is rebuilding its automation engine around the Model Context Protocol so technicians can describe a business process and have an AI agent custom-build it, even without deep scripting skills. ChannelE2E says the update turns automation from an internal efficiency play into a billable managed service. The rollout is expected through the third quarter. Microsoft opens its July 2026 partner playbook: Microsoft released July partner announcements covering FY27 planning resources, updated Azure IP co-sell incentives, and refreshed Microsoft 365 Copilot specialization requirements. The company is positioning the Copilot specialization as a prerequisite for AI deployment referrals, raising the bar from general cloud competency to specific AI delivery capability. A new End of Sale Software pricelist is also live in Partner Center as of July 1. CompassMSP acquires Logic Group: ChannelE2E reports the acquisition adds to CompassMSP’s portfolio as the consolidator continues its North American expansion. The 20 MSP acquires Sundance Networks, reaching 49 acquisitions: The rollup hits another milestone with the Sundance Networks deal, according to ChannelE2E. ManageEngine launches marketplace for partner-built IT extensions and AI agents: ChannelE2E says Zoho’s IT management arm is opening a marketplace where partners can build and sell extensions. Dell partners remain optimistic amid supply chain concerns: ChannelE2E reports that Dell is working to keep supply chains flowing for partners as data center growth puts pressure on memory supplies. Guardz adds agentic reporting for MSP client reviews: ChannelE2E says the new feature turns blocked threats and security activity into reports that SMB customers can understand. Read Full Transcript Welcome to The Buzz from ChannelBuzz.ca, I’m Robert Dutt, today is Tuesday, July 14, and here’s what’s happening in the channel today. Barracuda is buying Evo Security to expand its identity security capabilities for MSPs. In a deal announced last week, Barracuda said it will integrate Evo Security’s IAM and PAM tools into BarracudaONE, giving partners more ways to build identity security services beyond MFA. The move comes as identity attacks continue to outpace traditional perimeter defenses and MSPs are being asked to manage privileged access for customers with limited security staff. Barracuda is positioning the acquisition as a way to unify email, network, and identity protection under one stack. Canadian partners who have already standardized on BarracudaONE will see the new tools appear as integrated modules rather than a separate console, which matters for technicians who are already managing multiple dashboards. The channel has been waiting for Barracuda to deepen its identity story after years of speculation, and this appears to be the answer. Identity and access management has become one of the fastest-growing service lines for Canadian MSPs, but many have cobbled together solutions from multiple vendors. Barracuda’s bet is that MSPs will pay for a unified platform rather than stitching together point products. The deal size was not disclosed. Rewst is rebuilding its automation platform from the ground up around MCP and AI agents, and the timing is notable. The company announced today that MSPs will be able to describe a business process they want to automate and have an AI agent custom-build the workflow, even if the technician lacks deep scripting expertise. Rewst is leaning on the Model Context Protocol to connect its automation engine to third-party tools in a standardized way, which reduces the integration maintenance that typically consumes MSP engineering hours. The rebuild is a direct response to the skills gap that has kept many mid-market providers from offering automation as a managed service. For Canadian MSPs struggling to hire and retain technicians who can write PowerShell or Python, this could lower the barrier to entry for workflow automation and make it a billable service rather than an internal efficiency play. Rewst says the new architecture will also allow partners to sell automation to their own customers as a white-label managed service, which turns a cost center into a revenue line. The platform update is expected to roll out to existing partners in phases through the third quarter. Microsoft rolled out its July partner announcements on Thursday, and the bundle includes several items that will shape Canadian partner planning for the second half of the calendar year. The company opened FY27 planning resources, updated Azure IP co-sell incentives, and refreshed Microsoft 365 Copilot specialization requirements. A new End of Sale Software pricelist is also live in Partner Center as of July 1. Microsoft is positioning the Copilot specialization as a prerequisite for partners who want to be referred for AI deployment opportunities, which means the bar for entry is moving from general cloud competency to specific AI delivery capability. The FY27 planning materials emphasize recurring revenue and attached services, a message that aligns with what Canadian distributors have been telling partners for the last two quarters. Canadian CSPs will also want to note the pricing and packaging changes for Microsoft 365 Business plans that took effect July 1, which include additional mailbox storage and enhanced Copilot Chat experiences. The net effect is that Microsoft is tightening the link between partner program tiering and AI service delivery, something that will require training investments for smaller partners. In Brief – CompassMSP acquires Logic Group. The 20 MSP acquires Sundance Networks, reaching 49 acquisitions. ManageEngine launches a marketplace for partner-built IT extensions and AI agents. Dell partners remain optimistic amid IT component supply chain concerns. Guardz adds agentic reporting to help MSPs turn security activity into client-ready reviews. Full details and links in the show notes or the blog post. And if you haven’t heard it yet, my conversation with Curtis Dery from Xerox IT Solutions on what HPE’s financing moves, the channel-only expansion of Private Cloud and Zerto, and why AI is a digital goldmine. That’s on In The Channel now. That’s how we’re seeing the headlines today. I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, thanks for listening. Have a great day.

Dave Frederickson, executive vice president of strategic alliances and business development at Long View Systems There are not many people who can look at HPE Discover 2026 from the vantage point of someone who helped build it. Dave Frederickson spent over 24 years at HP, including leading the enterprise servers, storage, and networking business for HP Canada right around the time Discover was created as a unified event in 2011. He joined Long View Systems in June 2012 and is now executive vice president of strategic alliances and business development. That backstory matters, because Dave comes to this week with something almost no one else on the show floor has: direct memory of the HP that lost its way, the acquisition misadventures, and what it looks like when a large technology company loses focus. His verdict on the HPE of 2026? It has its mojo back – and the Juniper integration is the piece that finally makes the networking-plus-compute-plus-storage story credible in a way it could not be before. We also get into the real operational cost of the January quote-cycle crisis – the move to 7- and 14-day quote windows that Dave says created “an astronomical amount of overhead” for Long View’s operations teams – and what the return to 30-day quote validity actually signals coming out of the Partner Growth Summit. On AI, Dave pushes back – respectfully – on Antonio Neri’s keynote framing that the network is the foundation. For Long View, the conversation still starts at the data and governance layer. And he flags tokenomics as the near-term friction point that is coming for a lot of organizations faster than they may realize, with cost predictability becoming the real barrier to AI ROI conversations. For more from HPE Discover 2026, see our full coverage hub and our earlier preview episode with Jeremiah Jenson, VP of North America channel at HPE. Read Full Transcript ROBERT DUTT: Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor at ChannelBuzz.ca, and your host for the show. We’re here at HPE Discover in Las Vegas this week, and sometimes the best conversations happen by accident. Dave Frederickson is executive vice president of Strategic Alliances and Business Development at Long View Systems, one of Canada’s leading IT solution providers. But what makes Dave’s take on this week uniquely worth hearing is what he did before he got to Long View. Many in the channel know Dave for his 24 years at HP. He led the channel for a long time, and he spent some time leading the enterprise server, storage, and networking business for HP Canada right around the time Discover was created as a unified event in 2011. He’s been on the partner side now for 14 years, and that gives him an interesting lens on HPE – where it has been, where it’s struggled, and where it is today – that very few people walking the show floor this week can match. I happened to catch up with Dave at the airport in Vegas after we both arrived here, and he graciously agreed to sit down and share his thoughts on this week. Let’s get right into it. My chat with Dave Frederickson. ROBERT DUTT: Dave, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it. DAVE FREDERICKSON: My pleasure. ROBERT DUTT: I have to ask you the obvious one first. If I’m thinking back correctly to your time at HP, you were actually leading ESSN around the time that HP Discover became a thing in 2011. And here you are 15 years later at HPE’s major show Discover, representing one of the major Canadian partners. Does it feel a little bit like old home week? And also, what’s it like to make the mental switch – I know it’s been a while now, obviously – to make the mental switch from the vendor side of the table to the partner side? DAVE FREDERICKSON: Well, I have to say, 14 years ago at the end of this month is when I left HP. And I will say that every time I come to Discover, there’s a certain nostalgia. But also, I definitely miss it. There’s certain parts of it. I miss the big show. I miss the IP. I don’t necessarily miss having to go to 8,000 meetings over the course of however many [X] days, although I still do quite a few. But yeah, no, there’s definitely – look, and I’m pretty excited about how things are right now. So yeah, it’s definitely – I miss the show a little bit, even on the partner side. ROBERT DUTT: As I say, coming up on 14 years, how is your understanding of what HP is and what the relationship between HP and partners looks like evolved from what you knew when you were on the other side of the house? What did you not really fully appreciate about the HPE relationship until you were on the side of the table you’re on now? DAVE FREDERICKSON: Yeah, I think there’s a few things that kind of unpack that. One was just the ability on the partner side and the necessity for you to represent the client in a way that isn’t necessarily tied to a particular brand. And also the trust that, once earned, a client will put in you once you kind of make that shift over. And so I remember having a senior executive at one of the banks kind of say to me that, you know, “I never knew, you only had one flavor of Kool-Aid that you were drinking, so I know you were serving up to me every time.” Now, I appreciated the fact that I was coming in with maybe an unbiased, more of an unbiased view. So that’s probably the biggest one. The other one would be profitability and understanding the impact and the requirements. I mean, it was always there, right? I always said if you wanted loyalty from a channel partner, buy a dog. But really, profitability is the key to be able to continue sustainable relationships and partnerships. ROBERT DUTT: The Juniper acquisition closed less than a year ago. Clearly, it’s the structural story underneath everything we’re talking about here. The network is the foundation of AI, the Power of One, the unification of Aruba, Juniper, and the HPE compute and storage side of things. From Long View’s perspective, what has the acquisition changed in the conversation that you’re having with customers and the conversation that you’re having internally about the HPE relationship with Long View? DAVE FREDERICKSON: Yeah. So I mean, first off, it’s an interesting challenge it poses because we also have to have a very big, strong relationship with another strong networking organization. And I think that this has really opened, at least my eyes, and I get a whole new sense of kind of energy that’s also coming forward with it. And I think that HPE and Antonio has put together a set of pieces in this puzzle, if you want to call it, that he’s executing on. And with Juniper now, it’s a pretty powerful message. So I think there’s still a lot that we need to unpack and to understand a little bit more, but it’s an exciting time. And I think this positions them in a way that they couldn’t do it before. So yeah, it’s really, really interesting to see how the next number of months pan out. ROBERT DUTT: You were at the Partner Growth Summit yesterday. Real package of operational changes. That keynote, between 30-day quote validity finally, expanded credit lines, different financing options, new channel-only products in Private Cloud and Zerto. Is there anything in what was announced at Growth Summit that kind of really hit hard or made you say, finally, or this changes something for us specifically? What, among what was announced at Growth Summit, kind of hit most meaningful from where you are at Long View? DAVE FREDERICKSON: Yeah. So first off, I think the quote cycle that happened in January-ish timeframe, I’ve never seen anything like it in our industry. And I’ve told many clients this, like going to 7 or 14 days quote cycle, I mean, it’s unheard of. So to get back to a 30-day is pretty substantial. And by the way, the amount of rework that is required internally on us – so to me, that was probably a pain point to our operations teams because the amount of extra work that was required, the amount of times they had to do multiple quotes for the same piece of business or the same request for a client. I mean, it adds an astronomical amount of overhead. So to me, that was the one that said, OK, good. I don’t know if that’s signaling that there’s a correction that’s coming relative to the problems that we had. I suspect they’re still going to see escalating costs because I don’t think the work for data centres anywhere is anywhere near finished, by any stretch of the imagination. But yeah, I’d say that that was the big one. And look, the other financing options, we were exploring and educating customers because it did actually provide an ease, at least for those that could take advantage of it. Those that could do that. There was another angle – if they didn’t have the budget, they got a different shock all of a sudden, something escalated. Because it was an unheard of increase in prices. And it was across the industry. Hopefully, as you say, we don’t know for sure. But it seems like with HPE being willing to make that move, there’s at least some sense that, yes, things are probably going to rise, but in a more manageable, more predictable kind of fashion, so at least they can stand behind their pricing for a month. ROBERT DUTT: Yeah, I mean, annual budget cycles is really the reality of almost every IT organization. DAVE FREDERICKSON: So how do you deal with that? I hope so. ROBERT DUTT: On the partner branded services, it sounds like it’s basically HPE infrastructure support that you can deliver under your own brand. Seems like a big one for partners moving towards a services-led model. Something that you guys are thinking about. Is it something that you’re already planning? Is it something that meshes with how you look at services? DAVE FREDERICKSON: Yeah. So look, we’ve got a huge services business, right? Services make up pretty much half of our overall business. And managed services, professional services. So we will use and leverage the manufacturer branded where and when it makes sense. And there’s some cases where there’s clients that actually want that for whatever comfort level. But yeah, and being able to actually have us execute our own – I mean, our whole thing is about creating healthy lives and prosperous careers for our employees. That means we want to grow our employee base. So that means we want more services people, right? And we want more services to deliver. So anything that can help us by increasing and improving our utilization of our own people and the things we do, that’s good news. ROBERT DUTT: Antonio’s keynote theme was “architecting AI starts with your network.” Pretty deliberate position – not just “AI is everywhere,” but it’s a viewpoint specifically saying that the network is the thing that determines whether AI works or stays proof of concept. Does that match with what you’re seeing with customers right now? Where are you finding your customers are at in that journey, both in terms of the network as AI element and AI at large? DAVE FREDERICKSON: So I think that was – my guess would be that that was intentional to really emphasize the strategic importance of the Juniper and the integration of that into the overall strategy for HPE. I actually see it a little differently from a client perspective. It starts with data, right? So for us, our whole approach has been to focus around what’s that data state look like? What’s the maturation? And then from there, you start talking about governance, start talking about security. And so the elements of the network, at least that hasn’t been our core approach or play. As we learn more about HPE and the abilities now that they’re going to have, that will be interesting to see how that might shift. But I don’t think fundamentally it will, because I think it will still connect the dots down to security especially and then governance. But at the end of the day, you can only do great things with AI if you have a really good handle on your overall data state. ROBERT DUTT: I had a chance to chat with Jeremiah Jenson, lead of North America channel, the other day. And we were talking about Canadian partners and the Canadian market. And I used the term “conservative” to describe how Canadian businesses tend to approach technology. He used “intentional,” particularly around partners. You guys have always served enterprise mid-market customers who tend to want proven, production-ready solutions. How are you thinking about AI infrastructure conversations? Are you leaning into the HPE stack specifically as a foundation, or what’s the lead there? DAVE FREDERICKSON: So the AI conversation initially started around cloud with us, 100 percent. And again, I go back to because that also was the data story. And whether that be – for us, it’s primarily Azure. But then it’s also things like Databricks and that data architecture, and being able to kind of get that established first. So yeah, I think that from that perspective, it’s really more coming back on the data side. ROBERT DUTT: When you’re talking to customers, is the concept of tokenomics hitting? DAVE FREDERICKSON: Yeah, so right now, this is huge. We’re actually – and [Sarah Amalco – transcription likely garbled], who works for me as SVP here, and the team are putting together a whole education series and approach and an offering capability around FinOps and tokenization. This is actually going to be a potential slowdown or stall for many organizations, because all of a sudden, if there were other reasons why organizations were concerned about AI, i.e. governance and so forth, however escalating costs have always been – that’s something that comes up time and time again. And now the tokenization of that, and it’s all about predictability. And so it’s this cross between being able to measure ROI and getting the right level of ROI out for that, and then now can I predictably determine what the costs are going to be so I can determine whether or not that ROI matches, right? So I think that that’s going to – look, our first step will be building out and making sure that clients understand and are educated about it. It’s coming out fast. In a session with HPE and Microsoft just now, Azure Local, it’s an interesting value proposition around that because the fact is, OK, you’re not going to be tied to a tokenization situation. So that might be an interesting opportunity for organizations to take a look at as an option to be able to have more predictability around that. But yeah, it’s going to be big, especially in the next number of months. ROBERT DUTT: Stepping back to the bigger picture for a second, you’ve got the unusual vantage point we were talking about at the top of the episode for an event like this. Having been there at HP during the Compaq integration era when Discover was created, you’ve now watched the HP split into HP Inc. and HPE, you’ve seen the Juniper deal, the whole arc. What does the HPE of 2026 look like compared to where things were when you were on the vendor side? I guess I’m just kidding. Do you think that HPE has found its own identity at this point? DAVE FREDERICKSON: Yeah, I do. I think I use the term “mojo.” So pretty pleased. And look, it’s kind of gotten back to its core. When you look at the number of acquisitions that it’s made, even around compute with the Cray, for example, earlier with the Compaq side of it, nonstop – like there’s a deep, deep, deep legacy of compute capabilities and technology and experience that they’ve got. So that’s awesome. I think a lot of energy and effort around the storage side of that. And now with the networking front, it’s pretty powerful. So I would say that if I go back in time, when I was at HPE, it had the enterprise services, which was trying to play in a game that was a major global outsource play, which… and then there’s all kinds of different things that kind of happened. Autonomy – there’s a few beauties that would cause me to pause. But if I take a look at – if I go back in time to HPE, what’s core is, you think about HP Labs, core innovation. And so there were different times when, unfortunately, decisions were made that I think stripped away some of the investment opportunity that HP needed and was really deeply rooted in. And so it’s great to see that kind of come back. And then I think the acquisitions that it’s also made have now proven themselves out, whether it be with Aruba. Look, that’s been a successful – if you look at the profitability of HPE as an organization, it’s pretty telling, right, in terms of percentage of the profits that roll up from that. So look, Antonio, smart man for sure, 100 percent. I think he’s had the vision. And I think it’s the pieces of the investment so now starting to come together. ROBERT DUTT: Last one for me. What does Long View want to walk away from a week like this having accomplished? Whether it’s a conversation, a relationship, a strategy session – what does a successful Discover look like to you? DAVE FREDERICKSON: Well, I don’t hit the table, so I’ll ignore the gambling. But no, I think, look, we’ve reignited. We’ve had a really strong relationship with HPE for a number of years now. But I’d say that I think the better years are ahead of us to come. And so I think just kind of getting reconnected, it’s good to see there’s still a number of people that I know and love very closely in the organization. And so I think if nothing else, it’s one: to take back some of the key things to make sure that our organization understands strategically where they’re going to play and why and how it would fit our next number of years in terms of alignment. So that’s going to be an important one for me to bring back to the rest of the executive team, and then to make sure from my role in alliances, to make sure that we understand how that underpins our strategy and go-to-market with our core offerings. ROBERT DUTT: That’s it. All right, Dave, I appreciate you taking the time once again. Great catching up. DAVE FREDERICKSON: Always good, Robert. Thank you. ROBERT DUTT: There you have it, Dave Frederickson from Long View Systems. I’d like to thank Dave for his time on this one. Running into him at the airport at the start of the week turned out to be a very happy accident. And thanks for listening and following along with our Discover coverage. Full slate at ChannelBuzz.ca. You can find our HPE Discover 2026 news hub right in the top nav bar. A few things worth taking away from that conversation. The return to 30-day quote validity out of the Partner Growth Summit is a bigger deal than it might look on paper. Dave gave us a real window into what short quote cycles actually cost partner ops teams – the rework, the multiple quotes for the same piece of business, the overhead. Now that HPE is stepping back from that, it signals something. And keep an eye on tokenomics. Dave flagged it as the friction point that’s coming fast for customers trying to build a real AI business case. The cost predictability problem is real, and Long View is already standing up education programs around it. The Azure Local angle that he flagged at the end around predictability versus consumption-based billing is worth watching as that conversation develops. And the data-first framing on AI is worth noting. Long View is having those conversations at the data and governance layer first. The network’s part of the picture, but it’s not the starting point from where Dave sits. If you’re enjoying the show, please do follow us or subscribe in whatever app you use. You can find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, most of the major directories. Ratings and reviews are always appreciated. Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.

Stéphan Wener, chief customer officer at Compugen Recorded on-site at HPE Discover in Las Vegas, this episode of In The Channel features Stéphan Wener, chief customer officer at Compugen, one of Canada‘s most established HPE partners. It was a big week for Compugen at Discover. The company achieved Triple Platinum Plus status under HPE’s Partner Ready Vantage program — the highest tier available, reflecting deep investment across compute, networking, storage, and security — and was named HPE Canada Solution Provider of the Year at the Partner Growth Summit on Monday. Wener credits the recognition to consistent, long-term investment in the full HPE portfolio and what he describes as genuine “exec-to-field” engagement with the HPE Canada team. But the conversation moves quickly from celebrating to analyzing — and that’s where it gets useful for Canadian partners. His take on HPE’s evolution is direct: “It’s not anymore a compute-led company. I think it’s an AI technology-led company, but with a big focus on networking.” He sees the Aruba acquisition as having already delivered strong returns for both sides, and the Juniper integration as filling the data centre gap to create what he calls a genuine “powerhouse” networking portfolio — a view that aligns with what Antonio Neri laid out in Tuesday’s keynote but carries different weight coming from the partner side. On the Canadian market, Wener flags two converging trends: data sovereignty concerns continuing to push customers — especially in the public sector and regulated industries — toward on-premises and edge deployments, and the economics of cloud-based AI creating a second wave of on-prem investment as the cost of tokens at scale starts to sting. The “Power of One” program consolidation? Compugen has been asking for it for a couple of years and welcomes it — with the candid observation that the compute and networking sales motions are still distinct, and that closing that gap in practice will take ongoing work. And on self-driving networks and the automation question: Wener is a believer — but as an Air Canada Super Elite, he has some pointed thoughts about where the human layer still matters. Read Full Transcript ROBERT DUTT: This episode of In The Channel is brought to you by HPE Discover 2026. Check out our full coverage of the event on ChannelBuzz.ca. You’ll find our HPE Discover 2026 news hub in the menu bar at the top of the page. Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca, and your host for the show. We’re recording this one on-site at HPE Discover in Las Vegas, and if you’ve been following our coverage from the event, you know it’s been a full one. Big keynote from Antonio Neri on Tuesday, a lot of networking announcements from Rami Rahim and the HPE networking team, the Partner Growth Summit on Monday, where HPE laid out some significant program changes, most notably the coming unification of the Juniper Partner Program under Partner Ready Vantage by November 1. My guest for this episode is Stéphan Wener, chief customer officer at Compugen. Compugen is one of Canada’s largest and most prominent HPE partners. They just achieved Triple Platinum Plus status under the Partner Ready Vantage program, which is the highest tier available under HPE’s partner program, reflecting deep investment across compute, networking, storage and security. And at the Partner Growth Summit earlier this week, they were named HPE Canada Solution Provider of the Year. So yeah, it’s been a pretty good week to be Compugen in Las Vegas. I sat down with Stéphan to talk about the story behind that recognition, how Compugen sees the evolution of the HPE portfolio, especially now that it includes both Aruba and Juniper, and what’s actually resonating in the Canadian market right now around AI infrastructure, data sovereignty, and the economics of running AI workloads in the cloud versus at the edge. There’s also a moment in here about self-driving networks that any Air Canada Super Elite will relate to. Let’s get right into it. My chat with Stéphan Wener. ROBERT DUTT: Stéphan, thank you for taking the time. STÉPHAN WENER: [It’s my] pleasure. ROBERT DUTT: Big week for Compugen here at Discover. You were named HPE Canada Solution Provider of the Year. Separately, just announced Triple Platinum Plus status under Partner Ready Vantage. That’s the highest tier, as if the name didn’t give that away, right? Tell me the Compugen-HPE story that led here. When you think about why you’ve ended up at this point, what do you credit it to? STÉPHAN WENER: I would say it’s a long-term engagement. We’ve been really connected. It’s important, if you want to succeed with the OEM, it’s all about connection from the execs to the field. I think our sales resources are really well-engaged with HPE’s sales resources. It’s really a teamwork. The results are all around this collaboration. It’s all about also bringing common value to the customer. We’re working very closely, making sure that we are doing the right thing and growing the business. Being Partner of the Year was actually a surprise, but one element is we’re really engaged in the entire portfolio of HPE. HPE is a different company right now. We were dealing with Aruba in the past and HPE and all this, now being one portfolio. The fact that we are engaged with all lines of business really helps us out, taking it to another level. Having this recognition is great. It’s great for us. It’s great for our teams because there’s a lot of people trained on the technology. There’s a lot of investment we’re making internally, both on the technical side but also on the sales side. We have BDR motions. We have a lot of engagement commonly with HPE. I think it’s really the combination of all these actions that made us successful. We have to thank the HPE team in Canada as well because we don’t win this award by ourselves. It’s really by working very closely with them. The Triple Platinum is a commitment to HPE. We believe that Compugen with HPE can provide great solutions to the market and we want to bring this engagement to another level. We’re also very proud. It was a lot of work on the technical side to be able to ramp up to this level, both on the compute, same thing on the networking side, security. So it’s the entire portfolio. ROBERT DUTT: To that point, the entire portfolio — some listeners may still think of HPE primarily as a server company, a server and storage company with networking kind of on the side. Can you walk me through what the HPE relationship actually looks like at Compugen today in terms of how you work with each part of that business, and how’s that picture changed over the last couple of years? STÉPHAN WENER: I would say HPE is a different company because they kept for a very long time Aruba and the compute side and the networking side separately. You can really feel now that it’s more one company. I actually feel, and Antonio said it today, the networking piece with AI is a big, big part of the strategy right now. So the fact that now networking and compute and storage, all the technology is really evolving in one big channel. It’s really changing what HPE is. It’s not anymore a compute-led company. I think it’s an AI technology-led [company], but a big focus on networking, especially in an AI world. Networking is key for all organizations. And I think specifically, Aruba was already a great company. That was a great acquisition. For all of us — I’m a shareholder of HPE — I can say that for the shareholders, the acquisition of Aruba was amazing, very profitable. But adding Juniper to the mix, it fills the gap. Data centre, DC — it was more campus and branch with Aruba. Now it’s really, really a powerhouse. So networking is definitely… you don’t make these type of investments as a company if you don’t believe that networking is a big part of your future. And already the Aruba part was one of the most profitable pieces of the business. In the years where compute was struggling a little bit more on the profit side, now, okay, HPE is having a great year with all AI and the shortage and all this. It’s great. But I think now HPE [has] a complete portfolio of technology, and that’s what makes it very appealing to the market right now, in my opinion. ROBERT DUTT: On that profitability point, what is having that unified networking story doing for you guys in terms of margin opportunity and that sort of thing? STÉPHAN WENER: I would say HPE would love us to leverage both sides of the portfolio. It’s still two different sales motion[s], let’s call it out. The compute and storage is one element, the network is on the other [end]. I think profit comes with investment. Compugen is a service-led company. So a lot of our sales motion is based on leading with our services, our managed services, our professional services. So we can have great margin when we are leading with our services. So technology with services, it’s the best. We even deliver — we do partner-branded support on the behalf of HPE, so really engage as one company. This is where we maximize our profitability. Again, I know because I’ve been hearing it and hearing it from the leaders, that we would like to lead more with the entire portfolio now. I think it makes a lot of sense as a strategy. Let’s see how we can accomplish and deliver on this because I still see that it’s two different business needs. The networking and security is one element and the compute and storage and all the tools around it are another motion technology-wise. ROBERT DUTT: Well, a big step towards that I suppose was announced yesterday at the Partner Growth Summit. The big theme being “Power of One” — one portfolio, one partner program, one integrated partner experience, a whole bunch of stuff changing as of November 1. From where you sit, is that message landing with you as a partner? What does consolidating under one program actually mean for how you go to market and how you work with HPE? STÉPHAN WENER: I should add my colleague, Lorene, to the discussion. She deals with them. But to be honest with you, we’ve been waiting for this moment for a while. It was a question we asked them for a couple of years actually, saying, “Listen, we see these two programs. We took the best of both programs because we were having large volume with both sides of the business.” But I think having something unified, that makes a lot of sense, and it’s going to bring more opportunity. It’s also going to reward partners that are invested with HPE. That’s what we like about this program: with this Platinum, Triple Platinum Plus certification, we’re rewarded for the investment we’re making, which is I think something that really resonates for some of us partners. The other element, to be honest, the go-to-market is going to be evolving with time. AI is transforming everything that is happening. So having one program, I think it’s putting HPE in a position that we can leverage all the success we can have on the market. No, I think it’s great news. We’ve been seeing it coming. Now it’s there. It’s still two teams because we’re still interacting with people on compute. We still have two PBMs. We’re still on a service, partner-branded support discussion around the table a little earlier. Now they’re coming with a program that’s going to be one partner-branded support. Juniper had one, Aruba had one, and now all of a sudden HPE wants to have their own. So on the compute side, they’re going to come with one program, which makes it better because it’s going to allow us to have a better ROI on our investment moving forward. ROBERT DUTT: Today was Antonio Neri. STÉPHAN WENER: Yes. ROBERT DUTT: Keynote. “Architecting AI starts with the network.” Pretty deliberate framing. From where you’re sitting and when you’re talking to Canadian organizations day to day, does the premise ring true? Are customers coming to you and saying that the network is the constraint, or is the conversation starting somewhere else? And maybe you discover along the way, “By the way, if you want to get the most out of this, you’re probably going to have to do something with the state of your network.” STÉPHAN WENER: I would say, yes, customers are looking at the network. I think it’s something that I think HPE but other OEM[s] are wishing, that AI transform[s] the network because it’s a good way to kind of, let’s say, let’s refresh these networks. Let’s make sure to create opportunity. I would say, on top of network, I’m really attracted by the security side of it, which means with AI — I was with a customer at lunch today because also we have multiple hats, we meet customers while we’re here — and he was sharing with me that the challenge they live with security, with this AI motion that we see right now, with this new AI world where now it’s not about traditional security. You know, you can get attacked from all over the place. So I think this is going to change the way customers see their network and they’re going to make sure to secure it, but also integrate performance, security, evolution for AI. Because again, you’re building something now. You don’t know what AI is going to be in a year and a half. That’s like — I was actually talking to some customers and we were saying, you know, you have to revise your AI strategy every quarter, every month, because you’re starting somewhere and then, oh, you’re figuring out that there’s another business need that needs to go quicker. So there’s a lot of unknown where it’s going to take us. I think [Antonio] making the right decisions on the network, it’s brilliant for Antonio. And again, when you do a $15 billion investment, okay, you’re going to say this to the market, but I mean, it’s a strength. It’s the strength of HP. If you look at competition, HP has a broader portfolio and being able to lead on the network security side and AI network and all that is brilliant. Now let’s see how the market takes it. I think the AI discussion is not exactly the same depending on where the customer is in his journey. Some of them are more focused on “where do I put my compute?” What we really see now is that it’s not only cloud only anymore. The move back to on-prem is for real now. And we’ve been saying it, we’ve been dreaming it for a while, you know, because it allows us to have more opportunity to… like, to put AI not only on-prem, but also at the edge. We see that coming more and more. So I think the discussion is broader because again, if you go at the edge, it’s all different architecture for networking. You need to protect multiple sites, you know, so… there’s a lot of moving pieces, but I think HP has everything to cover that very well. ROBERT DUTT: When you’re talking to customers today in Canada, what are the big drivers of that move towards the edge and that kind of thing? Just curious how you’re hearing customers weighing data sovereignty versus tokenomics, the big topic of the day. STÉPHAN WENER: There’s two different discussion[s] there. The one part is that — because we do a lot of business in banking and retail and all of this — we have a lot of customers that are looking at the edge. And to be honest, what we were observing a couple of years ago was that they all thought that they didn’t need anything at the edge anymore. “Let’s centralize everything. Let’s go to the cloud. Let’s use VMware. Let’s not even [have] the server at the edge. Let’s just figure out other ways to manage it.” Now we see a total[ly] different direction. Now, customers are realizing that you need to perform a lot of stuff at the edge. So it’s forcing a lot of organization[s] to revisit their plan. So that’s… disruptive when you have… when you had a plan two years ago or five years ago and now you have to revisit it to do it a bit differently. But I mean, I think everyone realizes that you need to run a lot of stuff at the edge right now. AI is one thing, but there’s so many other application[s] that are not really [running] really well in the cloud, you know, security cameras and all of that. So we see a big shift towards having more compute at the edge. But also you need networking to back this up because if you start breaking up, so it creates a lot of opportunities. When you have customers looking [at this], also the explosion of cost of AI. Because if you run all your models in the cloud, it’s highly expensive. So some customers are realizing that for some specific business outcome or business needs, they better run it at the edge because it becomes more economical. I think that was ramping up pretty heavily and it’s really exploded since that [news of the] $500 million [monthly] tokens [bill] came public. And it’s funny, we hear because we have a lot of our people involved in AI, talking with different OEM[s], and I don’t know what’s going to be the end of the future model. You know, these tokens are one element, but there’s going to be competition there, too. You know, it’s never, at the end of the day, they’re all playing in one field where there’s going to have to [be] competition and not… it’s not going to be unlimited token[s] and paying that forever because of the cost. It’s the same thing with the cloud, you know, running AI in the cloud for some large organization[s]. It’s costly. So they have no choice [but] to look at alternatives because, yes, you have business value when you run an AI model that addresses a business need, but at which cost? It’s always the question. You know, where all these customers are running businesses. So they need to make decisions accordingly. ROBERT DUTT: In this moment, for whatever reasons, it may be regulation, general interest in data sovereignty. How do you find data sovereignty is weighing amongst [your customers]? STÉPHAN WENER: It’s big in Canada, especially. Let’s call it out. You know, we’re a Canadian business partner. It’s a big, big subject, sovereignty, both in provincial jurisdiction and also in the country. There’s multiple ways. We all have different options of sovereign [cloud], but also some customers are also rethinking what kind of data do we want to keep to ourselves? This is why there’s a bit [of] turning around to co-location or having on-premise, just because [of] you want to control some of your data. It’s always… there’s always a cautious side to which extent do I think that everything in the cloud is going to be in sovereign cloud in Canada one day? I don’t think so because I think… Azure, all the cloud providers are now having data center[s] in the country. So they found ways to kind of say[ing] that their cloud is also sovereign in a certain way because it’s located in Canada. So they found ways because they don’t want to lose all this market. So they had to have no choice but to go with the flow and figure out a way to address this element. But yeah, it’s definitely a big [topic]. No one wants to send data anywhere in the cloud without controlling where it resides. That’s a very important [consideration], even more in public sector and regulated [industries] in Canada. In Canada, public sector is a big, big part of the business and they are regulated and they have no choice but to follow this very closely. And I think it’s the same in the U.S. as well. We have a lot of discussion with U.S. peers and there’s also this tendency even from state to state, you know, and that there’s like… you never know, you know, there’s all these stories you hear about where’s your data going. You know, the value your data has. A lot of value. These organization[s] know that now. It’s all start[ing] there because you cannot have AI without having the right data. ROBERT DUTT: Today’s presentation from Rami Rahim was mostly about self-driving networks, AI-native, agentic, experience-driven operations, a whole new way of thinking about running the network. It’s a compelling vision. Where’s that at when you’re selling to, say, a 500-person mid-market company? STÉPHAN WENER: It’s great. I would say even enterprise. It’s just, in my opinion, it’s just the beginning. I think it’s great, and it’s really a great vision of HP with Juniper and all that to have that self-[driving capability]. We’ve been hearing about it for a couple of years, but now it’s really for real. I [think], in my opinion, it’s just the beginning because they are going to accelerate that, they’re going to figure out ways to be even more proactive about the network and having more powerful tools. I think it has a lot to do, especially with the SMB and the smaller customers who have a hard time having technical resources to support them. So that’s a big [win]. But on the other side, I always say automation is great, but you always need human[s]. So it’s also a great opportunity for us partners that are delivering a lot of managed services because we’re able to leverage these tools to deliver, to add this little layer where they don’t want to just have a self-[driving] solution that nobody’s going to look at. You know, it’s like you have a dashboard. Somebody needs to keep an eye on the dashboard. So I think it’s also going to change the way we deliver services. So as a service organization, we’re really transforming, leveraging AI as customer zero. So I think it forces us business partners that deliver managed services to our customers to… adjust the way we deliver services to leverage these tools and just add that human layer that is needed. I still believe in AI. We’re looking at it internally and we have a bunch of initiatives. It’s never going to replace totally human because at the end of the day, especially when you have a customer at the end, because the customer experience is very important. So you cannot just decide that you automate the way you answer the phone. See, I was telling [and] giving the example today: I’m [with] an airline that I’m a Super Elite with, Air Canada. I don’t want to call the 1-800 number and be asked 24 questions. I’m very happy because my nicest perk with Air Canada is, I think, a concierge line where I can call as a Super Elite member and somebody’s answering the phone and they’re changing my ticket in three minutes and I don’t have to press one and two and five and six. So in a way, I’m just giving you this example because I, as a user, there’s a frustration with AI. So I think it’s very important to leverage AI, but keep that human touch that you need to complete the CX at the end of the day. ROBERT DUTT: So is that the pitch that lands then — the idea that we can take some cost out of operating the network by automating a lot, but we’re still going to have that trust. But we can… STÉPHAN WENER: I think we can do more with less. I think it’s all about bringing even more value to our customer and leveraging these tools. It’s a must. You know, we see it all over the place in our service organization. We see it on the field services where we have to use this intelligence to be more effective. And I was… I can call it out, it’s like I was with an airline for lunch. That’s why it’s all in my head. And they’re using AI for maintenance because they said it’s so powerful because the data is amazing. All these manuals about the aircrafts and everything, so you can document this with also other tickets they had and they can give instruction to the maintenance team and they save them. They’re telling them it’s either A or B before they add ABCD and they were doing try and try out. So they’re way more effective. So I’m just saying AI is helping us doing more with less, being better at what we do. But I mean, you still need to leverage it the right way. You need to have human intelligence behind and bring the value around it. That’s my [view], my opinion about AI. And in the case of what Rami said and where Juniper is going, all these tools are amazing. But I think it’s important. Customers are going to leverage it. They’re going to be able to do more with less, too. But I think for the mid-market type of customers, it’s more important for us business partners to add these services to our portfolio and be able to complete the service offering of HP, HP, Juniper and Aruba, or whatever HP networking [is called] now. More services, always a win. That’s what to do. ROBERT DUTT: We’ve covered a lot of territory. I’m curious. What else have you taken away from this week? When you’re going back and meeting with your teammates, what’s going to be the thing that goes, “Hey guys, did you think about or did you hear about…?” STÉPHAN WENER: I would say it’s the broad portfolio that HP has to bring to the market right now. And the fact that, you know, it was amazing to see all these announcement[s] about HP [and] the new tools, the way they are, the evolution of Central, the evolution of Mist. I think HP now, after these big acquisition[s], [is] getting their act together. And I think they’re one of the best OEM[s] ready… to be ready for AI. They’re all saying it because all our team members are going to Cisco and all that, and they all have a message around AI. I think it’s a must in this industry right now. But I’m telling you, as an experienced [partner], as a technology ally that we are at Compugen, we see that HP has a real story and they’re really doing the right thing to be a key player in this AI transformation that we see right now. So I think the value HP brings, all the tools around… there’s multiple examples to give. But I think the portfolio, the engineering, you know, Antonio is an engineer at the end of the day. And Antonio’s vision is about integrating the solution and doing the right thing so we can bring the right set of solution to the market. And I think we can feel it now that this is all getting together nicely, adding the building blocks that are missing to the offering. But HP is really [positioned] to be a strong partner for all customers in this AI journey. That’s what I see. ROBERT DUTT: Last question. What should partners and customers of yours who aren’t here this week take away from what’s been announced, what’s been discussed here? If you’re updating a customer on what you’ve learned here, what’s the headline you’re going with? STÉPHAN WENER: I would say one thing I was impressed [by]. I feel, and again, I’m on the partner advisory board of HP Networking. So I’m going to see tomorrow what they say. But I have a feeling that the transition of bringing HPE, Aruba and Juniper is going quicker than expected. I think they’re doing a very good job at it. And that’s going to create a very good motion. So I would say that’s a powerhouse now when you put Juniper and HPE Aruba together. So I think for all customers, I see HP like a very strong dominant player in the future in that networking and security space. So the fact that this integration seems to go very smoothly and rapidly, I think is going to have a very positive impact on the market. That’s one element I see. Again, I love what I see, all these announcements about compute and storage and all these AI-ready solution[s]. That’s also, again, what I would take back. It’s all [about]: if you need help in AI, HP has a solution for you. That’s pretty much what I would say to customers: wherever you need to invest because they’re not all investing at the same area. Some of them, it’s only the network and they decided to do it in the cloud and they’re going to do it in the cloud. Some others are looking at different models. So that’s my biggest takeaway: where HP is as a portfolio right now and the role it can play on all customers’ AI journey. Considering the attention on AI, [it’s] pretty good, to be honest with you. But again, AI is also driving a lot of other transformation. It drives the way customers are looking at their IT services because again, I was talking to [another] customer yesterday. If you have to invest in AI, they’re not going to tell you, “Hire 20 more employees to do your AI.” They’re going to say, “Listen, figure out a way to do your AI with the staff you have.” So if I’m a CIO, the way I’m going to look at it, I’m going to say, “Listen, I’m going to need help elsewhere. If I’m able to allocate a certain number of my resources working on AI, I’m going to need business partners to perform some IT services on my behalf.” So it creates an amazing opportunity for us business partners, not only the AI journey itself, but the fact that they have no choice but to kind of reinvent the way they’re providing their services, because nothing changes: you still have users, you still have infrastructure, you still have to keep the lights on and run your business. So this is something I see a lot: AI is transforming the way they look at where they’re going next. Because they’re not going to have an explosion of cost, especially now with what we are experiencing in supplies and the price increase. They still have to do the same with the same money a lot of time. So they need to reinvent themselves to figure out a way to meet their budgets and meet their business outcomes. ROBERT DUTT: Good luck on helping many customers, man. STÉPHAN WENER: We will do it. And our goal is to do it as a team with HPE. We got the title for 2025 and we want to do what’s best to make sure we do it for 2026 as well. ROBERT DUTT: Good luck with that. And thank you again for taking the time. STÉPHAN WENER: My pleasure. ROBERT DUTT: There you have it. Stéphan Wener from Compugen. I’d like to thank Stéphan for his time on what was a very busy week at HPE Discover and a very successful one for Compugen. If you’ve been following the news from the event on the site, you now got a pretty complete picture of HPE Discover from a few different angles: the preview with Jeremiah Jenson, the partner program announcement deep dive on Tuesday, and now a partner’s-eye view from one of HPE’s top Canadian players. The thing I keep coming back to from this conversation is something Stéphan said fairly early: that HPE is “a different company right now” — not compute-led anymore, but AI technology-led with networking increasingly at the center of gravity. That message was all over Neri’s keynote and Rahim’s session, but hearing it reflected back from a partner who’s been in the trenches with HPE for years and who had to make real investment decisions to get to Triple Platinum Plus — that carries a different kind of weight. The data sovereignty and tokenomics point is one I’d flag for your own customer conversations if you’re an HPE partner, or really any partner in the infrastructure space. The cost of running AI at scale in the cloud is increasingly nudging customers, particularly in the Canadian public sector and regulated industries, back toward on-prem and edge deployments. That’s not a new idea, but it’s getting sharper, and it plays directly into the HPE portfolio story that was front and centre this week. In The Channel is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and most podcast directories. If you find value in what we’re doing here, a rating or review is always appreciated — it helps other people in the Canadian channel find us. Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.

Brad Shapiro, senior vice president and chief sales officer of HPE Financial Services HPE Financial Services is making a concerted push to be less of a “best-kept secret” and more of a deal-closing engine for partners. At HPE Discover 2026, Brad Shapiro, senior vice president and chief sales officer of HPE Financial Services, walked In the Channel through several new partner-facing offers unveiled at Monday’s Partner Growth Summit. The standout is the 90/9 Advantage structure: 90 days with no payments, followed by nine months at 1 per cent of the original equipment cost, before shifting to level payments. Shapiro said the program is designed to blunt the sting of recent price hikes by pushing costs into future budget cycles without requiring customers to find new money mid-year. On the networking side, HPFS is stacking three offers to help HPE take share from competitors: 0 per cent financing on Mist or Aruba Central software, a “10 per cent better than cash” hardware financing rate, and a competitive takeout program that monetizes displaced gear. The used equipment angle is particularly timely. Shapiro noted that memory shortages have driven up resale values for retiring gear, creating an offset against new hardware costs. “It’s the equivalent of the car market in the early COVID days,” he said. HPFS also expanded its approved credit capacity by 150 per cent, a move Shapiro said was driven by partner frustration with re-approval cycles as component prices fluctuated. The interview also touched on HPFS’s partner pledge – Shapiro said his team does not receive quota retirement until the partner gets paid – and the growing importance of IT asset disposition and chain of custody as Canadian customers navigate AI-driven infrastructure refreshes. Read Full Transcript Robert Dutt: This episode of In The Channel is brought to you by HPE Discover 2026. Check out our full coverage of the event on ChannelBuzz.ca. You’ll find our HPE Discover 2026 news hub on the menu bar at the top of the page. Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca, and your host for the show. Today, my guest is Brad Shapiro, Senior Vice President and Chief Sales Officer of HPE Financial Services, the captive financing arm of HPE. Brad is responsible for the global partner-facing financing strategy and programs that help resellers and MSPs close bigger deals and get paid faster. We sat down at HPE Discover last week to talk about the new partner portal enhancements HPEFS rolled out at Partner Growth Summit, the thinking behind the company’s aggressive credit expansion, and how IT asset disposition fits into the overall AI infrastructure refresh wave that’s starting to hit customer budgets. Let’s get right into it. My chat with Brad Shapiro. Brad, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it. Brad Shapiro: Sure. Glad to be here, Rob. Robert Dutt: You guys rolled out some meaningful enhancements to the HPEFS partner side on Monday: payment structures, promotional pricing, and competitive pricing tiered to the partner’s relationship level. Canada is on the first wave of that for July 1. I understand a bunch of Canadian partners are having a party for that. For a Canadian reseller or MSP who wasn’t here this week, what does it actually change in how they can put a deal together for their customers? Brad Shapiro: Yeah, sure. So as you said, lots of exciting announcements here for Discover. And I think first and foremost, what HPEFS has put together is really focused on helping the HPE partners sell more in a couple of key areas. So we’ve all seen, you know, with commodity prices going up and the price increases around products, we’ve got some really interesting offers that have gained a lot of traction in the market. The 90/9 Advantage is one of the key ones. And that offering partners can offer to their customers is 90 days of no payments, nine months at 1% of the original equipment cost, and then it goes to level payments after. So while we can’t address that the product prices are increasing, what we are doing is providing help for customers who didn’t plan for this in the budget cycle, right? CFOs didn’t say, “Oh, here’s more money because prices are going up.” So it allows the end-user customer to kind of plan for this into the next budget cycle and beyond so they can get the compute power they need. So that’s a key one. The other area, when we look at the networking space, right, we’re very excited about, you know, Aruba and Juniper coming together in the new HPE networking, and they’ve got some tremendous offerings out there. But to really help them and help customers avoid kind of a double payment, like we want to go take market share, we want to be aggressive. So the first offer is 0% financing on the networking software, whether that’s Mist or Aruba Central. Then we have on the hardware side 10% better than cash as a financing offer. So that’s a really cool offer. And then we’ve added a really aggressive focus on IT asset disposition. So we want to go in, help customers by monetizing the competitor’s assets, taking those out, and then putting HPE networking assets in. So when you combine those three offers—0% on software, 10% better than cash on hardware, and a competitive takeout on the competitor’s products—we think we’re really helping partners go and address and partner up with HPE networking and be aggressive in the market to help HPE take share. Robert Dutt: Going back to the 90/9 program, what areas is that covering? Brad Shapiro: That covers all products. So it’s really a financial structure that can address the whole portfolio. And again, it’s a very attractive offer. We’ve seen it compared to any other financing offers we put out there. We’ve seen the pipeline ramp tremendously. It’s really addressing a need that’s out there in the marketplace. Robert Dutt: Before getting into the details of some other programs, you touched on the supply chain situation that is on every partner’s mind right now. I’m curious over the last five months or so that this has been such a big factor. What have you been hearing from partners in terms of what they’re asking for from you, and where they’re looking for help here beyond obviously some clarity and whatever break they can get? Brad Shapiro: I’ll talk from a financial services perspective. It’s really about how can we help the partner address some of the customer concerns. One of the big ones is budgeting. It’s always been the case that there’s more to do than you have budget for. This just puts another wrinkle in it that is unprecedented. I’ve been doing this quite a long time. I’ve really not seen the market dynamic as we have it today. But that’s where financial engineering and financial structuring comes into play. Also, a lot of customers, while the new prices have gone up, when customers are retiring assets, what many don’t realize is the used equipment that’s coming off—the used equipment market has also increased in value. We’re able to give customers a lot more money for their used gear than they’re used to. That’s been helping offset some of the increases on the new product side. Robert Dutt: It’s the equivalent of the car market in the early COVID days. Brad Shapiro: Absolutely. Same type of scenario. Robert Dutt: The announcement around a 150% increase on approved credit capacity—that’s a pretty striking number. Is that part of the response to that? What’s driving you guys to go aggressively there right now? A response to that uncertainty, a response to tariffs, a response to all the things we see going on? Brad Shapiro: It’s a response to a few things. Yes, the price increases. For a while, the component pricing was so uncertain that there was a shorter validity period for quoting. The idea of increasing the credit line created enough room so that our partners didn’t have to keep going through the cycle. What we were hearing as feedback was, “Hey, we would go get a request from HPEFS, we get it approved, then if pricing went up, then we had to go through that process again.” We wanted to give plenty of headroom and be aggressive to allow partners to quickly get their deals done and not have to go through a process twice. It was ease of doing business, speed, and really helping them close their deals. Robert Dutt: Not a peculiar problem for HPE and HPEFS either. That’s something that we’re hearing across the industry front as a major partner issue—the idea of customer sales cycles and “validity” not matching up in any real way. Brad Shapiro: Yeah, absolutely. We’re trying to do our part to help partners get deals done. The good news is HPE on the BU side, on the compute side, announced a longer price validity. I know that they announced that here at Discover and there was really good feedback at the Partner Growth Summit. I think overall HPE, we’re all trying to address and help partners get their deals done with customers. Robert Dutt: The 0% software financing tied to VM migration is interesting when it feels like you’re trying to smooth that painful transition for folks who are on a platform and looking to move somewhere new. Is that the right way to think about it, or what else are you applying to that model? Brad Shapiro: Yeah, so I think just in general, we’re trying to provide customers a way to engage and look at our CloudOps suite—Morpheus and Zerto and OpsRamp and the whole suite—and really focus on how can we make it easy for the customer to say, “Yeah, let me try this.” So at the end of the day, it doesn’t have to be something where they’re coming in and wiping out one versus the other. The cost differential is so great and we believe that if they can just lower the number of licenses on VMware, we can help them reduce costs. So they may look to put in our CloudOps software in certain places and reduce those VM licenses. 0% financing makes it an easier decision: “Hey, I can pay over time and it’s the same as paying cash, no interest.” It’s just another option for customers who may not have it in this year’s budget. Robert Dutt: I’m trying to track it because it’s something that you’re kind of ramping up on though in competitive areas. Brad Shapiro: Yeah, so what’s new from HPEFS, I would say this year versus maybe the past five or seven years, is a renewed focus on leveraging our financing capabilities to help partners sell more with HPE. We didn’t really have in the last five or seven years a lot of financing promotions. We’ve integrated with the BUs. We’ve listened to the partners. They want to see us come out with integrated offers that help drive more sales. And so we’ve been working closely with the BUs. We’ve been developing these offers over the past year. It started a little bit at last Discover, but we’re really hitting our stride now as an organization. And I think the partners are really going to benefit from that. Robert Dutt: PGS also saw the debut of sustainability competencies for partners through HPEFS and through Partner Ready Vantage in combination there. What does earning that competency mean in practice? What does a partner get and why should they be pursuing it? Brad Shapiro: Yeah, so from our perspective, when we think about sustainability, we think it’s a really important aspect of the overall business. We have a responsibility. And so from a partner perspective, by getting that accreditation, there’s incentives that they can get under the Partner Ready Vantage program. And from an HPEFS perspective, we’ve created circular economy reports to help support partners and customers. And we’re proud that we’ve issued our 2,000th report to customers, and that keeps growing. So as sustainability continues to be an important part of this, I think partners have a role to play in helping their customers, but also can earn more from HPE. Robert Dutt: What are you hearing from partners around the idea of sustainability as part of the quoting and solution offering process? It’s just something that I feel like I’m hearing more of from Canadian partners in particular because of a series of regulations and requirements, and in some public sector spaces, the way it’s being weighted. Brad Shapiro: From my perspective, and I have a global role, so in certain geographies around the world, it’s very, very important. And it varies across geographies, but everywhere you look, it’s a growing trend in terms of importance, as you mentioned, in terms of government responses. We’re seeing more governments putting requirements in there. So my feeling is addressing sustainability is quickly becoming a must-have if you’re going to offer solutions. And so we’re right there with our partners in terms of helping them do that. Robert Dutt: It also connects to—and this is something that we touched on a little bit earlier—the idea that every customer upgrading their network and compute stack to something that’s more capable of AI has that corresponding pile of displaced gear that they’ve got to do something with. Brad Shapiro: Yeah. Robert Dutt: I guess, how significant do you see the ITAD opportunity in this refresh wave in the near future, and how do you help partners get in front of that? Brad Shapiro: Yeah, so again, I think there’s a significant opportunity, and I think HPE networking is really well positioned in that AI space. So from our perspective, in looking at the products that we can displace readily, there’s a pretty large install base. Some of our competitors have many customers out there, so the idea of putting those assets back into reuse somewhere is very real. So we think we can do well to help that customer monetize the asset. We can also put that back into reuse, which is good for the environment, and at the same time, help customers really modernize their network, because that’s really a solid foundation you need. When you think about AI, everybody thinks about the compute side and GPUs, but the network is so critical to having that solid AI foundation, and we believe HPE networking is the right choice. Robert Dutt: Across the board in your purview, is there a Canadian dimension here worth calling out? We’re hearing a lot more about data sovereignty driving decisions and that kind of thing about where workloads live. But does that also extend to how customers think about decommissioned hardware and where it goes? Brad Shapiro: Yeah, look, I think from a decommissioned hardware perspective, we are very careful about chain of custody and where that ends up. And I think that’s one thing that differentiates HPE when we’re thinking about decommissioning versus many others out there. We’re a large brand. It’s really important to us to decommission in the right way, following all the regulations that are out there. So if you’re a Canadian partner or a Canadian customer, knowing that the HPE brand… we are as focused on doing those things in the right way and following the rules and regulations. Our brand reputation is at stake, and we put a lot of thought and resource, time and energy into that. Robert Dutt: What’s the single biggest piece of feedback or most common piece of feedback you’ve been getting from partners here at Discover this week? What are they talking to you about? What are they curious about in terms of what you guys can bring to bear for their customers? Brad Shapiro: Yeah, so I think there’s been a lot of positive feedback on the offerings that we’ve come out with. As I mentioned before, we’re showing up differently now. We’re showing up coordinated with the different business units across HPE with these offers. That’s helpful. The other thing we’re focused on is really about the partner experience. So it’s not just having the right offers. It’s making them easy to access, operationally making it a smooth process. We want to be fast. We want to be predictable. When we put lines of credit in place, we commit to funding. We want to fund our partners fast. So my whole team doesn’t get quota retirement in sales until the partner gets paid. So it’s really important that we align our metrics and the way we’re measuring ourselves with what’s going to delight the partner and create a better experience for them. Robert Dutt: Has there been a notable increase in terms of acceleration there on partners getting paid? Brad Shapiro: Yeah, I would say it’s long been a focus of ours, but we’re really emphasizing it in coming out and being very deliberate about what we want to do in terms of turnaround times. We call it our partner pledge, but the idea is we want partners to know that we can be a reliable source of funding. Not only does financing help them close the deal and make the deals bigger, but then they can get paid faster as well. That really helps their metrics because most partners, most businesses, are looking at cash flow and free cash flow and all those kind of metrics. And financing with HPEFS really helps. The other thing it does is when you think about a partner’s capacity to do business, if they’re financing through HPEFS, it’s HPEFS’s credit line that’s being used, creating more availability for the partner to sell other solutions. So it doesn’t go against their credit limits. Robert Dutt: Not to get all “what have you done for me lately” with you, but what can partners expect from your business over the balance of 2026, as much as anyone has visibility into the near future? Brad Shapiro: Yeah, sure. I think what partners are going to see is, again, we talked about the offerings—us showing up with very competitive offerings, us showing up looking to help partners win, and again, helping partners. We want partners to think about, “Okay, there are these financing capabilities and I want to leverage those. How do we grow the HPE business?” The HPE business for our partners should be a growth engine for them—a profitable growth engine—and HPEFS is really here to help facilitate that. Robert Dutt: One thing I hear from folks in similar seats to you all the time is the idea that they feel their capabilities are underused or under-understood by partners. Generally speaking, obviously there are some exceptions to any rule. Does that kind of map with how you feel, and what’s the one tool, offering, or program that you offer that you think more partners would benefit from getting to know and adding to their toolkit? Brad Shapiro: Yeah, sure. I think Phil Mottram said it. He said, “HPEFS is one of our best-kept secrets.” So, yeah, I think generally we feel like we can do a better job, but I would say even coming to this Discover—and I’ve been to many, many, many Discovers—HPEFS is showing up because the marketing team has just done a fantastic job of integrating not only HPEFS, but kind of a whole value proposition focusing around IT economics. And I think that’s been a pivotal message here at Discover. From a partner perspective, again, I go back to all of those special financing offers that you just can’t get generally in the marketplace. You know, 0% on CloudOps software, 0% financing on Mist and Aruba Central. We’ve got a very competitive financing offer on storage. We talked about earlier the networking offerings that we have. So, across the portfolio, there are these offerings that you can only get from HPE and HPEFS. Robert Dutt: For an MSP or reseller who hasn’t thought much about asset disposition as part of their services offering, but is thinking, “Okay, well, maybe this is something I need to get into,” what’s the entry point? Is it something they engage you on directly, or do they kind of have to build their practice first and then bring you into the picture? Brad Shapiro: Well, I think they can engage us. If there’s an opportunity… the way I think about it is most customers are focused on, “What am I going to get that’s new? I need new technology for a project.” A lot of customers don’t have the wherewithal or focus on the disposition side. We think many customers end up giving their product away. Maybe somebody takes it and goes, “I’ll take care of it for you free of charge.” And the customer thinks, “Oh, this is great,” but there’s money in those assets, particularly now with the memory shortage. Anything with memory is going to have value. So for a partner, you don’t need to be an expert; just understand what the customer has in their environment and what they might be getting rid of. And it’s really just contacting HPEFS and we’ll do the assessment of whether there’s market value or not for the partner. Robert Dutt: That’s kind of where I wanted to go. Anything you want to throw out there in summation or in closing? Brad Shapiro: No, I really appreciate you having me. And it was great to get an opportunity to showcase what HPEFS is bringing to the table. I’m really excited and proud of what we’re doing and the role we can play in helping the partners grow with HPE. That’s what being a captive financing company is all about. So, looking forward to winning and growing with the partners in Canada. Robert Dutt: All right. Thank you for taking the time. Brad Shapiro: Thank you. Robert Dutt: There you have it. Brad Shapiro from HPE Financial Services. I’d like to thank Brad for his time, and I’d like to thank you for listening to the podcast. If you found the conversation useful, the best way to support the show is to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts, and leave us a rating or review if you’re so inclined. My takeaway from the conversation? HPEFS is making a deliberate shift away from being a passive financing option to an active weapon in the competitive arsenal. The 90/9 Advantage, the networking offer stack, and especially that partner pledge about quota retirement tied to partner payment speed—those are signals that HPE is serious about removing friction from channel economics. For Canadian partners, the July 1 portal rollout and the emphasis on chain of custody for ITAD are worth getting familiar with. Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.

Today’s headline news for Canadian IT solution providers: HPE Discover 2026 wraps up in Las Vegas today, and if you’ve been following our coverage, you know we’ve had plenty to unpack this week. For the Friday edition of The Buzz, we doing something slightly different – a reporter’s notebook on what HPE’s channel leadership said when they were off the keynote stage. The quote validity extension was the headline that drew the most relief, but the backstory is more interesting than the policy change itself. HPE extended standard quotes from 14 days to 30 days for compute, storage, and GreenLake, effective Monday. Simon Ewington, who leads HPE’s worldwide partner organisation, told press and partners Wednesday that the change was ‘pretty well kept secret’ – his own staff didn’t know about it either. The commodity volatility that had forced the two-week window had moderated enough that HPE could stand behind a 30-day price with confidence. Behind the ‘Power of One’ marketing, there are mechanical changes that determine whether partners can actually make money. Juniper’s Elite Plus, Elite, and Select tiers will map to HPE Platinum, Gold, and Silver starting November 1. HPE introduced a 3x multiplier on software sales for Zerto, Morpheus, and OpsRamp, plus a 1.5x GreenLake multiplier, to help partners climb tiers faster. Smart Choice SKUs – pre-configured servers missing only drives – are a speed play for distributors. The competitive storage take-out targets 14,000 customers under the VH Rail framing, with Alletra MP already outpacing market growth by 2x and 0% financing for three years. Then there was candour. Ewington noted HPE is the vendor who ‘typically moves first… and then others polish.’ The distributor overlap between HPE and Juniper is only about 10%, so they’re ‘refining the landscape’ rather than forcing universal carry. Service provider growth is running 23% to 30% CAGR. And HPE’s sustainability insight dashboard gives partners a concrete tool to analyse customer environments and open carbon footprint conversations. You can find every episode of The Buzz and In The Channel from HPE Discover on our HPE Discover news hub. Read Full Transcript This epsisode of The Buzz is brought to you by HPE Discover 2026. Check out our full coverage of the event on ChannelBuzz.ca — you’ll find out HPE Discover 2026 News Hub in the menu bar at the top of the page. Welcome to The Buzz from ChannelBuzz.ca, I’m Robert Dutt, today is Friday, June 19th, and here’s what’s happening in the channel today. I’m recording this a bit earl in Las Vegas, because I’m on a plane all day heading home from Discover.  If you’ve been following our coverage this week, you know we’ve had a lot to unpack – the Partner Growth Summit on Monday, the networking and AI infrastructure keynote on Tuesday, and a steady drumbeat of announcements through Wednesday. For this episode, I want to do something slightly different. Think of it as a reporter’s notebook – the details, the mechanics, and the candour that came out when HPE’s channel leadership sat down with press and partners on Wednesday morning, off the keynote stage. Let’s start with the quote validity extension, because the backstory here is as interesting than the policy change itself. HPE extended standard quote validity from 14 days to 30 days for compute, storage, and GreenLake, effective Monday. You’ve heard that already. What you probably haven’t heard is how closely they guarded it. Simon Ewington, who runs HPE’s worldwide partner organisation, told us Wednesday that the change was a ‘pretty well kept secret.’  His own staff didn’t know about it either. They wanted zero leaks because the commodity and supply chain volatility that had forced the two-week window in the first place had finally moderated enough that HPE could stand behind a 30-day price with confidence. Keeping it quiet meant announcing it without hedging. For partners who’ve been managing customer decision cycles that simply don’t fit a 14-day window, the relief was audible. The Partner Growth Summit was dense enough that Ewington admitted partners told him it was ‘almost too much’ and they ‘needed an AI summary to recap everything.’ So let me pull out the operational details that actually affect how you navigate the program. First, Juniper integration. We now have firm tier mapping: Juniper Elite Plus goes to HPE Platinum, Elite to Gold, Select to Silver, effective November 1. HPE is also launching a Routing competency – number 15 in the framework – to support that transition. Second, multipliers. HPE introduced a 3x multiplier on software sales for Zerto, Morpheus, and OpsRamp, plus a 1.5x multiplier for GreenLake, to help partners hit higher membership tiers faster by weighting software more heavily than hardware. Third, Smart Choice SKUs – pre-configured servers that ship missing only hard drives. It’s a speed and velocity play for distributors. Fourth, the competitive storage take-out. HPE has identified 14,000 target customers for what they’re calling the VH Rail opportunity. Alletra MP is outpacing market growth by 2x, and they’re backing the migration with 0% financing for three years. These aren’t marketing headlines. These are the details that determine whether you can actually make money on the portfolio. Then there were the moments of genuine candour. Ewington’s line that HPE is the vendor who ‘typically moves first… and then others polish’ is either confidence or arrogance depending on your perspective, but it’s not ambiguous. You may have seen recently that HP formally announced its two main global distributors as Ingram Micro and TD SYNNEX. The distributor overlap reality is worth noting: only about 10% overlap between HPE and Juniper distributors. HPE is actively ‘refining the landscape’ rather than forcing every distributor to carry everything. That’s a concession that operational integration takes time and care. On services, HPE is expanding partner-branded services so partners own the Level 1 and 2 support relationship while HPE stays in the background for Level 3 and 4. Ewington said this largely came about because there have been some large partners who have declined to get closer to HPE because of the company’s previous retisense to allow partners to lead on services around its gear.  For service providers specifically, leadership cited 23% to 30% CAGR growth rates, and they’re opening CloudOps software to CSPs to build new services around. And on sustainability, which came up in the context of AI’s energy demands, HPE has built an insight dashboard that lets partners analyse customer environments and open conversations about carbon footprint and efficiency. It’s a practical tool rather than a vague pledge. If there’s a through-line to the week, it’s that HPE is trying to make ‘Power of One’ mean something operationally, not just rhetorically. The quote validity change was a trust repair. The multiplier and tier mapping are structural incentives. The distributor and services refinements are admissions that integration is hard and takes time. Whether it all lands as promised is what we’ll be watching through the second half of this year. That’s it for this edition of The Buzz. You can find our full HPE Discover 2026 coverage on ChannelBuzz.ca – there’s a news hub in the menu bar at the top of the page. And we’ll also have more epsidoes of In The Channel from Discover next week here on the site, including more HPE executives, and more reactions from Canadian HPE partners. That’s how we’re seeing the headlines from HPE Discover. I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, thanks for listening. Have a great day.

Justin McGarry, vice president of product management for compute software at HPE At HPE Discover 2026 in Las Vegas this week, In The Channel sat down with Justin McGarry, vice president of product management for compute software at HPE, to talk about where HPE’s server management story is headed – and what it means for MSPs in the Canadian channel. The centrepiece of that story is Compute Ops Management (COM) – HPE’s cloud-native, subscription-based platform built on iLO telemetry embedded in every ProLiant server. McGarry’s pitch is direct: COM is not just a management tool, it’s a business growth platform for MSPs who lean into it. His primary proof point is Nitec, an MSP that helped co-develop COM’s multi-tenant capability and now manages distributed customer environments at higher margins with fewer resources than previously required. Across a broader study of roughly 300 ProLiant customers, HPE found up to 75% less downtime and approximately $150,000 in travel and resource cost savings per customer. For MSPs serving customers with ESG or sustainability reporting obligations – increasingly common in Canadian public sector and regulated industries – COM’s AI insights module adds a forecasting layer that projects future carbon emissions and energy costs using an open-source forecasting engine. That projection can anchor a practical business case for a server refresh, as illustrated by Booking.com, which is using COM on its path to net zero by 2030. Two capabilities worth flagging for mixed-environment MSPs: third-party server monitoring (visibility into non-HPE OEM hardware from the same console) and Secure Gateway, a virtual appliance that aggregates iLO traffic into a single cloud egress point – solving the cloud-connectivity objection for customers in financial services, healthcare, and other regulated sectors. On the agentic AI front, McGarry is candid that Compute Copilot is early. This week’s Discover announcement extends its reach into security advisories – surfacing recommendations and moving toward automated remediation. The fuller agentic vision is still taking shape. McGarry’s takeaway for partners: there’s still significant runway to understand what COM can do for their businesses, and the MSPs who’ve made it a core capability are seeing it pay off. Read Full Transcript ROBERT DUTT: This episode of In The Channel is brought to you by HPE Discover 2026. Check out our full coverage of the event at ChannelBuzz.ca. You’ll find our HPE Discover 2026 news hub in the menu bar right at the top of the page. Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca and your host for the show. This week I’m at HPE Discover 2026 in Las Vegas, and over the course of the show I’ve been sitting down with HPE executives and partners for a series of conversations that I’ll be releasing over the next few days. Today’s guest is Justin McGarry, vice president of product management for compute software at HPE. Now, when HPE says compute, they mean their server business anchored by the ProLiant line, but Justin’s specific domain is the software that wraps around that hardware. The centerpiece of that is Compute Ops Management, which is HPE’s cloud-native platform for securing, automating and managing ProLiant estates. It’s built on top of iLO, HPE’s embedded server intelligence technology, and over the past few years it’s evolved into something that Justin argues is less a management tool and more a business growth engine for MSPs. Justin came to HPE a couple years ago from VMware, where he ran global services portfolio and the go-to-market strategy, so he brings an interesting outside perspective to where HPE’s story fits in the broader enterprise infrastructure picture. We talked about the MSP opportunity, sustainability forecasting, where Compute Copilot, the conversational AI layer for server management, actually stands today, and where HPE thinks agentic capabilities take all of this. Let’s get right into it. My chat with Justin McGarry. Justin, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it. JUSTIN MCGARRY: Yeah, happy to be here, Rob. Thanks for giving me the opportunity to chat with you today. I’m sure it’s a busy week, this kind of show almost always is. ROBERT DUTT: Absolutely. To start with, you guys have been calling the business unit Compute rather than servers for a while now. When you’re talking to partners, how do you describe what Compute is today versus maybe what it was five years ago, what it all kind of entails? JUSTIN MCGARRY: Yeah, I mean, I’ll give you my perspective. So I joined the company about two and a half years ago now. And when I think about what we do in Compute, the foundation of that is ProLiant. So from a hardware perspective, the servers that we ship day in and day out to our customers. The other piece, from my perspective, and maybe I’m being a little selfish here, is all the software and solutions that wrap around that. So from a software perspective, I own what we call Compute Ops Management. So that is our cloud-native management platform for securing and automating those ProLiant estates. We actually do third-party monitoring as well. So other server OEMs that you have in the environment, we’ll monitor that as well. And then we have our on-premise solution for air-gapped and sovereign environments. That’s OneView. We’ve had OneView out in the market for many years now. And then, of course, the foundation of everything we do from a software perspective is with iLO, integrated lights-out. That has been out in the market now for a few decades. We continue to innovate and evolve on that. And so all of that intelligence, the data, the telemetry, that’s all foundation to what we do in our management platforms with our subscription-based cloud-native Compute Ops Management, and our sovereign air-gapped solution with OneView. ROBERT DUTT: Okay. A couple questions around things that you guys have announced recently. You guys just highlighted a 20% energy efficiency gain with the Gen 12 platform on Xeon. So for a reseller or MSP helping a mid-market customer justify the server refresh right now, how do you see energy efficiency playing in actually closing deals? Or is it still just sort of a nice-to-have thing on the spec sheet? JUSTIN MCGARRY: Yeah, I think customers are still really focused on sustainability. Again, if I think back to what we do from a software perspective with Compute Ops Management, one of the key assets or capabilities that we have there is what we call AI insights. And with those AI insights, we can actually help customers from a sustainability perspective be able to predict and forecast future carbon emissions. So I was at Discover in Barcelona late last year. We had a customer Booking.com on stage and Booking.com has a massive distributed environment all ProLiant-based. How are they managing, securing, automating that? They’re using Compute Ops Management. One of their key goals at a company level is they want to be net-zero by 2030. How are they going to get there? They got to make sure that they’re running an efficient, sustainable operation, certainly from a data center perspective. ProLiant is in that picture. And then how they’re managing, monitoring that, predicting their future forecasts or their carbon emissions to help them derive when they’re going to go do their refreshes. They’re using Compute Ops Management for that. So sustainability is still very much top of mind. Globally, I would say even more important in EMEA with some of those board-level sustainability targets that customers have with their ESG board-level goals that they’ve got to go and achieve. ROBERT DUTT: Do you see that catching up at all in the North American market? JUSTIN MCGARRY: You know, I do. I mean, I’m hearing it more in customer conversations. If I think about when I was in Discover Barcelona, a lot of the discussion there was around sovereign and sustainability. Early into the week here at Discover, I haven’t had a lot of customer meetings yet, but I’m going to kind of predict that I think some of the sustainability pieces are going to come into play, especially when you think about AI, you think about inferencing in particular out at the edge. You think about all the energy required to go in and not just do the training, but now thinking about the inferencing and workloads and use cases around GenAI. I think that’s just going to continue to become more important. And so that’s why we prioritized it in our roadmap to continue to evolve on what we’re doing from a sustainability perspective. ROBERT DUTT: Let’s get a little bit more into Compute Ops Management. You came from VMware, which has its own management tooling story. What does COM do that’s genuinely different and what does it mean for an MSP managing, say, 100 ProLiant servers across 20 customers or whatever that profile looks like? JUSTIN MCGARRY: Yeah, yeah. So I think what really differentiates HPE, I think, generally in the market is that we have the Compute Ops Management capability. So this was a build from the ground up, cloud-native subscription-based management tool that we brought to market a few years ago now. I think it has been very transformational in the customer conversations that we’ve been having because at the end of the day, it’s not just the hardware. It’s how you secure that, how you automate it. I think the unique differentiation that we have with Compute Ops Management is specifically with all the telemetry data and intelligence that we have at the iLO level. That is in every single ProLiant that we ship out the door. And because we have that chip in each of those ProLiants that goes out, it gives us a lot of capability to secure, automate, manage, orchestrate that environment for the customer. So I think that’s the unique value that we have in Compute Ops Management that may be a little bit different than what else you see out on the market and you reference VMware. Certainly a lot of great management capabilities there when it came to the workload level, the virtualization level. This is down at the hardware level, at the ProLiant level, helping customers manage and automate and secure that environment. When it comes to what’s in it for managed service providers, so we have a lot of success stories there that we’re continuing to build on where COM really enables multi-tenant compute management for those MSPs. They can do it from a single, secure, cloud console. They can proactively manage and monitor their customers’ environments. We have this MSP actually who will be on stage with me later today, Nitec, and the managing director there that runs that business. He started working with our team a few years ago now as we were starting to really kind of build some foundational capabilities into Compute Ops Management. He helped us with developing the concept around our MSP capability where we can manage different workspaces across an environment and have all of that visibility roll up to a single level. I think the key benefit for these partners, and of course there’s all the IT benefits and capabilities that they get. I think when I consider what Nitec has done and some of the other MSPs from a business perspective, what used to take a lot more resources for them to manage those customer environments, now they’re able to do that much more efficiently and effectively. They’re seeing a larger margin profile on these value-added services that they’re delivering to these customers as a result. And so, Compute Ops Management, you ask the folks at Nitec, that has been foundational to them being able to deliver these services effectively and at a much higher margin than they have been able to do in the past. So the story, Rob, honestly, is a very similar story to what customers achieve with using Compute Ops Management. We’ve got a study we did a little while back across about 300 ProLiant customers, up to 75% less downtime in their environment, a lot more, up to 150,000 or so in travel and resource costs saved. So just like we’re helping our customers effectively manage their environments with less resources and less cost at those distributed edge locations, we’re doing the same thing with our MSP partners. So we have a lot of opportunity there. It’s exciting to see, I would say, COM is not just a management tool, it’s a business growth platform for these MSPs who really lean into it and partner with us. ROBERT DUTT: Obviously, you’ve got folks like Nitec who are well along the curve, it sounds like, maybe even leading the way in many ways. Where are you at in terms of reaching the long tail of the MSP channel and kind of getting that, how fully realized is the opportunity for COM in the community today? JUSTIN MCGARRY: I think, Rob, we still have a ton of opportunity to get the message out there around Compute Ops Management. I find myself, when I am presenting to the various partner communities, there’s still a lot of opportunity to bring them up to speed on the capabilities that we have there, the benefits they can derive, and in particular, what’s in it for them. How can they go in and repeat what Nitec has done? I think if you ask Nitec, what is the one thing that they would recommend for partners to go do who are looking to scale their MSP businesses on top of a management capability like Compute Ops Management? It is getting a single kind of advocate champion in the organization to really understand what not only the product can provide to the end customer, but what are the benefits that the managed service provider can get out of using this type of capability in their environment to manage those end customers? ROBERT DUTT: You guys just recently launched or added Copilot, an integrated conversational AI layer for server management in COM. Interesting concept. Where is that at today? Is it sort of in the “this is what the future might look like” kind of phase, or is there aspects that it’s kind of going to be genuinely useful to an MSP today? JUSTIN MCGARRY: Yeah, I think it is very early stages with Compute Copilot. Today, it is very much a conversational AI assistant. So if I think about in my daily life how I’m using tools like Claude and my just kind of conversational interaction back and forth, Compute Copilot is very much that today. So hey, Compute Copilot, tell me about the servers I have in the environment and their health, or hey, Compute Copilot, tell me where I’m at on achieving, as I talked about the Booking.com story earlier, where am I at on my path to sustainability and meeting some of those targets? Those are some of the questions that you can ask of it today. If you asked Nitec, they would say, “Hey, all the manual effort and looking through all the manuals and documentation that HPE provides around the ProLiant infrastructure, we no longer have to go in, dig that all up and navigate our way through that.” We can ask the conversational assistant with Compute Copilot to do that. That’s the beginning. I think the future is really around agentic. So how can I interact with that Compute Copilot to say, “Hey, notice that this issue is happening in my environment. Provide me some recommendations on what I can do next.” It provides me those recommendations. And then I can say, “Hey, Compute Copilot, go and enact those recommendations.” And so I think about back to that study with those ProLiant customers and all that time and resource and effort saved, I just can’t imagine how much we can multiply that for our MSPs and for our customers once we start to get some of those agentic capabilities in place. What are the announcements we have this week, Rob, as we start to head down that agentic path is with security advisories. So security advisories, you think about the past, “Okay, I got to understand that there’s a security advisory out there. I then got to go and act on it and figure out what I need to go do in the environment to rectify that issue.” Now we’re heading down the path of, “Okay, I can get some intelligence to tell me, ‘Hey, this is happening in the environment. We can go and provide recommendations on where you need to go and implement this and then go and implement that.'” And so, yeah, I’m really excited about the opportunity that we have with agentic. I think back to your question, we’re just very much at the beginnings of where we can take capabilities like Compute Copilot. ROBERT DUTT: Especially as that kind of stuff starts to fit into the mix, it strikes me that it’s even more important that, as you mentioned, it’s a multi-vendor kind of environment that I as an MSP, if I have customers or existing infrastructure that’s running someone else, it’s, you know, it can be covered under this as well. JUSTIN MCGARRY: Yeah, yeah. So the third-party monitoring capability we have today is very much monitoring. So other OEM servers that you have in your environment, you can get visibility into those. And so we provide this capability today. I think we announced that about a year or so ago. I would say that is opening a lot more doors for our, certainly the conversations with the MSPs. You know, we can’t kid ourselves that at MSPs they only have one type of OEM in the environment. They might have multiple. It’s a hybrid environment. And the same can be said for our customers out there as well. And so having this third-party monitoring capability in place where I can go to that single console and not just have visibility into my ProLiant estate, but if an issue occurs, I want to be able to see that across the entire estate. The third-party monitoring capability gives us the ability to do that, Rob. And, you know, one other thing I’d add real quick, and this is something that a lot of our partners and even, I’d say, our customers, we still have some awareness-building to do around Secure Gateway. So one of the challenges that customers, when I first joined, time and time again, I have discussions with customers about cloud manageability. And the first question they say is, well, Justin, where is this all hosted? And, you know, do I really want my environment talking to the cloud? And one of the things that we developed over time is this capability called Secure Gateway. It’s a virtual appliance that can be deployed in the environment. And what that does is it actually aggregates all of the iLO traffic to that Secure Gateway. That’s then one egress connection out to the cloud instead of all of those iLOs connecting and talking to the cloud. Nine times out of ten in customer conversations I have, whether it’s financial, it’s some other regulated industry, healthcare, insurance, what have you, we are now able to overcome that hurdle with cloud management capability because we have the Secure Gateway virtual appliance that we can deploy for customers. So that’s another great capability. Combined with third-party monitoring, you deploy that virtual appliance and that’s how we’re able to have that visibility across the entire estate. ROBERT DUTT: We touched a little bit on sustainability earlier. Back home in Canada, we have particular sensitivities around energy costs, carbon reporting, especially for public sector and anyone under provincial ESG oversight. What is the sustainability dashboard in COM? Does that move the needle here? Is it a checkbox feature? What can it kind of add to an MSP who’s trying to make sure that their customers are informed and in the right place? JUSTIN MCGARRY: Yeah, I would say it’s a fundamental feature that we have in Compute Ops Management today. I think what really takes it to the next level is the AI insights that I mentioned. So we worked with an open-source forecasting engine model out there that we leverage to develop and engineer that capability. And what that allows you to do is be able to forecast out to the future. Hey, this is how we’ve been trending today. This is where we will end up in the future based on some of that intelligence that we have in the AI-driven insights capability. So I would say sustainability dashboard in Compute Ops Management is a very kind of foundational fundamental capability. How you take that to the next level is then being able to leverage the AI-driven insights that we have for sustainability, be able to predict what the future is going to look like from a carbon emissions, energy cost perspective, and then be able to proactively take some measures to make sure that you’re going to be able to meet or exceed those targets. And so some customers are actually looking at that and saying, okay, I’m not necessarily ready to refresh now, but based on how I’m predicting out to the future, yes, I need to make that next step from Gen 10 or even prior to that in my environment to the new Gen 12 and the cost associated with doing so. I can predict and forecast out into the future that based on my energy costs, I may be able to cover, I mean, not all of that expense to do the refresh, but certainly a part of it. And so that’s something else that I know we have had a lot of success with our customers here recently. Again, it comes back to not just having that fundamental sustainability dashboard in place, but also being able to look out into the future to a certain extent with that forecasting model that we have to predict where you’re going to go with carbon emissions, energy costs. ROBERT DUTT: Last one for me. What do you think is the biggest untapped or under-realized opportunity in the compute software sphere for you guys right now? What’s basically the one thing that you’d want a Canadian reseller walking away from Discover this week understanding about this business that maybe they didn’t come in with? JUSTIN MCGARRY: Yeah, I think that back to what we talked about a little bit ago, there’s still, I think, an opportunity with partners. Partners have heard maybe a little bit about Compute Ops Management, but haven’t yet gotten to the place where they fully understand the capabilities that we have there, where we have delivered on some of the things like Secure Gateway, third-party monitoring, the sustainability, AI-driven insights and the forecasting model there, where we’re going with agentic. What’s in it for them at the end of the day? What are they going to benefit from getting their customers up to speed on Compute Ops Management, using it to manage, orchestrate, secure, automate those environments? I think there’s a tremendous opportunity there to continue to, and this is on me. It’s on our teams at HPE to continue to work with our partners to bring them up to speed there. And then I think back to looking at what Nitec and others have done: really get that champion within your organization to understand not just what the customer benefits are and the outcomes that can be derived, not just from an IT perspective, but with the Booking.com story, that real business-critical impact that this software is driving. I think that’s a unique differentiator that HPE has out in the market from a ProLiant perspective with Compute Ops Management. And then the other piece for MSPs is, hey, I can go in and deliver higher-margin value-added services just by leveraging this management tool in the environment and learning from Nitec and others on how they’re doing that. So I think I feel like it’s very early stages, Rob, with the partner ecosystem. I think we have a ton of opportunity there to help them understand that COM isn’t just a management tool. It is a business growth driver for them, and helping them understand that and realize that outcome is certainly where I’m focused and where the team is focused going forward. ROBERT DUTT: Between that runway and I think the potential for agentic getting its hooks even deeper into this and making it increasingly actionable, I think you’re right. There’s a lot still to come. JUSTIN MCGARRY: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it’s exciting. I think there’s a tremendous opportunity with the partner ecosystem and I think, genuinely, I think we’re just getting started. ROBERT DUTT: All right. Look forward to seeing how it evolves. Awesome. Well, I appreciate you taking the time with me, Rob. Thank you. Thank you. ROBERT DUTT: There you have it. Justin McGarry from HPE. I’d like to thank Justin for carving out some time during what is a genuinely hectic week here at Discover. I really appreciate it. And thank you for listening. If you’d like to follow or subscribe to the podcast, you can find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, most podcast directories. Ratings and reviews are always appreciated if you have a moment. A few things I take away from this conversation. First, Compute Ops Management is a more interesting story than the name might suggest. When you’ve got an MSP like Nitec that helped co-develop the platform’s multi-tenant capability and is now managing distributed customer environments at significantly higher margins with fewer resources, that’s a real signal worth paying attention to. Justin’s framing of COM as a business growth platform rather than a management tool is the right way to think about it. Second, the sustainability forecasting piece is genuinely differentiated for the Canadian market. The ability to project future carbon emissions and energy costs and use that forecast to build a board-level business case for a server refresh is practical and timely, especially for customers with ESG reporting obligations. And third, Compute Copilot is early, and Justin was honest about that. The near-term step, moving from conversational Q&A to actual agentic action on security advisories, is the right direction. It’s worth revisiting this conversation in a year to see how far that’s come. Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.

Today’s headline news for Canadian IT solution providers: HPE chief technology officer for cloud and AI Fidelma Russo used her Discover general session to introduce “tokenomics” – the argument that agentic AI economics are fundamentally infrastructure economics. She told the Las Vegas audience that continuous AI agents can cost $13,000 per agent per month in the public cloud, and revealed that HPE’s own MindStone AI support platform achieved a 30x cost reduction by moving from the public cloud to HPE Private Cloud AI on-prem – a saving of roughly $100,000 per month. Vultr announced it is buying HPE and NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra rack-scale systems – the GB300 NVL72 – with 800GbE Spectrum-X networking to build out next-generation global AI data centres. Vultr CEO J.J. Kardwell called out “decentralized, latency-sensitive workloads” as a driver. The announcement contained no channel component. HPE unveiled Morpheus 9, the latest version of its GreenLake virtualization platform, with a built-in MCP server for agent-driven operations. HPE claims up to 90 percent cost reduction versus traditional virtualization, and says more than 2,000 customers and one million cores are already on VM Essentials. A platform migration program offers the first year of Morpheus and VM Essentials at no cost. Zerto’s recovery tools are positioned as an “undo” button for when autonomous AI agents make unintended infrastructure changes. Read Full Transcript This epsisode of The Buzz is brought to you by HPE Discover 2026. Check out our full coverage of the event on ChannelBuzz.ca — you’ll find out HPE Discover 2026 News Hub in the menu bar at the top of the page. Welcome to The Buzz from ChannelBuzz.ca, I’m Robert Dutt, today is Thursday, June 18th, and here’s what’s happening in the channel today. Today, day three of HPE Discover 2026 in Las Vegas, and the story is the economics of the agentic enterprise. Let’s get to it. HPE’s chief technology officer for cloud and AI, Fidelma Russo, took the main stage yesterday morning with a message that will resonate with anyone who has watched a client’s cloud AI bill spiral: continuous agentic AI is wildly expensive in the public cloud. Russo cited a figure of $13,000 per month, per agent, for continuous reasoning operations in the public cloud. That is not a pilot. That is production infrastructure. Her answer is HPE’s take on “tokenomics” – the idea that AI economics are fundamentally infrastructure economics. It comes down to utilization, efficiency, and scale. And HPE has proof. Russo revealed that HPE built its own AI support platform, MindStone, and moved it from the public cloud to HPE Private Cloud AI on-prem. The result: a 30-fold cost reduction, saving roughly $100,000 per month. That is the argument for why production AI is coming to the data centre. Not because it is fashionable, but because the math stops working anywhere else. The alternative hyperscaler announced it is buying HPE and NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra rack-scale systems – specifically the GB300 NVL72 – along with 800-gigabit Ethernet Spectrum-X networking, to build out its next generation of global AI data centres. This is a procurement deal, not a partnership, but it is serious hardware at serious scale. Vultr CEO J.J. Kardwell framed it around “decentralized, latency-sensitive workloads across Vultr’s extensive global network.” Now clearly, this isn’t a channel story unto itself at this moment. This is pure enterprise infrastructure. But it does signal that someone is actually buying the big AI factory gear HPE has been talking about all week. The GreenLake platform now has a built-in MCP server for agent-driven operations, and HPE says Morpheus 9 delivers up to 90 percent cost reduction compared to traditional virtualization. There are more than 2,000 customers and a million cores already running on VM Essentials. To ease the migration pain, HPE is offering the first year of Morpheus and VM Essentials at no cost through a platform migration program. There is a caveat: Zerto’s instant recovery and migration support is Morpheus-only for now. No KVM, no Kubernetes natively. But Zerto gets an interesting new job in this agentic world. Russo positioned it as the undo button for when autonomous AI agents make unintended changes to infrastructure – roll back to a known good state instantly. I’ll be back tomorrow with a reporter’s notebook from the channel leadership breakfast panel at Discover, as we wrap up our coverage of the event this week. That’s how we’re seeing the headlines from HPE Discover. I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, thanks for listening. Have a great day.

en Fallon, vice president of worldwide channel and partner ecosystem networking sales At HPE Discover Las Vegas this week, HPE pushed its networking story to the centre of the event – from autonomous AIOps capabilities to a unified SASE platform – and the channel is central to how it plans to execute on some ambitious market share targets. ChannelBuzz.ca sat down on-site with Ben Fallon, vice president of worldwide channel and partner ecosystem networking sales, to talk about what the announcements mean in practice for Canadian partners. On the self-driving network vision – a major theme in the general sessions this week – Fallon pointed to HPE Aruba Mist as the concrete proof point: autonomous remediation that partners can toggle on in the dashboard for known network problems, no human click required. “Autonomous networking, with that human deciding where they want that to take place, is already real,” he said. On the Aruba and Juniper Networks platform integration – a frequent question from partners navigating two management platforms – Fallon described a “build once, deploy twice” philosophy built on microservices architecture, keeping both platforms differentiated by use case while accelerating innovation through cross-pollination rather than forced convergence. The SASE and security opportunity produced one of the clearest channel statements of the conversation: “Pretty much 100% of our security sales go through partners. There is no other path.” With HPE publicly targeting a $1 billion security business, Fallon said the partner base is nowhere near saturated – and that competency-based incentives within the Partner Ready Vantage program are in place to bring more networking-pedigreed partners into that conversation. A formal partner program unification is on track for November, with a stated focus on simplifying certification, deal registration, and rebates – and new incentives aimed squarely at winning net-new networking customers away from competing vendors. Read Full Transcript Robert Dutt: Today’s episode of In The Channel is brought to you by HPE Discover 2026. Discover runs June 15-18 at the Venetian in Las Vegas. Discover what’s next at hpe.com/discover. Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca, and your host for the show. We’re coming to you this week from HPE Discover Las Vegas, where HPE has been rolling out a significant set of announcements across networking, cloud, and AI infrastructure. The embargoes are lifted, and the Partner Growth Summit is in the books, so we can actually get into the substance of things. My guest is Ben Fallon, vice president of worldwide channel and partner ecosystem networking sales at HPE. Ben came to this role via the Juniper side of the house. He was running global partner and commercial sales for Juniper Networks when the acquisition closed, and moved into leading the combined networking channel earlier this year. His session at Discover this week was called “Betting on HPE Networking,” which turned out to be a pretty useful frame for a conversation. We got into what self-driving networks actually mean for a partner having a Monday morning conversation with a customer, the Aruba and Mist integration story, the SASE and security opportunity, and what partners can expect when the unified program formally launches in November. Let’s get right into it. My chat with Ben Fallon. Ben, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it. I know it’s a busy week on site here, I’m sure. Ben Fallon: It is. It’s a fun week. We’ve got thousands of partners here, but it’s great to be here with you. Robert Dutt: For listeners who don’t know you or your role, can you give me a quick rundown on what you do here and how you came to be leading networking channels for HPE? Ben Fallon: Yeah, so like you said, I lead the global networking channel for HPE. I’ve spent the last 25-odd years in the industry, have led channels for a number of the significant vendors in the market. I was part of the Juniper acquisition, most recently running one of the global sales segments, and in January moved over to lead the channel. We’ve got a fantastic opportunity in front of us. Robert Dutt: I like that you frame it as you’re part of the Juniper acquisition. You’re not taking entire credit for them acquiring Juniper to get your talent. Ben Fallon: Absolutely not, no. It was a bonus. Robert Dutt: Absolutely. Your session this week is called “Betting on HPE Networking.” It’s a pretty confident way of looking at it, and obvious given the milieu. Walk me through what the bet looks like from where you sit. What are you asking partners to bet on, and why now? Ben Fallon: Yeah, so for me, it’s like when you look at a bet, you’ve got to make sure it’s a good one. No one wants to be playing the lottery. That’s got the worst chance of winning. The more strategy that you actually bring into a game, along with some execution, increases your chance of winning. So for us, what increases the chance of winning with HPE Networking is cross-selling. The more you’re selling across the portfolio, the more you’re going to engage with our account teams, the more problems you’re going to solve for our customers. And also, that’s where you can earn the most amount of rebates, and where the program is really geared towards. So if you make a bet on us, we’re making a bet on you, and you’ll get that back in profitability and customer satisfaction. Robert Dutt: Cross-selling within networking, across the HPE portfolio, or… Ben Fallon: All of the above. So you can absolutely cross-sell within the portfolio, whether you’re selling campus and branch, or you want to move into selling more security solutions. Or if you’re selling the hybrid cloud solution portfolio from HPE, you need to start getting involved in networking, because it’s going to expand your opportunity, and we know the network is at the heart of all of these AI workloads. Robert Dutt: One of the big presentations here is about taking the idea of self-driving networks from vision to reality. For a lot of partners, though, the question is always, “What do I take to my customer?” On Monday morning, how do partners translate that message around self-driving networks to a concrete conversation with staff at a customer, and make it map with their care-abouts? Ben Fallon: Yeah, sure. Well, look, complexity is only increasing. We know there are talent shortages. We know that it’s almost an impossible task to keep up with all the vulnerabilities that are created through AI. And so you have to have AI as part of your defense. So what’s real? Let’s take something like HPE Mist, where that has autonomous actions now built into the dashboard. So we know for certain problems that come up on the network, we know how to remediate them. We don’t need a person to go and click a button. You can literally switch on a toggle, and off it goes. So autonomous networking, with that human deciding where they want that to take place, is already real. Robert Dutt: You touch on Mist. One thing I do hear from partners sometimes is with the Aruba and Juniper integration, the two platforms you’ve got with Aruba Central and Mist, moving toward common capabilities, but it sounds like the vision is not to merge. What do you tell the partner who’s been selling one side of that equation or the other? And now that we’ve kind of got one HPE networking, what does it mean in practice, basically? Ben Fallon: Yeah, well, you touched on self-driving. That’s a unified vision across the entire portfolio. And then we’ve got this strategy of cross-pollination. I think if you look at a lot of acquisitions over the years, they’ve spent so long arguing over maybe not a feature, but how do you actually get to that feature to be capable? And innovation dies when that happens. If you want innovation to actually accelerate, which is what we’re seeing, you take the best from each platform, and because they’re built with a microservices architecture, you can build once, deploy twice, and it becomes this incredible boon of innovation on the platform. So I’d say that is real, because customers are voting with their wallet. So there’s a decent amount of cross-pollination, but each kind of remains aimed towards its focus. Robert Dutt: That’s it. Ben Fallon: And really what I see with partners is they see this as a growth play in the same way that we do. This is about finding new opportunity. So they may have served some SMB customers with some on-prem part of the Aruba portfolio. Now they’re wanting to get into some mid-sized lower enterprise, and they’re seeing that Mist has some capability that helps get them there. So it’s a growth play for us, and it’s a growth play for the partner. Robert Dutt: One of the things that caught my attention in the announcements this week was the unified SASE story – bringing SD-WAN and SSE under one management pane. You guys have talked about a billion-dollar security ambition. Pretty big number. What’s the channel’s role in getting to that? And for a partner who hasn’t historically led with networking security, what’s kind of the on-ramp or the easiest first step? Ben Fallon: Yeah. So first of all, obviously, we’ve got this universal zero-trust network architecture, which we’re really leaning into. And it’s about bringing together the different parts of the security portfolios from across HPE. And obviously with the Juniper acquisition, that brought an even richer portfolio. For partners, pretty much 100% of our security sales go through partners, so there is no other path. And what we’re really looking for is – we have some very, very capable, specialized partners on security – I think there’s a bigger opportunity for more partners to be selling HPE networking and security solutions. We’re just getting started. We’re already posting some great numbers. We had some incredible growth just last quarter, and there’s still more partners can do. We are not saturated from the partner landscape selling our security portfolio, so lots of opportunity there. Robert Dutt: Those additional partners in that space – do you see them being primarily folks who come in from other parts of the HPE network, existing specialists in security who maybe haven‘t worked with you in the past, a little bit of both? What’s kind of the… Ben Fallon: It’s a bit of a combination, but you always have to focus. You can’t go everywhere. And where we’re focusing is on partners that have a pedigree in networking with us, because we’re increasingly seeing that there’s a great attach opportunity, and the convergence of the network and security we think is only going to accelerate. Robert Dutt: Are we at the point of having a formal program, that kind of thing, to bring those partners on board, or to enable and encourage the partners who are in the HPE sphere, but not yet? Ben Fallon: Yeah, we do. We have, as part of our Partner Ready Vantage program, our broad certifications that are part of that, and that’s how you get to platinum, gold, silver, etc. But then we have competencies, and we have a number of security competencies that partners can build up that capability. They can pick different parts of the portfolio. They could be brand new to networking, but build up competency in security, and that will bring technical competence and capability, but also incremental profitability for them as well. Robert Dutt: A lot of talk this week, obviously, about the disruption around VMware – customers reconsidering virtualization strategies and how that drives the refresh cycles within the data center on some of the compute and storage hardware, all that kind of good stuff. Does that also create a network refresh opportunity? Ben Fallon: So there can be opportunities that do arise. I don’t know if that’s the biggest piece that’s driving growth in data center networking right now. I think the AI boom is doing a significant job there, and probably dwarfs anything else. But what you’ll see is announcements this week around how we’re, really from a technology perspective, bringing more parts of the portfolio together from across the hybrid cloud portfolio and networking. Because really, that’s what customers want. They want integrated technology that solves their problems, and that’s what we’re focused on. Robert Dutt: From a Canadian channel perspective, where do you see the biggest networking opportunities today? I’m going to guess your answer to the last question strongly informs the answer to this one. But what are the biggest opportunities in the back half of the year? And what’s your ask of Canadian partners who are listening to this? Ben Fallon: Yeah. Well, there are two things I think are the biggest opportunity. One is cross-selling. If you’re selling part of the HPE portfolio today, look at how you can integrate across the stack – whether that’s the full HPE stack, or whether it’s specific to networking. There’s a huge opportunity there, and we’re seeing that partners that have adopted that are growing faster than anyone else. Second, new logos – going after new customers. We’re here to win. We’re here to be number one, and we’ll do that first in wireless networking. And to do that, we need new customers. And you’ll see new incentives and new programs come out in November that will put even more wood behind the arrow – that’s going to make it an incredible opportunity for partners to go and solve the networking crimes of other vendors and bring them into the light of a self-driving network. Robert Dutt: You guys are obviously deep into the process of integrating programs between legacy HPE and legacy Juniper. We have the November 1 date, I believe, as the formalized launch date for that becoming one. What can partners expect coming out of that at a programmatic level on the networking side? Ben Fallon: Yeah. So what we’re doing is, first of all, looking at the experience partners have – everything from how they get certified, trying to simplify that and make sure that they’re not having to do multiple layers and duplicative actions. We’re working on the experience when it comes to things like registering a deal, getting rebates, keeping it simple. I think other vendors I’ve seen, you need a bit of a rocket science degree to figure out how all of these different programs and rebates come together. We’re focusing on keeping it simple, we’re focused on driving action, and most of all – which I think is often missed – we’re making sure that our sales teams know how to engage with partners really well and go and win deals together. Robert Dutt: Good luck on a big week here at Discover, and thanks for taking the time once again. Ben Fallon: Appreciated. And we love working with our Canadian partners, and just a big thank you to all of them that are on board already. Robert Dutt: There you have it, Ben Fallon from HPE. I’d like to thank Ben for his time. We were literally recording between sessions at Discover, and I appreciate him making it work. And thank you for listening as well. A few things that stuck with me from this one. The self-driving network story has been fairly abstract for a while, but his Mist example – autonomous remediation actions you can toggle on in the dashboard, no human in the loop for known problem types – it’s the most concrete I’ve heard it get. That’s actually something you can put in front of a customer. The other thing worth sitting with: “pretty much 100% of our security sales go through partners. There is no other path.” That’s what Ben said. If you’re an HPE networking partner who hasn’t yet built a security practice, and HPE is out there talking about a billion-dollar security ambition, someone is going to capture that opportunity. Make sure it’s you. And for partners who may have walked away from the Juniper side of the portfolio at acquisition time and have been watching from the sidelines, November is shaping up to be the moment to take another look. Simplified programs, new incentives, a unified experience. It’s worth paying attention to. If you found the episode useful, we’d love to have you subscribe to the podcast. You’ll find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and most of the major podcast directories. If you have a moment to leave a rating or a review, it always helps. Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.

HPE used keynote day at HPE Discover 2026 in Las Vegas to make a clear argument: networking is the foundation of the AI era. In the afternoon general session, Rami Rahim, HPE’s EVP and GM of Networking, led what was arguably the most channel-actionable session of the week. Using a “Millennium Tower” analogy to frame the risk of building AI on a networking foundation that wasn’t designed for it, Rahim announced four items worth flagging for Canadian partners. First, Marvis AI cross-pollination: Mist‘s Marvis AI engine is coming to the Aruba Central platform, with explicit confirmation that neither platform is being sunset. Second, a unified SASE orchestrator combining SD-WAN and Secure Service Edge under a single console and consistent zero trust policy layer – including a new AI Firewall capability that classifies GenAI application usage as sanctioned, unsanctioned, or tolerated with guardrails like prompt filtering and upload controls. Third, the QFX 5140, a new inference switch purpose-built for distributed AI at the edge, announced this week. And fourth, the HPE Network Migration Program: zero percent financing through HPE Financial Services plus asset trade-in for legacy gear – a deal closer for stalled network refresh conversations. In the morning keynote, HPE president and CEO Antonio Neri framed the company’s direction around the “agentic enterprise” – autonomous AI agents that act without user input – and warned of the “shadow cost” of agents deployed at scale without IT governance. His GreenLake Intelligence example made it concrete: a system that sees a major all-hands meeting on the calendar and proactively prioritizes video traffic before the strain hits, based on historical telemetry. In the press Q&A, Neri put a five-month timeline on the Juniper integration – from deal close to fully integrated data centre switching, routing, and campus portfolios – and said HPE is “better than Cisco in many ways, whether it’s campus and branch.” For Canadian partners, data sovereignty is adding a uniquely local dimension to the private cloud AI and self-driving networks story. More on that in an upcoming In The Channel episode from the show. Read Full Transcript This epsisode of In The Channel is brought to you by HPE Discover 2026. Check out our full coverage of the event on ChannelBuzz.ca — you’ll find out HPE Discover 2026 News Hub in the menu bar at the top of the page. This episode of The Buzz is brought to you by HPE Discover 2026. HPE Discover runs June 15 to 18 at The Venetian in Las Vegas. Discover what’s next at hpe.com/discover. Welcome to The Buzz from ChannelBuzz.ca, I’m Robert Dutt, today is Wedneday, June 17th, and here’s what’s happening in the channel today. We covered news elsewhere in an earlier episode of the Buzz, go check that out if you haven’t already. For this one, we’re drilling down on Tuesday’s news from HPE Discover 2026. We’re right in the middle of the week here, and I want to bring you the highlights from Tuesday – keynote day, the day HPE makes its biggest arguments. And the argument on Tuesday was pretty clear: the network – not the GPU, not the server – is the foundation of the AI era. They had product announcements to back it up. Here’s what went down. Let’s start with the afternoon, because honestly, the networking general session led by Rami Rahim – who heads up HPE’s networking business as EVP and GM following the Juniper acquisition – was the meatiest part of the day for the channel. The headline is what HPE is calling self-driving networks. The idea is that AI-driven networking should be able to sense, learn, optimize, and heal itself in real time, without requiring a human to manually troubleshoot every issue. Rami opened with an analogy I thought landed pretty well. He talked about the Millennium Tower in San Francisco – the luxury condo building that started sinking after construction because the foundation wasn’t built for the environmental load it was sitting on. His point: companies that are building AI on top of networking infrastructure that wasn’t designed for it are making the same mistake. “AI innovation can only move as fast as the network allows” was the line. It’s a good one. So what did they actually announce? Four things worth flagging. First: Marvis AI cross-pollination. Mist’s Marvis AI engine is coming to the Aruba Central platform, and Aruba capabilities are moving the other way too. Both platforms get stronger. And the important subtext for the channel: neither platform is being sunset. HPE has been clear about that, and it’s worth saying out loud, because there’s been plenty of speculation since the Juniper deal closed. Second: a unified SASE orchestrator. HPE is combining its SD-WAN and Secure Service Edge capabilities into a single console with a consistent zero trust policy layer across the enterprise. But the most interesting piece is what they’re calling the AI Firewall – the ability to classify your users’ GenAI applications as sanctioned, unsanctioned and blocked, or tolerated with guardrails like prompt filtering and data upload controls. They demoed it blocking a data exfiltration attempt through a GenAI app in real time. If you’re an MSP and your customers are asking you how they let people use AI tools without losing control of sensitive data, this is a concrete answer to that question. Third: the QFX 5140. This is a new inference switch – new this week, not a prior announcement – purpose-built for distributed AI workloads at the edge. AI-optimized load balancing and congestion control, designed to connect GPUs at distributed locations. The edge inference angle is where this gets interesting for partners who are thinking about AI at branch or remote sites. And fourth – and I want to make sure this doesn’t get buried – the HPE Network Migration Program. Zero percent financing through HPE Financial Services, plus asset trade-in for legacy non-self-driving gear. If you’ve got a customer sitting on aging campus or branch infrastructure and the refresh conversation has stalled, this is the conversation starter to go back with. On proof points: Rami said that over 80 percent of network incidents are now either fully self-remediating or instantly identified with a resolution ready – up from around 50 percent just a few years ago. He had big customers on stage: Ohio State University, the Royal Bank of Canada, Sentara Health. The RBC quote was notable – security is now “job number one” and it has to be managed at the network layer for what they called immutable evidence. That framing works particularly well in regulated industries, which is a big part of the Canadian market. In the press Q&A afterward, Rami was direct about where the security and networking story goes: “When we say network and security are coming together, it’s not a tagline – it’s an investment strategy.” He also acknowledged that getting customers to trust full network autonomy is an adoption curve – most start with what they call trusted actions, where the system recommends and the human approves, before moving to full automation. I actually think that’s a reassuring thing to say rather than a weakness – it matches how enterprise IT actually works. Now let’s go back to the morning. CEO Antonio Neri’s keynote set the strategic context for everything Rami built on in the afternoon. Neri’s frame for the whole show is what he’s calling the agentic enterprise – the shift from applications that respond to user inputs, to autonomous agents that reason across your data and take action. And his point is that infrastructure has to be built to handle that, because agents deployed at scale without IT governance become the new shadow IT problem. He used the phrase “shadow cost” – the risk of an AI-heavy workforce operating outside IT’s visibility and control. That’s a real and near-term problem for your customers, and MSPs are typically the ones who get called when it goes sideways. The most concrete illustration he gave was GreenLake Intelligence. The example: a major internal announcement gets added to the corporate calendar. The system sees it, anticipates that a large portion of the workforce is about to jump on a video call simultaneously, and proactively prioritizes video traffic before the strain hits – based on historical telemetry, no human in the loop. It’s a small example but it makes the concept real in a way that “agentic infrastructure” as a term doesn’t always do. In the press Q&A after the keynote, Neri was notably direct on a couple of things. On the Juniper integration, he put a specific number on it: from close of the deal on July 2nd last year, to fully integrated data centre switching, routing, and campus portfolios – five months. That’s a credible timeline, and it matters for partners who’ve been watching to see whether the deal delivers or whether it turns into the kind of slow-moving integration that disrupts customer relationships for years. And on competitive positioning, he was unusually blunt. Asked about HPE’s networking vision going forward, he said HPE is – direct quote – “better than Cisco in many ways, whether it’s campus and branch.” That’s not something you hear a CEO say casually at a press Q&A. Now, for the Canadian channel specifically, there’s a layer here that tends to get underplayed in the broader coverage of a show like this. The conversation in Canada right now isn’t just “upgrade your network because AI needs faster pipes.” It’s “bring AI workloads back on-prem or to Canadian colocation, because you can’t let that data live in a US-based cloud under current conditions.” Data sovereignty is a genuine buying driver right now in a way it hasn’t been before. And HPE’s self-driving networks story, and the broader private cloud AI play, maps onto that buying driver in a way that’s worth having a direct conversation with your customers about. I’ll have more on the Canadian channel perspective in an upcoming In The Channel episode coming later this week from HPE Discover. But the framing I’d leave you with is this: self-driving networks don’t eliminate the managed services partner – they change what that partner does. The network takes on more of the routine work, but someone still needs to watch the dashboard, make strategic decisions, and bring the human layer. That’s still your business, and if anything it’s a higher-value version of it. One more thing before we go – and this one’s a little off the beaten path. Someone asked Antonio Neri in the press Q&A who he’s picking for the World Cup. Being Argentine, he said he’d love to see Argentina win again – but acknowledged it’s tougher with an extra game in the format this time around. His final four: England, France, Argentina, and Spain. No bias there whatsoever. That’s how we’re seeing the headlines from HPE Discover. I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, thanks for listening. Have a great day.

Today’s headline news for Canadian IT solution providers, aside from HPE Discover: OpenAI launches official partner program and investment fund: OpenAI has officially introduced its new partner program alongside a $150 million investment fund aimed at expanding its enterprise ecosystem. The partner program is designed to help service providers, system integrators, and consultancies build, deploy, and manage custom AI solutions leveraging OpenAI’s models. According to the company, the initiative will provide partners with dedicated technical support, go-to-market resources, and early access to new product features. The accompanying $150 million fund will focus on investing in early-stage startups that are developing applications on top of the platform. GTIA names two Canadian Innovate Awards finalists: GTIA announced the six finalists for its inaugural Innovate Awards today, with two Canadian companies among them: GoWest.ai (Toronto, customer-facing AI category, for its CFP Service Desk and Field Technician Assistant) and Nucleus Networks (Vancouver, internal AI category). Winners receive a $20,000 USD cash prize, announced at ChannelCon 2026 on August 5 in San Diego. For more on the awards and what GTIA is looking for, check out our In The Channel conversation with Carolyn April from April 27. And to hear Jennifer Roy of Nucleus on how they’re thinking about AI, that episode is here. Cisco research highlights Canadian AI network risks: A new study from Cisco underscores an infrastructure cliff for Canadian organizations. The research found that 71 percent of Canadian respondents expect their current network capacity to hit its limits within 36 months due to AI workloads, while 91 percent cited budget constraints as the primary barrier to the required modernization. The data provides a critical conversation point for MSPs: any serious AI strategy must now be preceded by a serious network upgrade strategy. Okta integrates with Google Cloud AI: Okta has announced it is adding a dedicated identity security layer to Google Cloud AI, while its Auth0 platform is now directly integrating with Gemini for AI agent deployment. According to the company, these integrations are designed to bring enterprise-grade identity governance into the fast-moving AI ecosystem. For Canadian solution providers helping customers experiment with AI tools, this integration provides a mechanism to secure these environments and non-human identities without slowing down developer velocity. CrowdStrike open AI gateway: CrowdStrike has announced an open gateway ecosystem making Falcon AI’s control plane available across AI infrastructure, with native integrations spanning Databricks, Google Cloud, Azure API Management, and others. Simultaneously, Grant Thornton Advisors announced it is standardizing its managed security service operations on Falcon Complete, replacing legacy MDR with what CrowdStrike is positioning as agentic MDR. Acumatica channel appointment: Acumatica has appointed Roman Bukary as senior vice president of partner strategy and programs, effective immediately. Bukary brings prior experience in SaaS channel leadership and will be responsible for the strategy and ongoing evolution of Acumatica’s partner ecosystem. Coro Global Lean IT Day: Coro has launched Global Lean IT Day as an annual observance on June 16, recognizing IT professionals who manage enterprise-level cybersecurity complexity with limited team size and resources. The announcement is tied to ISC2 data showing 59 percent of organizations report critical or significant cybersecurity skills shortages, and Coro says it will release full survey findings ahead of Black Hat USA 2026. Leaseweb Canada leadership: Leaseweb Canada has named Estelle Azemard as its new chief executive officer. Azemard, who will be based in Montreal, brings more than 16 years of cloud industry experience and will lead the company’s continued growth and strategic expansion in Canada, where data sovereignty and hybrid cloud demand are both rising. Read Full Transcript Welcome to The Buzz from ChannelBuzz.ca, I’m Robert Dutt, today is Wednesday, June 17th, and here’s what’s happening in the channel today. We’ll have a full roundup of everything going down at HPE Discover this week in your feed in about an hour from now, but in the meantime, there’s plenty going on aside from all the news at Discover. Here’s what we think is worth keeping an eye on. OpenAI has officially introduced its new partner program alongside a $150 million investment fund aimed at expanding its enterprise ecosystem. The partner program is designed to help service providers, system integrators, and consultancies build, deploy, and manage custom AI solutions leveraging OpenAI’s models. According to the company, the initiative will provide partners with dedicated technical support, go-to-market resources, and early access to new product features. The accompanying $150 million fund will focus on investing in early-stage startups that are developing applications on top of the platform. As enterprise demand for generative AI moves from the proof-of-concept phase to production deployment, solution providers are increasingly being asked to navigate the integration complexities of building AI agents and customized models. The launch represents a significant maturation of OpenAI’s channel strategy, moving beyond direct enterprise sales to embrace the third-party ecosystem. Formalizing a channel structure gives Canadian IT providers a clearer framework to monetize AI advisory and implementation services, allowing them to capture more margin as customer demand scales up. The Global Technology Industry Association – GTIA – has announced the six finalists for its inaugural Innovate Awards, and Canadians have a strong showing. Two of the six companies are Canadian: GoWest.ai, the Toronto-based AI consultancy founded by West McDonald, is a finalist for its CFP Service Desk and Field Technician Assistant in the customer-facing category, while Nucleus Networks, the Vancouver-based MSP that now operates across five Canadian cities, is a finalist in the internal AI solutions category. The remaining four finalists – J&M Solutions, Sentry Technology Solutions, Framework IT, and Thrive – are all US-based. Winners in each category receive a twenty-thousand-dollar cash prize, announced live at the ChannelCon 2026 final keynote on August 5th in San Diego. One-third of the inaugural finalist class being Canadian is significant for a channel community that too often looks south of the border for proof points on what real AI deployment looks like. If you want more context on what GTIA was building toward with these awards, and what “deployed and in production” actually means in practice, we covered exactly that earlier this year on In The Channel with Carolyn April, GTIA’s vice president of research and market intelligence. And to hear how Nucleus thinks about AI inside their own MSP operations, Jennifer Roy joined us on the show in late April. Links to both episodes are in the show notes. A new study from Cisco underscores a looming infrastructure cliff for Canadian organizations chasing AI ambitions. The research found that 71 percent of Canadian respondents expect their current network capacity to hit its limits within 36 months due to the demands of AI workloads. Even more pressing, 91 percent cited budget constraints as the primary barrier to the required modernization. This data suggests an impending reckoning where artificial intelligence software aspirations simply outpace the physical network capabilities required to move massive data sets. The strain on existing infrastructure will likely manifest in latency issues and stalled proof-of-concept projects. This presents a critical conversation point for Canadian MSPs and infrastructure partners to bring to their customers: any serious AI strategy must now be preceded by a serious network upgrade strategy. It creates a massive opportunity for the channel to re-engage clients on foundational infrastructure, turning a software conversation into a broader hardware and services engagement. In Brief:  Okta announces dedicated identity secrity layer for Google Cloud CrowdStrike announced open AI gateway ecosystem. Acumatica appoints Roman Bukary as its new senior vice president of partner strategy and programs.  Coro launches the first-ever Global Lean IT Day to recognize IT professionals managing enterprise-level cybersecurity with limited resources.   Leaseweb Canada names Estelle Azemard as its new chief executive officer.  Full details and links in the show notes or the blog post. Remember that we’ll have all The Buzz from HPE Discover in your inbox in about an hour, and shortly after that, be sure to check out today’s In The Channel, where we’ll talk to HPE’s Ben Fallon about the company’s self-driving networks strategy.  And if you haven’t heard it yet, yesterday on The Buzz we took you through all the news from HPE Partner Growth Summit at Discover 2026, and then we followed that up Tuesday with HPE North American channel chief Jeremiah Jenson, going deep on The Power of One, the announcements from the show, and his big reqquest for solution providers. Be sure you check it out if you’re working with Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. That’s how we’re seeing the headlines today. I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, thanks for listening. Have a great day.

Jeremiah Jenson, vice president of North Amiercan channels at HPE This episode is the second half of a two-part conversation with Jeremiah Jenson, vice president of North America Channel and Partner Ecosystem at HPE, recorded ahead of HPE Discover 2026. Part one – the Discover preview and HPE’s AI infrastructure themes – is Monday’s episode. This half focuses on the announcements made at the HPE Partner Growth Summit on Monday, June 16. The centrepiece is what HPE is calling the “power of one” – one portfolio, one partner program, one integrated experience. It’s partly organizational messaging, but there’s real substance underneath: HPE spent the past 18 months merging three separate channel organizations (HPE, Aruba, and Juniper) into a single team, and the work of translating that into a coherent partner experience is now coming due. Concretely, that means Juniper partners integrating into Partner Ready Vantage on November 1 – with tier mapping already defined – along with Zerto, Private Cloud 3000, and Private Cloud 1000 shifting to channel-only routes to market. HPE is also extending free three-year Morpheus software licenses to approximately 600 partners for internal deployment, as much about building hands-on expertise as it is about the virtualization savings. The piece with the most direct relevance for Canadian MSPs is the new partner-branded services model: partners lead with their own brand, own the customer relationship, and HPE backs them as the invisible infrastructure layer for on-site break-fix and parts logistics. Jenson specifically calls out Canadian partners’ customer intimacy and regional compliance knowledge as a natural fit for that services-forward model. The “one more mile” close is worth hearing directly. Tuesday’s episode of The Buzz has the headline news breakdown – check that first if you want the full context. Read Full Transcript [Robert Dutt]: This episode of In The Channel is brought to you by HPE Discover 2026, and we’ll be bringing you full event coverage all week right here on ChannelBuzz.ca. Don’t miss it! Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca, and your host for the show. Quick note before we dive into this one – if you haven’t already listened to Tuesday’s episode of The Buzz, I’d really encourage you to go find that in your feed first. On The Buzz, we’ve got the headline rundown on HPE’s Partner Growth Summit announcements – what was announced, what moved, what the numbers are. What we’re doing here is going a level deeper with the person who actually owns this for North America. Jeremiah Jenson is the vice president of North America Channel and Partner Ecosystem at HPE. He returned to the company about a year ago, after a previous decade-plus that included the Aruba acquisition, a stint at AWS in between, and enough perspective on how the IT channel actually works to fill several episodes on their own. This is part two of a conversation we recorded just ahead of Discover. Part one, the Discover preview and the big AI infrastructure themes, is on the feed Monday if you want the full picture. This half is about the Partner Growth Summit announcements – what HPE is calling the power of one. One portfolio, one program, one partner experience. And specifically, what it means if you’re a Canadian reseller or MSP trying to figure out where HPE fits into your business right now and into the second half of 2026. Let’s get right into it. My chat with Jeremiah Jenson. Jeremiah, good to be chatting with you again. [Jeremiah Jenson]: Yeah, good to talk to you, Rob. Thanks. [Robert Dutt]: Let’s get into some of the stuff that was announced at Partner Growth Summit. And I guess let’s start here. You’ve now had about 18 months since the single channel org stood up, and now you’ve got the Juniper integration happening on top of that. From your seat, what did that single organization feel like to execute on? And what’s the one thing that turned out to be harder than expected? [Jeremiah Jenson]: One, it feels very good. So a little bit of my history – I was here when the Aruba acquisition happened some 10 years ago, and then I was with a different company for a period of time, and I’ve been back for about a year and a half now. And I will say it’s been fantastic to unify the channel in a lot of ways – making it more simple and easier and more profitable for partners to understand and to do business with, but also to take advantage of the power of the portfolio. So what’s it like? Simple answer. It’s great because we have a tremendous amount of channel history and momentum and power from that piece of the business, combined with a tremendous amount of channel history, momentum, and power on the hybrid IT side, and bringing all that together in a unified way. It’s fantastic. Now, the hardest part about that is you’re dealing with big businesses and the devil being in the details. And that’s where we just spend a lot of time working on. While the big themes are unification, ease of doing business, and simplifying things along those lines, the hard part is in the detail. Like, how do we actually want to help accomplish this? And so from that, we’ve had to get a lot of very big voices in the room and get through some very meaningful things on behalf of our customers and our partners. [Robert Dutt]: I guess, to your point on your history and the long history of HPE in this acquisition space, at least to some degree, you’ve got the muscle memory of doing the Aruba side of things and getting that integrated into the programs. And now it’s sort of doing that at a different timeline, at a different scale with Juniper. [Jeremiah Jenson]: It’s true. We have the muscle memory of acquisitions and some history of that. I think the one thing that is really just awesome to see is how people have come together with customer and partner being front and center, and how are we iterating and innovating on their behalf, and just a unified goal of how do we move really fast? Because the opportunity in that market is too big for us to miss. And so there’s really this motivation to move very, very fast and very quickly. And that’s why we’re ahead of our integration targets. We’re very pleased with where we are in that business, unifying the channel, unifying a bunch of business processes. You’re seeing that in the programmatic announcements we made. So it’s nice to be able to take advantage of that muscle memory. We’ve done the training, now we’re doing it for real. [Robert Dutt]: So the November 1 date is concrete, and the tier mapping for the Juniper roll into Partner Ready Vantage is clear – Elite Plus becomes Platinum, etc. But what about the Canadian partner today who’s a Juniper partner, but has never really sold HPE server or storage? What does that reality look like in practice? Is there a runway and enablement in place to help bring those folks on board? And obviously, I assume you want as many of them transacting as far across the portfolio as possible – what does it look like as the two truly become one? [Jeremiah Jenson]: Absolutely. So one, we want them participating across the full portfolio. One program gives partners a very clear, unified path across networking, cloud, and AI. And this move that we’ve made, it’s a major simplification that gives partners a more consistent way in which they can engage across those three – whether that’s networking, cloud, or AI. And it also paints a very clear opportunity in terms of how they can take the broader portfolio to their customers to solve those business problems. I always want to keep that customer front and center, and that they have a unique opportunity to solve a broader set of customer challenges. And so the value there is that partners can work across more of the portfolio without navigating disconnected experiences. And I also want to say, we’re not forcing anybody to become something that they’re not. This is an opportunity for them, and we’ve made it simple for them to capture that opportunity and to grow their business with HPE. [Robert Dutt]: It’s always a balancing act, right? You want to incentivize, but you don’t want to push too hard because that potentially breaks partner business models or creates challenges. But at the same time, it’s like – we’ve got all this stuff over here too. You want to sell it? That’d be cool. [Jeremiah Jenson]: Yeah, look, I’m not twisting anybody’s arm here. I think the opportunity speaks for itself. And I think our results in the market also speak for themselves. The opportunity is there, and that opportunity stands on its own. Whether you want to invest in an AI practice or whether you have an opportunity to help customers solve a problem with compute, we have the right enablement and want to come alongside that partner and take advantage of that opportunity and help that customer. But that opportunity is real and right there for them now. The value of the opportunity, the capability of our products, how that’s meeting the market with customers – that speaks for itself. So the opportunity is there, and I want to harness it. I want to take advantage of it with our mutual partners. [Robert Dutt]: We seem to be getting a little bit of a drumbeat going in terms of HPE products being declared channel-only in terms of go-to-market. Last year with VME Essentials, this year it’s Zerto, PC 3000, PC 1000. There’s clearly a strategic logic here beyond just adding product to the list. What’s the underlying principle on what makes a product the right candidate to be channel-only? And what does it mean for a partner that these products will only come through them and their peers? [Jeremiah Jenson]: Well, I mean, there’s a couple of things there. Certainly we’re expanding areas where partners can lead, and that creates additional room for growth, both for them and for us. And it’s a clear signal that HPE is expanding in areas where – like I said – where partners can lead, but especially in areas that are core to the market, whether that’s private cloud or virtualization with this great VM reset that we’ve got going on, or whether that’s data protection with some of our Zerto solutions and ransomware protection, things along those lines. So this gives partners more ownership and opportunity while also creating more room for them to differentiate. I don’t want a homogeneous channel. Each partner has not made the same investments. And so each partner has a level of capability, a market that they serve, and has made investments to serve their customers in the right way. And so this partner-led opportunity with these products gives them not only ownership of the opportunity, but clear ways in which they can differentiate by investing in these product sets. So it’s an area of channel leadership. And then finally, it also speaks to our channel heritage. We trust the channel. We partner with them very closely, and we see an opportunity for us to grow our collective business by allowing them to lead. [Robert Dutt]: To your point on the non-homogeneous nature of the channel, I think that’s represented well throughout the program and what you guys are talking about in terms of being open to embracing and facilitating multi-partner engagements when the customer needs support from different specialists in different areas to drive those outcomes. [Jeremiah Jenson]: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think this helps partners build higher-value practices. I don’t need them just to sell another product. We have lots of products that are available for sale, but this helps them see and build a higher-value practice, whether that’s the services capability that they can bring in – because we all know customers need help transforming to new and more efficient ways of doing business in a hybrid IT environment. So it creates more ways for partners to move up that value chain, whether that’s through their services or deeper expertise that they want to build. And it matters because that creates long-term growth. As they become more valuable to the customer through their differentiated capabilities, differentiated services, or the distinct and unique value that they bring to their customers, it creates long-term growth. It helps build something that outlasts not only them, but us. [Robert Dutt]: Part of the announcements is you’re giving up to 600 partners free Morpheus licenses to run their own environments. It’s interesting – it really sounds like it’s saying, sort of an opportunity to become your own reference customer, to drink your own champagne, to eat your own dog food, whatever your preferred analogy is there. What are the expectations around how partners use those capabilities? Is it about demos? Is it about building their own expertise? Is it about getting a chance to do some of that transformation and reinvention of their own infrastructure and tech stack so they can speak more clearly to customers about what’s possible? [Jeremiah Jenson]: Yeah, I mean, what is going on in the virtualization market is impacting everybody – the entire channel. And I don’t mean just how various companies are going to market. It’s impacting everybody, and that includes our partners who are customers of a lot of different companies. And there’s real power in our portfolio. We see a clear opportunity not only to invest in the channel with those partners who have invested in us, those partners who have invested in the virtualization competency – we want to invest back in them with the capability that our portfolio brings to them. So these VME licenses offer them an opportunity to reset their virtualization environment and set themselves up for continued modernization. And what better story to take to their customers than, “We know this works for you because we did it ourselves.” So drinking their own champagne is a very good analogy there. And that is our expectation – not only to help partners realize the true value of the portfolio, but also enable them to modernize and take that story to their customers. And there’s no better way than to say, “I’ve done it myself and here were the outcomes that we saw.” [Robert Dutt]: Given the scale of the HPE channel, I’m guessing there are going to be a lot of hands going up for those 600 slots. [Jeremiah Jenson]: Well, look, what we see in VME, the Morpheus software suite, is nothing short of impressive. I’ve got a history of working with and working for companies that move very fast, that make decisions fast and execute very quickly. What I have seen in this Morpheus VME space is impressive – it’s like nothing I’ve ever seen. The roadmap, our ability to execute against that roadmap, to produce enterprise-quality and just phenomenal products at pace and at scale is incredibly impressive. And so partners that are working with VME and Morpheus today are continuing to be blown away by the capability and the roadmap. And for those partners that haven’t taken advantage of that, please take a moment for yourself and look at what we’re doing here. It’s a fantastic product and a fantastic solution to help customers with what they need most – cost savings while setting the on-ramp to modernization. [Robert Dutt]: Especially in a moment where perhaps acquiring new tech is not going to be as easy as it has been from a hardware point of view. [Jeremiah Jenson]: Exactly. In a moment where everybody is looking for ways to save dollars, you can cut virtualization costs by up to 90% with this product. It has very simple per-socket pricing. And so what better opportunity not only to help our partners, but to get that message out to their customers. [Robert Dutt]: In terms of channel penetration, is this a fairly mature, realized market, or is there still a lot of greenfield out there on the channel side? [Jeremiah Jenson]: I mean, there’s a massive opportunity. You think about the size of that virtualization market – the size of the VM reset, the virtual machine market – it’s huge. So there is a tremendous amount of headroom in this market. There is a tremendous amount of opportunity for all of us. And we have to turn that opportunity into reality. And that’s happening now. [Robert Dutt]: Moving on to partner-branded services – this is one that really caught my interest, and I think is going to catch the interest of a lot of folks, especially those who are in the MSP mode. Can you walk me through what it actually looks like for a Canadian MSP? They’re putting their name on a support offering, HPE is the invisible backbone. What does it look like in terms of the customer call, billing, and what does HPE get out of participating in this model where it’s the partner and not HPE that’s the primary brand? [Jeremiah Jenson]: First of all, a clear thing with partners is they have a level of customer understanding – or I often say they have a level of customer intimacy that I could never replace and don’t intend to. So partner-branded services really helps us service the customer faster with a very valuable piece of that equation, and that’s the partner. So allowing a partner to take first-call support, first-call services, and to be able to capitalize on that customer knowledge and that depth of history and customer intimacy that they have – what we have found is that just produces a better customer outcome. So E+ in North America is one of those first partners that has taken advantage of this, and we’re really just enthused and excited about what’s coming through at the customer level. That’s the piece that I want to put front and center – customers have a need for a faster answer, a faster path to resolution, and partners are part of that. And so this acceleration of this program is really helping. From a Canadian standpoint, look, who knows more about the Canadian market than a Canadian partner serving a Canadian customer and understanding their requirements? I often say Canadians have forgotten more about Canada than I’ll ever know, and I have a tremendous amount of respect for that. So the opportunity to deploy that knowledge front and center with a customer – no better opportunity. And it plays especially important, I think, in a market like Canada where there are so many differences regionally. In any large market there are regional differences, but there are real and meaningful differences here. [Robert Dutt]: Yeah, I mean, let’s not pretend that the United States and Canada are identical, because they’re not. There are nuances, there are real and meaningful differences. [Jeremiah Jenson]: And whether that’s compliance or any other kind of nuance, those differences are real at the customer level. And so the opportunity for partners to service customers with that level of knowledge – whether that’s compliance or regional nuance – that speaks to the power of the channel. And it’s phenomenal to see this announcement come to life and see partners taking advantage of it. [Robert Dutt]: So how quickly do you anticipate it expanding to a broader number of potential service provider partners who are in that partner-branded services mode with you? [Jeremiah Jenson]: I think it really is incumbent upon us to be very deliberate about what we build with our partners. I think in the past, sometimes partners get very focused on what can I sell today. And I think the opportunity with partner-branded services is how can we build something that outlasts all of us? How can we build a foundation of services? Because once you have that services capability and once you are effectively taking that first call and you are not only the provider but you are the solution – you are the solution for when things need to be fixed – that stickiness becomes very real. So we have to really think about what do we want to build? What is the services capability that we’re building together? And from that, that will create the pace at which we grow. But there are very large partners, very sizable MSPs, as well as what I would call MSPs who have very specialized capability that want to take advantage of this. [Robert Dutt]: Moving on to storage – you’ve got the 15% front-end takeout rebate on top of existing rebates for competitive storage displacement. That’s a notable number. How should a Canadian reseller read that? I’ve heard that it runs at least through calendar year, but is this a period-based incentive or is it a signal that HPE is ready to play offense on storage for the long haul? [Jeremiah Jenson]: It’s the latter. We are very much on the front foot when it comes to our storage portfolio. The product is fantastic. The storage portfolio specifically is in a place that I’ve never seen it before in decades of history. And that’s phenomenal. And the results we have seen over the past several quarters – it has been several quarters of really good growth and great success here in North America. And now is the time to pour gasoline on that fire. So this is a signal of not only our existing success, but how can we be even more on the front foot and take that to our partners who want to lean in with us. Now is the time to lean in with storage and our hybrid cloud offerings and really accelerate – how we go and acquire new customers and grow that base for the future. There’s a phenomenal opportunity with our product, but there’s a bigger opportunity in what customers are demanding, and we have the right product to meet it. [Robert Dutt]: So November 1, one experience. That’s a big promise. We’ve got one portal, one deal registration system, one development fund. There’s a lot in there. For a partner who’s been managing different login credentials and different MDF processes, what’s actually noticeably different on November 2 in terms of their relationship and running their business with HPE? [Jeremiah Jenson]: Yeah. I mean, I say this a lot because it’s real – I spend an inordinate amount of my time thinking about how do we simplify? How do we make ourselves easier to do business with? And so one experience is really about making it easier for partners to engage, to move faster, and to grow at an accelerated rate. And it matters because partners want speed, but speed comes from consistency and getting rid of some of the administrative overhead that is in place. So this is all about reducing friction in the places where partners feel it the most. Having to log out of one website and into another – common tools, common onboarding processes, contracting, deal flow, deal registration, things along those lines. This is really all about making it easier for partners to engage and easier for us to do business together. It pains me and keeps me awake at night if they’ve got to log into multiple websites – it’s just time. It’s impacting the time in which we can get to customers and service customers. So that’s what they should expect: a common set of tools, common contracting, common deal flow, easier to engage, and moving faster with HPE. [Robert Dutt]: We’ve heard that this is going to be AI-enabled in terms of the partner portal and partner tools and experiences. Can you tell me a little bit about what that means today, as well as – without giving away too much of the secret sauce – what you’re thinking about in terms of what AI-enabling the partner experience is going to look like for your partners in the long run? [Jeremiah Jenson]: Yeah, I mean, we’re a leader in the AI market and we have a long history of drinking our own champagne, as we talked about earlier. And so there’s an opportunity to deploy some of our AI tools in customer- and partner-facing experiences – whether that’s websites and things along those lines. As an example – and I don’t have a very explicit example in terms of this specific process – but one of the mental models that we have is: sometimes you’ve got to send an email to an email alias when it’s a repetitive process, things along those lines. Agentic AI and the AI tools and infrastructure that we produce for customers every day can help solve those questions immediately. So how do we put some of our AI tools into that workflow and solve at pace and do things much, much faster – so we’re not waiting on someone to type up a response from some anonymous alias. And while that’s a very basic example, you begin to think about other opportunities in terms of repetitive processes that drive partners crazy. How can we simplify and make things move faster? [Robert Dutt]: Yeah, I was going to say – it may be a basic example, but you can imagine how that multiplies over time and over opportunities and over deals when it’s repeated again and again. [Jeremiah Jenson]: It’s really about solving real problems. We can talk high and mighty and pie in the sky and AI this and AI that, but it’s really about what, at the end of the day, some human sitting in front of a desk is experiencing. It’s solving real-world problems with technology and capability. And it’s that real-world approach to the business that we’re taking. [Robert Dutt]: On the distribution landscape – we heard recently you’ve named TD SYNNEX and Ingram Micro as the two globals with local augmentation. Obviously those two are very strong players in the Canadian market. But how does distribution look now in Canada, and how do you see it looking in terms of additional niche or boutique players to round out the strategy? [Jeremiah Jenson]: So distribution is a core part of how we go to market and a core part of our overall channel strategy. The global announcement of Ingram Micro and TD SYNNEX – of course they’re both headquartered here in North America and we do a lot of business with them, and we’re excited about the plans that we have together. Stay tuned. You’ll see additional announcements in terms of how we think about that landscape and how we’re accelerating with our other distribution partners. So more to come there in the very near term. [Robert Dutt]: All right. A teaser. I love that. Last one for me. There’s a lot in these announcements and partners are going to be reading a lot of headlines, listening to a lot of stuff – probably have already, as they’re listening to this. But what’s the one big thing you would most want a Canadian partner – reseller, MSP, wherever they fit in the equation – to actually understand and act on from what HPE is announcing at Partner Growth Summit? [Jeremiah Jenson]: I’ll answer it this way – just who I am as a person, just my personal hobby. I love long-distance trail running. I’m an ultramarathoner. And I always think about: can I run one more mile? And I’m not saying that everybody should go out there and sign up for a 50-mile or 100-mile race, but I do think about, can I run one more mile? And so to bring that back to what is my ask of whether you’re an MSP or partner or something along those lines – with a portfolio of our size, what’s one more thing that you can take to your customer? Is that data center networking? Is that moving from Juniper into the wireless space with some of our Aruba products? Is that compute? Is it that I’ve sold storage, but now I want to talk about data protection with Zerto – can I do one more? And so as we think about Discover and the announcements we’ve made this week and the momentum we have with our portfolio, that’s what I want to ask. Can you do one more? What is that one more thing that we might be able to do together that will help you grow your business, help your customer solve another business problem, and help us accomplish our mutual goals? [Robert Dutt]: All right. I think that’s a reasonable ask. I appreciate you taking the time. Once again, thanks for walking us through some of the details of what was announced at Partner Growth Summit, and have a great rest of the week. [Jeremiah Jenson]: Always good to talk to you, Rob. Thanks. [Robert Dutt]: There you have it – Jeremiah Jenson, vice president of North America Channel and Partner Ecosystem at HPE. I’d like to thank Jeremiah for his time and for a pretty candid look at how HPE is thinking about the partner community as these organizations – HPE and Juniper – settle into one. Thank you for listening. There’s a lot to process in these announcements, but the thing I keep coming back to is the frame that Jeremiah closed with – the “one more mile” idea. He’s an ultramarathoner, and the ask he’s making of the Canadian channel isn’t to boil the ocean. It’s to ask yourself if there’s one more HPE product that belongs in front of your customers. Data center networking if you’re already doing compute. Zerto if you’re already doing virtualization. Partner-branded services if you’re an MSP looking to own more of the customer relationship. One more mile, compounded across a partner base, is how the power of one actually becomes real. We’re going to have a lot more from HPE Discover through the rest of the week, including an on-site recap coming later. So keep an eye on your feed. You’ll find the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and most of the major podcast directories. And if you’re finding the show useful, a rating or a review genuinely helps other people in the Canadian channel find us. Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.

Today’s headline news for Canadian IT solution providers: HPE’s Partner Growth Summit served as the channel keynote kickoff for HPE Discover 2026 in Las Vegas on Monday, organized around the company’s “Power of One” theme – the ongoing effort to unify its HPE, Aruba, and Juniper channel organizations under a single program, experience, and portfolio. The deeper programmatic story is covered in this week’s In The Channel with Jeremiah Jenson. But Monday’s keynote also delivered a package of near-term operational and commercial changes that matter to Canadian solution providers right now. Quote validity extends to 30 days, effective June 16th. HPE is moving its standard quote validity from 14 to 30 days for compute, storage, and GreenLake. Partner operations lead Mark Bakker explained it plainly: extreme commodity cost volatility in the first half of fiscal 2026 forced the two-week window. That’s moderating enough now for HPE to stand behind pricing for a full month. HPE also introduced Smart Choice SKUs – competitively priced configurations aligned to best available supply – and Smart Models in OCA, workload-specific templates updated continuously against current inventory. Two new financing tools. HPE Financial Services announced a 150% increase in approved partner credit lines to support larger deal proposals. The company also highlighted its 90/9 offer – no payments for 90 days, then 1% monthly payments for nine months – which has been in market since earlier this year and is particularly relevant now for customers whose budget cycle doesn’t align with their deployment timeline. Channel-only territory expands significantly. Building on last year’s VM Essentials channel-only move – which HPE says generated 700+ new partners and 1,300+ certifications in twelve months – HPE is adding HPE Private Cloud PC 3000, HPE Private Cloud PC 1000, and HPE Zerto software to the channel-only list. Partners earning the private cloud virtualization competency can also apply for free three-year VME licenses to deploy internally, and a new migration assistance program defers VME license costs until customer workloads are actually running on HPE virtual machines, eliminating the “double bullet” cost of mid-migration transition. Partner Branded Services: the managed services bridge. Simon Ewington, HPE’s senior vice president of worldwide channel and partner ecosystem, used the keynote to formally highlight Partner Branded Services – a model enabling eligible partners to sell and deliver HPE infrastructure support under their own brand, with HPE providing break-fix, parts logistics, and engineering support invisibly in the background. Ewington called it “the bridge that many of you have been waiting for to managed services.” The program launched in April and is actively onboarding its first large partner. Competitive storage incentives start July 1st. A new competitive storage takeout program offers 15% front-end margin on top of existing rebates for deals that displace a competitor’s storage product. Partner Day One lands November 1st. HPE is branding its unified experience rollout “Partner Day One” – a single portal, digitized onboarding under three days, unified deal registration, and one MDF program, all effective November 1st. Mark Bakker’s operations team has already consolidated four quoting tools into one, cut support response times from 40 to 8 seconds, and improved payment accuracy from 84% to 98% – operational gains that will translate into the partner-facing portal experience later this year. For the full conversation on Juniper integration, channel-only strategy, and what the unified program means for Canadian partners, listen to this week’s In The Channel with HPE’s Jeremiah Jenson. Read Full Transcript This episode of The Buzz is brought to you by HPE Discover 2026. HPE Discover runs June 15 to 18 at The Venetian in Las Vegas. Discover what’s next at hpe.com/discover. Welcome to The Buzz from ChannelBuzz.ca, I’m Robert Dutt, today is Tuesday, June 16th, and here’s what’s happening in the channel today. HPE’s Partner Growth Summit in Las Vegas wrapped yesterday as the channel kickoff for HPE Discover 2026, and there was enough ground covered in the keynote that I’m going to take a bit more time than usual today. If you work with HPE at all – compute, storage, networking, virtualization – there are several things in here that affect how you do business with them, and some of them take effect today. HPE is extending its standard quote validity from 14 days to 30 days for compute, storage, and GreenLake, effective today. The backstory matters here. HPE’s partner operations lead Mark Bakker was direct on stage about why quotes were shortened in the first place. Commodity costs went through a period of extreme volatility in the first half of this year – HPE literally couldn’t hold pricing for more than two weeks. That volatility has moderated enough now that HPE is willing to stand behind a full 30-day quote. For partners who’ve been managing customer decision timelines that rarely fit a two-week window – which is most of them – this means fewer expired quotes, less rework, and more actual selling time. HPE also introduced two supply chain tools aimed at reducing the gap between what you quote and what actually ships: Smart Choice SKUs, which are competitively priced configurations built around best available inventory; and Smart Models in OCA, which are preconfigured workload-specific templates that update continuously against current supply. On the financing side, HPE Financial Services had two items. The first is new: a 150% increase in approved credit lines for partners, giving you more headroom to propose and win larger configurations. The second is a tool that’s been available since earlier this year but is worth highlighting in this context: the 90/9 offer. No payments for 90 days, then 1% monthly payments for nine months after that. The pitch is straightforward – customers who are committed to buying but whose budget cycle doesn’t match their deployment timeline now have a bridge. HPE continues to expand what it routes exclusively through the partner channel, and the additions this year are significant. Some quick context: last year at Discover, HPE moved VM Essentials – its virtualization platform – to channel-only. The results they reported Monday: more than 700 additional partners are now selling VME software compared to twelve months ago, and over 1,300 partners have taken the associated certifications since November. HPE is treating those numbers as validation and doubling down. This year’s channel-only additions: HPE Private Cloud PC 3000, HPE Private Cloud PC 1000, and HPE Zerto software. That’s a meaningful slice of HPE’s private cloud and disaster recovery portfolio now locked to the channel. If you’re in the business of helping customers modernize workloads and protect data – the territory most MSPs already play in – HPE is putting margin and exclusivity behind you in those conversations. Two more items in this space. For partners who want to actually deploy VME inside their own IT environment before taking it to customers, HPE is offering free three-year software licenses – nominal support charge only – to approximately 600 partners who earn the private cloud virtualization competency this year. That’s HPE backing partners to practice what they preach. And for customers who are hesitating on VME because they’re still mid-migration from another hypervisor, there’s now a migration assistance program that defers VME software license costs until workloads are actually running on HPE virtual machines. It eliminates what one speaker described as the “double bullet” – paying for two platforms at the same time during a transition. That’s a real barrier removed. This one will resonate most with MSPs – and with partners thinking seriously about becoming one. HPE has launched Partner Branded Services. Eligible partners can now sell and deliver HPE infrastructure support entirely under their own brand. HPE stays invisible, providing on-site break-fix, parts logistics, and deeper engineering support through a channel-only backing arrangement. The partner is the customer’s first call. The partner manages the relationship. The partner books the recurring revenue. Simon Ewington, HPE’s senior vice president of worldwide channel and partner ecosystem, was explicit about the intent. He called it “the bridge that many of you have been waiting for to managed services.” That’s not spin – it’s HPE publicly acknowledging that its partners’ business models are shifting toward services-led, and building commercial infrastructure around that shift rather than working against it. The program launched quietly in April. HPE is onboarding its first large partner this week. Starting July 1st, HPE is launching a competitive storage takeout program. Partners who displace a competitor’s storage product will receive 15% front-end margin on top of existing rebates. It’s targeted, it’s aggressive, and it’s designed specifically to push partners into competitive accounts rather than just protect existing HPE business. Last item, a bit more forward-looking. HPE is calling its unified experience rollout “Partner Day One,” landing November 1st. What that means in practice: a single partner portal covering the full HPE, Aruba, and Juniper portfolio. A fully digitized onboarding and contracting process, with enrollment time dropping from weeks to under three days. Unified deal registration. A single MDF program spanning the full portfolio. Mark Bakker, who leads the operations team building all of this, shared some numbers that give you a concrete sense of where the backend is already heading. His team has consolidated four separate quoting and pricing tools into one. AI-assisted support response times have dropped from 40 seconds to 8 seconds. Partner compensation payment accuracy has improved from 84% to 98%. Those are internal numbers today – but they’re the foundation for what partners will start experiencing directly through the portal starting November 1st. For the full picture on what HPE’s “Power of One” strategy actually means for your business – and there’s considerably more to it than what I’ve covered here – check out today’s In The Channel. It’s part two of my conversation with Jeremiah Jenson, vice president of North America channel and partner ecosystem at HPE, recorded this week at Discover. Jenson walks through the Juniper integration in detail: how partner tiers are mapping across programs when everything merges November 1st, what the unified compensation structure looks like, and which Juniper specializations convert to HPE competencies. He also gets into the philosophy behind the channel-only decisions and what HPE sees as the biggest cross-portfolio opportunity for partners heading into fiscal 2027. If you’re evaluating your HPE relationship heading into the second half of the year – whether you’re deep in compute, just starting to look at networking, or somewhere in between – that episode is worth your time. That’s how we’re seeing the headlines from HPE Discover. I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, thanks for listening. Have a great day.

Jeremiah Jenson, vice president of North Amiercan channels at HPE HPE Discover 2026 is underway in Las Vegas this week – June 15-18 at the Venetian Convention and Expo Center – and by Jeremiah Jenson’s account, it’s the biggest Discover yet. The event is oversubscribed, with partner demand he describes as unlike anything HPE has seen before. Jenson is HPE’s vice president of North America channel, overseeing partner strategy across the United States and Canada. We sat down with him ahead of the show opening to preview the event for Canadian partners – whether they’re on the ground in Vegas or following along from home. The headline theme of Discover 2026 is “architecting AI, starting with the network.” CEO Antonio Neri’s keynote frames that out on Tuesday morning, and it’s a deliberate positioning: the network isn’t the last thing you figure out when deploying AI, it’s the foundation that determines whether AI delivers real outcomes or stays a proof of concept. For channel partners, Jenson says that framing opens up more strategic conversations with customers around readiness, performance, and security. On the partner side, the week kicks off with the Partner Growth Summit on Monday – a dedicated partner day before the main conference begins. This year’s theme is “The Power of One”: one portfolio, one program, one integrated experience through HPE’s Partner Ready Vantage. Jenson sees it as a signal of HPE’s direction on program simplification and consolidation. Jenson’s advice to partners watching this week: don’t try to absorb everything. Pick one area – data center networking, cloud and hybrid cloud storage, or AI acceleration – and go deep on it. A follow-up episode focused on the specific partner program announcements out of Discover is coming later this week. Read Full Transcript Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last sixteen years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca and your host for the show. HPE Discover 2026 opens this morning in Las Vegas, running from June 15 to 18 at the Venetian Convention and Expo Center, and if you’re on the ground in Vegas today you’re probably settling in to the Partner Growth Summit as you’re listening to this. The headline theme this year is “architecting AI, starting with the network.” HPE’s Antonio Neri takes the main stage tomorrow morning with that framing, and it’s a deliberate point of view. The network isn’t the last thing you figure out when you’re deploying AI – in HPE’s view, it’s the foundation. That’s worth unpacking. Joining me today is Jeremiah Jenson, vice president of North America Channel at HPE, who oversees partner strategy across the United States and Canada. I chatted with Jeremiah ahead of the show, so nothing embargoed is in here – none of the announcements are really covered. We’ll get to those in future episodes. This one is about setting the stage: who’s there, what the big themes are, how the week flows, and what Canadian partners following along from home should be paying attention to. Let’s get right into it – my chat with Jeremiah Jenson. Jeremiah, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it. Jeremiah Jenson: Yeah, thanks Robert. Robert Dutt: So for listeners who may not know you, can you give us a quick rundown of your role at HPE, and especially what that means in the context of an event like Discover this week? Jeremiah Jenson: Yeah, well, I lead HPE’s channel strategy across North America – both the United States and Canada – and that gives me a very close, direct view into what partners care about heading into Discover. My role is really to understand what partners care about and how to help them grow. I have responsibility across the full portfolio of Hewlett Packard Enterprise – compute, our hybrid IT business, all the associated software components, the networking business, and the services pieces as well. I really like to help connect our strategy to partners for ultimate delivery to customers. Robert Dutt: Let’s start with the event itself. It’s your flagship event, and it’s a big one. What does the scale look like, and particularly from where you’re sitting and what you’re responsible for, what kind of partner presence are you expecting – both in general and on the Canadian side? Do you have a sense of what the Canadian contingent looks like, both on-site in Vegas and watching virtually? Jeremiah Jenson: Yeah, I mean, it’s our flagship event and it’s always a major moment for the partner ecosystem across our portfolio, which includes networking, cloud, and AI. Massive event – and I would just say, first off, we’re oversubscribed. Demand for the event has been unlike anything we’ve ever seen. I have a fair bit of tenure with HPE and there is just a tremendous amount of interest, and I think that stems from the themes we’re bringing forward at Discover – helping not only our customers but partners shape and plan for the upcoming months. It’s a big moment for the HPE ecosystem. Canadian partners play a huge role. They’re a huge part of North America, a huge part of the market. Canada is a differentiated market, and I think they’re paying quite a bit of attention to this event because it helps them shape where they want to focus next – where do they want to make that next investment, what is the next opportunity for them to help serve their customers. Robert Dutt: I don’t want to get ahead of any of the announcements to come, but Antonio Neri’s keynote on Tuesday is publicly framed as “architecting AI starts with your network” – and that feels like a pretty deliberate point of view. It’s not just saying AI is everywhere, it’s saying the network is where AI actually gets built, actually runs, actually lives. What’s driving that framing from HPE’s perspective, and how does it translate into what channel partners are being asked to bring to their customers? Jeremiah Jenson: AI is a huge opportunity – it’s part of every conversation, it’s part of everyday life at this point. And what we’re seeing is that customers need the right foundation in place to move from interest to real outcomes. Now is the time to build that underlying foundation, and AI success really depends on the quality, security, and intelligence of the underlying infrastructure – and in particular, the networking. Whether that’s networking for AI or AI for networking, for partners that creates a bigger opportunity to lead conversations around readiness, security, and performance. Robert Dutt: How have you seen that conversation around AI with partners evolve since the last time HPE brought partners together for Discover? Jeremiah Jenson: If anything, the AI opportunity has accelerated. In years past there may have been questions about where AI would ultimately land, what the impact would ultimately be. And I think the thing that has changed – or maybe the right word is accelerated – is that AI isn’t a future opportunity anymore, it is a current opportunity. It is happening now, and now is the time to talk to your customers about the business outcome they intend to drive with AI. And that has just accelerated, whether that’s in networking as we discussed, whether it’s in some of our storage capabilities that we’ve brought to market, or generalized compute or high-performance compute. The opportunity has done nothing but accelerate. Robert Dutt: Partners are kicking off the week with the Partner Growth Summit today – later in the day on Monday – before the main conference even starts, and the general session theme is “The Power of One.” What’s the thinking behind having that dedicated partner day, and what does it mean in terms of how you’re trying to communicate with the channel right now? Jeremiah Jenson: I love Partner Growth Summit because, first, it speaks to how sincere we are about partnerships – partners are part of our DNA, they’re part of who we are and how we go to market. The Power of One theme is really the emphasis on one portfolio, one program, and one integrated experience through Partner Ready Vantage. It’s a signal about where we’re going – with a portfolio of our size and a channel of our size, we’re on a constant quest for simplification. Partner Growth Summit is really a dedicated moment for partners to focus on what HPE’s strategy means to them, how they can implement that strategy within their business, and it’s about making HPE easier to work with, more profitable to grow with, and more efficient to operate within. Robert Dutt: Certainly the idea of having a partner conference attached to a big customer-centric event like Discover is common practice across the industry. But it’s interesting that instead of “partner summit,” “partner conference,” or “partner day” – the names you see elsewhere – it seems quite intentional to have the word “growth” in Partner Growth Summit. Can you speak to that decision? Jeremiah Jenson: Absolutely. Partners are powering our growth – they’re part and parcel to who we are, and how and where we’re growing. While dedicated partner days might in some cases be fairly standard, ours is very deliberate. We start with the partner strategy, from there into the broader company strategy, and then into deeper technical and customer conversations. From my standpoint, that growth element starts with the partner – painting the areas of strategic growth and strategic investment, where we are going together as one, in the markets that we want to help take advantage of. Robert Dutt: Walk us through how the week actually plays out for someone on the ground here in Vegas. We start off Monday with the Partner Growth Summit, the main conference runs Tuesday through Thursday – what’s the rhythm and shape of the week, and what should people be watching for as it unfolds? Jeremiah Jenson: So the week starts with Partner Growth Summit on Monday – that starts with the partner strategy, how we’re simplifying and consolidating our programs, driving efficiency, and presenting real growth opportunities, and that’s directly linked to the following days. That goes right into the broader company strategy: CEO keynote Tuesday, CTO general session Wednesday. Then the showcase and one-on-one meetings throughout. What you see is that move from partner strategy to broader company strategy and then into deeper technical and customer conversations with individual bespoke meetings throughout. The other piece I’d highlight is that customers and partners have the opportunity to follow along remotely, so the key there is to focus on the themes, the keynotes, and the signals around where HPE is investing. And it all wraps up Wednesday night – for those who are at least in Vegas – at Allegiant Stadium. A big celebration night with our customers, our partners, and the broader HPE ecosystem, with Steve Aoki and Imagine Dragons headlining that evening. A big send-off for everyone. Robert Dutt: Pulling back the lens to Canada specifically – you’re running North America Channel. What can you tell me about what the conversation with Canadian partners looks like heading into this show? Where is the Canadian partner community with HPE right now, and is there anything distinctive about what they should be watching for this week at Discover? Jeremiah Jenson: It’s a great question, because the Canadian channel partner ecosystem is one that is distinct and unique, but also very deliberate and focused on customer outcomes. I always really appreciate that about that market. Discover is both a strategy event – in terms of where are we investing, what are the strategic areas and customer opportunities – and a business event: where is demand moving, how are those themes translating into opportunity and profitability? Some of the areas I’d draw their attention to: certainly networking, and in particular data center networking – there’s a huge opportunity there with what’s happening around networking for AI. I’d also call their attention to our cloud offerings and sovereign cloud offerings, which are particularly important for a lot of Canadian businesses and Canadian partners. We’re seeing a tremendous amount of opportunity around sovereign cloud, whether that’s in the Canadian public sector or some of the other businesses we historically serve or are targeting in Canada. They’re very focused on the deliberate opportunity with their customers, and the real question is how do we translate those strategic areas into real business, real profitability, and real growth. Robert Dutt: It’s interesting – it sounds like you’re describing the Canadian channel as sort of ahead of the curve, if anything, on selling on outcomes. That’s obviously been a focus for more than a year now. Sometimes I think the Canadian market writ large gets painted with a brush of being a little conservative in terms of adopting technology, and maybe that focus on outcomes is a way of managing that – getting through to customers who don’t necessarily want to be first out of the gate, but want something that’s proven and ready to go. Jeremiah Jenson: Yeah, for me, I wouldn’t use the word “conservative.” I would use the word “intentional.” The Canadian partners I do business with are very exciting and forward-thinking, but intentional. They’re close with their customers – they have a level of customer intimacy that I’m often impressed with – and they’re very focused on where they can add value and help customers accomplish their business goals. So conservative is not a word I would use. They’re just very forward-thinking and intentional. Robert Dutt: Last one – sort of a two-header, one from your perspective and one from a partner perspective. You’ve covered some of this, but just to narrow it down: if I’m a Canadian partner heading to Vegas or following along online, what’s the one thing you’d make sure you walk away from Discover this week understanding? And from your perspective, what does a successful week look like for you? Jeremiah Jenson: If I’m a partner about to watch Discover – either in person or following along online – I would challenge yourself to personalize it: where’s the next growth opportunity for me? Hewlett Packard Enterprise offers such a huge portfolio, so the question is, what is the next opportunity I can take to my customer or customer base? I’ll point out a couple of very strategic areas: data center networking, and how we’re bringing that strong networking portfolio together; our cloud offerings, hybrid cloud software, and storage; and what we’re doing in AI, where we’re seeing massive acceleration. Pick one, and challenge yourself personally – where can I invest in myself that will help me produce a better customer outcome for the customers I serve? Pick one and be really deliberate about how you can understand that more deeply. And for me – what does success look like coming away from this year? I want clarity of message to be impressed upon the entire North America Channel, and probably most importantly, the Canadian channel. How do we make this real for Canadian partners in their differentiated market? Clarity of message, and making sure we all walk away with the same mission, one goal, and one very clear definition of success. Robert Dutt: Big goals for a big week. Good luck – I hope it’s a very successful Discover for you. Jeremiah Jenson: Thanks so much for the opportunity. I’m looking forward to seeing everybody in Las Vegas. Robert Dutt: There you have it – Jeremiah Jenson from HPE. I’d like to thank Jeremiah for his time. Just a heads up – this is part one. We’ll be back later this week with another conversation, as Jeremiah and I are going to talk a little bit after the Partner Growth Summit’s main stage so we can get a look at the specific partner program announcements coming out of Discover. Keep an ear out for that, and of course we’ll have the news breakdown tomorrow morning on The Buzz as well. Thanks as always for listening. A couple of things I want to leave you with from this conversation. First: the “networking for AI – or AI for the network” framing. The argument HPE is making is that the network is the enabling layer for everything your customers are trying to do with AI. That’s a positioning opportunity worth thinking about in your own customer conversations, wherever you sit in the stack. Second: Jeremiah’s challenge to partners watching or attending Discover this week – don’t try to absorb everything. Pick one area, whether that’s data center networking, cloud and hybrid cloud storage, or AI acceleration, and go deep on it. That’s how you turn a week of announcements into something you can actually bring back to your business. I thought that was good advice for following any big vendor event. If you’re enjoying the podcast, please do subscribe or follow wherever you listen. We’re available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and most of the usual places. And if you can leave a rating or review, those are always appreciated. Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.

Today’s headline news for Canadian IT solution providers: HPE Discover 2026 kicks off: HPE Discover 2026 opens today at The Venetian in Las Vegas with the Partner Growth Summit, the partner-exclusive day that precedes the main conference. The General Session – “The Power of One” – is led by HPE channel head Simon Ewington and focuses on HPE’s unified partner strategy under the HPE Partner Ready Vantage program, spanning networking, cloud, and AI. This is the first Partner Growth Summit since HPE’s $14 billion Juniper Networks acquisition closed, and HPE is presenting partners with a fully unified portfolio story for the first time. ChannelBuzz.ca is on the ground all week: Tuesday’s Buzz will feature a full Partner Growth Summit recap, and In The Channel this week features a multi-part series with Jeremiah Jenson, HPE’s vice president of North America channel and partner ecosystem, covering the Discover announcements in depth. Cato Networks launches integration hub: Cato Networks has launched a new Technology Partner Program and a Platform Integration Hub, debuting with more than 100 out-of-the-box integrations with third-party security, cloud, and networking solutions. The SASE provider says the program is designed to simplify how partners and customers connect Cato’s platform with existing enterprise technology stacks. The move is significant for Canadian MSPs and MSSPs: a robust integration catalog reduces the custom API work that often slows deployment and increases delivery costs, making it easier to position Cato alongside the broader tools in a customer’s security environment. Checkmarx flags CISO compliance pressures: A new 2026 Future of Application Security Report from Checkmarx, based on a survey of more than 2,000 developers and CISOs, found that 95 per cent of CISOs report being pressured to suppress or delay compliance-related security issues when business deadlines loom. The research also highlights how AI-generated code is expanding the attack surface faster than many security teams can manage. For Canadian MSSPs, the data reinforces the value of independent, third-party security oversight – and the case for structured application security as a managed service. Dataminr and TD SYNNEX partner on AI cyber defense: Dataminr has signed a strategic distribution agreement with TD SYNNEX, making Dataminr for Cyber Defense available to more than 35,000 North American resellers. The platform combines external risk signals with internal telemetry to help security teams prioritize threats in real time. For Canadian partners already working with TD SYNNEX, the deal adds an AI-driven threat intelligence offering to the distributor’s security portfolio at a time when customers are asking for earlier warning around cyber risk. inforcer launches Microsoft 365 TDR platform: inforcer has launched inforcer Threat Detection and Response, a new platform that gives MSPs a single environment to manage detection, incident response, and reporting across the full Microsoft 365 estate – including Entra, Defender, Purview, Teams, and SharePoint. According to the company, the platform’s advantage is its existing policy and configuration context for each tenant, which it says allows the detection engine to separate real threats from alert noise. The product launched in early access at Pax8 Beyond last week. ConnectSecure introduces Patch 360: ConnectSecure has launched Patch 360, a patch management solution designed specifically for MSPs. According to the company, the platform gives MSPs more control over patch prioritization, testing, and approval workflows, and is designed to reduce deployment risk while accelerating patching across operating systems and third-party applications. NetRise launches Discovery Partner Program: Software supply chain security firm NetRise has launched the Discovery Partner Program for VARs, MSSPs, distributors, and systems integrators. The program provides partners access to the NetRise Platform, which analyzes compiled software artifacts – including binaries, firmware, and containers – to identify components and risks that may not appear in source-code scans or vendor-provided SBOMs. NetRise is positioning the program as a way for partners to address growing customer demand for independent software supply chain verification. Read Full Transcript This episode of The Buzz is brought to you by HPE Discover 2026. HPE Discover runs June 15 to 18 at The Venetian in Las Vegas. Discover what’s next at hpe.com/discover. Welcome to The Buzz from ChannelBuzz.ca, I’m Robert Dutt, today is Monday, June 15th, and here’s what’s happening in the channel today. The biggest event on HPE’s calendar opens today at The Venetian Convention and Expo Center in Las Vegas, and ChannelBuzz.ca is on the ground for the full week. But before the main conference opens to the broader audience tomorrow, today belongs exclusively to the channel. The HPE Partner Growth Summit – the partner-only day that kicks off Discover week – is underway as you’re hearing this. The centrepiece is the General Session called “The Power of One,” led by HPE channel head Simon Ewington alongside a lineup of HPE senior executives. The name captures the message HPE is sending its partner ecosystem heading into the back half of 2026: one comprehensive portfolio, one unified program under HPE Partner Ready Vantage, and one integrated experience across networking, cloud, and AI. The afternoon breakout agenda is dense – covering GreenLake and hybrid cloud, Aruba networking with AI, monetizing accelerated compute and agentic workloads, and HPE’s evolving service provider story. It’s also worth noting the context: this is the first Partner Growth Summit since HPE’s $14 billion acquisition of Juniper Networks cleared regulatory review and officially closed. Partners are getting their first look at a fully unified networking and compute story from a company that can now tell it cleanly. We’re bringing you the announcements as they happen all week.  In just a couple of hours on In The Channel, I’ll help you get ready for Discover, as I preview the event with the help of none other than Jeremiah Jenson, HPE’s vice president of North American channel and partner ecosystem.  Tomorrow on The Buzz, we’ll have all the news from Partner Growth Summit, and tomorrow’s In The Channel will also feature Jenson, as we take a deeper dive into the HPE’s partner programs and where he sees the biggest opportunities for the channel right now. Be sure to stick with us all week as we bring you full coverage from Vegas. Cato Networks is expanding its ecosystem with the launch of a new Technology Partner Program and a Platform Integration Hub. The SASE provider says the hub debuts with more than 100 integrations out of the box, offering streamlined connectivity with third-party security, cloud, and networking solutions. According to Cato, the program is designed to simplify how partners and customers integrate its platform with existing enterprise technology stacks, reducing friction and speeding up deployments. A vendor-led integration effort at this scale matters for the channel. As enterprise environments grow more layered and complex, MSPs rely on platforms that connect cleanly to an existing stack rather than requiring months of custom API work. Out-of-the-box integrations mean less time troubleshooting compatibility and more time delivering security outcomes to clients. It’s worth noting that Cato’s channel chief said earlier this year that seven out of ten deals the company closes are already partner-led. A stronger integration story could deepen that dependence on the channel by making it easier for MSPs and MSSPs to position Cato alongside the other tools in a customer’s security stack. A report released last week by application security vendor Checkmarx is putting hard numbers on a dynamic that security-focused channel partners have likely been seeing for some time. The 2026 Future of Application Security Report, based on a survey of more than 2,000 developers and CISOs, found that 95 per cent of CISOs say they have been pressured to suppress or delay compliance-related security issues when business deadlines loom. Compounding the problem: the adoption of AI-generated code is accelerating, which Checkmarx says is multiplying the attack surface in production environments faster than many security teams can manage. The business case for external, independent security oversight has rarely been clearer. When internal security leaders are being overruled on vulnerability management, an MSP or MSSP operating as a neutral third party – accountable to security outcomes rather than product launch timelines – steps into a genuine gap. The data also validates the case for application security as a structured managed service. As AI-generated code becomes standard in the development pipeline, organizations that can’t close that gap internally will need to find a partner who can. In Brief – Dataminr and TD SYNNEX have signed a distribution agreement that makes Dataminr for Cyber Defense available to more than 35,000 North American resellers through TD SYNNEX’s channel network.  Security vendor inforcer has launched inforcer Threat Detection and Response, a new platform designed to give MSPs a single environment to manage detection, incident response, and reporting for Microsoft 365.  ConnectSecure has introduced Patch 360, a patch management solution built specifically for MSPs that the company says reduces deployment risk while accelerating patching across operating systems and third-party applications.  NetRise has launched the Discovery Partner Program, targeting VARs, MSSPs, distributors, and systems integrators with software supply chain security capabilities built around compiled binary analysis rather than source code or vendor-provided SBOMs.  Full details and links in the show notes or the blog post. That’s how we’re seeing the headlines today. I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, thanks for listening. Have a great day.

Josh Singh, sales director at Turning Point Technology Services Josh Singh didn’t arrive at Dell Technologies World simply as a partner – he arrived as someone who spent nearly eight years on the vendor side, in Dell sales roles, before crossing over to Turning Point as the company’s sales lead. That dual perspective shapes everything about how Turning Point operates. The Vancouver-based solution provider, founded in 2012, runs exclusively on Dell in the data center – a deliberate, all-in single-vendor bet that Josh frames not as a constraint but as a competitive advantage. Nearly half of the team is ex-Dell, which means when a customer needs an answer fast, Turning Point knows exactly who to call inside Dell’s notoriously complex internal matrix. That navigational fluency, Josh argues, is the kind of differentiation that doesn’t show up in a spec sheet but shows up every time there’s urgency. Turning Point recently formalized that depth by opening what Dell designates as its first official solution center in Canada, in their Vancouver office, giving the team and their clients hands-on access to the full portfolio – including the GB10 for deskside AI development. On AI, Josh’s read is that the “AI factory” framing was right directionally but too large a first step for most of the Canadian market. Dell’s move toward more modular, consumable AI infrastructure – starting at one or two servers, proving a use case, then scaling – is what actually unlocks adoption for SMB customers. Small wins first, then the appetite for something bigger. On security and resilience, Josh drew a clear line: backup is the last line of defense, and if that last line gets hit – or gets frozen by a ransomware insurance claim – you’re rebuilding from scratch. Dell’s Data Domain and its proprietary DDBoost protocol forms the core of what Turning Point puts in front of customers who need to actually recover, not just theoretically recover. And rounding it out: the supply chain disruption, compounded by Broadcom‘s reshaping of the virtualization market, is forcing Canadian organizations to plan differently – more external awareness, more budget flexibility, earlier commitment. That’s a challenge across the industry, Josh notes. But for partners who can guide customers through it, it’s also an opening. Read Full Transcript Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last sixteen years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca, and your host for the show. We’re continuing our series from Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas. This week, we’re deep on the partner perspective. Today’s guest brings a point of view you don’t usually get. Nearly a decade inside Dell Technologies, followed by a move to the partner side – specifically to a partner that has made one of the most deliberate, all-in single-vendor bets you’ll find in the Canadian channel. Josh Singh leads the sales team at Turning Point Technology Services, a Vancouver-based solution provider founded in 2012 that operates exclusively on Dell in the data center. Not mostly Dell, not primarily Dell – exclusively. In a channel where diversification is almost reflexively treated as risk management, Turning Point went the other way, and they did it right at the beginning of Dell’s channel investment cycle, which turned out to be good timing. Josh brings to that an unusual lens. He spent almost eight years in Dell’s sales roles, where he learned early that the channel was the key to his success, and that knowing how to navigate Dell’s internal matrix is an advantage that translates directly into faster, better outcomes for customers. Roughly half of Turning Point’s team is ex-Dell. They recently opened what Dell designates as its first official solution center in Canada, right there in their Vancouver office. We talked about what it actually means to make the single-vendor bet and why it’s holding up. How the AI adoption conversation is changing for SMB customers who weren’t ready for the Dell AI Factory, but might be ready for something smaller. The security and data resilience story, and why backup shouldn’t be confused with business continuity. And what the supply chain situation, plus Broadcom’s disruption of the market, is doing to how customers have to plan. Let’s get right into it. My chat with Josh Singh. Josh, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it. I’m sure it’s been a busy week. Josh Singh: It has been a busy week, and thanks for having me. Robert Dutt: I guess to open it up, I want to start with a question that frames the perspective that you have at an event like this. Turning Point made the explicit call to go all-in on Dell on the infrastructure side, as I understand. A lot of partners diversify, carry multiple vendors, pick and choose their spots. What’s the logic behind that bet? What does a week like this one – where Dell’s making a lot of big moves around AI and the direction of the partner program and all that – feel like for a shop that’s tied its future to the Dell story? Josh Singh: Very good question. I’ve been asked this numerous times, and it’s clear you’ve done your research on us. As you said, Robert, we are 100% Dell-exclusive in the data center. We do have other technologies that are complementary to Dell to give our clients an end-to-end ecosystem of technology, but we have doubled, tripled, and quadrupled down on Dell in the data center. Turning Point was formed in 2012. Three founders – Lee, Sean, and Lauren – they came from a value-added reseller that sold a multitude of technologies. What they found out at the time was Dell had a portfolio that covered the end-to-end, especially in the data center. They branched out, all three of them from [Seven Group – verify company name], and they formed Turning Point. They just realized that Dell was at the beginning of their partner program. You’ll see a legacy fabric still embedded in some aspects of Dell Technologies where they still are partial to selling direct, but they have put a large amount of emphasis and investment in the channel over the last fifteen years. Turning Point was formed at the very beginning of that cycle. Since then, we have had no regrets. Dell has really come to the table as a really solid partner for us, allowing us to offer our clients the end-to-end data center strategy with Dell Technologies. Robert Dutt: Your lens is unique too in that you have some time at Dell EMC – a viewpoint that a lot of partners don’t have in terms of having seen both sides of that fence, especially around the same vendor. What does that vendor-side time teach you about what Dell actually needs and wants from partners, and the reality of what Dell values in a partner? Josh Singh: Yeah, that’s a really good question. I spent almost eight years at Dell in various sales roles. I learned very quickly, and early on in my Dell sales career, that the channel was the key to my success. The core reason why is I’m one individual. I have a solutions engineer, I have some overlays, and we manage a pretty large territory. I found that if I could just introduce a channel partner into the mix, I could lob it over the fence, play quarterback a little bit, get enough updates from the channel partner so I can update my leadership – because that’s really important. But I was able to scale my business significantly when I started to work with the channel. Actually, Turning Point was one of those channel partners that I worked very closely with. So it’s a bit of a full circle moment for me to come back and I lead the sales team at Turning Point. Robert Dutt: I have to imagine the Dell team is happy to have you, because clearly you’ve got that lens for exactly what they are looking for from you as a partner. Josh Singh: Yeah, you know, every vendor has their own methodology and go-to-market culture. And so it does help. Actually, almost half of Turning Point’s team is ex-Dell Technologies employees. So that really gives us a unique perspective on how Dell wants to sell, how to update Dell, what’s important to them – what’s important to each level in the organization, from the sales rep to the manager, to the director, to the senior director, to the president. So we understand what is important to Dell Technologies. And also, for our customers, it’s really important to pick the right technologies. But as we all know, this world is moving so fast and our customers need answers, and they need us to be on their requests in a really time-sensitive way. And so, typically with most vendors, you know your account executive and that individual is the key to the organization. When you come from Dell, you all of a sudden know how to navigate the matrix of Dell. And so when a customer has a question, you know exactly who to call. You can pick up the phone and get that answer in a much more time-sensitive way than navigating the matrix of Dell, which can be large and daunting. Robert Dutt: So the secret sauce is as simple as spending more than half a decade inside the company itself. Josh Singh: Simple. Yeah, easy peasy. Robert Dutt: Big week for AI infrastructure here, and the Dell AI thesis – in so much as they’ve for a while been pulling on the idea of running AI models on-prem and on their infrastructure – was really amplified this week. Between that, desktop agentic AI, and the whole server and storage announcements underneath that, how does what was announced here resonate with what you guys are doing now and what your customers are asking for in terms of technology and how it’s delivered? Josh Singh: Yeah, no, that’s a really good question. So I’ve been at Dell Technologies World almost every year, and I’m finding a big difference in the talk tracks this year. AI was a concept, it was a lot of buzzwords, it was a lot of fluff, to be honest with you as well. Everyone’s trying to chase what AI means to them. But I think this year is the first year where I started to see concepts materialize into practicality, whether it comes to data locality or infrastructure, or really how to go to the next steps of adopting AI. The Canadian market is more pragmatic in their approach to adoption of technology – a little laggard, but not in a negative way, just a bit more conservative. And so what Dell Technologies World enables me and us to do is learn from people actually deploying AI in a much more meaningful and scalable way, for us to then be able to go back to Canada and start to talk about potential use cases, potential outcomes – because it is a very daunting topic, AI, sometimes it can be very overwhelming. So Dell Technologies World allows us to take some key facts about AI, bring them back into our local market, and then help them through that journey. And also, we’re meeting a lot of experts here as well. So it’s not just that we take these concepts and go back to Canada and try to do it ourselves – we’re really supported by the Dell channel ecosystem as well, to help our clients evolve in their AI journey. Robert Dutt: What are the ideas that you’re hearing that specifically are making you think, “All right, this is going to change something in how we do business internally, or this is something I have to take to customer X, customer Y, customer Z,” because it maps to what they’re thinking about or where they should be thinking? Josh Singh: Yeah. I think Dell, when they first wanted to address AI, they came out with the Dell AI Factory, and that was the message. So for a lot of Canadian organizations – which are largely SMB – adoption of an AI Factory is not consumable. It’s too large. They need to prove the model out. And then as soon as they get some small wins and successes, then they can scale out, because the smallest AI Factory was large for them. And this is what we noticed, actually, in the last twelve months. So what Dell is doing now is making it a bit more economical, a bit more consumable – in the AI data platform, starting at one server, maybe two servers, a little PowerScale, and then using that to prove out a use case. And then once we prove out a use case, our customers say, “Hey, there’s really something to this AI thing that everybody keeps talking about.” Now they can really start to invest in a much more scalable, larger way. So I think what Dell has released – very small products with the GB10 all the way up to that massive AI Factory – I mean, you saw when Michael Dell came out with Jensen, and he came out on stage and showed the entire portfolio of AI with a small little itty-bitty – not quite Raspberry Pi size, but not too far from that. Robert Dutt: Really, yeah. Josh Singh: And then having Jensen talk about the next model and how much more powerful that next model is – 100x, 100x, 100x, all the way up to that big AI Factory. So I think it just allows us to be a bit more practical in AI adoption rather than, “Mr. Customer, you have to adopt an AI Factory and that’s how you’re going to achieve AI.” So yeah. Robert Dutt: Has some of the stuff they’re talking about – deskside AI, and specifically deskside agents – when you talk about a GB10 and the lower end of that, and even for more casual users, they would make the case down to the AI-enabled PC – how does that kind of map with how your customers are approaching AI, given that they aren’t going to be going out and buying even a bottom-end, full-on AI Factory experience as a day-one thing? Josh Singh: Yeah. So at Turning Point, we have our data center – it’s actually a solution center. Dell has multiple across the world. There was none in Canada. So actually, with Dell leadership, we opened up Dell’s first solution center in Vancouver in our office. There was a big unveiling with the president of Dell Canada, all Dell leadership came out, and we stood up our solution center in conjunction with Dell. So in that solution center, we have every piece of technology that Dell has – from PowerStore to PowerScale to ObjectScale. And we recently adopted the GB10 so we’re able to actually learn it, use practical use cases that actually help Turning Point, and then we can actually know how to speak to our customers as an adopter ourselves of the GB10 and some of the use cases. So anything from OpenClaw to using different language models and trying to help business productivity in that manner. We serve customers in almost every single vertical. So we are working with healthcare – we’re doing some work right now with healthcare and looking at different use cases when it comes to X-rays and things like that. And then we also work with legal, looking at contractual ways to actually pull out data from thousands or millions of contracts to find commonalities to help an organization improve their operational efficiency. So we’ve got our system in our solution center and we’re actually going through those use cases ourselves so that we can better serve our customers. Robert Dutt: Given that you’ve got that data center and you’ve got that – choose your own analogy, eat your own dog food, drink your own champagne – approach to things, how have you guys approached AI internally, and what have you learned from how you’ve done that over the last year or two? Josh Singh: So it’s a good question. Admittedly, we are a little bit at the beginning of that journey as well. So at Turning Point, as well as many of our customers, we were a bit overwhelmed with what AI meant. And so we have a practice when it comes to consultation to navigate what AI means for them. We do specific workshops to get a client to understand what they want out of AI and to conceptualize what AI is capable of doing. Now we’re really getting into how product is going to help that. So this is the next iteration of our AI journey to help our customers – going over and beyond the consultative nature of how AI works and models and inferencing and all those buzzwords that customers understand but don’t really understand. And then we’ll take whatever is the output from that workshop, and now with our solution center, we’re looking to actually take the results of that and try to replicate it using product and technology and actual outcome. Robert Dutt: How often do you find that the outcome of the workshop – “this is what AI would do best for you” – maps with what they came in thinking AI would do best for them? Josh Singh: It’s fascinating to see, actually, because in a lot of SMB organizations, there is no AI data scientist, there is no AI leader. So it’s essentially decision by committee. And that committee could be a storage admin, a network admin, a compute admin, an application admin, all the way up to leadership, cybersecurity, of course, for governance and compliance. So seeing the different perspectives in these AI committees is really interesting – to watch the customer look at each other and each individual have their own expertise and go, “Oh, that’s interesting. Oh, that’s interesting. Why did I know you viewed the world through the lens of this?” And so coming in with these workshops, it’s typically not one outcome. It’s actually allowing a conversation between these committees at our customer organizations to really help push what AI means for each of those individuals. And then they branch out, actually not with Turning Point but internally, to foster more discussion. And then we come back in and help prod and push in certain areas with our AI knowledge. But really, it’s more contextual. It’s not really about language models and things like that. It’s more about blue sky – like, what do we want to do? And what’s success for you, and what’s success for you, and what’s success for you? You’ll notice that success for each of these individuals is very different. So it’s been fascinating for us to watch. Robert Dutt: It’s funny how often some of these things do – for all the technology behind it – come down to breaking down internal silos. Josh Singh: Yes, yes, yeah. It’s a big part of our job. We help bridge technology to business, to legal, to cybersecurity, all the way up to business goals. So it’s really – it’s an honor to work in this industry and see those conversations play out. Robert Dutt: We saw some fairly significant changes to the partner program and the rollout of the Modern Partner Platform – in terms of the agentic AI stuff that’s rolling into the partner portal and the partner experience, deal registration improvements, a whole bunch of things – especially where you guys are at as a boutique, exclusively Dell-focused operation on the data center side. What did you see in there that really caught your interest – “okay, that’s going to make my life better”? And in a more art-of-the-possible mode, what do you think AI appearing in partner platforms is going to mean in the long run in terms of what you can do, and what you can get from the overall experience you have with key vendors like Dell? Josh Singh: Yeah, good question. So they haven’t fully rolled out the One Dell Way platform yet – they’re chipping away at it. First is with CSG on the client side, and they’re starting that internally. So we haven’t actually seen the result of a lot of that change yet. But I do know theoretically what the plan is for that, and I think it’s going to be really advantageous for us. We are seeing a little bit of the benefits right now where human intervention – as vendors start to consolidate a bit more in sales and back office – the role of the sales rep is changing. There are a lot of tasks that that sales rep now has to do. And so they can sometimes be the bottleneck of operational efficiency. Let’s talk about deal registration, for example: they will get an email, and if they’re busy in meetings, by the time they get to that email and press OK, it could be twenty-four, it could be forty-eight hours, it could be seventy-two hours if that person’s out of town. So then you have to chase – and with how fast IT is moving with our customers, we can’t afford to wait that long. So we’re starting to see a bit more intelligence and automation in how deal registrations are approved. It is a bit of a complicated topic because the channel relies on Dell’s ability to recognize who our accounts are, who our loyal customers are. And so there have been some conflicts since then. But I do see that Dell is on it and they are working it out. And I do love the transparency and honesty from Dell in owning up where mistakes were made and correcting them in the field. So I am seeing some AI adoption when it comes to the partner program, but it’s not fully rolled out yet. So I am looking forward to seeing what they come out with. Robert Dutt: In terms of future state – whether it’s stuff that they’re already discussing or stuff that’s just possible but not yet on the roadmap – what would be the most impactful for you and your organization to move to a more automated, more agentic motion with a key vendor like Dell? Josh Singh: Yeah. I’m sure you’ve heard of Dell Sales Chat. It’s basically their version of GPT, but it references all of Dell’s information – presentations, documents, white papers, service briefs, and things like that. So the Dell rep just types in a query into Dell Sales Chat, and an answer comes out while referencing all Dell documentation. What I really want to see is Dell enabling that for the channel. And so I’ve talked to Dell leadership – specifically people that own this product – and that is the plan. And so I’m really, really excited for that, because especially when we respond to RFPs in public sector, it’s a very time-consuming endeavor. And so for us to be able to type in queries on very specific questions that public sector has about technology would be really valuable. And I do know that there are compliance and governance issues as well. The labeling of documentation has to be accurate – otherwise, the channel would get access to potentially confidential data from Dell Sales Chat. But that’s the biggest thing that I’m waiting for Dell to offer the channel. Robert Dutt: Cool. I wanted to talk a little bit about security and data resilience, because that was another theme here at the event – an area where you guys have a fair bit going on with vCISO and MDR, cyber recovery, all that kind of stuff. Basically, how does the Dell cyber resilience narrative from this week connect with what you’re already doing? Does it strengthen the story you’re telling clients? Does it give you new opportunities? How are you viewing the message here? Josh Singh: Yeah. So I actually come from the security and resilience team at Dell – that’s my most recent role there. So it’s near and dear to me and my heart, and I am seeing a lot of product updates when it comes to security. That’s really exciting for me to see, actually. So Dell has a security and data platform in Data Domain, and there are other partners in the ecosystem like Druva and others. There are some partnerships with CrowdStrike and other MDR companies. And that’s what I really appreciate about Dell – they did have Secureworks for a period of time, which got spun off, but I do appreciate Dell constantly looking at where their gaps are from a technology perspective and then partnering up with other vendors to complete the end-to-end strategy. As I mentioned, each individual product in the technology portfolio – they are releasing a lot of security updates and functionality embedded in PowerStore, more in Data Domain when it comes to immutability and things like that, and PowerScale anomaly detection in each of the different products, end-to-end encryption with secure [HPAs – unclear; possibly “HBAs” or “APIs” – verify]. So there’s a lot of attention right now when it comes to security. And to come back to AI – AI is really cool and it can create a lot of really cool outcomes. That’s if you’re wearing a white hat. If you’re wearing a black hat, it can be equally exciting for them as well. And so Dell has to keep up now with not just asking what are the positive outcomes that can drive more efficiency and unlock human progress, but what are the black hats going to be doing with AI, and how do we respond? Robert Dutt: I was sharing a detail this week that backup infrastructure is kind of a primary target for attacks. Curious – does that kind of match with what you’re seeing? And how do you, especially with customers who are newer to you or just going through the process, help them reconcile what they think they’re protecting with their backup versus what they actually have in terms of protection? Josh Singh: Yeah, this is – I mean, every backup vendor says the same thing. This becomes really difficult, actually, to undo a lot of the conditioning from a lot of the backup vendors. I joined DPS – which is now the SRP, the Security and Resiliency Platform, at Dell – for a very specific reason. I actually used to also work for Secureworks. And I realized that talking to people about managed security services was resonating at the time. But the answer was always, “Hey, we just go back to our backup target and we restore, we recover, we’re up and running within a couple of hours.” So I thought, I could spend the same amount of time with a different team and a different product and achieve much more success, because that’s what most organizations are relying on. So they really rely on backup. Now, backup should not be confused with business continuity. Backup is the last line of defense – and it really is the last line of defense. So when you have a last line of defense, you need to make sure that that is locked down. If you don’t trust your last line of defense, it doesn’t really matter what you do on top of that. You can spend millions of dollars per year operationally on subscriptions and monitoring and things like that. But if you don’t trust your last line of defense, you are hooked. And so Dell’s backup product, Data Domain, is the most secure, purpose-built backup appliance out there in the market – hands down. It’s not even a comparison, from my perspective – and it could be a biased perspective – against other competition and other vendors that also play in the same area. There are just so many features in Data Domain when it comes to immutability and governance and compliance and DDBoost, which is a proprietary protocol – it’s not CIFS, it’s not NFS. A bad actor can scan a CIFS or NFS directory so easily and then just encrypt it. So while we do work very well with PPDM – which is Dell’s backup software – we also use Veeam as well. And so the Veeam-to-Data Domain story is very powerful, and it’s really good for the SMB market as well. So we’re constantly looking at the market and seeing what’s compatible, what plays well with Dell products, and we’re introducing that into our ecosystem as well. Robert Dutt: All right. To wrap it up – sitting where you sit as a partner who’s made a pretty significant single-vendor bet on Dell, what’s the one thing from this week that you sit back and go, “Yeah, that validates the decision”? And also, was there anything that gives you pause – that makes you go, “Okay, I need to learn more about that before I’m sure that we’re aligned”? Josh Singh: Yeah. I mean, I can’t deny that we haven’t been forced to think about more vendor adoption. And as every company needs to iterate and evolve and stay on top of industry trends, we need to constantly be surveying other technologies. And we do. We look at NetApp all the time. We look at Pure. We look at HPE constantly. And what we’ve noticed is we don’t need to take on a different vendor. And especially – one thing I will say about Dell, and I’m not sure if this is an answer to your question, but I do have to mention this – Dell’s supply chain is second to none. So we’re in this world right now which is shifting aggressively to shortages and components and things like that. And that’s where Dell’s really shining right now – in their ability to go to different geographic areas and fast-track product from other areas. So that’s just one thing that I have to plug Dell for: very impressive about what they’re doing there. But from a Dell perspective, they’re constantly innovating. All the thought leaders of the world – in different companies and different partners and vendors – they’re all here. And so if we have that big bet on Dell and they’re constantly innovating and adding new partnerships and are at the forefront of innovation, then that means we are too. And if we are, then we don’t need to look anywhere else – and we’re going to double down on the bet. Robert Dutt: To go back to what you were saying about the supply chain situation – it’s no doubt wild times trying to get infrastructure for everyone on the planet right now. And we hear pretty clearly from Jeff Clarke the idea, the message to customers: put your hand up early – really early, if you can – because that’ll give you the best chances of getting what you want when you want it. If you’re thinking two years out or something, how are you approaching timelines and guidance to customers on – okay, so you want to be here at some point – speccing that out in light of the uncertainty of availability, the uncertainty of price, all the fun stuff that’s going on right now? Josh Singh: We’re living in that world right now and it’s changing the way customers have to respond to their stakeholders in their organizations. Back in the day – and by back in the day, I mean six months ago – a customer needed compute and they would buy compute and they would get it within three weeks, likely two. Now we’re looking at two months, three months, sometimes six-month delays, depending on if they need very specific components. So it is a little bit like the COVID days, where there was a big push to remote connectivity. Now customers are looking at public cloud again in a bigger way because they need immediate resources. So what we’re trying to do as an organization is say, “Yes, you could go to the cloud – that is an option. It always has been an option and always will be an option. But is that the right thing for your organization economically, from a security perspective, from a latency perspective?” There are so many more considerations, especially in the Canadian market with data sovereignty. And so the shift of parts shortages – and this wouldn’t be a current interview unless we talked about Broadcom and the changes they’ve made in the market as well. These two very big changes in our market are now affecting the way that organizations have to respond to their stakeholders and the immediacy of resources. So planning now is critically important. The way that customers are now trying to secure budget within their organizations is changing, because they need to be a bit more adaptable and flexible to what’s externally offered. Previously, it was internal operational methodologies on how they adopted technologies. Now they’re being affected by the external. So they have to be a bit more flexible and adaptable as to how they need to support their growing environment – by way of data, by way of compute resources, and especially AI. Now that I need GPUs and memory and CPUs, which are now in shortage, it is a very big challenge. But it’s not a Dell challenge, it’s a customer challenge. It’s happening across the entire industry. So that’s a good thing for us. If it was a Dell challenge, then we’d have a challenge ourselves and be in a bit of a corner. But it’s a global challenge right now that we are constantly seeing changes to. And I suspect we’ll continue to see changes for the rest of the year. Robert Dutt: It’s wild times when you hear folks who are very intelligent on these things saying this is going to be a multi-year kind of cycle. I guess AI giveth, AI taketh away. Josh Singh: Yes, yes. And geopolitics – we’ve got some leaders in the world right now that are making decisions that are affecting our geopolitical climate as well, which is then downstream affecting IT. So it’s interesting times. Exciting times. And I think we’ll look back on today just like we looked back on COVID – we’ll get through it. We’re all in it together. Robert Dutt: Here’s hoping the war stories end up good at the end of the day. Josh Singh: That’s right. Robert Dutt: Thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it. Josh Singh: Thanks very much, Rob. I appreciate it. Thank you. Robert Dutt: There you have it, Josh Singh from Turning Point Technology Services. I’d like to thank Josh for his time in Las Vegas. The full-circle element of his story – spending years inside Dell, working alongside Turning Point as a channel partner, and then joining the company he was selling through – comes through clearly in how he talks about the business. And I think that perspective showed throughout the conversation. A few things I’d like to take away from this one. First, the single-vendor bet argument. A lot of partners hedge on vendor relationships as a form of risk management, but Turning Point went the other way. And the case Josh makes is essentially that depth beats breadth – that knowing how to navigate a large vendor’s internal matrix quickly is itself a competitive advantage for customers. When someone needs an answer today, knowing exactly who to call inside Dell and getting it done in hours instead of days is a real differentiator. Doesn’t show up in a product spec, but it does show up in the relationship. Second, the AI adoption ladder. The AI Factory is the right concept, but maybe too large a bite for most of the Canadian market. What’s changing now – and what you heard Josh describe with the solution center and the GB10 pilots – is AI becoming consumable at the entry level. Small win, prove the model, scale it up. That’s how it actually gets adopted in the mid-market and SMB space, and the partners who figured out how to structure that journey are the ones who are going to win those accounts. And third, backup is the last line of defense, not the first. Josh put it plainly: if you don’t trust your last line of defense, it doesn’t really matter what you spend on top of it. And if your backup infrastructure gets hit with a ransomware attack – which is increasingly the whole point of the attack – and you’ve filed an insurance claim on top of that, you can’t touch it until the insurance company is done with their analysis. You’re building from scratch. That air gap, clean recovery point is the whole game. Not a nice-to-have. If you’re enjoying the show, please follow or subscribe wherever you listen. We’re on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, the usual suspects. And if you have a moment to leave a rating or review, please do. Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.

Today’s headline news for Canadian IT solution providers: Pax8 Beyond26 – managed intelligence: Pax8 wrapped its annual Beyond conference in Salt Lake City on Tuesday with over 3,500 attendees including 200+ from Canada, centering the show on the transition from managed services to the Managed Intelligence Provider model. The headline announcement was Microsoft Agent 365 for Managed Intelligence – multi-tenant governance of agentic AI across MSP client environments through the Pax8 Agent Store, arriving in July – alongside the launch of the Managed Intelligence Provider Program, Voyager Alliance Rewards, and the Managed Intelligence Alliance. CEO Scott Chasin argued that as AI models commoditize, the trust MSPs have already built with clients is their primary competitive advantage going forward. Arrow Electronics global experience centers: Arrow introduced a network of global experience centers on Tuesday, built in close collaboration with channel partners in North America and Europe to reflect how partners actually go to market today. Facilities in the US and Sweden are fully networked to deliver a consistent design and testing experience regardless of location, and are designed specifically to help partners accelerate the move from AI and cloud evaluation into deployment and monetization. Mitel names new channel chief: Mitel has appointed Ben Macdonald as vice president of global channel go-to-market, bringing experience from Owl Labs, Poly, Juniper Networks, and Ekahau. The hire comes as Mitel’s own research shows 68 percent of businesses are running communications infrastructure more than seven years old, with 92 percent of modernizing organizations choosing an integrated-hybrid strategy – a dynamic the company says positions its 6,000-plus channel partners at the center of one of the largest communications refresh cycles in a decade. Cork Cyber wins Pax8 Startup Vendor of the Year: Pax8 recognized Cork Cyber at Beyond26 for its AI-native remediation platform built for MSPs, which remediates threats automatically, reduces ticket volume, and provides financial payback when risks slip through. The award was presented on the Beyond mainstage by Pax8 president Nick Heddy. Canada’s cloud market: A new report from the Canadian Anti-Monopoly Project, covered by CBC News, calls the Canadian cloud computing market “broken,” warning that Amazon, Microsoft, and Google control approximately 85 percent of the market. The report argues that even adding domestic sovereign alternatives will not fix the problem without interoperability standards, coining the term “maplewashed dependency” for the risk of trading one lock-in for another. Pentesting research: New research from Cobalt and Omdia finds that 53 percent of security leaders believe traditional penetration testing is now outdated, with demand growing for continuous, AI-assisted approaches. iCOUNTER leadership: iCOUNTER has appointed Joel Molinoff, formerly of BlueVoyant and CBS Corporation, as chief operating officer. DataStrike expansion: DataStrike has expanded its Linux managed services practice by hiring Jon Cain as senior Linux infrastructure engineer to meet growing client demand. Read Full Transcript Welcome to The Buzz from ChannelBuzz.ca, I’m Robert Dutt, today is Thursday, June 11, 2026, and here’s what’s happening in the channel today. Pax8 wrapped its annual Beyond conference in Salt Lake City on Tuesday, and the event made a clear statement about where the distributor sees the managed services business heading. With more than 3,500 attendees – including over 200 from Canada – the show centered on what Pax8 is calling the Managed Intelligence Provider model, or MIP. The idea is that MSPs are no longer primarily managing infrastructure. The next phase of the business is orchestrating agentic AI and delivering outcomes that SMB customers cannot build on their own. The headline product announcement from the show was Microsoft Agent 365 for Managed Intelligence, which will give MSPs multi-tenant governance of agentic AI across their client base through the Pax8 Agent Store, arriving in July. Alongside that, Pax8 announced the Managed Intelligence Provider Program, the Voyager Alliance Rewards program, and the Managed Intelligence Alliance, all aimed at helping partners navigate that business model transition. CEO Scott Chasin’s central argument was that as AI models commoditize rapidly, the trust that MSPs have already built with their clients becomes the primary competitive differentiator. It’s a different kind of pitch than many vendors have been making this year, and the Canadian partner contingent at the show was among the largest regional groups in attendance. Distribution giant Arrow Electronics introduced a new set of networked global experience centers on Tuesday, and the design philosophy behind them is worth paying attention to. According to Arrow, the facilities in the US and Sweden were built in close collaboration with channel partners across North America and Europe, specifically around how partners actually go to market today, where they face constraints, and what slows them down. The two locations are fully networked, meaning the design and testing experience is consistent regardless of where the customer or partner is located. Arrow has operated various lab facilities over the years, but this iteration is explicitly oriented around solving the commercial and operational friction partners face in moving customers from AI and cloud evaluation into deployment. For solution providers working to differentiate on deep technical expertise and pre-sales capability, the ability to leverage distribution infrastructure at this level is increasingly part of the value equation. Mitel announced Tuesday that Ben Macdonald has joined the company as vice president of global channel go-to-market, making him the company’s new channel chief. Macdonald comes from Owl Labs, where he led the shift to a scalable B2B and enterprise channel model including strategic alliances with Microsoft and Lenovo. He has also held senior channel roles at Poly, Juniper Networks, and Ekahau. The appointment arrives at a moment Mitel describes as one of the largest communications refresh cycles in a decade. According to Mitel’s own research, 68 percent of businesses are currently running communications systems that are more than seven years old, and 92 percent of organizations actively modernizing are choosing an integrated-hybrid strategy. Macdonald’s specific background – building recurring revenue models out of historically transactional, hardware-centric businesses – aligns directly with what Mitel says it needs. For the more than 6,000 channel partners in Mitel’s ecosystem, including a significant number of Canadian resellers and MSPs with established UC practices, the appointment signals an intent to activate that market opportunity through the partner community. In Brief – Pax8 named Cork Cyber its Startup Vendor of the Year at Beyond, recognizing the MSP-focused AI remediation platform that remediates threats automatically and pays out financially when risks slip through. A report from the Canadian Anti-Monopoly Project calls Canada’s cloud computing market “broken,” warning that Amazon, Microsoft and Google control 85 percent of the market and domestic providers risk creating what the report calls “maplewashed dependencies.” Cobalt and Omdia research finds that 53 percent of security leaders believe traditional penetration testing is now outdated. iCOUNTER appoints Joel Molinoff, formerly of BlueVoyant and CBS Corporation, as chief operating officer. DataStrike expands its Linux managed services practice by hiring Jon Cain as senior Linux infrastructure engineer. Full details and links in the show notes or the blog post. Later today on In The Channel, we’re hearing from Josh Singh at Turning Point Technologies in Vancouver – it’s a conversation about running a single-vendor Dell practice, AI for SMB, and why backup is the last line of defense against ransomware. And if you haven’t heard it yet, yesterday on In The Channel I sat down with ESTI’s Earl Gosick on AI infrastructure, cyber resilience, and why Saskatchewan may be Canada’s next data center hub. That’s how we’re seeing the headlines today. I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, thanks for listening. Have a great day.

Earl Gosick, CTO at ESTI Consulting Services Earl Gosick has been attending Dell’s annual event since the EMC World days, and the ESTI Consulting Services CTO brought to this year’s Dell Technologies World a perspective grounded in 35 years of building deep technical expertise on the Prairies. ESTI, the Saskatoon-based solution provider that won Dell’s Data Centre Solutions Excellence Award for Canada last year, runs a pure-play Dell infrastructure practice with particular depth in storage and data center design. Earl also sits in Dell’s CTO Connect program – a small, invitation-only group of partner technologists with early visibility into Dell’s product roadmap and a real voice in shaping it. His framing for the week: AI is fundamentally a data story, and data stories are storage stories. The push toward on-premises AI infrastructure – from deskside devices up through the newly announced Exascale and Rackscale solutions – is being driven as much by data governance requirements and token economics as by raw performance. Organizations that don’t control their data, Earl argues, can’t truly control their AI outcomes. On cyber resilience, he made a point worth underlining for anyone running managed services: ransomware insurance changes the recovery equation in ways clients don’t always anticipate. When a claim is filed, infrastructure gets frozen for forensic analysis. Recovery speed from a clean, air-gapped golden image – built with technology partners like Index Engines – isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the whole game. And to close: Saskatchewan and Alberta may be poised to become Canada’s next significant data center hubs. With regulated power, guaranteed energy supply, and a provincial government that has now seen a CoreWeave-scale facility successfully built in the province and is actively pursuing more, Earl sees a real and growing opportunity – and ESTI is already working to support it. Read Full Transcript Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In the Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor at ChannelBuzz.ca, and your host for the show. We’re continuing our series of conversations from Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas. This week, we’re shifting from the Dell executive perspective to the partner perspective, and today’s guest has been making the trip to this event since the EMC World days. Earl Gosick is senior consultant at ESTI Consulting Services, a Saskatoon-based solution provider that just celebrated 35 years in business and took home Dell’s Data Centre Solutions Excellence Award for Canada last year. Earl also sits inside Dell’s CTO Connect program, a small, invitation-only group of partner technologists who get an early look at where Dell’s roadmap is actually heading – and, importantly, a real opportunity to push back on it. Earl’s a storage specialist at his core, and that turned out to be a useful lens at a conference that was fundamentally about AI infrastructure. Because if you pull on that AI thread long enough, it leads you back to data, and data always leads you back to storage. We talked about what the Exascale and Rackscale announcements mean for real customer deployments, why the cyber resilience conversation is as much about recovery speed as backup integrity, and a genuinely interesting thread about why Saskatchewan and the broader Canadian Prairies may be sitting on one of the most underappreciated data centre opportunities in North America right now. Let’s get right into it. My chat with Earl Gosick. Earl, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it. Earl Gosick: I appreciate you having me here. It’s always nice to talk about what we’re doing with Dell. Robert Dutt: No doubt, and you guys are doing a lot. I understand this is by no means your first DTW rodeo. Earl Gosick: No, I’ve been coming since the EMC World days, and I’ve never – I missed a year through COVID, that was about it. Robert Dutt: Well, I guess we’ll allow you that. So you’ve got this background here, you do the CTO Connect with Dell. What’s different about this year, if anything? What’s the tone or the energy that tells you something about where the industry is at right now, and not necessarily just where Dell would like it to be going? Earl Gosick: I think the driving factor of today is really the supply constraints. You can see what AI is doing and the effect that’s having across the board on every product that has memory or CPU or flash drives in it – which is everything in technology. So that’s really setting the tone. But it also shows how effective AI is as a market driver, and what people think is going to come out of that technology – which is, I think, very important for people to understand. It’s ubiquitous technology that’s going to drive a lot of change in our industry. And we’re seeing a leading edge of that. And if this is the leading edge, there’s some pretty exciting things coming, I suspect, and it’s going to do some pretty important and probably quite wonderful things for our clients. Robert Dutt: We heard from the main stage the idea of encouraging customers to get their hand up early – to get those orders, or even an inkling of where things are going for orders, in as early as possible – and that that will, in effect, Jeff Clarke was suggesting, get folks the best possible results. What’s the guidance you guys are providing your customers around that whole issue, and thinking about availability and pricing of hardware in this current super-fun environment? Earl Gosick: Our position does align with what we’re hearing from Dell when we’re dealing with Dell Technologies, so we try and pass on the messages as transparently as we can, understanding there are supply constraints coming. And we have to deal with those in the only way we have, and that is to figure out what we need. Let’s plan early. Let’s plan the budgets we have for the year, and we can make some estimates about what’s going to be happening six months from now – but they’re estimates, and they’re going to be higher. So it’s probably going to be cheaper for you to have technology that’s sitting on the floor unused for a few months and waste through some support potentially, as opposed to delaying the purchase for three months. So if we know what we’re going to buy, we should operate in a manner that allows us to order those technologies as soon as possible and make sure you’re not waiting for something that delays your business initiatives. Robert Dutt: You guys won the Data Centre Solutions Excellence Award last year for Canada. Take your victory lap. Tell me – what is it you guys are doing in the data centre space that earned that, and what does winning the award tell you about where your practice is focused? Earl Gosick: I hope it helps demonstrate our success. So what ESTI likes to do as a business – our business model is really to build highly competent experts all the way from solution architecture to implementation of those technologies at the customer site. That takes a lot of effort on our behalf, and so it’s nice to get a reward that says we’re doing the right things. Because if you can build a strong rapport with a client who trusts your experts in their field, that creates long-term relationships – which is what both ESTI and Dell are after, and what our clients want. Robert Dutt: You’re a storage specialist at a conference that has been at its core all about AI infrastructure. But at the same time, you go back to when it was – you said – EMC World, all about storage. The more I heard this week, the more it feels like the AI story is really a data story, and data stories are storage stories to at least some degree. How are you seeing that translate in terms of what your customers are actually asking about, or what they’re going to be asking you about? Earl Gosick: It’s significant. You’re right. In order for any type of artificial intelligence to derive a useful data product out the end, it’s built on the data that you have. So customers are coming to the realization that they have to store everything. So it is driving a lot of demand for storage. It’s driving storage in different ways and they just keep everything. Then there’s another product that comes after that, which is cleaning that data – building the data pipelines. When I talk about storage, it’s really about data, and AI is a data-driven product. So it’s doing great things for the storage industry. But the clients understand that they do have to have the data – it has to be there, it has to be available. And then when they build these data products, they have to protect those data products. They’ve got to make sure they’re secure. So it’s driving a lot of initiatives on both sides of the fence that are good for all of us. Robert Dutt: Especially with new or newer customers, or customers who are looking to expand what they’re doing with AI – and acknowledging there’s going to be a range from folks who have had the religion since day one and folks who’ve just been randomly shoving stuff digitally wherever they can. Where do you find those newer customers are at, generally speaking, in terms of sophistication of data management and data governance and all that kind of fun? Earl Gosick: Unfortunately, I’d like to say there’s a median in there. There is not. Everybody is at a different stage in that cycle for them. So you really have to be a little bit cognizant and ask the questions to find out where they’re at before you can really sort of hold their hands and walk them down the road. Many people who started that journey early – you can learn from them. And so they’re going to tell us to start and do something, and you may fail, there may be some things, but you’re going to learn something from that. The second time will be more successful. Then you take that information, you pass it on to the newer people who are trying to get quick value from those investments they’re making on the AI front. So it could be things about how to connect those various data sources because they’re spread everywhere, to how do they build, or select which ones they put their money and their efforts behind. And so you take from the ones that have been doing this for a while, you pass that information on to the ones that are starting on this journey, and you connect the dots. You provide value and make pain go away wherever you can. And customers appreciate that. Robert Dutt: And that sounds like that’s where you’re kind of bridging that gap that exists and trying to bring customers to the level they need to be at to get something out of this. Earl Gosick: Absolutely. Like I said, everybody’s on a journey at a different stage of that journey. And so you have to communicate well to understand where they’re at and what they’re trying to achieve. Once you know that – we don’t always have the answers, but we leverage great partners like Dell who do have somebody that knows the answer. And so building this sort of ecosystem of potential partners to bridge that gap is great. And Dell does that not just from us and the partner community, but their partner community as well, to support all the component pieces that go together to build these pretty highly complex solutions in some cases. Robert Dutt: Of all the announcements, all the stuff that we heard on the main stage and elsewhere this week, what kind of caught your attention – your major aha moment – the thing that’s going to be interesting going back to your business or going back to your customers with new opportunities or the ability to do something better, faster, more? Earl Gosick: So as we talked about, I am a storage guy. So I look at something like Exascale. They’ve been talking about this for a couple of years now in the CTO cycles that I’ve been to. To see that product sort of come to fruition, where you have something and you can just put a personality on that module and build something out – I think that could be very game-changing, especially for AI. They might want to do a lot of things with file storage today, object storage tomorrow. Being able to build up a cluster and put a personality on it that meets the needs of the day – I think that could be quite interesting. That Rackscale solution you saw on the stage with Michael Dell and Jensen the other day – for the larger clients, something like that could be quite interesting. I mean, we’re building these large data centers right now and trying to fill them. Rackscale infrastructure that helps with power and energy and doing a lot of powerful things is going to probably be a game changer for a lot of people. Robert Dutt: One of the things that struck me here is what I want to call the AI agnosticism, as long as you’re doing it on Dell infrastructure – that Dell is talking about here, ranging from, if you’ve got really basic needs, run it locally on your AI PC, moving up a bit there’s the GB10, which is more of a deskside machine, up to the big old box that Jensen signed on stage. How does that map with what you see in terms of customer needs for AI, and what do you think of that kind of approach to structuring both the data center and broader AI processing across the enterprise? Earl Gosick: I think as we touched on earlier, everybody’s on a different stage in that journey. So if you’ve got a guy that’s working at his desk and he’s trying to do some cool things, but he doesn’t have access to a million tokens – that little GB10 you put on the desk beside him and he’s going to do some development, he’s going to learn some wonderful things. Then as you move up the stack in your journey, you’ve got some big clients who are going to do small proof-of-concept type scenarios where they might want a smaller box and then move up that stack. I think it’s important to have a product that covers a diverse range of those people because nobody’s in that one sweet spot – they’re all over the map. Having that full technology set supports wherever they happen to be in their life cycle. Robert Dutt: You touch on tokens, and Jeff Clarke’s presentation was really deep into tokenomics and the kind of the trap there. I’m curious how that maps with what you’ve seen in customers as they’ve started to explore AI. Are they seeing these same challenges, and how are they thinking about it? Earl Gosick: Tokens are the buzzword of the day, but they’re out there for a reason. Everybody has finite resources to put towards the solution they’re trying to build. They may or may not know what that solution is – they’re working towards something, they need tokens to achieve that. What I find interesting is the people who are very early into the game of AI and building solutions around that – it doesn’t take them long before they’re like, “I’m out of tokens. I need to do some stuff.” So it just comes back to the fact that there are only so many resources to solve the needs you have, and you only have so many tokens, and you’ve got to learn to live within what you can get your hands on. And that’s driving the economy, whether it’s at a data center level or at an internal level for any business. Robert Dutt: And does that in turn drive – which I believe is Dell’s thesis here – does that in turn drive the interest in building out infrastructure in-house, so that the relative incremental cost of those additional tokens goes way down because it’s bought and built versus rented? Earl Gosick: Yeah. I think there’s a step along that AI journey where people have potentially outgrown what they can do in the cloud in an economic fashion. We see the supply constraints are driven by CPU and memory usage. If you look at what the cloud hyperscalers offer, when you get into highly intensive memory and CPU, it starts to get very expensive. A lot of storage, a lot of bits and bytes moving back and forth – very expensive. All those things are prevalent in AI. You’re moving a lot of data back and forth, you’re touching a lot of things, you need a lot of memory at times. So once you get to a point where you’re doing useful things with your AI and building generative models, no matter what you do with inferencing, it starts to get really expensive. Then it becomes a time where you can move those things into a data center you control. You can get some economics from it and you can get some sovereignty out of it. A hyperscaler outside of your control can turn things off – they can’t do that when it’s your data center. So you’ve got a lot of control as well as the economics behind how you’re achieving the outcomes you’re looking to achieve. Robert Dutt: I used a word which is actually where I wanted to go next, which is sovereignty. When we’re talking about data center infrastructure and moving bits around and enterprise storage, how is data sovereignty trending among your customers, especially folks who have regulatory concerns and that sort of thing? Earl Gosick: Being a Canadian company, predominantly, we have a larger focus on sovereignty and data sovereignty and sovereign solutions than maybe you’ll see south of the border here. And we find our friends in the European Union are a little bit different – they’re ahead of us even. But it’s a really big concern, especially when you have any type of government agency that you’re dealing with, or anybody that really has intellectual property that they’re looking to protect. They’ve learned that open AI models may expose things – even if it’s just from how they’re creating their algorithms. But if the data gets out there, it’s a concern. They’re protecting their assets as well. These AIs are delivering very useful outcomes for them. They need to make sure they own those outcomes and that they can actually reach them when they need them. So part of data sovereignty is not just the sovereign part of your data, but it’s the actual access to your data. We’re learning things from not just the AI piece but from ransomware – all of a sudden your data goes away. The same thing could happen with a hyperscaler for some people. Sovereign IT solutions are going to be, I think, increasingly important moving forward. Robert Dutt: On that note, you mentioned ransomware, and data resilience and protection is another area I wanted to touch on. We heard the figure that 97% of cyber attacks are now specifically targeting backup infrastructure – because of the old line about, I forget the particular bank robber’s name, but why do you rob the banks? Because that’s where the money is. Why do you go after the backup? Because that’s where all the data is. Does that match with what you’re seeing, and if so, how does that change how you’re designing and recommending data protection for your customers? Earl Gosick: It is absolutely changing people’s realization of how they need to protect their data. This one doesn’t matter if it’s AI or your regular business practices – your data has value, whether it’s to support applications that are running your critical business or you’re building AI products that you need to protect. That has value and you need to access it. What we’re seeing more and more – and we’ve built a really strong practice around this – is building things like cyber vaults and using Dell’s technology partners like Index Engines, where they come in and they can quickly identify threats inside your environment and act on those. Because these guys loiter around for potentially months at a time. They know how to get to your backups. They know they’re not getting paid if you can recover. So they’re going to do everything they can to try and disrupt that. They have AI engines just like ours, but they have a lot of money and they don’t have the constraints about how they use their AI. I mean, these people are criminals, so they act in a method that makes them money. We’re going to be facing even more potential threats in the future, and some of those are going to be AI-driven. We’re going to have to react at AI speeds. There are changes coming, but certainly people are learning to build protection mechanisms that are air-gapped and can respond very quickly to threats. Robert Dutt: When you’re sitting in front of a client who thinks they’re covered – they’ve got a backup solution, they’ve got someone who’s responsible for it – what are the most common gaps that you find between what they think they have and what they actually have? Earl Gosick: I think for many clients, they don’t really understand how disruptive it’s going to be if they run into a ransomware attack. If you’re a client that may have ransomware insurance, for example, and they get hit – you have to tell them, “Do you understand you’re not going to be able to touch any of that infrastructure? Because your insurance company is going to want to do some analysis on that to see how the threat came in.” That infrastructure is dead and gone. You’re starting from scratch. You need a golden image – you need something you know nobody has touched. Protecting the data is only the first piece. Rebuilding from that data, and how fast you can do that – that’s the very critical component. That’s where an air-gapped cyber recovery solution like Dell Cyber Recovery is critical, because you can understand what data to recover and you can recover quickly. Having the data there – that’s the great first step and that’s where you should start. But following that, that is only the first step. Robert Dutt: Your client base is different from a lot of partners I talk to. Given where you sit and who you’re focused on – not necessarily organizations that are under the same kind of pressure or have the same kind of resources to pursue AI – how do you translate and filter what you hear at a conference like this, where a lot is focused towards big enterprise, to a message that makes sense for your customers and scales to their needs and appetites? Earl Gosick: That’s one I think isn’t really that difficult – it’s not as difficult as you would think. Because everybody has the same problems. They run into the same problems. How they build solutions to those problems might change on the scale, but you just have to understand and recognize that everybody’s having the same problems. You can articulate and communicate to them that you’re not the only one that has this. We can resolve this problem at a large scale, but we don’t have to. You came back to it earlier when we talked about the product sets, from small to large – you just pick the right one to meet the solution that these guys have. How you solve that problem of the day doesn’t necessarily change for a really, really large client versus a very, very small client. It’s really just the scale of the end solution and the architecture that’s put together to solve the need. Robert Dutt: From a Titanium partner’s seat, what did the program changes that we saw rolled out – the agentification of the program, some of the incentive shifts – tell you about where Dell sees growth opportunity, and how does it align with where you’re already going or where it might take you? Earl Gosick: I think you can see very easily that Dell is putting a large focus around AI and what it can do for them to streamline their business and be successful. We, like any other company we deal with, are doing the same thing. What they’re doing with their Dell One program, and having a single operation from lead generation down to quoting and pricing and follow-up – it matches what we’re doing on the back end and trying to automate that. Because as long as we can automate that process and reduce the friction in those programs and dealing with Dell, we can spend that time focusing on our clients’ needs. You see Dell, I think, leveraging the same technologies to do that. And if we’re smart business people today, we’re looking to the people around us who are being successful and trying to do what they’re doing in a sense. That’s true for us and our clients. Leveraging AI and seeing how that’s being successful for our partners is driving what we’re all doing – to drive automation and simplification through the processes that are just painful every day that we have to do better at, to support our clients. Robert Dutt: I’m guessing you guys are pretty far down this road already because you’re pretty much a pure-play Dell on the infrastructure side, as far as I understand. But when a company like Dell rolls out these incentives focused on expanding customer footprints – getting a Dell storage customer into Dell PCs or any of the other solution lines – just curious if that moves the needle for you in terms of the incentive, or is it already baked into what you’re doing? Earl Gosick: It’s baked into what we’re doing. In the end of the day, you are trying to build a rapport with a customer based on being a trusted expert. You’re not going to flip your technologies around based on what’s going to get somebody a little bit more money. You’ve got to do the right thing for the customer today and every time you deal with them. The advantage of dealing with Dell is they typically tie their incentives to the product that they are investing in today – that they see the future growing into. So they usually coincide. They understand the pain points of the year, and the incentives usually match the requirements of the day as well. So they’re really good at that. And then they usually have a lot of tools to support that initiative of IT transformation, whatever it is for that time and place in our industry. Robert Dutt: You mentioned earlier you’re on the CTO Connect program – pretty small room, an exclusive group. Tell me about what that relationship looks like on the inside of the room, and the value that an organization like ESTI gets from sitting in there. Earl Gosick: I guess I’ll put it this way. We deal with some technology providers – predominantly Dell. Dell puts us in a room, they tell us what they’re doing for the next year or two, and they ask us if they’re on the right track. That’s telling to me – they care and they listen. They talk about the technologies that we’re going to see upcoming, so it’s helpful for us to talk to our clients about where the industry is headed. But they do sometimes say, “We’re going to do this,” and the room says, “Oh, no, you can’t do that. Our customers love this,” or, “We like this for this reason.” And they say, “Oh, okay.” And we have a dialogue about those things. So I think that’s one of the most important things that comes out of CTO Connect – we hear about industry trends, but they also ask us our opinion on whether they’re on the right track, and then they listen to that opinion. I think that’s telling for any company you deal with – one that engages not only with their clients, but with their technology partners. It’s one of the things I really like about CTO Connect. Robert Dutt: You guys just turned 35 or so, as I understand, as an organization. That’s a long time to be running a consultancy in any market – and markets move, vendors come and go. What’s the philosophy behind building something that durable in a market that changes so fast, and especially in an area of the country that doesn’t necessarily get as much headline attention from vendors as a Toronto or a Vancouver or a Montreal? Earl Gosick: I think it comes back to what I stated earlier around building strong and capable expertise across the board – and that’s building relationships with the clients, building relationships with partners like Dell to solve the solutions of the day. Our clients respect that because they know they can come back to us again and again and we’ll do the right thing together. So that’s really the crux of it. Our business model is a little different in that we support a little bit more of an entrepreneurial aspect to our business. When young, capable people come on board and they build differentiating products, they get a seat at the table – and that’s critical for ESTI and the way we operate. But it’s really about looking at modern technology solutions and being agile to support those ever-changing technologies. It makes our industry exciting. You’re never doing the same thing every day. And as long as you can recognize the fact that you won’t be doing the same thing tomorrow and you just have to find a way to deal with it – that’s how we thrive in our company, and in working with Dell as well. Robert Dutt: All right, so let’s close with asking you to do a little bit of the impossible, given that pace of change. What’s one thing that you’re thinking about today, but maybe not totally all-in on at this point, that you think is going to be shaping the business for ESTI and your customers when we’re sitting here at DTW 2027? Earl Gosick: Well, that’s a really hard question. On the investment side, we do look at some of the technologies today – and as we talked about, AI is big for us. We need to build services that our clients don’t have. So we spend a lot of focus on where they have skills and where they don’t. We’re going to build a lot of expertise around cleaning data, building data pipelines and that kind of stuff, to focus on the needs our clients are asking us to help them solve. So that’s kind of an easy one because everybody sees that going forward. Beyond that – we’re making a strong effort in Saskatchewan and Alberta to build a sort of data center economy to support a lot of these data centers that need to be built. We already have access to power infrastructure to support those things. That’s going to drive a little bit of a change in our operating model just to support our local governments as they try and take advantage of the differentiators we have. That’ll drive some change for ESTI. And then as we expand across the rest of Canada, different geographies have different requirements as well. So lots of change, lots of new people coming on board all the time – interesting but dynamic. Robert Dutt: That will be an interesting thread to pull on. I remember going to an event – God, it must have been 15 years ago now – talking about how Canada really should be a data center powerhouse. When you consider we have power, clean power in relative abundance, we have cold, which turns out to be important – it sounds like maybe there’s an opportunity to realize some of that with what you guys are doing and what governments are starting to look at more seriously. Earl Gosick: They are. Also, right outside my hometown, they just announced a very large data center which is going to house some infrastructure from CoreWeave – and we’re going to see more of that, I think, because that process went very well. I sat in on a conference a couple of weeks ago where it was government and industry getting together to talk about why they were successful, what they bring to the table. Saskatchewan is unique because they have regulated power, energy, and land. They can guarantee, “We will give you power, we can guarantee you’ll get LNG.” Those types of things are very important for anybody trying to build a data center – it’s the critical piece. And with the government having control over all of those, they can guarantee them. That’s where I think Saskatchewan is going to have a real differentiator to support that technology, and the government is well aware of that fact now. They’re going to want to do more of these things. And then our neighbors in both Alberta and Manitoba are sort of on board as well. Certainly Alberta has done a few key data centers to support AI and those are going to continue to happen. We’re sometimes slow to move because it’s government. But once they realize the differentiators they have and what it can do for the market, I think there’ll be some traction there. Robert Dutt: Should be interesting times, and sitting where you’re sitting sounds like a big opportunity. Earl Gosick: Absolutely. I think it’s a big opportunity for all of us – supporting your community around you as well as building a thriving business. Robert Dutt: Earl, I appreciate you taking the time once again. I hope this has been a good DTW for you. Earl Gosick: It’s been a great discussion and a good DTW, so thanks a lot for having me. Robert Dutt: There you have it – Earl Gosick from ESTI Consulting Services. I’d like to thank Earl for his time last week in Las Vegas. Thirty-five years building deep technical expertise from Saskatoon, in a vendor relationship game that tends to reward proximity to the bigger centres – that’s not an accident, and it came through in the conversation. A few things I’ll take away from this one. First, the AI-is-a-storage-story framing. Every AI product ultimately requires data to be collected, governed, moved, and protected. That’s not news to Earl, but it’s a useful reframe for anyone still trying to connect their existing practice to the AI conversation. The hardware gets the headlines. The data work actually gets the contracts. Second, on cyber resilience – the ransomware insurance point Earl raised is worth sitting with. The moment a client files a claim, that infrastructure gets frozen while the insurance company figures out how the breach happened. Your ability to recover doesn’t just depend on whether the backup is intact – it depends on whether you built a clean, air-gapped golden image that nobody has touched. That’s the conversation. And if you’re not having it with your clients, maybe someone else is. And third, keep an eye on Saskatchewan. Regulated power, guaranteed energy supply, and a provincial government that has now seen a CoreWeave-scale data center get successfully built in the province and wants more of them. Earl thinks that’s just the start of something, and I’m inclined to agree. If you’re enjoying the show, please follow or subscribe wherever you listen. We’re on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and most of the usual podcast directories. And if you have a moment to leave a rating or a review, that really does help folks in the channel find the show. Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.

Today’s headline news for Canadian IT solution providers: Kaseya MSP Success ecosystem: Kaseya has launched MSP Success, a unified growth initiative led by EVP of Channel Dan Tomaszewski and backed by a 140-person global team. The ecosystem consolidates three programs: MSP Success Digital Marketing (AI-powered lead generation, website, and SEO/AEO tools in Express and Pro tiers), MSP Success Peer (combining TruMethods Peer and Technology Marketing Toolkit into a single accountability network), and the Kaseya Community hub at MSPsuccess.com. The launch is framed around a finding from Kaseya’s own 2026 State of the MSP Report: 71% of MSPs say acquiring new customers is their single biggest challenge. Zscaler agentic AI security: Zscaler has announced major innovations to its Zero Trust Exchange platform at Zenith Live 2026, including three new capabilities for securing agentic AI: Zscaler AI Broker (securing MCP and A2A agent communications via an integrated Agent Registry), Zscaler Endpoint AI Security (detecting AI-related threats in browsers, plugins, and local tools), and Zscaler AI Access Graph (mapping identities, apps, and data sources in real time, powered by the Symmetry Systems acquisition). The company is positioning this as the industry’s first complete Zero Trust platform for Agentic AI. FlexPoint AI agents for MSPs: FlexPoint launched what it describes as the first AI-powered agents purpose-built for the MSP back-office, built into its AI-native accounts receivable platform. According to FlexPoint, the agents automate billing, collections, payment reconciliation, and client follow-up workflows, and are designed to integrate into existing MSP toolstacks without requiring additional administrative headcount. Kaseya State of the MSP Report context: The 2026 Kaseya State of the MSP Report finds 48% of MSPs rank AI as their top client need, while difficulty hiring skilled technicians has risen from 9% to 16% year over year, compounding the business development challenges MSP Success is designed to address. DTEX behavior intelligence: DTEX Systems has announced a new behavior intelligence tool built specifically for its partner ecosystem, using behavioral science and machine learning to flag anomalies that indicate potential insider risk or accidental data loss events. ConnectSecure Patch 360: ConnectSecure launched Patch 360, a centralized patch management platform purpose-built for MSPs, offering consolidated visibility across endpoints and third-party applications to streamline remediation workflows. Tumeryk and CSA AI Trust Score: Tumeryk has announced a collaboration with the Cloud Security Alliance on the RiskRubric v2 AI risk framework, now covering agentic AI and MCP servers, and has launched its AI Trust Score assessment service in beta. Read Full Transcript Welcome to The Buzz from ChannelBuzz.ca, I’m Robert Dutt, today is Wednesday, June 10, and here’s what’s happening in the channel today. Kaseya yesterday launched MSP Success, a unified growth ecosystem designed to tackle what its own research identifies as the managed service provider community’s single biggest problem. According to Kaseya’s 2026 State of the MSP Report, 71% of MSPs say acquiring new customers is their primary challenge. MSP Success is Kaseya’s answer – a three-pillar initiative that consolidates the company’s existing growth programs under one roof. The first pillar, MSP Success Digital Marketing, is a new platform offering conversion-focused websites, AI-powered search and answer engine optimization, local search visibility, automated lead generation, and access to a dedicated marketing specialist. The platform comes in Express and Pro tiers depending on scale. The second pillar, MSP Success Peer, unifies two programs Kaseya has operated separately until now – TruMethods Peer and Technology Marketing Toolkit – into a single global accountability network with quarterly in-person meetings across North America, EMEA, and APAC. The third pillar is the Kaseya Community hub at MSPsuccess.com, a centralized resource and learning portal. The initiative is led by Dan Tomaszewski, EVP of Channel, supported by a 140-person global team. In a sector where technical excellence is table stakes, this is a signal that Kaseya is investing meaningfully in the business side of running an MSP, not just the tooling. Zscaler yesterday used its Zenith Live 2026 conference in Las Vegas to announce what it describes as the industry’s first complete Zero Trust platform for Agentic AI. The announcement extends Zscaler’s Zero Trust Exchange to address a challenge traditional security tools were not designed to handle: autonomous AI agents that operate at machine speed, create ephemeral identities, and access sensitive data in ways that conventional perimeter and identity-based tools cannot fully see or control. The centerpiece of the announcement is Zscaler AI Broker, which secures agent-to-agent and MCP-based communications through an integrated Agent Registry that governs what each AI agent is permitted to access. Alongside that, Zscaler introduced Endpoint AI Security, targeting threats hidden in browsers, plugins, extensions, and local AI tools that many legacy endpoint products miss. A third new capability, AI Access Graph, powered by Zscaler’s earlier acquisition of Symmetry Systems, maps how identities, applications, and data sources connect across an enterprise to enable real-time policy enforcement and data lineage tracking. For MSSPs building managed AI security practices, this is a significant platform update from one of the key SASE and zero trust providers in the market. FlexPoint yesterday launched what it is positioning as the first AI-powered agents purpose-built for the MSP back-office. The company, which operates an AI-native accounts receivable platform for service providers, says the new agents are designed to automate the financial workflows that consume significant administrative time inside MSP operations – billing, collections, payment reconciliation, and client follow-up. According to FlexPoint, the agents integrate directly into existing MSP toolstacks and are designed to work without requiring dedicated back-office headcount. The core argument from FlexPoint is that MSP revenue growth often stalls not because of a shortage of clients, but because back-office operations don’t scale proportionally. That framing aligns with the theme emerging from Kaseya’s research and this morning’s news – that the constraint on MSP growth is increasingly on the business operations side, not the technical side. In Brief – Kaseya’s announcement follows its own 2026 State of the MSP Report, which also finds that 48% of MSPs rank AI as their top client need and that difficulty hiring skilled technicians has nearly doubled year-over-year. DTEX Systems announces a new behavior intelligence tool built for its partner ecosystem, designed to detect insider risk through behavioral analytics and machine learning anomaly detection. ConnectSecure launches Patch 360, a new patch management platform purpose-built for MSPs, offering a centralized view across endpoints and third-party applications. Tumeryk and the Cloud Security Alliance announce a collaboration on RiskRubric v2, an AI risk assessment framework that now covers agentic AI and MCP servers, with Tumeryk launching its AI Trust Score assessment service as part of the ecosystem. Later today on In The Channel, ESTI Consulting Services’ Earl Gosick brings a Prairie data center perspective to a conversation about AI infrastructure, cyber resilience, and why the storage conversation is the one Canadian partners should be having right now. And if you haven’t heard it yet, yesterday’s episode features AWS Canada’s Martin Brazonet and CGI’s Dinesh Bhavsar on the launch of the AWS Partner Innovation Hub in Toronto – and why the gap between AI prototype and production is where the real partner opportunity sits. That’s how we’re seeing the headlines today. I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, thanks for listening. Have a great day.

Martin Brazinet, head of Technology at AWS Canada AWS Canada has opened its first Canadian Partner Innovation Hub in Toronto, a purpose-built facility designed to help Canadian businesses move from AI experimentation to production-ready implementation – with their partners in the lead. The center, publicly announced June 2 at the AWS Summit Canada, is the Canadian evolution of AWS’s GenAI Innovation Center (GenAIIC) model. Globally, 65 percent of solutions that went through the GenAIIC program have made it to production, some in as few as 45 days. The key distinction for the Toronto hub: it is explicitly built around partner delivery and scale. “Seventy percent of our customers are hoping to get their GenAI implementation done using a partner,” said Martin Brazinet, head of technology at AWS Canada. “Having an environment where we can bring our launch partners and show cross-industry specificity is how this came about.” The facility opens with four launch partners: CGI, Dedicatted, Elevata, and OpsGuru. Each visit is tailored rather than templated – partners customize the demos and talk track for a specific customer, then move into a structured workshop designed to get C-suite, architects, and line-of-business stakeholders aligned on a shared action plan before they leave. Dinesh Bhavsar, director of AI, emerging technologies and innovation at CGI, said the space addresses a gap he sees regularly in how customers approach AI adoption. “If you’re starting with AI as the solution, you’ve already failed,” he told In The Channel. “You haven‘t thought about what problem you’re actually trying to solve.” AWS says it intends to expand access beyond the four launch partners, with industry specificity and differentiated offerings being the primary selection criteria for future participants. Read Full Transcript Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca, your host for the show. So here’s a number worth thinking about. 650,000 Canadian businesses are already on the AI adoption path, but only a third of them have actually mastered it. The other two-thirds are still at a very basic level of implementation, and the challenge isn’t getting started, it’s getting serious. Moving from a proof of concept that generates excitement in the boardroom to a production solution that actually changes how the business runs. That gap between prototype and production is the problem AWS Canada is trying to help its partners solve, and on June 2nd, the company formally launched its answer, the Partner Innovation Hub in Toronto. I was on site the day before the launch for a couple of conversations. First, I sat down with Martin Brazinet, head of technology at AWS Canada, who walked me through the vision behind the centre, why it’s built around partners and what success actually looks like. Then I spoke with Dinesh Bhavsar, director of AI, emerging technologies and innovation at CGI, one of the four launch partners, about what the space means for his clients and how he thinks about sparking curiosity with customers who may not yet know what questions to ask. Let’s get right into it, starting with my chat with Martin Brazinet. Thanks for taking the time, really appreciate it, especially on the eve of the centre going public and getting it launched out there.Martin Brazinet: Oh, thank you very much. It’s my pleasure to be here with you, Rob. Rob: For folks who aren’t familiar with the concept or haven’t heard it yet, can you kind of give us the elevator pitch, I guess, for the Partner Innovation Centre – what it is and why Toronto is the place for it? Martin Brazinet: Yeah, no, for sure, Rob. Every day my team is working with customers and helping customers adopt AI on a continuous basis. We see a lot of excitement from customers who wanted to get deeper into AI. I believe in terms of Canadian customers, there are 650,000 customers already in Canada that have adopted AI. But surprisingly, only about a third of them have really mastered AI – two-thirds of them are still at a very basic level of AI adoption. And we see that, and customers want to get some support on having a better understanding of how they can adopt AI at a more transformative level that touches their industry and touches their requirement. And the AWS Partner Innovation Hub is really there for that – to provide that space where we can see solutions in action, having an immersive environment where we can, with our partners, show some solutions that are transformative, and then talk about an action plan on how to put that in effect within their environment. Rob: You guys have had other innovation spaces, innovation hubs, innovation centres, that kind of thing globally. Can you kind of tell me a bit about how you’ve built on those ideas? And especially, I’m interested because you chose to put “Partner” right on the tin in terms of the name of this centre – why was the partner focus so important for this one? Martin Brazinet: Yeah, of course. So I guess two-fold here. From a GenAI Innovation Centre perspective – and this is called GenAIIC – GenAIIC is something that we started in 2023 with a lot of demand from our customers. And this is based on our own experience of bringing customers into an immersive environment, thinking about their scenario, showing them solutions and prototypes. And that has been super successful – that was an AWS practice. We’ve brought thousands of customers globally to adopt the solutions that we were presenting. I think it’s 65% of the solutions that went through our GenAIIC that went to production, and some of them just within 45 days. Over time, we’ve adopted a lot of partner motion as part of the GenAIIC in order to scale it and bring way more industry knowledge, industry specificity. And so we took the best of the GenAIIC in terms of the demos and the industry specifics, and we made it more scalable. And this is how the hub here that we’re implementing in Toronto came about. Toronto is the first Canadian hub that we’re launching, and it’s really because we see that Canadian customers really want to have that partner support to launch their GenAI journeys. In fact, 70% of our customers are really thinking about using partners to be deploying their GenAI environment, and having an environment where we can bring our launch partners – that we’ll talk about in a minute – to bring that cross-industry specificity. Rob: Let’s talk a little bit about one of the problems that you’re designing to solve here – the dynamic that you see where AI projects stall out between proof of concept and actually getting out there and earning their keep in the business. How widespread a problem is that for Canadian partners talking to their customers today? Martin Brazinet: Well, I think that’s one of the problems, right? Our customers have started to adopt AI, and they had that first stage of adoption of having pretty basic implementation. And when it comes to having more complex use cases to address in terms of really trying to transform their industry, they lack some of the knowledge that is required to move this to production. And this is where working with partners such as the launch partners that we have here – which are CGI, Dedicated, Elevata, and OpsGuru – they’ve been going to those types of projects dozens of times. They know how to move from proof of concept to production, building the right runbook, upscaling the customer environment, and they are that proof of success that can really reassure customers in that journey to moving to production. Rob: We talked a little bit before this about a shift that you’re seeing in how purchasing decisions are being made – kind of away from IT and towards line of business, the people who actually own the ultimate solution. How do you find that’s changing what a partner actually does to spec, to architect, to close a deal? Martin Brazinet: Well, it comes back to the fact that right now, the solutions that were initially planned were very generic. When you’re buying an AI solution off the shelf, it’s relatively non-complex to bring to production, but then you don’t transform your business as much. And it’s really where you see the partner with different depth of expertise – whether it’s consulting expertise that really understands how you need to shift your production environment if you’re in a manufacturing environment, or if you’re a global organization – having the partners that understand those different dynamics and can bring their expertise to help them launch and transform your business. Rob: Is this a Canada-specific challenge, or something you’re seeing around the world? And if it is sort of a universal challenge – which I suspect at least to some degree it is – is there anything that’s specifically unique about the Canadian market and its peculiarities? Martin Brazinet: Yeah. I think overall Canadian businesses are, in some aspect, maybe less risk-taking than some other countries. Rob: You would not be the first who said that. Martin Brazinet: Yeah. So being supported by a partner that has the experience to move this into your environment is certainly reassuring to customers in terms of the chances of success and avoiding costly mistakes that some may have made. So I think this is kind of maybe more unique to Canada, and this is why the number that I shared earlier – of 70%, 70% of customers are hoping to get their GenAI implementation using a partner – there’s certainly a connection between those two data points there. Rob: Yeah. I sometimes use the term, “Canadian businesses like to have someone walk through the minefield first and see where it is.” In the case of the right partner who’s done this a bunch of times, they hopefully know where all those mines are beforehand, and specific to your industry. Rob: So let’s talk about the centre itself and the experience. Walk me through – if I’m a partner and I’m bringing a customer in here, what does that look like in practice? How does the experience unfold? Martin Brazinet: Yeah. So I think the first thing is every visit to the hub is expected to be a tailored visit. It’s not a demo centre where everybody gets the same experience. A partner is going to take the time to really tailor it with demos and a talk track that are certainly pertinent to the customer that is going to come. So with that in mind, the visit has two dimensions. The first dimension is to work through that immersive demo centre where they’re going to see curated demos that speak to their industry. And it’s going to give some form of reference in terms of the art of the possible – what is the most innovative organization in my specific industry thinking about, and solving problems in different ways? So I think that’s a very intuitive moment where the lights are turning on and you see the art of the possible. And then we’re going to shift to the second aspect of the visit, which is the workshop. And the workshop is where you build that alignment. We have the leadership of our customers present there, and it’s often a diverse set of personas that are going to come – it’s going to be the C-suite and the architects and the line of business, not just the CIO. And we’re bringing the partners’ architects and our architects as well from AWS. And altogether we’re going to try to align the value map of the use cases that they’re trying to solve from a customer perspective, and define what the workstreams are – whether it’s to do a better understanding of the KPI for that use case that we’re thinking about, or whether it’s to go directly to a proof of concept or proof of value, or just to bring it to production. We’re going to get that customized experience. So by the end of the session, the customer walks out of here not only having seen really impressive technology, but they’re going to walk out of here with a plan in hand and documented next steps that we can go and pursue together. Rob: And I think that last bit may inform this, but I’m curious what you think is the most powerful thing about this space – the thing that you think is really going to get things moving, get things unstuck and create some momentum toward getting AI solutions that are meaningful, that are delivering business outcomes. Martin Brazinet: You know, that’s a good question. There’s certainly the inspiration moment that is quite powerful – really understanding how technology can now solve a problem in a completely different way. And we try to say that to our customers: if you are going to implement a generative AI solution, don’t try to just automate the steps that are already part of your process, but try to look at it through a completely different lens so that you get a disproportionately better outcome. But to answer your question directly, I think some of the most powerful things that come out of here is the alignment – getting the leadership alignment of our customers, all being in the room, realizing the same capabilities together, and then brainstorming with subject matter experts on what the next steps are. You walk out of here with a consensus on what the best next steps are. And I think that alignment from the leadership perspective is really, really powerful. Rob: Is it a best practice to lock the door and not let anyone have pizza until everyone’s got on the same page? Martin Brazinet: Where did you learn about that? I cannot reveal my sources. Rob: So if I’m a partner who’s participating here and I want to bring a customer in – what does that look like in terms of lead time, in terms of setup, in terms of thinking through what I want to be showing and talking about? Martin Brazinet: I mean, I guess it depends on where you are in terms of your journey. There’s not a one-size-fits-all. If you’re pretty advanced in terms of defining the outcomes that you’re trying to drive and it’s really about understanding what technology we can align, it’s probably something that we can get ready to do in a couple of days. But if you’re still at the ideation level and you don’t really have a clear understanding of what you’re trying to do, there’s probably more work to do in terms of gathering the requirements and understanding what “good” looks like in terms of the outcome of that session. So I’d say anywhere between a couple of days to a week or two of prep work. Rob: And I guess lead time will depend on how popular the place is and how many customers are lining up outside the door. Martin Brazinet: Absolutely. And that’s why we have a few launch partners – so that we start with scale and each of them bring their own set of capabilities. And we also have the scaling factor behind having a few large launch partners with us. Rob: What’s the vision for the broader partner community going forward? You’re starting with four – what’s the message in terms of a roadmap for more partners having access, and how are you looking at what the qualifying metrics will be to get on the list to bring customers in? Martin Brazinet: Yeah. Well, I think to your point, this is a starting point. We’re starting with four and it’s not an ultra-gated approach – we want to scale. We want to bring partners that have differentiative offerings. I think that’s the main selection criteria. We’re looking to bring differentiative offerings from the perspective of either industry or type of use case. But this is expected to be a transformation session – not to talk about “oh, I just need to migrate from A to Z.” So if a partner has a specificity in terms of the industry or the way that they tackle problems, we’re certainly willing to hear it and scale our capabilities here. Rob: What are some of the things that you think will make for the best customers to bring in here, in terms of where they’re at in their journey – what the partners have identified as being beneficial for them versus maybe what the customer themselves has already figured out is beneficial for them? Martin Brazinet: I think it’s about rotating on the personas. We often pivot when we think about technology and AWS and cloud and AI to the tech owners of the businesses – we go to the CIOs and the architects. But a lot of the expectation from AI and generative AI is a revenue growth imperative that our customers are looking at, and that’s really a board-level priority. So we’re hoping to get more than just the usual technical leaders. Let’s go to the line of business – the people that are really interfacing with the industry problem they’re trying to solve – and see how AI and generative capabilities are now able to accelerate the innovation within that space. Rob: You mentioned the art of the possible on the customer side. I’m curious on the partner side – as I imagine we’re close enough to having customers going through here regularly that some of the partners have started to identify who they want to bring in – any surprises, without naming names or with naming names if you wish, in terms of what you’ve seen partners bringing to the table in terms of the types of customers or the types of things they want to be showing off? Martin Brazinet: Yeah, well, it’s a little bit early because we’re really launching this today – it’s going to be announced at the summit the day after tomorrow. So I think we’ll see that and make those discoveries as we go. We’re super excited and our partner ecosystem is really excited about that. But I can’t wait to get some of those learnings. Rob: So if this works out the way that you’re hoping, what does success look like a year from now? What are you measuring – is it deal velocity, customer outcomes that are actually out there, something else? Martin Brazinet: That’s a good one. I think the real measure of success is moving to production. Because that’s where the rubber meets the road and we are able to measure the outcome that we’re trying to drive. If it just turns out that we’re visiting the innovation hub and having great discussions and we walk out with a roadmap, but none of this goes into production – I think that’s the exact problem that we’re solving for. I’d say moving to production, and deepening the expertise into different industries, and really thinking about solving the problem in a different way – so that when we solve a problem in a different way, we can scale those learnings to other customers and help the Canadian industry evolve in that matter. Rob: Big picture – how significant do you think this place, and places like this, will ultimately play in moving the needle on AI adoption in the Canadian market, especially for partners and for customers? Martin Brazinet: Well, I think the opportunity is immense. If I just go back to my initial statement – there are 650,000 Canadian customers and two-thirds of which are at that very basic implementation of AI. We need to unblock those customers. We need to accelerate them. And I think places like this one are a way to get there. So I expect it’s going to be really impactful, providing this format is what customers need. They need to see things through a different lens and they definitely need the support of the partner community to move to implementation and get them to production. So I’m hoping it’s going to be really impactful for Canadian customers to accelerate their transformation. I think the number that I saw is that we expect 85% of the Canadian industry needs to change within the next five years, driven by AI adoption. So if we want our Canadian customers to stay innovative, to stay relevant, to be as productive and innovative as the rest of the industry, I think doing those experiments that we’re doing here with the hub is how we can help them. That’s a lot of folks through the centre. Rob: Good luck with the launch and getting partners in here and getting some of those AI projects moving forward. Thanks for taking the time. Martin Brazinet: No, thank you very much. It was great speaking with you today. That was Martin Brazinet from AWS Canada on the vision behind the Partner Innovation Hub and what it’s designed to unlock for Canadian businesses on their AI journeys. Now let’s hear the partner side of the story. Dinesh Bhavsar is director of AI, emerging technologies and innovation at CGI – one of the four companies tapped as launch partners for the facility. His take on what customers actually need, and the honest conversations partners sometimes need to have, is a nice complement to what we just heard from AWS itself. Rob: Dinesh, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it. Dinesh Bhavsar: Thanks for having me. I appreciate it as well. Rob: Tell me a little bit about where your customers at CGI are at with AI. Obviously one of the precepts here – and this is something I’ve heard from partners for at least the last year – the idea that we start out strong, we have lots of ambition to do AI, but we don’t necessarily know what we want to do, we don’t necessarily know how we want to do it. We don’t know what that outcome looks like. What are you seeing from customers today in terms of where their AI journey falls off, for want of a better phrase? Dinesh Bhavsar: Yeah, I think there’s a broad spectrum of maturity when it comes to understanding what AI is, what it’s not, and what it can do for the organization. So we’ve had great clients who have a really good, clear understanding of what AI can do for their business and their business processes. And then we’ve had clients who are just, “Hey, I need to implement AI – Dinesh, help me implement AI.” And it’s those clients where we really have to have the honest conversation about the fact that if you’re starting with AI or any technology as the solution, you’ve already failed. Because you haven’t thought about what problem you’re actually trying to solve, and yet you’ve jumped to AI being the solution for all things in life. I don’t think that’s the case in many instances, but you do have to have those honest conversations with clients about that. Rob: Tell me about how you guys got involved here with the centre. At what point did AWS pull you in, and what was the initial reaction to the idea of doing this kind of an innovation hub? Dinesh Bhavsar: Yeah, I think at CGI – and especially within our team in the emerging technologies, AI and innovation team – we really try to drive a culture of innovation, a culture of customer-first mindset. And through our partnership with AWS, we were able to bring clients in to work through that concept and that practice. So that really allowed our clients to understand what it really means to put customer-first in every opportunity, in every challenge that they’re trying to solve. And I think through that partnership, through that collaboration, this hub really allows us to bring that to life and really bring clients into that journey. And we’re hoping to bring more of those experiences to our clients, as well as our CGI partners. I think CGI as a whole is looking to innovate and drive more customer-centric, or client-centric delivery. And I think this practice, this centre, will allow us to showcase some of that as well with our partners. Rob: What do you think will be the most impactful, especially when it comes to the demos and the things that they can show off here? I know it’s hard to predict because every customer is going to be different, but just in terms of things that you think might really get into a customer’s mind. Dinesh Bhavsar: Yeah, I think it’s the application of AI. Real-world scenarios, real-world application – I think that’s going to stand out. It’s very easy to think about the theoretical aspects of everything that’s happening in the AI space. Like I said, clients can get very lost. All of us can get really lost in everything that’s happening. But when you try to bring it down to real, tangible examples where people can see it in action, that relates to their role or relates to their business process – I think that’s when AI really becomes real. And I think this allows us to showcase that. Rob: What do you think it’s going to do in terms of speed to value, speed to outcomes – whatever you want to call it – in terms of the sales and architecting cycle that you guys go through with customers? Dinesh Bhavsar: Yeah, I think it’ll accelerate that quite a bit. Again, I’m a big advocate of solutions – real screens, real models, real-world solutions – and less of theoretical slides. I think the days of current state assessments and advisory alone are of the past. I think clients expect us to show real working solutions. And once you actually have that – what I always say is 70%, 80% there – you only really have the balance to customize for the client. And that allows you to move a lot faster than how we do today. Rob: You guys, I have to presume, are very familiar with the idea of working with the C-suite and working across the business. But I’m curious how much more of a shift you’ve seen towards line of business and C-suite as we’re looking at this AI technology stack. Dinesh Bhavsar: Yeah, I think we’ve gone from the world of being curious and wanting to understand more about AI at that level – and a bit of FOMO, I think – we’ve had executives that are in the race for the sake of being in the race to deploy AI – to more of, “Okay, I understand the technology now. I really need to understand the ROI or the value that it’s going to help drive in our business. What impact does it have on our employees?” So technology alone is great, but really you need to surround yourself with the human-centered, customer-centric practices – like design thinking, systems thinking, for example – which are great practices to surround yourself with AI or any technology. And I think C-suites are now understanding what that human impact is going to be. Efficiencies, sure, but it’s really around empowering their employees with more decision-making power at a pace that hasn’t been there in the past. So I think that’s evolved. Like I said, there are some notions out there of being in the AI space because it’s the thing to do right now. But I think executives, I think middle managers are all taking a step back to really understand what value it can bring, and really understand the cost of maintaining and creating these models. So I think the maturity has evolved quite a bit. Rob: How important is it that it’s a physical location? You guys are obviously global in scale with customers both local and international. And the whole concept of the cloud, of AI, of all this – is that it’s out there, it’s everywhere, all at the same time. And yet it does come down to getting everyone in the same room and hashing it out, working it out, and getting everyone aligned on the same value. Dinesh Bhavsar: Yeah, I mean, I’m a big advocate of in-person experiences. So I think having a physical space does allow you to bring a different mindset when you walk into it – whether that’s how it’s laid out and how people can navigate the space, complemented by the technology there to help you think differently, and then of course the collaborative spaces that surround it. Whether it’s workshops, groupthink, communal seating – I think all of that makes a big difference in a space like the Innovation Hub here. I think it does help that people get away from their day-to-day routine and come through an experience like this, because I think it does help you think differently, think more boldly. And it allows you to, again like I said before, be vulnerable, ask all the questions, and know that you’re surrounded in a safe environment that allows you to do that and fosters it. So physical space, to me, is great. I’m a big advocate of whiteboarding. I love whiteboarding. I’m such a visual person that I just draw it all out and see how it all works. And you’d be surprised to see how quickly decisions can get made when everyone’s in a room together, focused on one thing and not distracted by the emails and the phone calls – but really allowing themselves for focused work, group work. Rob: It sounds like almost the benefits of an off-site type of meeting, just where the site involved happens to be purpose-driven for what you’re trying to do with it. Dinesh Bhavsar: Exactly. And you want to be intentional. You want to come in here for a purpose. You want to come here with intention. And you do need facilitation of that. And I think the space helps facilitate that thinking. I think the people in the room can help facilitate that as well. But I think it is much more important to have a space like this than to not. Rob: How are you thinking about the customers who come in here, especially in terms of prioritization? Is it the biggest opportunities first, or is it you want to look at those who have big hairy audacious goals, or those who maybe don’t quite realize yet what could be the goal? Dinesh Bhavsar: Yeah, it’s probably the last part. In my world in emerging technologies and innovation, our role is really to help clients think about things they haven’t thought about yet, help CGI partners think about things they haven’t thought about yet, and really the art of the possible. So I think having clients come through here and really seeing what it could be is very beneficial. I’m hoping that seeing real-world solutions really helps to say, “Okay, well, what is AI and how does it help me and my business process? And what does that mean for my employees? Or what does it mean for my customers? Or what does it mean for my partners?” And so I think those questions can all be sort of answered in a space like this, in an experience like this, with real solutions. So yeah, I think it’ll be great. I don’t necessarily prioritize in terms of the size of the pie. My job is more about sparking curiosity with all our clients. And so we focus a lot more on strategic pursuits than tactical delivery. Rob: In terms of the kinds of demos you want to be delivering, I’m curious how customized, how granular do you want to go on setting those up? Is it a matter of the more customized the better, or do you want to keep it at an industry level? What does best case look like for you? Dinesh Bhavsar: Yeah, I think for me, one thing is keeping it as simple as possible – that will get the most adoption and understanding of what we’re trying to showcase. I think industry-wide definitely helps, because then you can see what others are doing, or where the industry is headed, and how that can apply to your specific scenario. And then you have to flex, right? So I think there are certain demos that are very business-friendly – where you do have executives come in and want to understand those solutions at a high level – and then you can have it so that you can go technically deep as well for the right audience and have those conversations. So you do need to be able to flex the demo, but I would say industry-wide, what’s truly emerging – and again, focus on what clients perhaps are not thinking of or considering yet – and really show them the art of the possible. Rob: Last one for me – a year from now, once getting folks in here is a frequent experience and you’ve got lots of reps on it, what are you thinking about in terms of one specific type of AI success story that you hope will have come out of bringing a customer into this facility? Dinesh Bhavsar: Yeah, I think I hope to bring a lot more clients through this experience, as I call it. I’m hoping we can bring real-world AI solutions that have impacted not only the client themselves, but I think it’d be great to see AI supporting social good, and us being able to dive into responsible innovation as well. So an AI solution that’s helping Canadians collectively across the country would be a great AI use case. And we’re doing a lot of work at CGI in terms of responsible innovation and how do we drive AI for good, for Canadians, with Canadians. And I’m hoping that use case or something gets sprung from this space. Rob: Big goals. I wish you well on that. Dinesh Bhavsar: Yeah, appreciate it. Thanks for having me. Rob: Thank you. There you have it – Martin Brazinet from AWS Canada and Dinesh Bhavsar from CGI. I’d like to thank both Martin and Dinesh for their time, and for carving out space for these conversations in the middle of what was a busy launch week. A couple things that stuck with me from these two interviews. Martin’s numbers are worth sitting with: of 650,000 Canadian businesses already on the AI journey, only about a third have gone deep. Two-thirds are still at the basics – not for lack of ambition. It’s just that moving from proof of concept to production is genuinely hard. It takes industry expertise, stakeholder alignment, and someone who’s been through the minefield enough times to know where the mines are. What I appreciate about Dinesh’s perspective is how direct he is with customers about the starting point. If someone comes to CGI and says, “I need to implement AI – help me,” he’ll be the first to tell them that they’ve already made a mistake, because they jumped to the solution before identifying the problem. That’s a conversation a lot of partners are navigating right now, and it’s a healthy one to hear out loud. The hub itself is an interesting bet on the idea that getting the C-suite, the architects, and the line-of-business people in the same room, seeing the same demos, and walking out with a shared plan is what actually gets these projects unstuck. The model has a good track record globally – 65% of solutions through AWS’s GenAIIC program have made it to production – so there’s something to build on here. If you found this one useful, I’d love to have you follow or subscribe to the podcast. We’re on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and most of the major directories. And if you’ve got a moment, ratings and reviews are always helpful. Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.

Today’s headline news for Canadian IT solution providers: ConnectWise Platform: ConnectWise yesterday unveiled what it calls the industry’s first purpose-built platform for Predictive IT, unifying PSA, RMM, cybersecurity, automation, workflow orchestration, and native agentic AI into a single execution layer for managed services. CEO Manny Rivelo described it as a fundamental shift from reactive IT management to an AI-native operating model. The company also released new operational benchmark modeling based on a representative MSP with approximately $3M in annual managed services revenue, showing the productivity and economic impact it says AI-driven automation can deliver. Cavelo Cora AI Security Analyst: Kitchener, Ontario-based Cavelo has introduced Cora, an AI Security Analyst integrated into its data security posture management platform and positioned specifically for MSPs and MSSPs. Cavelo says Cora analyzes security telemetry and translates it into a guided remediation action plan in seconds, tailored by role. The tool targets the operational gap between risk visibility and actual remediation – without requiring additional headcount. Radiant Logic and Zscaler Partnership: Radiant Logic and Zscaler have announced a technology partnership aimed at solving the Day 1 access problem in mergers and acquisitions. By integrating RadiantOne’s identity data fabric with the Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange, the companies say acquiring organizations can securely connect newly onboarded employees to applications from the moment a deal closes, regardless of disparate identity systems. ConnectSecure Patch 360: ConnectSecure is launching Patch 360, a patch management platform built for MSPs that introduces pilot-first validation, risk-based prioritization using CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities and EPSS scoring, controlled rollouts with approval workflows, and integrated rollback – replacing what the company describes as a “deploy-and-hope” model with a “test-and-trust” framework. NTT DATA and Google Cloud: NTT DATA is expanding its AI partnership with Google Cloud, launching a dedicated Gemini Enterprise practice to help enterprise clients move AI deployments from pilot to production at scale. Descope Agentic Identity Hub: Identity platform Descope is announcing enhancements to its Agentic Identity Hub today, extending its tools for managing authentication and access for autonomous AI agents. Checkmarx CISO Research: Checkmarx has released research surveying more than 2,000 developers and CISOs, finding that 95 percent of CISOs report facing internal pressure to suppress software compliance findings. Read Full Transcript Welcome to The Buzz from ChannelBuzz.ca, I’m Robert Dutt, today is Tuesday, June 9, 2026, and here’s what’s happening in the channel today. ConnectWise yesterday unveiled what it is calling the industry’s first purpose-built platform for the era of Predictive IT. The ConnectWise Platform brings together PSA, RMM, cybersecurity, automation, workflow orchestration, and native agentic AI into what the company describes as a single intelligent execution layer for managed services. CEO Manny Rivelo positioned it as a fundamental shift away from the labor-intensive, disconnected systems that have defined MSP operations for decades, toward what ConnectWise calls an AI-native operating model. To support the launch, the company released new operational benchmark modeling showing the productivity and economic impact it says AI-driven automation can have on MSP operations. In their model, a representative managed services firm with approximately three million dollars in annual revenue could see measurable transformation across their first stages of the Predictive Intelligence journey. This is a significant platform bet from one of the largest players in the MSP tooling market, and the framing around “Predictive IT” is clearly a narrative ConnectWise intends to own. In the security space, Kitchener, Ontario-based Cavelo has introduced Cora, an AI Security Analyst integrated directly into its data security posture management platform. Positioned specifically for MSPs and MSSPs, Cora functions as an AI agent that analyzes security telemetry to identify, prioritize, and recommend remediation steps for cyber risks across client environments. Rather than adding more alerts to the dashboard, Cavelo says the tool translates security data into a guided action plan in seconds, tailored to the specific roles of frontline technicians and senior security leaders. The development targets a well-documented operational gap between risk visibility and remediation – allowing service providers to reduce manual investigation time and offer clients clear, actionable intelligence without increasing headcount. Radiant Logic and Zscaler have formed a strategic partnership designed to address the Day 1 access challenges commonly found in mergers and acquisitions. By integrating RadiantOne’s identity data fabric with the Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange, the companies are aiming to eliminate the complex network and identity merge projects that typically stall productivity following a deal close. The joint solution allows acquiring organizations to securely connect newly onboarded employees to necessary applications from day one, regardless of disparate Active Directory or HR systems. In a market where M&A activity among IT service providers shows no sign of slowing, this integration offers a repeatable framework for reducing the downtime and cyber risk associated with bringing acquired entities onto a managed environment – which is a practical and recurring service challenge for many MSPs in the field. In Brief – ConnectSecure launches Patch 360, a patch management platform for MSPs built on pilot-first testing, risk-based vulnerability prioritization, and integrated rollback controls. NTT DATA expands its AI partnership with Google Cloud, launching a dedicated Gemini Enterprise practice to help organizations move deployments from pilot to production scale. Descope is announcing enhancements today to its Agentic Identity Hub, aimed at helping organizations manage access for autonomous AI agents. Checkmarx research of more than 2,000 developers and CISOs finds 95 percent of CISOs report facing pressure to suppress software compliance findings. Full details and links in the show notes or the blog post. Later today on In The Channel, we have a conversation about the launch of the AWS Partner Innovation Hub in Toronto, with AWS Canada’s Martin Brazonet and CGI’s Dinesh Bhavsar on the challenge of moving AI from proof-of-concept to production. And if you haven’t heard it yet, check out our conversation with Earl Gosick from ESTI Consulting Services, recorded at Dell Technologies World, on why the AI story is really a storage story – that one is on the feed now. That’s how we’re seeing the headlines today. I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, thanks for listening. Have a great day.

Nigel Brown, CTO of Microserve Not every voice at Dell Technologies World last week belonged to a vendor. For a partner perspective on the week’s biggest themes, In The Channel sat down with Nigel Brown, CTO of Microserve – a Burnaby, BC-based solution provider, Dell Titanium partner, and Dell’s Client Solutions Partner of the Year in Canada in consecutive years. Brown walked away from DTW with deskside agentic AI as his headline takeaway, particularly after hands-on time in a Dell lab showcasing NemoClaw – NVIDIA’s enterprise-governance take on the OpenClaw open-source agent framework. “They’ve set it up closed by default – it can’t leave the box,” Brown says. “That’s a safety net that really opens the conversation.” That said, he’s clear-eyed about where most of his public sector and enterprise clients actually are. “Broad scope, it’s ahead. The hardware is going to follow it.” The tokenomics reality landed hard too. Brown shared a personal story about spending a hundred dollars testing Claude on a single flight – a relatable example he’s started using to frame the real cost implications of unmanaged AI usage, well before any on-premises or local inference conversation begins. On cyber resilience, Brown says he’s had to evolve his approach: “I got to be more of a jerk. I was being too nice.” His firm’s managed backup practice has seen firsthand the damage when clients – and even other MSPs – treat backup as a checkbox. When you show up after a ransomware event to find the backup server was on the same domain and hit just as hard, the conversation changes. And on Canadian data sovereignty, Brown goes beyond the standard data-residency talking points. FISA Section 702 and the CLOUD Act, he argues, represent far more serious legal exposure than most clients realize – even those who believe a Canadian cloud region is sufficient protection. The conversation also covers the AI PC refresh cycle colliding with supply chain pressure, the end-user adoption gap that’s undermining Copilot investments, and what Dell’s revised partner incentive structure signals about where the growth opportunities are. Read Full Transcript Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In the Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca and your host for the show. Last week, I was at Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas, Dell’s big annual customer and partner event. Over the course of the week, I had a number of conversations that I’ll be bringing here on In the Channel. Last week, we featured three Dell executives. This week, we’re bringing you some partners. Today, we start on that partner perspective, specifically from one of Canada’s top Dell partners. Nigel Brown is CTO of Microserve, a Burnaby, BC-based solution provider that has earned Titanium status with Dell and taken home Dell’s Client Solutions Partner of the Year in Canada in consecutive years. Microserve serves an enterprise and public sector-heavy client base, which means Nigel’s job is regularly about taking what gets announced on a stage in Las Vegas and translating it into something that makes sense for organizations that don’t necessarily move at conference speed. I caught up with Nigel on site at DTW last week. We covered a lot of ground – deskside agentic AI and what it’s actually going to take to make that real for customers, the very real cost of token economics, why he’s had to be, as he put it, more of a jerk about cyber resilience, and why the Canadian data sovereignty conversation is more urgent than most people realize. Let’s get right to it. My chat with Nigel Brown. Nigel, thanks for taking the time. Appreciate it. Nigel Brown: Happy to be here. Thanks for having me. Robert Dutt: So you guys are here, obviously, as a Titanium-level Dell partner, consecutive years as the Client Solutions Partner of the Year in Canada. What’s your overall read on this week? What made your ears stand up? What caught your attention? What are you taking back to both your team and to your customers when you go back to Burnaby? Nigel Brown: That’s a really good question. It’s also a big one. There’s been a lot of announcements, a lot of dialogue over the last couple of days. I’m trying to process that a little bit, assuming you were going to ask me that. I think the biggest takeaway I had – everybody’s heard of OpenClaw, everybody’s heard all the IT people are terrified of it, so it’s more, how do we get rid of it in our environments? Seeing this whole push around deskside agentic AI, especially given our market where we play a lot with clients – I actually had the opportunity, I did the lab today because I couldn’t resist seeing what it’s like. The governance and security wrapper on it totally makes sense and it’s opened my eyes. I think that’s probably the biggest. Beyond that, I would say the Dell hardware being able to run frontier models, seeing Gemini running local for sovereignty conversations – I think that’s a really good thing to see as well. Robert Dutt: Along those lines, obviously you touched on one of the big stories this week, which is deskside AI – the idea of physical infrastructure that’s at or near the customer’s desk, either in the data center or right there in the PC, that’s processing the models locally. It sounds like something that you’re interested in. I’m curious where it lands for your customers. Is it something that’s a conversation point, or is it ahead of where they are in the AI discussion at this point? Nigel Brown: I would say broad scope – I don’t want to lump all my customers into one bucket – but broad scope, it’s ahead. I don’t think you’re seeing a lot of organizations ready for it. We also deal heavily with public sector enterprise accounts, for example. We’re doing more and more in the commercial market where you’re going to see a little bit more playing and adoption within tech teams. But in ours, yeah, I’d say we’re definitely ahead right now. So it gives you a chance to get in there and pitch the idea as something new and plant those seeds. Once I get it past my IT and security folks, then that’s where it’s all going to start. If I can’t get it through mine in a good conversation, then I’m never going to be able to with our clients. Robert Dutt: But it sounds like there’s at least that – from your comments on OpenClaw, it sounds like there’s that door, that area of interest. Nigel Brown: Seeing it today under the NemoClaw and Viya umbrella – yeah, I think there’s definitely something there. They’ve set it up closed by default. It can’t leave the box. That’s what I saw in the lab today. So until you set up essentially like a firewall rule to allow it to do something, it’s a safety net that I think really opens the conversation and allows the idea of end users actually playing. Those are really early adopters anyway. And how could I integrate agentic AI into organizations? Robert Dutt: Man, how often does it come back down to governance with AI? Nigel Brown: Oh, absolutely. That’s pretty much the name of the game everywhere. And so we’re doing it well, and many are still scrambling. Robert Dutt: You touch on you guys having a lot of public sector, healthcare, education, all those kinds of verticals – not always the fastest to move on new tech. Along the lines of the previous questions, but sort of taken out a notch – how much of what the AI announcements we’ve heard this week translate directly to where your customers are at, versus how much needs to be, shall we say, adapted for the reality of your accounts? Nigel Brown: Well, you go to any of these events and it’s, “We’re behind if we’re not doing agentic AI everywhere.” Reality is, it’s just not true. I think it’s very forward-thinking – or very optimistic – to think we’re all moving that fast. It’s headed in that direction quicker and quicker. Executive tables are always the ones sitting there going, “We want it, we need it in our organizations, we’re going to get left behind.” So it’s very top of mind. But some organizations have very niche deployments – they’re figuring out the right solutions. Healthcare – I’ve seen it, they’ve done some phenomenal things in radiology and other areas. So it’s picking up. We’re dealing with one client right now that’s looking at online pharmacy and they’re looking at a huge Dell compute cluster to run AI on. So you see it, but it’s not commonplace. It’s not every organization. Certainly as you get into municipalities and things like that, it’s Copilot at best – that’s really where they’re trying to play – and their user base just isn’t adopting, not even close. Robert Dutt: So it sounds like there are at least a couple of steps that need to happen to get to the point of, A, using what’s already in place and, B, potentially looking at building out something internally – and the stuff that’s been talked about here a lot, the idea of running those AI workloads internally on the data center side. Nigel Brown: Yeah. I think it’s going to get there for sure. Right now the conversation has to be outcomes – not “I want AI.” And right now it’s so heavily, “Well, I know I need it, I don’t know what for yet.” I’ve seen it even in some peer groups – the dialogue is, “Well, we’re going to do AI, we’re going to build agents.” So, what for? And then there’s a long pause. Driving outcomes conversations is where it’s going to start, in my opinion. The hardware is going to follow it. And that really ties into, well, where are you going to run it? Do you understand token economics – or tokenomics, whatever the buzzword is right now – and that’s a really big deal. For me, getting that message out really loud and clear around the cost of tokens – I’ve done it, I’ve gotten burned. I spent a hundred bucks on a plane because I wanted to see Claude do something cool. And you’re going, wow, if I can do that in 10 minutes, think of what larger organizations will spend if they don’t find a smarter way to run it. Robert Dutt: That’s a good point – it’s not something you necessarily understand, but it’s something you can sure feel if you start to have adventures with the stuff. Nigel Brown: Well, exactly. And all it’s going to take – like I said, a lot of organizations started with Copilot under the Microsoft umbrella, because it was like an easy button. It was there for them, it was already set up. I am worried about some of those days changing, where that subscription turns into usage-based models. And we’ll see where that goes. You’re seeing it with Anthropic, you’re seeing it with Perplexity. I bounce off my limits all the time. Most of what I’m doing I can wait till tomorrow – but it’s easy to get out of control. Robert Dutt: And user computing is pretty core to what you guys do. There are a few things going on there – Windows 11 end-of-life support coming in October, the AI PC push coming from every direction at the same time. I’m curious if those two things are coming together in customer conversations as one refresh decision, or are they still separate tracks – the need to modernize for the Windows upgrade versus the need to modernize to get the most out of AI workloads? Nigel Brown: I think the end-of-support conversation and hardware refresh, honestly, is the biggest driver of the conversation that I’ve seen. And then that leads into, well, do I need an AI PC, and why, and what’s going to run on it? Everybody’s exploring and curious about it. There’s more skepticism about whether you need it now. Robert Dutt: How is that hitting along with the current fun situation with hardware constraints and prices spiking? And we’re hearing pretty directly from Jeff Clarke that, you know, telling customers, let us know what you want as early in the process as you can. I think the natural addendum to that is, make decisions knowing you might have this machine for a little bit longer than you previously expected. Nigel Brown: Totally right. So it’s very much my dialogue with our clients – it’s future-proofing. You better do it now. You don’t want to be stuck with a machine that can’t run an NPU for the next five years. So even if right now there’s skepticism about how much is going to run on it today, I think it is an important conversation to have and make sure that we’re ready for the moments where we’re really seeing workloads and inferencing running on device. You have to have that conversation now and pre-plan for it. But yeah, it’s been – especially in public sector – a hard conversation to have right now. Supply chain – we’re like a broken record. It still surprises me how many clients we talk to that haven’t seen this coming, that don’t know it’s real, or you get the ones going, “Well, I think it’s going to clear up in September, I’ll just wait till then.” Oh man. Brace for it. We’ve got to be ready. It just feels like a conversation on repeat these days – and it’s more than worth it, making sure we’re doing model selection with the future in mind. Robert Dutt: I find it’s a fun time to be a partner in that particular space. Nigel Brown: Well, you know, quote volume has quadrupled, because that same customer deal might take four different passes before they’ve made it through, especially in government. Pricing validity is a real challenge. It’s a moving target – no decision ever gets made fast. Robert Dutt: I want to talk a little about cyber resilience – another big topic here at the event. You guys run a managed backup practice, I understand, and you’re doing a lot of what vendors are asking MSPs to evolve towards. When you get into a customer environment today, what’s the most common gap between what they think their backup situation looks like and the reality of the situation? Nigel Brown: That’s an interesting question. It’s a real mixed bag. I always start with, “How confident are you in your ability to recover?” And most leaders – business leaders, outside of IT – there’s like a long pause. “Well, I don’t know.” Okay. Have you ever tested your recovery capability? No. Well, that’s where we’re going to start. And in other dialogues, they think they’ve got the backups running, but nobody’s been looking at them – they’re coming from doing it themselves, or maybe a mom-and-pop IT person taking care of it. They’re not watching, they’re not looking at tools, they’re not getting alert notifications on whether it’s keeping up and whether they’re protected. So that’s very foundational. Warning new clients – it’s just, let’s take them on that journey, do an assessment of the whole environment, make sure we’re protected. And a lot of conversations are, “Do you know that you’re not protected? Like, if you got ransomware tomorrow, there’s nothing I could do to help you, even though I’m your MSP.” That’s a scary reality. I’ve seen that have to go back to boards and make some tough decisions, find budget and solve it. They usually do – they react fast – but you’ve got to make the risk abundantly clear. Robert Dutt: That makes sense. In talking to Rob Emsley, who’s on the marketing team for the cyber resilience side at Dell, he was saying that 97% of cyber attacks now are specifically targeting backup infrastructure – because it turns out that’s where all the stuff is. Does that match what you’re seeing, and has that shift changed what you’re recommending to customers about what being protected really means for them? Nigel Brown: I wouldn’t say it’s really changed our messaging. I’d like to think we were maybe ahead of the curve in talking about storage and immutability – some of these key elements of, well, you just need it. That’s how we run our hosted service for clients that use it. And if we’re building out an architecture for another client, it’s just fundamental these days. You can’t even consider a solution that doesn’t include immutability protection, being able to spot bad things happening. But I’ve seen it – we’ve come into a disaster client where, “Hey, we got ransomware, can you help us recover?” And you go to the backup server to find out it was ransomwared too. “Do you have any tapes floating around?” It’s a tough chat to have. You see that less these days, but you definitely see the attempts – people trying to do it. And even other MSPs – I hate to say it – they’re not mature enough in how they’re protecting. They took the backup server, joined it to the domain – it’s just another device on the network. And sure enough, that’s exactly what gets hit because they didn’t plan it out. So it’s all planning and doing it right in the first place. Robert Dutt: It’s a checkbox as opposed to something that’s more firmly thought through. Given that, how do you approach it with customers? Do you come at it as, “This is something you should do, these are the reasons why, this is the potential downside” – or is it a thou-shalt kind of conversation? Nigel Brown: You know, a pile of years ago, after seeing an incident hit a new customer, I kind of resolved – I’ve got to be more of a jerk. I hate to say it. I got to be a lot tougher in my stance. I was being too nice. So yeah, in all things on this, my position is to generally take a pretty firm line. It’s all about risk, though. And to business leaders especially, that’s a term they understand. I’m not telling them, “Okay, you need this type of backup solution and it’s going to do these things.” It’s all about, how do we address the risk that you have right now? Leave it to us to figure out the details as we design the solution. Rarely do we get into the weeds of it unless it’s a larger client where we’re dealing with a large IT team that has opinions. But usually in those larger environments, there are groups that are already aligned – they know what they should be doing, maybe just haven’t done it themselves yet. The new architecture is absolutely going to include all those steps. So it’s an easier conversation to have. In some ways, it’s giving them permission if you’re coming in as a new supplier – it’s the stuff they’ve wanted to do, but haven’t really had the air cover to make the case. Robert Dutt: Yeah, you come in as that outside opinion to say, this is how it needs to be. Nigel Brown: And our job is often more of just a translator for those IT teams to their leadership – to help support the business case. Robert Dutt: I want to talk about the Modern Partner Platform and some of the partner program changes that have rolled out this week. One of the big things is obviously the revised incentive structure, with cyber resilience particularly called out as a premium rebate area. From your seat as a Titanium partner, what does the new structure tell you about where Dell sees the biggest growth opportunities for partners? Nigel Brown: Well, I think it does exactly that – it says where the growth opportunities are. And largely there was no surprise. In my opinion, when you look at it, it aligns to how we want to lead deals, it aligns with the conversations we’re already going to have. Now it’s just helping incentivize that dialogue. Nothing surprising there – I just see better alignment. Robert Dutt: Let’s play a little bit of “anything can happen here.” Vendors like Dell are starting to build agentic AI into their programs, their portals, their tools – all the stuff you guys work with every day. Where do you see the most genuine value for an organization like your own in vendors – agentifying, for want of a better word – their partner programs and tools? And the flip side: are there any potholes you’re watching out for as that rolls out? Nigel Brown: You know, the more the merrier – more tools you can bring in is great. We’re always excited to see what they come up with. But to me, the bottom line is back to outcomes. It’s about reducing friction in the sales process. What do we want our sellers to do? We want them out selling. Living in a partner portal trying to find what they need, deal registration, all of those things that can be painful – sometimes it’s just admin work taking you away from conversations with clients. Reduce friction – that’s the name of the game. Do I want to see more AI-generated marketing content? No. We can do that ourselves – one prompt, feed something in, done. To me, the more you can expose what matters to us and reduce friction, the better. It keeps us doing what we should be doing and not sitting there doing admin work. Robert Dutt: It sounds like based on that comment, what Dell and a lot of its peers are doing is already on track – because I’m sure they’re asking these exact same questions of partners around the world right now. Nigel Brown: Oh, they’ve got way smarter people than me working in these massive organizations. They know the outcomes we want to achieve. And I’m excited that we’re at a point in time where we can see some of this come to fruition. Ten years ago, this was never a reality. Robert Dutt: What’s the biggest misconception you think your customers have about what it means to be AI ready right now? Nigel Brown: I think it depends on who the conversation is centered around. If it’s C-suite leadership, it’s back to, “We want AI, I don’t know what for, I don’t know what it is, but I know I need it.” There are tough conversations to be had. AI readiness is really, is your data ready? We heard that on stage this morning. Most organizations we walk into – it turns out they’ve got no data governance. So, let’s define some of this, let’s build some process, look at the right tools. In the Microsoft lens, we do a lot around Microsoft 365 and modern workplace. Well, then it’s a Purview conversation. And they get confused – “Why are you talking about DLP and Purview? I thought we were talking about AI readiness.” That’s exactly what it’s all about. The other big one I think they’re not taking seriously enough is the end-user adoption side. I’ve seen organizations – you go into their portals and have a look with them – their adoption of Copilot, where they’ve spent a whole pile of money, is abysmal. So then the dialogue is, “What you actually need to do is get your users excited. Train them, show them the cool things.” I think we’ve been really successful doing that inside our own organization, and now that’s something we deliver to our clients as well – we need to get your teams ready and thinking differently. At a C-suite level, they’re usually surprised at the path it takes, or in some cases how long it might take to get there. “Your data is in such rough shape – you’re two years away. You need to build a foundation before you can really consume it.” Now, some of the announcements this morning – okay, that starts changing the equation. We could get there faster if we have the right infrastructure in place. Robert Dutt: For a variety of reasons, the Canadian data sovereignty question feels like it’s getting louder. And I have to imagine, especially in your public sector footprint, how are you helping customers think through AI infrastructure decisions when data residency and compliance are an increasing part of the equation? Nigel Brown: It’s a non-negotiable for most of our enterprise and public sector clients. It’s going to run on-prem. They cannot afford to run on cloud. Yes, they want the latest models, the frontier models, the cool bells and whistles as we all do. But really – I presented at a conference last year on exactly this topic, why it’s important to bring it back on-prem. Never mind the tokenomics conversation – now there’s just more ammunition. I chatted with one IT leader, a commercial client, not public sector, who was all proud of how he’d migrated everything to cloud. We were in a session where they talked through the tokenomics challenge and another reason why sovereignty matters. And you watch the look on his face go, “Wow, I’m going to have to start building a data center again. I thought I got out of that.” And he was sitting there with his CEO in the room for that conversation. Kind of a wake-up call. So my dialogue is, let’s talk through what does the Patriot Act mean? What does FISA Section 702 mean? It’s a little bit scary, and people are shocked – “I thought running in Google Cloud or AWS, running it in a Canadian location was good enough.” No. That provider has access to your data. Have you heard of the CLOUD Act? That’s nothing compared to FISA 702 – they don’t even need to ask. They can just go and get it. And that’s pretty scary. So yeah, a lot of our job now is just sharing and communicating the right things to our clients and making sure they’re aware. Robert Dutt: Aside from your efforts to bring that education – do you find that the level of general awareness is on the rise? Are we getting to more of a discussion about how to solve for this, rather than still defining the scope of the problem? Nigel Brown: I would love to say it’s more mature. The reality is no – it’s still early-stage conversations. You get anomalies. We were with some clients who are way ahead and have just deployed Azure Local on Dell infrastructure. They’re doing amazing things, moving fast. So now it’s more, “How can I partner with you to go share this message? Why you went there, why you built it this way, what are you doing about it?” But no, it’s going to be a continued push – much like the supply chain story here – these dialogues just repeat as you walk into client after client. Robert Dutt: Last one for me – along the same lines as the first question, but a slightly different lens. What’s one thing from this week that you think will genuinely change what Microserve brings to customers in the next 12 months? Nigel Brown: I come back to where we started – the whole side of agentic AI. That was not on my radar, not in a serious way. “Let’s play around with this, let’s lab it out, see where it’s getting explored.” When you see a name like Dell behind what we’re doing, that got me more excited than I would have thought. I want to pilot inside our org. And if we can start building something that works here, then absolutely – taking that to clients and saying, “Okay, look at the GB10s, look at the GB300s, let’s move up the ladder.” There’s a tangible path that gives them more value than trying to build massive solutions right out of the gate. There are quick wins there, and that’s what excites me – showing a customer how there could be a quick win if we did this right. And it ties into the last thread we were pulling on – “Okay, you’re telling me I shouldn’t have all this stuff running on public cloud, so where’s it going to run?” And you’re not talking megawatts and massive data centers here. All I want to do is automate tasks and do some of this lower-level stuff. I think that’s going to be an interesting entry point for a lot of clients – making it more accessible. Everybody’s used ChatGPT, Claude, whatever their tool of choice is, so they’re into prompting. Nobody’s really understanding Copilot or understanding agentic – it’s a big buzzword. That’s our job. We can show them a slice of the possible, mock up these use cases, and those are quick wins. Then it is something deployable at scale – you just move it from the little box to a bigger box. The more people take advantage of it and keep moving up the scale, you don’t need to go spend millions upfront to play around with something like that. It’s going to open more doors. Robert Dutt: No shortage of interesting opportunities. Good luck getting out there and chasing those, and thanks again for making the time this week. Nigel Brown: You bet. Thanks for having me.

Today’s headline news for Canadian IT solution providers: ASUS Canada Country Manager: ASUS Canada has announced the appointment of Vernon Coutinho as Country Manager for its System Business Group. Made ahead of the ASUS Business Summit 2026 in Toronto, the move underscores the company’s long-term growth ambitions in the commercial market as it accelerates its focus on AI-ready devices. 7AI PLAID ELITE Launch: Security vendor 7AI has launched PLAID ELITE, a fully managed, AI-native security operations solution. The platform uses agentic AI to autonomously complete the majority of investigations end-to-end, offering partners a way to scale security operations without increasing headcount. Guardz Appoints Channel Leader: SMB cybersecurity platform Guardz has appointed former Pax8 executive Danni Munro as its new Director of Channel Sales for the ANZ region. The hire reflects a broader global channel push by the vendor to help MSPs meet the accelerating demand for consolidated security services. ChannelNEXT Toronto: TechnoPlanet‘s ChannelNEXT conference kicks off tomorrow in Toronto, gathering Canadian VARs and MSPs to tackle pressing channel challenges. The event will feature extensive discussions on the future of the channel ecosystem. ManageEngine Autonomous AI: ManageEngine is rolling out an autonomous AI push designed to streamline IT operations. The initiative aims to help MSPs handle increasingly complex environments with automated workflows. Tech Builders 2026: Global Startups will host the Tech Builders 2026 conference in Toronto on June 16, focusing on the new digital economy. The event will explore AI, venture capital, and Canada’s role as a global innovation hub. Tech Financing Adoption: Mitsubishi HC Capital Canada is urging the channel to embed financing into partnerships. Director of Technology Finance Jim Moschos believes this approach will help clients overcome the high upfront costs of complex technology implementations. CRTC Streaming Demands: The CRTC has officially ordered streaming giants like Netflix and Apple TV to boost their spending on Canadian content. The regulatory move is designed to support the domestic production industry. Read Full Transcript Welcome to The Buzz from ChannelBuzz.ca, I’m Robert Dutt, today is Wednesday, May 27th, and here’s what’s happening in the channel today. Yesterday, ASUS Canada announced the appointment of Vernon Coutinho as Country Manager for its System Business Group. The announcement, which came just ahead of the ASUS Business Summit in Toronto, reflects the company’s long-term growth ambitions in the Canadian commercial market. Coutinho, who brings nearly 30 years of industry experience, will oversee strategy and performance across consumer, gaming, and commercial segments. For Canadian MSPs, this signals a deepening of the ASUS partner ecosystem locally. The company is actively accelerating its focus on AI-ready commercial devices, bringing its consumer DNA into the workplace. According to ASUS, the goal is to elevate the business laptop experience by delivering devices that are secure, manageable, and enjoyable to use. Also on Tuesday, 7AI announced the availability of PLAID ELITE, a fully managed, AI-native security operations solution. The platform combines autonomous investigation by AI agents with expert oversight from 7AI security engineers, delivering a continuous, follow-the-sun security outcome. The company is positioning the tool as a way for organizations to protect their environments without needing to build or scale an internal operations team. What makes this relevant for the channel is the service model. Rather than relying entirely on human analyst shifts, PLAID ELITE’s coverage scales with investigation volume through agentic AI. 7AI noted that agents are now autonomously completing the majority of investigations end-to-end, allowing partners to drive security outcomes through technology rather than headcount. Cybersecurity platform Guardz has appointed former Pax8 executive Danni Munro as its new Director of Channel Sales for the Australia and New Zealand region. While this is an international appointment, Munro’s background in scaling Pax8’s operations underscores a broader channel push by Guardz. The company is actively deepening its partner relationships to meet accelerating demand from small and medium-sized businesses facing rising ransomware threats. This move highlights a continuing global trend where cybersecurity vendors are relying on seasoned channel veterans to help MSPs deliver consolidated security services to clients who lack the internal expertise to manage threats independently. In Brief – TechnoPlanet’s ChannelNEXT conference kicks off tomorrow in Toronto to address pressing partner challenges. ManageEngine says its new autonomous AI push will streamline IT operations for managed service providers. Global Startups is set to host the Tech Builders 2026 conference in Toronto on June 16. Mitsubishi HC Capital Canada is urging the channel to embed financing into partnerships to offset complex technology costs. The CRTC has ordered streaming platforms like Netflix and Apple TV to boost their spending on Canadian content. Full details and links in the show notes or the blog post. Later today on In The Channel, we will be airing our conversation with Coro CEO Joe Sykora to discuss security stacks and the 2026 threat landscape. And if you haven’t heard it yet, be sure to check out yesterday’s episode featuring Nigel Brown, CTO of Microserve, for a practitioner’s take on AI readiness and tokenomics from Dell Technologies World. That’s how we’re seeing the headlines today. I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, thanks for listening. Have a great day.

Anthony Tanoury, senior director of distribution at Dell Technologies Distribution doesn’t get a lot of editorial love. It’s easy to treat it as the background infrastructure of the channel – the warehousing, the credit lines, the logistics layer that keeps product moving. But as anyone who’s been paying attention knows, that picture is well out of date. At Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas this week, In the Channel sat down with Anthony Tanoury, Dell’s senior director of distribution, to talk about what distribution actually looks like in 2026 – and the conversation ranged from supply chain strategy to AI-assisted deal registration to the shifting economics of the partner ecosystem. The headline number: Dell moved approximately ten thousand partners to a distribution-led buying model last year. Partners who previously purchased direct from Dell now route exclusively through distribution. The more interesting data point is what happened next – those partners are growing faster than the ones who remained on a direct model. Tanoury attributes it to the enablement depth that distributors can offer at a scale that Dell simply can’t replicate directly. On the Modern Partner Platform rollout – one of the bigger announcements at DTW this week – the conversation came down to speed. Deal registration that today takes two to three days is being redesigned, with AI-assisted automation in the pipeline to bring that down to two to three hours. The plumbing involves integrating Dell’s systems tightly with distributor platforms, streamlining the multi-system, multi-email-thread process that currently slows everything down. And when asked for the single most underutilized resource available to partners through distribution, Tanoury didn’t hesitate: the AI accelerator programs that distributors have built to help partners get started in the AI practice space. With every partner asking “where do I begin,” the answer may already be sitting in the distributor’s enablement catalogue. Read Full Transcript Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor at ChannelBuzz.ca and your host for the show. We’re continuing our coverage from Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas this week, and I wanted to close the series of Dell execs with a conversation that I think will resonate with pretty much anyone who moves Dell product – which, let’s be honest, is a lot of you. Distribution is one of the topics that often gets taken for granted. It’s the plumbing, it’s the logistics, it’s the credit line. Except that’s not really what distribution is anymore, and Anthony Tanoury has about as good a vantage point as anyone to explain why. He spent 30 years in the industry on both the vendor and distributor side of the table, and he’s now Dell’s senior director of distribution, which means he’s the person responsible for making the relationship between Dell and its distributor partners actually work at scale. This week at DTW, Dell announced some significant changes to how it’s thinking about its partner ecosystem, and distribution’s right at the center of that. We talked about the evolution of distribution from warehouse and financing shop to AI enablement engine, what it actually means for partners that Dell moved 10,000 of them to distribution-led buying last year, and what the promise of deal registration in hours rather than days actually requires to make real. Let’s get right into it. My chat with Anthony Tanoury. Anthony, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it.Anthony Tanoury: Thanks for having me. Robert Dutt: To kick things off – the definition of distribution, and the definition from distributors themselves of what they do, has changed so dramatically over the last few years, as you’ve been party to on both sides of the fence, vendor and distributor, with your background. Sitting where you are now as senior director of distribution, how do you define the core value proposition for your distribution partners today compared to the way it may have looked a few years ago if you were in the seat, or in a previous seat managing distribution? Anthony Tanoury: Yeah, I think 30 years in distribution – dating myself here. The idea of a distributor was warehousing, finance, so on. Really, the way that that’s evolved – and still evolving, because not everyone fully understands distribution and the value of distribution – but it’s really become the engine for all of us OEMs to really dive deep into the mid-market, and as lead generation for all of us. So SMB, mid-market, and then really leveraging their enablement platforms for our partners. So as an example, this week here at Dell Technologies World, we’ve launched our full AI portfolio. And really at the end of the day, it’s a platform to build off of. And our distributors, through our partners, are really enabling those partners – especially in the mid-market. The enterprise partners have hired data scientists and so on. And those mid-market and SMB partners, they need our help. And we really rely on our distributors, who have AI accelerator programs and can really take a partner through the journey of how to look at AI, how to start, and then how to implement and really get started in this space. We’ve met with multiple partners at this show and we’ve had our partner advisory boards. And that’s the number one takeaway when we’re talking to our partners: “How do I get started?” And I think Jeff Clarke and Michael Dell talked about that on stage – it’s really, we’ve got the platform to build off of, and then really rely on our distributors to go enable all of our partners out there to have those conversations, and then to build the proof, the POCs for us with their customers and take it to the next step. Robert Dutt: Let’s talk about this moment in time and managing distribution right now. Whenever I think of running a hardware vendor, running distribution, or being on the purchasing side of the solution provider right now – boy, that’s an interesting challenge – with the supply chain issue, with the pricing issue, with all of that. I guess it boils down to, from your perspective: how are you leaning on distribution differently to help you guys and your partners ultimately, especially the smaller ones, handle this issue of availability, of supply chain, of capacity, as we’ve seen the component price challenges across the industry? Anthony Tanoury: Yeah, so that’s not unique to Dell. We’re all challenged with the supply chain challenges, and it’s really about having a consistent message to our partner community, to our customers, on how – or why – to partner with Dell in these times. And our distributors have really leaned in with us right now and are getting that message out to our partners that “Dell’s got a plan. Here’s the plan.” And this is how we want you to message that and relay that to your partner community. So as an example, I did a keynote speech at one of our large partner events recently, and my talk track was based on how to navigate those supply challenges with us. I spent a lot of time on that, and had multiple partners come up afterwards, catching me outside. And the comment was, “That’s what we need to hear. That’s our challenge today, and you’re tackling that head on.” So to get back to your question from a distribution perspective – they enabled me to take that message to them, and then they’re expanding on that to their 20,000 partners in their ecosystem. Robert Dutt: As you bring up an interesting thread there – I don’t have time obviously to go through the whole keynote, but the elevator pitch, boiled-down version of it – what’s the advice to partners on tackling it from where you sit and from where Dell sits? Anthony Tanoury: Yeah, really leaning in with us and going deeper with your customers. And so that’s where you’re going to work with Dell and get priority allocation – looking long-term versus short-term, “I just need this product in the next week to get through this phase.” Now, let’s look at a long-term solution together and let’s plan two years out. Let’s plan longer in some cases, and then we’ll take it from there. Robert Dutt: And that’s something we heard also from Jeff Clarke in Q&A – that idea of build out those long-term plans, put your hand up as early as you can. Because it sounds like if you’ve got your hand up early, you’ve obviously got the best chance of getting that list fulfilled. Anthony Tanoury: Yeah, whether it’s a customer or a partner – I mean, that’s a true partnership and we’ll lean in when customers want to lean in with Dell. Robert Dutt: I wanted to touch on the changes that are coming to the partner program, specifically as it involves your interactions with distribution. The Dell portal is getting redone and the Dell program is getting redone with the modern partner platform rolling out this year. You guys are baking agentic AI into your partner platform. Meanwhile, your distributors are doing the same thing with their partner platforms. I’m curious – obviously very early in the game – but how are you and your distribution partners thinking long-term about how those various platforms interact with each other, in terms of delineating who covers what base, when it comes to serving the partner and what you may be able to do down the road as a result of having those platforms? Anthony Tanoury: Yeah, so the key is cutting down on SLAs. How do we take getting pricing out to a partner, out to a customer, from two to three days down to a matter of hours, right? And we’ve worked closely with all of our distributors over the last year or two, because our partners rely on our distributors’ platforms. And how does that integrate with ours? But the key is speed. How do we do things faster? And that is, as you stated, embedding AI into that. And so again, can’t get too far ahead, because we’re still going down this path and things sometimes get pushed out. But we’ve been working on this for a long time with them. We’ve had a lot of meetings with them here. We’ve gone deep into their platforms. They’re all rolling out new platforms as well. So making sure we’re doing it all at the same time, and together, has been key. Robert Dutt: One area I did want to double-click on there. One of the big promises of the new platform is deal-reg approval in minutes, AI-generated demand signals, those kinds of things. As Dell is accelerating its own systems, how does distribution plug into that? How does the distributor help manage and act on those AI-driven demand signals and facilitate a faster quote-to-deal-reg? Anthony Tanoury: Without getting too deep into deal-reg, there are a lot of nuances there. But yes, today where you’ve got multiple partners of record and you’ve got multiple partner IDs – simplifying that down to one or two partner IDs versus 20 today that we have – and then with deal registration, having partner of record is key in that mix, and we do have that today. But the distributors are really where it starts. So a partner comes to the distributor, says, “Hey, I need pricing on this and I want deal registration.” Today it might take the full SLA – the two to three days we just talked about – to get deal registration approved, with multiple systems flowing back and forth. In the future – and when I say future, we’re close, we’ll get there – is having that one stream go, starting from the distributor, through AI, plays into that, where it’ll do the work of looking in and making sure: here’s the partner of record. Is there a partner on record? Does the end user qualify? And without multiple people, multiple email streams going back and forth, it locks it in. And so now you’ve got an answer back in two to three hours versus two to three days. Robert Dutt: A lot of MSPs prefer to consume technology as a service, because it’s kind of in what they do – the name’s kind of on the tin – and bundle that with vendors like Microsoft or security or what have you. How are you working with distributors to make APEX and infrastructure solutions seamlessly consumable within distribution, and particularly on their marketplace? Anthony Tanoury: Yeah, so that’s a good question. So there’s APEX, right? We have Dell APEX, and our competitors have their own, but we have Dell APEX. But our distributors also have their own versions of APEX, or as-a-service models. And at the end of the day, we leverage theirs just as well as we do our own. And it depends on the customer, depends on the contract situation, but there are multiple vehicles to get an as-a-service deal done today that didn’t exist a year ago, didn’t exist two years ago, right? And then there’s – moving to another topic, and really the same topic – device as a service, right? And that was something we’ve been talking about for a few years now and hasn’t really taken off, but that’s all part of this now. Because the device at the edge is co-mingled now – especially in the new AI world – with your server infrastructure. So it could all become part of a recurring revenue stream for MSPs. Robert Dutt: And I think it makes potentially hardware more compelling to the MSP. When you’ve gotten that tie-in – I know it’s early days and it’s a way off from being fully operationalized – but what you’re talking about, and what Jeff Clarke was talking about today about basically acting as the arbiter, sort of an open orchestration layer, saying “all right, this particular bit is best handled in the infrastructure and the data center, this particular bit is best handled right here on the machine sitting by the desk side.” Anthony Tanoury: Absolutely. Robert Dutt: We’ve heard a lot this week about the focused accounts incentive, rewarding partners for selling across lines of business. And it’s kind of a cliche almost, in that vendors such as yourselves who have multiple lines of business are always looking for great ways to get partners to sell across those businesses. And certainly incentives are a classic way of doing that. How are you using distribution to train, enable, and facilitate partners making that leap across the portfolio – especially as this seems to be something that Denise Millard and the team are putting a lot of the wood behind? Anthony Tanoury: Yeah, so you mentioned the partner program – and that’s really what we leverage with the push coming from distribution. You typically focus where you can earn the most dollars. And so we’re putting the dollars on driving all lines of business for us. So today you may have a lot of infrastructure-focused partners – like MSPs, they don’t want to sell the client the edge device. But again, with AI driving from both ends now, it’s become an imperative that they don’t ignore the edge devices anymore. So really leveraging distribution both ways. We’ve got CSG partners that don’t sell storage and infrastructure, and then we’ve got partners that are trying to move in that direction. And then we’ve got other partners saying, “Hey, I’ve got to get on board too,” that are in the infrastructure space and have got to move in the other direction. And that’s where we leverage distribution – they have multiple enablement engines, all of our distributors, to enable those partners to do that. So for us – and again, to the partner program – we’ve announced some changes here at this event, with our partner advisory board meeting coming up. Partner programs, you want to keep them simple, predictable for partners, with tweaks along the way. And AI is one of those tweaks where we’ve got to pull the levers in different directions to get partners and distributors moving in that motion. So yeah, it’s an exciting time to be at Dell with this opportunity in front of us. Robert Dutt: That’s a big tweak – or more accurately, a big series, whole family, whole universe of tweaks to be made. But you don’t want to pull a whole program apart. You’ve got partners that have invested and distributors that have invested in that program. So you’ve got to make sure you do those incremental tweaks when you need them, but not blow up the whole program. Anthony Tanoury: Absolutely. Robert Dutt: You mentioned off the top the classic framing of distribution as the warehouse and the bank kind of structure. Let’s touch on the bank side of things a little bit there. In light of everything that’s going on today, in light of the infrastructure refresh opportunity that’s out there, the constraints in the marketplace – financial engineering is probably more critical than ever. Dell Financial Services is doing a lot of heavy lifting, but how do you view the role of the distributor when it comes to PO financing, terms, bridging the financing gap for complex projects, and helping partners manage this whole multiple-balls-in-the-air situation? Anthony Tanoury: You can’t look at a partner just through the lens of what they do with Dell. The business they have with Dell – partners procure from many places. We love them to only sell Dell for us, but they have other options, other solutions, other areas of the business that we’re not focused on. They procure through distribution. Distributors have huge businesses with a lot of these partners. They have financial terms through the distributors that maybe we can’t offer them through Dell – and leveraging our partner programs to deliver extended terms in this environment. With the supply shortages and lead times getting pushed out, really leveraging distribution with terms that we can’t give them today. There are multiple levels, and they have much higher credit lines with the distributors than maybe we have with them. And then going back to the as-a-service model – really leveraging distributors who have all those options in place for them today, that maybe they don’t have with us. Robert Dutt: When you’re looking at distribution, what’s the one metric you look at first to judge whether a distributor is meeting the bar – is delivering net new value to Dell? Anthony Tanoury: New partner recruitment, right? Multiple lines of business – not just focused in one area of our business, but selling across all lines of business. Then we rely on distribution. We just moved 10,000 partners last year over to distribution-led. Where those partners could procure direct from Dell in the past, now they can’t, and they buy strictly through distribution. Those are our authorized partner community – and potentially in the future, expanding that to other levels of our business and offloading them to distribution. Dell is a more channel- and distribution-friendly company than we get credit for. I think that doesn’t always get seen, and we’re moving that way. Robert Dutt: How did that process go, and any learnings from moving those 10,000 partners that may inform what you do in moving the next group, if there is a next group to be moved? Anthony Tanoury: Exactly, a lot. A lot of that is in data transfer and making sure that the distributors have the right data to target those partners and give those partners the service they need. The distributors all had to ramp up their infrastructure to support those partners – credit line facilities with those partners – because they didn’t do business with those partners before. Onboarding some of those partners as net new to distribution, who had never bought from distribution before. And then again, really letting those partners know the value of distribution. Since we’ve moved those partners over, those partners that have embraced distribution are growing faster than the partners that haven‘t. It’s sometimes a lot easier to get that additional support, that additional attention from a disti, than it is to try to navigate that directly. In some cases, they can support them better than we can, and it’s proven out in the last year. Robert Dutt: What’s the single most underutilized resource that you guys have through distribution, in terms of what partners are using? Anthony Tanoury: I would say the AI accelerator programs I spoke about earlier. That’s key. Going back to the enablement piece – I just don’t think a lot of partners understand the value. They come to these events, they make the statements, “Hey, we need help here. We need to leverage distribution for that help.” Especially when you come to a Dell Technologies World, or you go to one of our competitors’ or peers’ events. Our distributors have that enablement piece for you to get started, that you need to leverage, because it’s not just a point-solution type of conversation, it’s broad. Really leveraging them to help. Robert Dutt: Along the same lines, but a little bit different – obviously we’ve touched on the idea of cross-selling, and the idea that, surprise surprise, Dell would like partners to sell more of the portfolio, better together, all that kind of stuff. For an MSP or VAR whose primary look at Dell to date has been selling end devices – laptops, desktops, et cetera – sourced through distribution, what do you see as the most likely next logical step to expand that relationship? To get thinking across lines? What are some of the common threads for the best ways to approach that? Anthony Tanoury: Yeah, that’s a tough question. Common ways to approach how to sell across lines of business – take it back to the customer level. Your customer is buying these products, and they may be buying them from somebody else or they may be buying them online, depending on the size of the organization, so on. Again, the service model – going back to it, it’s another service revenue stream that they can leverage. But I think when you look at the distributors, they have a lot of talk tracks with the partners on how to do that, and frankly do it better than we do. So that’s why we really leverage them. When we say, “Hey, we want to sell more of our client and peripheral devices,” we start with distribution. We start with the partner community, and it’s paid off. I think it’s just – really, don’t leave revenue on the table. We’ve been saying it for years and I think it’s starting to resonate, and leveraging distribution to push that message forward. And I think partners are starting to catch on. Robert Dutt: All right, great insights. Anthony, I thank you for taking the time. I’m sure it’s been a busy week for you here. Thanks for joining us. Anthony Tanoury: Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. Robert Dutt: There you have it, Anthony Tanoury from Dell Technologies. I’d like to thank Anthony for carving out some time in what I’m sure was a very busy week on the show floor here at DTW. Few things from the conversation that I thought were worth pulling out. First, the 10,000 partners that Dell moved to distribution-led buying last year – that’s not a small number, and the fact that those partners are outgrowing the ones who haven’t yet made that transition should be a data point for anyone still on the fence about how they structure their Dell relationship. Second, when Anthony named net new partner recruitment as his primary metric for judging distributor performance – not revenue, not attach rate, net new – that tells you something about where Dell thinks its distribution channel still has room to grow. And third, if you haven’t looked at the AI accelerator programs your distributor is running, that came up twice as the single most underutilized resource available to partners right now. Probably worth a phone call. I’d like to thank you as always for listening to the show. Please follow or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts – Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, most directories. Ratings and reviews are always appreciated as well. Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.

Today’s headline news for Canadian IT solution providers: Zscaler launches Project AI-Guardian: Zscaler announced a new initiative on Tuesday called Project AI-Guardian, partnering with global systems integrators Cognizant, EY, HCL, Infosys, TCS, and Wipro to help enterprises secure AI deployments. The program leverages Zscaler’s AI Protect portfolio – covering AI asset discovery, access controls for AI services, and real-time guardrails for AI infrastructure – to address what the company describes as the security blind spots created by autonomous AI agents acting with delegated permissions. According to CEO Jay Chaudhry, the initiative is designed to “ensure that AI adoption does not come at the cost of security.” Jamf names Beth Tschida CEO: Jamf named Beth Tschida as chief executive officer, effective immediately, on May 20. Tschida moves from interim CEO and former CTO to the permanent role, becoming the first woman to lead the company in its more than 20-year history. The appointment comes roughly four months after Francisco Partners completed its $2.2 billion acquisition of Jamf in January 2026; Tschida’s tenure as CTO saw Jamf’s security ARR grow 40 percent year over year to represent more than 30 percent of total revenue. Aura + TD SYNNEX: Aura Business has partnered with TD SYNNEX to bring its identity-centric BYOD security solution to MSPs through distribution. Aura debuted the offering at MSP Summit 2026, with Omdia research finding that demand for BYOD security among MSP clients is surging. SOCRadar AI agents: SOCRadar launched an AI Agent Marketplace and Identity Intelligence platform designed to help security teams automate detection and response against identity-driven attacks, positioning the agents as additions to existing security stacks. Akamai acquires LayerX: Akamai Technologies announced a definitive agreement to acquire browser security vendor LayerX, extending its workforce security strategy with browser-level visibility and governance over AI usage. Cisco Canada marketing: Jennifer Rideout has rejoined Cisco as head of Canada marketing, noting on LinkedInthat she is about a week into the new role. Read Full Transcript Welcome to The Buzz from ChannelBuzz.ca, I’m Robert Dutt, today is Thursday, May 21, 2026, and here’s what’s happening in the channel today. On Tuesday, Zscaler announced Project AI-Guardian – a formalized initiative that brings together six major global systems integrators under a common framework for securing enterprise AI deployments. The partners are Cognizant, EY, HCL, Infosys, TCS, and Wipro, and together they’ll leverage Zscaler’s AI Protect portfolio to deliver what the company describes as a full 360-degree view of an organization’s AI footprint. The program is designed to address what Zscaler calls the “agentic world” problem – the reality that AI models don’t just respond to queries anymore. They act autonomously, connect to data and apps, trigger downstream actions with delegated permissions, and in doing so, create blind spots that traditional security tools simply aren’t built to see. According to Zscaler’s CEO Jay Chaudhry, “AI adoption does not come at the cost of security” – and the GSI partnerships are meant to scale that posture across the largest enterprises in the world. The GSI framing is enterprise-scale, but the underlying framework – discover your AI assets, control who accesses AI services, secure what AI builds and runs – is a blueprint that maps directly onto the conversations solution providers at every level are already having with their clients. As more organizations ask harder questions about what’s actually running on their networks, the partners who have this conversation early will have an edge. Jamf named Beth Tschida as its permanent chief executive officer yesterday, effective immediately. Tschida has served as interim CEO since March, and before that was the company’s chief technology officer. She becomes the first woman to lead Jamf in its more than 20-year history. The announcement lands about four months after Francisco Partners completed its $2.2 billion acquisition of Jamf in January, taking the company private. Strosahl, who shepherded that transition, has stepped away. Brian Decker of Francisco Partners cited Tschida’s “technical depth, operational discipline, and strategic vision” in a statement. The headline number from her CTO tenure: Jamf’s security ARR grew 40 percent year over year under her watch and now accounts for more than 30 percent of total company revenue. Her stated priorities going forward include autonomous device management, opening the platform for third-party AI tools, and building out an AI governance layer – all of which signal where the product is heading. The Francisco Partners angle is worth a second look. The PE firm also owns SonicWall, BeyondTrust, and Boomi – a portfolio of security and integration assets that, taken together, creates interesting possibilities for cross-platform plays. Channel partners who move Apple devices, or who sell into environments where Apple is a growing presence, should keep an eye on where this leadership takes the product roadmap. In Brief – Aura Business partners with TD SYNNEX to bring its identity-centric BYOD security solution to MSPs through distribution. SOCRadar launches an AI Agent Marketplace and Identity Intelligence platform targeting identity-driven cyberattacks. Akamai announces a definitive agreement to acquire LayerX, a browser-based AI usage control and workforce security vendor. Jennifer Rideout has rejoined Cisco as head of Canada marketing. Full details and links in the show notes or the blog post. Later today on In The Channel, Anthony Tanoury from Dell Technologies joins me to talk about how distribution has become the primary on-ramp for mid-market AI, and what that means as Dell’s Modern Partner Platform takes shape. It’s the last of three conversations I had at Dell Technologies World this week and a good one to end on. And if you haven’t caught Wednesday’s episode yet, Rob Emsley from Dell makes the case that the backup is the target – and why data protection needs to be reframed as a full cyber resilience practice. That’s how we’re seeing the headlines today. I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, thanks for listening. Have a great day.

Rob Emsley, director of cyber resilience marketing at Dell Technologies For most of the history of managed services, backup has been foundational but frankly unremarkable. You back up the data. Customers sleep better. Everyone moves on. That model needs to evolve. In this episode of In The Channel, recorded at Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas, Rob Emsley, director of cyber resilience marketing at Dell Technologies, makes a compelling case for why MSPs need to reframe their entire backup practice around cyber resilience – and why the opportunity to do so has never been bigger or more urgent. The stat that sets the table: 97% of cyber attacks now involve targeting the backup infrastructure directly. Attackers know that if they can compromise the backup, the game is essentially over. An MSP whose backup practice is not built around isolated, immutable copies is not selling a last line of defense – it’s selling false assurance. Central to the conversation is the idea of the “minimum viable company”: a framework Emsley encourages MSPs to bring to their customers, ideally at the board level. The question is deceptively simple – if everything goes down, what are the absolute minimum systems and data sets required to bring the business back online? Building a resilience strategy around that answer changes how you architect backup, and how you price and position it. Emsley walks through Dell’s PowerProtect portfolio, including the Data Domain platform and its multi-tenant capabilities for MSP environments, the Workspace Protection endpoint play, and the new premium rebate incentives for cyber resilience solutions in Dell’s Modern Partner Platform. His most practical advice for the mid-market? Have an incident response plan – and print it out. Because when ransomware strikes, the runbook sitting on the encrypted server is not going to help anyone. Read Full Transcript Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca, and your host for the show. We’re still coming to you from Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas this week, where AI Factory and agentic AI have understandably grabbed most of the headlines. But while I was on the show floor, I also wanted to bring you a conversation that I think is going to resonate long after the conference fades. The question of how MSPs should be thinking about cyber resilience – not just backup or data recovery, but the full picture of what it actually takes to bring a customer’s business back to life after a ransomware attack – sits at or near the top of virtually every board-level buying agenda right now. And with AI increasingly in the hands of the bad guys as much as the good guys, the calculus around protecting data is changing fast. I sat down with Rob Emsley, director of cyber resilience marketing at Dell Technologies, for a conversation about the difference between disaster recovery and cyber recovery, the concept of the minimum viable company, and why MSPs who are still selling backup the old-fashioned way may be leaving both value and their customers seriously exposed. Let’s get right into it. My chat with Rob Emsley. Robert Dutt: Rob, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it. Rob Emsley: Yeah, great to meet you, Robert. Robert Dutt: Director of cyber resilience marketing. You’re sitting in a pretty fascinating place right now, I have to think. Let’s start by sort of setting the table a little bit for an MSP and solution provider audience. How do you define cyber resilience at Dell today and how is that different from what it looked like even a couple of years back? Rob Emsley: Yeah, I mean, for many years, what the portfolio that I market was really the data protection portfolio. And like many vendors in the industry, one of the things that’s dramatically changed over probably the last decade, I would say, is the increase in cyber attacks and really the concern over things like ransomware, over things like insider threats, basically anything where bad actors are going after your data. And over the last probably 10 years, you’ve seen a lot more interest in cyber recovery as opposed to disaster recovery. Disaster recovery has been around forever. Bad things happen to good people. Do I have a set of infrastructure that I can restart from, whether it’s a natural disaster or human error, et cetera, et cetera. And the interesting thing with cyber recovery is the frustrating reality is that your hardware is probably still in good shape. You’re not under five feet of water or your infrastructure hasn’t been destroyed by a tornado. So everything looks as if it’s recoverable, but you know it isn’t because it’s been impacted, it’s been infected, and your good data is now bad data. So many MSPs that work with vendors in this market have seen an evolution of those vendors changing their messaging to certainly become more security companies. And some of that, you could argue, is based on vendor evaluations, especially private companies that are looking to go public or be acquired, et cetera, et cetera. So Dell Technologies was probably one of the last to really make a hard pivot from the products that we sell, predominantly delivering backup and recovery, but really to position those products and market those products as cyber resilience offerings. And cyber resilience really drives us to have new conversations with different parts of the customer’s team. Certainly it’s the old adage that when you’re selling data protection, you take the elevator to the basement to talk to the infrastructure team. When you’re selling cyber resilience, you take the elevator to the top floor to talk to the board, and it really has become a board-level discussion. So I think for managed service providers, the topic of cyber resilience is a much broader conversation that they can have with prospective customers. I think that customers know that there’s only two things that they’re afraid of losing. One is their employees, and two is their data. Losing either of them is really a bad day. So I think that when you look at buying intentions from many analyst firms that do those types of research projects – Omdia, for instance, is one – cyber resilience tops the top three, if not the top two or even top one, buying intentions for the coming years. And it has done for many, many years. So I think that’s why cyber resilience is an opportunity for managed service providers to expand the conversations and the people that they’re talking to, because it’s a horizontally required discipline. One of the things that customers, unfortunately over the years, have overspent on – maybe not overspent, but maybe not got the balance correct – is they’ve spent a lot of their budgets on cybersecurity products, trying to make their environments more secure. Basically build a wall. Firewalls fall into that category of technology, ransomware detection, those types of things. The area where we’ve tried to get a better balance in IT budgets is on recovery and resilience, based on the premise that there’s no such thing as absolute security. So you need to be prepared to have a good copy of your data to bring back to life, to bring your company back to life. Robert Dutt: Obviously, a lot of talk about AI because it’s the 2020s and we’re at a tech conference. Everyone’s going that way, which is good news in some regards and bad news in other regards in the security sphere, because it turns out the bad guys have access to it. Rob Emsley: Yeah. And that’s true for, as you imagine, a lot of technology. If you think about just life in general, there’s a lot of things that are available in the market that can be used for good and can also be used for bad. It all depends on what hands those technologies are in. And certainly, if you look at the use of AI to manufacture more sophisticated cyber attacks, certainly if you think about the use of AI to provide more sophisticated phishing emails, that’s certainly one thing I think we’ve seen. And certainly the concern around using AI to more quickly identify vulnerabilities – that’s been something that’s been top of mind in the news over the last few weeks, a couple of months. But again, I think both of those just reinforce the importance of having a surety that you have a good known copy of your data that you can take to the bank to bring the company back online. And I think from an MSP perspective, offering an infrastructure that gives their customers that assurance is really beneficial to customers. The old adage of customers want to sleep well at night – and if an MSP can help them do that, then a good night’s sleep is worth a fortune sometimes. Certainly my wife would say so. Robert Dutt: I think after 365, backup has been a fundamental underpinning of managed services for such a long time. I’m curious what you think is most common for MSPs to miss in terms of evolving and doing more than just the old-fashioned backup technology and getting more out of that. Rob Emsley: Yeah, I think if you look at a lot of the backup technologies that are available, certainly backup has always been that last line of defense. And unfortunately, being that last line of defense, the bad actors realize that if you compromise the backup infrastructure, you can pretty much do whatever you want. All bets are off. The customer doesn’t have a last line of defense. So if you think about some of the research that’s in the industry, 97% of cyber attacks involve attacking the backup infrastructure. And that doesn’t matter whether or not it’s managed by the customer or managed by an MSP. So I do think that MSPs need to become much more conversant in explaining what they are doing and how they have implemented a backup infrastructure that really is that last line of defense. And that’s something which you start getting into the concept of offering isolated copies of backups – maybe not for every single data type, but certainly we believe wholeheartedly in the concept of the minimum viable company, which really is a discussion to have with the board about when everything is gone, what needs to come back in order for you to be viable. Because I think that’s the killer – some people have a laissez-faire attitude to, well, everything’s important. But if everything’s important, then nothing’s important. So I do think that the MSPs that are in the backup industry need to realize that the backup value has changed. It used to be very much around being there for operational recovery. Having backups is just good hygiene, but having backups that aren’t secure is a no-no in today’s market. So that becomes a very important shift for MSPs that are in the backup market. Because I do agree with you – backup, God bless it, has been a great value creator for MSPs. Many customers realize that they need to back up their data. Subscribing to a service to do that is certainly an easy way to use your resources for more productive work to drive revenue. But at the end of the day, if you’re not secure, it’s difficult to innovate with confidence. Robert Dutt: All right. How does the portfolio that you guys are offering today help partners position their customers to be able to bounce back based on what really happens when they get attacked, breached, when their backup is part of that? Rob Emsley: Yeah. So within the Dell Technologies portfolio, this occurred probably about seven years ago. When I came back to Dell in 2018, we were simplifying the infrastructure portfolio of the company – storage predominantly, servers, and at the time data protection and cyber resilience. So many of our customers and our partners realized we have a portfolio of Power-branded products: PowerEdge, PowerStore, PowerMax, PowerSwitch. And probably in 2019, we introduced PowerProtect. So PowerProtect is the umbrella portfolio for everything we do in that backup and recovery, data protection, and cyber resilience space. Within there, we sell software to create copies of data and store them on hardware. And the hardware that we sell is something that we’ve been very lucky to have ownership of for literally 20 years. It’s an acquisition that was made by Dell Technologies, actually prior to the acquisition of EMC – it was an EMC acquisition, a company called Data Domain. And Data Domain has been really foundational for delivering cyber resilience. It falls into the category of what IDC calls the purpose-built backup appliance market. So unlike general purpose storage that many backup vendors use, this is a storage tier that was specifically developed for the purpose of storing backups. So it was developed with three attributes in mind. One was performance – how fast can I back up, how fast can I recover? It was built on efficiency – backup is a very repetitive process, so how can I store multiple backups in less physical capacity? So data reduction, deduplication. And then scalability – how can I start small and scale? But then overarching to that is how can you make it rock solid and secure? So the security features of our PowerProtect Data Domain appliances are something that’s very advantageous. And many of our managed service providers have stood that up in their data centers and offered that as the foundation for cyber resilience. The nice thing is that Data Domain, as well as supporting Dell Technologies software – so PowerProtect Data Manager, and other software assets that we’ve had for even longer, products like Networker and Avamar – it also has a very healthy ecosystem. There’s a protocol called Data Domain Boost that we use to allow third parties to integrate with Data Domain directly. Because the reality is that an MSP, when they go and talk to a customer, that customer has more than likely already made choices around the backup software that they’re using. And it’s more than likely not just one. And sometimes when they go to the MSP, they’ll say, well, can you basically choose a backup software application? But even the nice thing is, from an MSP perspective, Data Domain is multi-tenant. So you can slice up Data Domain into an ability to serve many MSP customers using different software if the customer so chooses. So if you look at our expo floor this year, we’ve got companies like Commvault exhibiting, companies like Veeam exhibiting. That’s the way that our portfolio is set up to provide that backup infrastructure for MSPs to leverage. Robert Dutt: Obviously, one of the big occurrences here from a partner point of view is the Modern Partner Platform that’s rolling out. And in part of all of those changes, you got the specific call out for cyber resilience solutions as one of the differentiated product areas for premium rebates. That’s a pretty big carrot. What does it say about the signal to the channel about where you see the biggest growth opportunities across Dell? Rob Emsley: Yeah, we have historically done the majority of our business through the channel, but we also recognize that the channel has a lot of choices. Many of our competitors, in fact most of our competitors in that cyber resilience backup solution space, are all pure-play individual companies, most of which have very little direct sales capabilities. So very channel-focused and therefore have blanketed the channel to sell their wares, sell their products. We wholeheartedly believe that the Dell Technologies portfolio, either standalone from a cyber resilience solutions perspective, but also taken in context of the other key elements – you think about things like private cloud and AI – gives a channel partner the concept of delivering secure infrastructure and the opportunity to take advantage of that broader portfolio. And as we talked about earlier, you can’t deny that cyber resilience is top of mind. It’s as high on the board’s agenda as, hey, how are we going to take advantage of artificial intelligence? Some could argue that cyber resilience is either on par or if not, for many customers, more of a concern, because it’s that ever-present danger of – is the infrastructure that I have now, even before I’ve implemented AI, secure enough to allow us to sleep at night? We certainly see the pivot from data protection to cyber resilience fitting well with the other vendors that our MSPs talk to. We certainly have a portfolio that addresses small customer needs to large customer needs, can absolutely be leveraged by our MSP partners to build a practice behind. And also, with cyber resilience solutions, there’s that upfront services component built in – identifying what is the minimum viable company that needs to be the most secure, the most isolated, to give those customers the peace of mind and actually show the MSPs as valued trusted partners. Robert Dutt: So much of the focus is obviously on enterprise data, on the data center, on the infrastructure side. But you also have the Workspace Protection offering going on. How important is securing the endpoint in the overall resilience strategy, and what’s the play there for partners from a resilience point of view? Rob Emsley: Yeah, certainly if you think about the entry point into most networks, the endpoints are clearly the most numerous, just by the volume of endpoints compared to the volume of elements in the data center. So certainly when we look at cyber resilience, we look holistically – not only at the data center infrastructure, but absolutely the endpoints that we sell. We continually look at the elements of security across the portfolio. And there’s a lot of foundational technology across the Dell product line, whether it be in the client space or in the server or storage space. The concept of trusted boot, secure BIOS, really carries forward through the PC line all the way into our server line and then the leverage of those servers into our storage portfolio. And then from an MSP standpoint, when you engage with Dell from a purchase perspective, you gain the advantage of the secure supply chain that Dell uses to its advantage. Our supply chain forever has been an incredible value, not only to ourselves, but also to anybody that buys from us, including our partners. But the fact that the way that we leverage that supply chain securely gives a lot of peace of mind. Because many of our partners, when they’re working with security companies, those security companies are not manufacturing their devices. Certainly they’re not manufacturing endpoints. Most of the time, they’re not manufacturing data center servers and data center storage solutions. They’re buying from somebody else. So the concept of a secure supply chain becomes harder to rationalize when you have multiple suppliers providing your solution. So at the end of the day, one of the advantages when it comes to Dell is that if you choose to work holistically with Dell, you get this foundational benefit across the portfolio of a lot of commonality when it comes to security and resilience. That’s one take-it-to-the-bank benefit that an MSP can achieve when they work with Dell Technologies across the entire portfolio. We’re fortunate enough to be in a position to have that entire portfolio, and long may that continue. And certainly that’s one of the advantages – when we look at security and resilience, we can look at it from the endpoint all the way to the data center and beyond. And I think that’s something that is a big benefit for MSPs to lean into the whole portfolio, as well as the advantages of aggregation of benefits and different tier levels by having a single-vendor, multi-portfolio opportunity, as opposed to slicing and dicing their vendor engagements across half a dozen different vendors. Robert Dutt: What do you see as the most common gap, especially in the mid-market, in terms of incident response plans today? Rob Emsley: I think it’s one, having one that is documented and printed out. That may seem very basic, but… Robert Dutt: Until your systems are locked down by ransomware. Rob Emsley: Exactly. So the very basic advice of have a plan and print it out may sound very old-fashioned and simplistic, but in the mid-market, that is probably something that people should consider. Certainly, practice does make perfect is not a trite saying. Practice, practice, practice in the mid-market becomes important. You don’t want to be developing a plan or using a plan for the first time when the house is on fire. You want to know where the exits are, where the fire extinguisher is, and you want to know how to use it. You want to make sure that when you use it, they work. Something which we can probably all think about in our own home lives, to be honest. So I think that’s probably something which, no matter what size company you are, it comes back to – you don’t want to lose your employees, you don’t want to lose your data. And when it comes to cyber resilience, you’re never too small or too big to take a fresh look at what you do and what your plan is. Robert Dutt: Once again, I appreciate you taking the time. Great chat. Rob Emsley: Great. Thanks, Robert. Robert Dutt: There you have it, Rob Emsley from Dell. I’d like to thank Rob for carving out some time during what has been a very busy week on the show floor at DTW. A couple of things from the conversation that I think are worth mentioning. First, that 97% figure – 97% of cyber attacks now involve targeting the backup infrastructure directly. If you’re an MSP and your backup practice is still built on the assumption that the backup is the safe harbor, that’s a foundational problem. The attackers know exactly where the life raft is. And second, the idea of the minimum viable company sounds simple, even obvious, but it’s actually a board-level conversation that most MSPs probably aren’t having and probably should be. What are the absolute minimum systems, data sets, and processes that a business needs to restart their operations? Answering that question and then building a resilience stack around that answer is the real difference between selling backup and selling business continuity. And his parting advice – have a plan and print it out – almost laughably basic until you consider how many organizations discover their incident response runbook is sitting on the encrypted server when they need it the most. I’d like to thank you as always for listening to the show. Please follow or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts – Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, most directories. Ratings and reviews are always appreciated and always help. Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.

Today’s headline news for Canadian IT solution providers: Dell PowerStore Elite and the reimagined data center: Yesterday at Dell Technologies World, Dell Technologiesintroduced Dell PowerStore Elite, a new enterprise storage platform delivering up to 3x performance over the prior generation and an industry-best 6:1 data reduction guarantee. The platform packs 5.8 petabytes into a single 3U chassis using standards-based E3 NVMe flash, and introduces Dell Cyber Detect, which identifies ransomware with 99.99% accuracy and pinpoints the last known clean copy for recovery. PowerStore Elite ships in July 2026; Cyber Detect for PowerStore follows in Q3. The broader Day 2 announcement also included 11 new PowerEdge servers, expanded Dell Private Cloud support for Broadcom, Microsoft, and Nutanix stacks, Dell PowerProtect One for simplified cyber resilience, and two new automation products: the Dell Automation Platform and Dell Automation Studio. Jeff Clarke‘s tokenomics keynote: In Tuesday’s Day 2 keynote at DTW, Dell COO Jeff Clarke presented a set of ten fundamental shifts from the past year whose through-line is what he called tokenomics. The math: model prices fell 80% per token; token consumption is up 10x; GenAI software spend tripled. Net effect – AI is getting more expensive for most organizations, not less. Clarke illustrated the stakes with a concrete example: one developer running a single agentic use case on the public cloud can burn approximately $3,400 per day in token costs; the same workload runs at zero incremental cost on on-premises infrastructure. Clarke confirmed Dell moved its own operations to on-prem after internal token costs became untenable, and described work underway on what he called “token routing” – an orchestration layer that would automatically direct tasks to either a deskside AI workstation or data center hardware based on workload. He closed with three imperatives: know your token consumption, find your super users, and lead the operating model change or be disrupted by it. Intezer launches Amplify Partner Program: Intezer has officially launched its Intezer Amplify Partner Program, naming channel veteran Mark Daggett as vice president of global channels and alliances. The program formalizes Intezer’s channel investment as demand for AI-driven security operations grows and the talent gap in security operations continues to widen. According to Intezer, the program is designed to help MSSPs and solution providers step in where internal security teams lack the capacity to operationalize AI-powered alert triage and threat investigation, translating the company’s platform capabilities into managed and co-managed service offerings. Check Point agentic network security orchestration: Check Point announced an agentic network security orchestration platform on Monday designed to replace decades of rule-based complexity, reducing network policy management from months of manual effort to minutes of verified, automated action. The announcement is part of a broader Check Point push into agentic security capabilities across its Infinity platform. Zendesk unveils Autonomous Service Workforce: At its annual Relate conference, Zendesk announced the Autonomous Service Workforce, a product vision built around specialized AI agents priced per resolution rather than per seat. Key launches include a no-code Agent Builder, omnichannel coverage with shared context, and a real-time Quality Score applied to every interaction – human or AI. Riverbed extends Aternity AIOps: Riverbed has released new Aternity digital experience (DEX) capabilities positioning AIOps as proactive disruption prevention rather than reactive monitoring, giving IT teams predictive intelligence before end-user experience degrades. WinMagic brings zero trust to legacy OT: WinMagic has introduced Continuous Identity Assurance, a hardware-bound approach to endpoint identity that extends zero trust controls to air-gapped systems and legacy operational technology environments traditionally outside the reach of modern identity platforms. Read Full Transcript Welcome to The Buzz from ChannelBuzz.ca, I’m Robert Dutt, today is Wednesday, May 20, 2026, and here’s what’s happening in the channel today. Continuing coverage from Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas, where yesterday’s Day 2 product announcements shifted the spotlight from the partner program to the infrastructure portfolio. The headline item was Dell PowerStore Elite, which Dell is positioning as a new class of enterprise storage platform built for what it calls an AI-era data center. According to the company, PowerStore Elite delivers up to three times the performance of the previous generation through software-driven improvements, and backs it all with what Dell describes as an industry-best 6:1 data reduction guarantee – up from 5:1 – a number it says carries real weight in today’s supply-constrained flash market. The platform packs up to 5.8 petabytes of effective capacity into a single 3U chassis using industry-standard E3 NVMe flash rather than proprietary drives, giving partners and their customers more flexibility on cost and sourcing. The cyber resilience angle is where it gets interesting for MSPs. Dell is introducing Dell Cyber Detect for PowerStore, which inspects data at the byte level and is positioned as being able to identify ransomware with 99.99% accuracy – surfacing the last known clean copy so organizations can recover fast. That capability will be available in Q3 2026. PowerStore Elite itself is set for global availability in July. The broader data center announcement also included 11 new PowerEdge servers spanning both air-cooled and liquid-cooled environments, expanded Dell Private Cloud support for Broadcom, Microsoft, and Nutanix software stacks, and two new automation products: the Dell Automation Platform, which pairs AI agents with a conversational interface for infrastructure deployment and management, and Dell Automation Studio for building custom, full-stack orchestration workflows. Nearly 20,000 customers already run PowerStore globally, and Dell is emphasizing that existing deployments can cluster with PowerStore Elite without disruption – a meaningful selling point for partners managing live customer environments. The second big story out of Las Vegas yesterday is one that deserves some unpacking. During his keynote, Dell’s chief operating officer Jeff Clarke laid out what he called ten fundamental changes in the past twelve months – and the thread running through the whole list is a single concept: tokenomics. The numbers Clarke presented tell a story that’s easy to miss if you only hear the headline. Model prices have fallen roughly 80% per token in the last year – sounds like great news. Except token consumption is simultaneously up ten times. And GenAI software spend has tripled in twelve months. The net effect is that AI is actually getting more expensive for most organizations, not less. Clarke made it concrete with a single example: one developer, one agentic use case, building a software tool. On the public cloud, that use case can run up roughly $3,400 a day in token costs. Running the equivalent workload on on-premises infrastructure with local models? Zero incremental dollars. Clarke went further and confirmed that Dell itself made the shift to on-premises AI after its own token costs became untenable – which is a different kind of endorsement than anything you hear from a keynote stage. He also flagged something worth watching: Dell is working on what he called token routing, an orchestration layer that would automatically determine whether a given task is better handled by a deskside AI workstation or by data center infrastructure. He was clear it’s still in development, but it signals where Dell sees the intersection of its PC and server businesses heading. Clarke closed his keynote with three actionable imperatives: know your token consumption, find your super users, and lead the operating model change or be disrupted by it. That first one is the real challenge for most organizations – and the one an MSP or trusted advisor can walk into and own. Away from Las Vegas now, and Intezer has officially launched its Intezer Amplify Partner Program, naming industry veteran Mark Daggett as vice president of global channels and alliances to lead the effort. The program formalizes the company’s channel investment at a moment when demand for AI-driven security operations is accelerating. Intezer’s pitch to the channel is essentially a gap-filling argument: internal security teams are drowning in alert volume while the talent required to triage and investigate those alerts remains in short supply. The Amplify program is designed to equip partners to step into that gap, delivering Intezer’s automated alert triage and threat investigation capabilities as a managed or co-managed offering. The appointment of a dedicated channel VP is the clearest signal yet that Intezer is treating the channel as a primary route to market, not a secondary one. Partners building out managed security or MSSP practices looking to differentiate around AI-augmented SOC capabilities have another option worth a closer look. In Brief –  Check Point launches an agentic network security orchestration platform it says collapses months of manual policy work into minutes of verified action.  Zendesk unveils its Autonomous Service Workforce at the Relate conference, introducing per-resolution AI agent pricing and a no-code Agent Builder.  Riverbed announces new Aternity digital experience capabilities designed to shift AIOps from reactive visibility to proactive disruption prevention.  WinMagic introduces Continuous Identity Assurance, anchoring identity verification in hardware to extend zero trust protocols to air-gapped and legacy OT environments.  Full details and links in the show notes or the blog post. Later today on In The Channel, still from the show floor at Dell Technologies World, I sit down with Rob Emsley, director of cyber resilience marketing at Dell Technologies, on why 97% of cyber attacks now specifically target the backup infrastructure – and what it actually means to build a resilience strategy around the concept of the minimum viable company. And if you haven’t heard yesterday’s episode yet, check out my conversation with Alan Ashby, Dell’s senior director of Americas data center presales and specialty sales, on the practical infrastructure realities of the AI boom – from a deskside AI workstation for an SMB to consolidating 13 legacy servers into one. That’s how we’re seeing the headlines today. I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, thanks for listening. Have a great day.

Alan Ashby, senior director of Americas data center presales and specialty sales at Dell. Today’s episode of In The Channel comes to you from the floor of Dell Technologies World 2026, where the expansion of the Dell AI Factory has been dominating the headlines. But what does that mean for partners who aren’t selling multi-million dollar deployments to the Fortune 500? To find out, we sat down with Alan Ashby, senior director of Americas data center presales and specialty sales at Dell. Ashby breaks down the practical realities of the AI infrastructure boom, explaining how partners can start small by deploying “AI supercomputers” like the Dell Pro Max GB10 directly to SMB desktops to unlock local, highly secure agentic AI workflows. We also dive into the economics of on-prem AI versus the public cloud, how partners can help customers escape “prototype purgatory” by narrowing their focus, and the massive opportunity remaining in traditional data center modernization—including the staggering claim that Dell’s new 18G platforms can consolidate 13 legacy servers into one. We also touch on how Dell is leveraging its Customer Solution Centers to help partners de-risk these complex deployments before the customer signs the PO. Read Full Transcript Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In the Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca and your host for the show. We’re coming to you today from the floor of Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas where the expansion of the Dell AI Factory and new agentic AI capabilities have completely dominated the Day 1 headlines. But as we know, the keynote hype doesn’t always translate immediately to the loading dock. To understand how partners are supposed to actually size, architect, and sell these new AI infrastructure solutions, I sat down with Alan Ashby. He’s the senior director of Americas Data Center pre-sales and specialty sales at Dell. We dig into the economics of on-prem AI versus the public cloud, how partners can get mid-market customers started with an AI supercomputer right at their desk, and why the traditional data center refresh is still a massive and highly lucrative play for the channel. Let’s get right into it. My chat with Alan Ashby. Alan, thanks for taking the time. Appreciate it. Alan Ashby: Absolutely. Thanks for having us. Robert Dutt: Americas Data Center pre-sales and specialty sales. That’s a broad title. A lot of ground to cover there. To set the stage for MSPs, solution providers, folks listening to this, what can you tell me about what your team actually does kind of day-to-day when it comes to working with partners around infrastructure and AI solutions? Alan Ashby: Yeah, absolutely. So we’ve got a handful of folks that, you know, we’re aligned and dedicated to the partner ecosystem focused across the Americas. We have a couple of primary roles. So from a pre-sales perspective, helping support our partners from a technical enablement, understanding our product portfolio, understanding how to position the products correctly, both amongst the portfolio itself, but also kind of competitively in the marketplace. We also run what we call a technical account plan with our partners. So, you know, supporting them on their certifications, their enablement motions, etc. And then we also run what we have a program we call Heroes for our partners. So Heroes is our foundational enablement motion for partners. We run in the Americas somewhere between 15 and 30 regional face-to-face sessions every single quarter. Those we’d love to see partners participate in, try to do them all over the country. And those are deep dive sessions, you know, going through products and roadmaps and futures and how to position products, etc. And, you know, those have been an enablement motion for the last several years and been incredibly successful. Robert Dutt: All right. We’re hearing a lot this week, obviously, about the expansion of Dell AI Factory and the idea of bringing AI on-premise to the edge, closer to the enterprise itself. And from an infrastructure perspective, you’ve got PowerRack, the pitch there being you go to live customer workloads from kind of the box to deployed in six hours and change. For a partner who’s trying to sell into the mid-market or the enterprise, you know, how does that kind of speed of value fundamentally change the conversation that they’re having with their customer, whether that’s the CEO, CIO, or the business leader? Alan Ashby: Yeah, I don’t think there’s been a more exciting time for our partners with what the market’s putting out there for us. You know, when we look at, you know, you mentioned the mid-market space, I actually think there’s a massive opportunity for partners to go support those customers, especially with some of the agentic workflow processes that we announced today with some of the platforms. You know, it may not be those 100 million, 200 million dollar opportunities, but almost every single small business and medium business, you know, you start with maybe a product like the Dell Pro Max GB10, and you start there and you start building out that agentic workflows, you know, building out automated dashboards with AI assistance built into it. You know, a lot of great things that a partner could go deliver that everybody can see value in. Sometimes in that mid-market space and small business space, it’s easier to get started on some of these agentic flows because they don’t have data that’s kind of messy. They don’t have legacy debt from a data center infrastructure perspective. And then from a larger enterprise or commercial customer, you know, we have seen a number of very good successes across our partner ecosystem with delivering services and value to our customer sets collectively, you know, to help customers really try to find value through their AI journeys. Understanding and identifying key use cases or workloads that they think they can get value out of it, understanding the infrastructure, the architecture that’s designing it right. You know, early days, you know, we had a lot of times where, you know, customers and partners struggle with just, you know, how do we deploy this thing because power and cooling needs are maybe bigger than what I was expecting and, you know, managing through that challenge. So partners have a phenomenal opportunity, I think, to help provide that value to our customers collectively together. You know, every one of our partners, they bring a unique skill set and differentiators on their own to the marketplace and help support those customers to that kind of their own journeys together. Robert Dutt: What is that infrastructure pitch down to that, especially that mid-market or even SMB customer? In the past, there was interest in doing it, I think often they would end up, if they were going to do it, doing it on public cloud, because the alternative was a big old infrastructure solution that doesn’t really fit them, unless maybe a partner can bring it on and kind of do a multi-tenant kind of situation there. But where are we at in terms of having right-fit infrastructure to make that work? Alan Ashby: Yeah, I think, you know, even the stuff that we announced today on stage, you know, products we announced at GTC, I think really helped kind of build out that situation and story for a small customer to be able to scale. You think about going back to the Dell Pro Max GB10, you know, you can take that device and you can, you know, run a small business basically off that depending on the concurrent users and be able to move up from that to some of our Pro workstations all the way up to the GB300. You know, we can run a model as big as a trillion parameters, it’s kind of crazy what you can do on a desktop, you know, and that doesn’t require any unique power requirements, I can plug that into a normal outlet. And then I could scale into, you know, actual infrastructure depending on the size of what the need is. And that’s where I think there’s a lot of opportunity for partners to think through, you know, how do they help customers scale through that. And so we talked a lot today at the show around, you know, the economics of everything. And in the long term, it’s going to be very challenging economically to run things in a public cloud. Yeah, on-prem is going to be a massive opportunity. And the fact that Michael today even talked about things about running foundation models and open source models on-prem, you know, your data is fully secure, you manage it all yourself. You know, it’s a lot easier to think about how I actually, you know, pull and extract value out of those different solutions. Robert Dutt: Well, and that’s the pitch right for the desk-side agentic AI solution is the idea, I think that the number was 87% reduction in token cost and in terms of comparing the cost of acquiring, deploying, running the solution on-prem. I think the break-even was three months or something like that against running the same kind of solution in public cloud. Alan Ashby: Yeah, I think that’s where customers are challenged today is, you know, you can have a lot of different, you know, foundational models and, you know, some of the agentic tools that are out there today that are subscription-based, cloud-based. And you can run through usage real fast without getting a lot of value out of it. When you start thinking about deploying stuff on-prem, you know, you know exactly what your output per day could be, and you can scale accordingly. Robert Dutt: How does that change how a partner approaches both selling and thinking about running, maintaining that infrastructure as opposed to something that’s all outsourced to the cloud and has those significant question marks of cost attached? Alan Ashby: I think there’s a lot of stuff we’re still figuring out, to be honest. You know, I think a lot of partners are trying to understand that and every customer is going to be a little bit in a different spot in their journey. And I think, you know, that’s where some of our partner ecosystems have tremendous value to help meet them where they are and help them take that first or second step forward to try to be able to deliver overall value to the company. Robert Dutt: Do you see that kind of time to value, that reduction in overall costs being something that can get unstuck some of those classic cases of AI workloads that are getting put into prototype, into test phase, but never quite see the light of day, partially perhaps because of that economic headwind that you discover when you start trying to scale these things? Alan Ashby: I think there’s that. I also think sometimes some customers probably try to maybe bite off more than they can chew at one time. And I think when we start thinking about these AI use cases, sometimes we’ll talk with some customers and partners helping them through them. They have, you know, two, three dozen things they want to try to accomplish out of one solution or one opportunity. It’s how do we narrow that down a little bit to where we actually extract value out of that particular use case that you’re trying to drive value with. And we’ve seen some really great success with some of our partners being able to help, you know, negotiate and navigate partner customers through that journey. You know, I think it takes a skill set that’s unique, and we’re starting to see more and more of our partners, you know, invest in and put attention to building out dedicated AI practice teams, helping them understand the skill set. The market’s moving incredibly fast, unlike ever before. And so, you know, it takes somebody who has a real passionate interest and a lot of curiosity to understand how these things all work together and all the pieces fit together and how do you take advantage of everything as you go forward. Robert Dutt: How do you see the co-delivery model evolving over time as you say, things are moving fast. When it comes to deploying AI factories, I think we heard earlier that, you know, the model is sort of Dell handling deployment and management of the overall environment while partners are being asked to focus on the application, the vertical, those kinds of things. How do you see the role of the channel, I guess, especially professional services and advisory-type partners evolving? Alan Ashby: Yeah, I think that to your point, I think it’s evolving. And I think that, you know, there’s a lot of opportunities here from an educational services perspective, consulting services perspective, services for our partners, you know, very few customers, especially when you think about, you know, a traditional commercial customer, mid-market customer, know exactly what to do and what to do next. You know, they might have started a pilot out in the public cloud. And then they’re trying to figure out where to go from here. And like, there’s a lot of service opportunity for our partners there. When it comes from, you know, other deployment services, I think there’s opportunities there for our partners, you know, depending on the solutions. When you look at post-delivery of the product into the customer, I think that there’s even more opportunity for partners of how, once things are deployed and installed, what’s next? And how do you help customers really extract value out of the infrastructure they spent a lot of money on, and have pretty high expectations of the ROI and the benefits they get out of it? I think there’s a massive opportunity for partners to help those customers through that journey. I think there’s a big opportunity for partners to take a product like our GB10, GP300 products and say, how do I go show you how to build an agentic workflow on those systems that can deliver value for your customers? You know, those are all going to be partner-delivered opportunities. Robert Dutt: All right. It sounds like even though it’s relatively early in the process, we are at the point where some of those next steps are becoming clear then. Alan Ashby: Yeah, I would say so. I mean, the question is, how fast do things change? You know, and it’s one of those things like I look at the agentic opportunities, probably one of the biggest things that can bring value for our partners. We’re really looking for a partner ecosystem that has the skill sets to deliver those for customers. Robert Dutt: Speaking of things changing, moving from traditional virtualization workloads to AI is a pretty big shift in how you think about structure, infrastructure, especially around storage, IO, networking, GPUs, needless to say. How’s the pre-sales team helping partners to figure out what the right size is for these solutions, both for current state and future state, so that you’re not either over-provisioning or under-provisioning customers? Alan Ashby: That’s a great question, actually. I mean, we’ve done a lot of things internally at Dell to get better ourselves and have the right talent and resources to support the partner ecosystem. You know, we have teams that can help support partners, both from a sizing, scoping of the opportunity, all the way down to configuring and deploying that solution if the partner needs that help. We’re also trying to help up-level our partners to be able to do it on their own. It’s kind of self-service and building the tools to help them through that motion. A couple of years ago, we started launching AI workshops, the different skill sets to help up-level and help that motion for a lot of our partners. The partners that have participated in those have seen a lot more success than those that didn’t. We do those multiple times a quarter and encourage partners to participate through those motions. We have an AI workshop multiple times a quarter in North America, and we go through every step of the phase from how do you have a conversation with a customer all the way through, how do you narrow down use cases, to all the way to how do you actually develop, design, and build the systems for what you need. Robert Dutt: Along those same lines, but a little bit more customer-facing and kind of looking at the economics of it, AI projects carry a lot of financial and technical risk for CIOs. What resources are there, whether it’s proof of concept, technical validation, or specialty engineering teams that partners can tap in to kind of prove the math and de-risk a solution such as AI Factory for customers? Alan Ashby: Yeah, there’s a couple of them actually, and I encourage all partners to kind of look at the options. We have at Dell, we have what we call our Customer Solution Centers, and those Customer Solution Centers have the ability to be able to work with a pre-sales specialist, a pre-sales expert on various different solutions. We have data centers where partners can take advantage of and leverage to be able to do proof of concept for customers, proof of value with those folks, and that can vary from any size of the architecture, from small all the way up to very large, and help support them through that. Also encourage partners to reach out to their Dell teams and how do you take advantage of those CSC resources. It’s a very simple process, but work through Dell teams. Same thing would be to go spend time with us in our labs. We have a great lab up in the Hopkinton area where AI factories are manufactured and built, and love to take partners through that facility to be able to see what’s possible there. We have an AI lab down in Austin to help them through that as well. So there’s a lot of opportunities. I would say the other one is we have a lot of partners also building out their own capabilities, their own labs, and we’ve helped support them through that as well. I think that they’re providing some amazing value to their customers, being able to do their own POCs and demonstrations and whatever it might be to help support that customer throughout the process. Robert Dutt: AI obviously gets the big headlines because it’s the 2020s as it is. But customers still have traditional enterprise apps and aging infrastructure that is going to need a refresh. I guess, how does your team handle guiding partners around going after the new shiny thing, the big opportunity that’s out there versus the kind of day-to-day operational challenge of standard data center modernization and refresh? Alan Ashby: Yeah, it’s hard when they have two of these really big shiny objects out there that have a lot of potential value for customers, both with AI but also just traditional data center modernization. We’ve seen a really great success over the last year of helping customers, I would say, clean up the data center, think through what they’ve got today in there and how to modernize it and right-size everything. When you look at some of the things that we’ll announce here at the show, it’s pretty exciting, honestly. There’s some great announcements we had in the Day 1 keynote, Day 2 keynote will be just as exciting, more from an infrastructure perspective of things. I’m really excited what we’re doing just with traditional servers and we’ve seen a lot of great success by our partner ecosystem over the last several quarters with them going in and helping customers look at consolidation of those environments. Our 18G server platforms, which we’ll announce, can consolidate 13 legacy servers into one. That’s kind of crazy math when you think about that. It’s easy now to think about how do I help customers free up space and modernize things that makes it so AI is possible in their own data centers; consolidating racks in the servers is kind of a crazy concept. Then you think of how we’re looking at modernizing just traditional architecture with HCI architecture and the disaggregated architecture providing real value for customers with right-sizing, both compute capacity and storage capacity to be able to extract as much value as possible across the ecosystem of the portfolio. Robert Dutt: Along those lines, any other, I guess hidden opportunities for partners, things that maybe don’t get the big attention of the desk-side AI or PowerRack or some of those things, but still represent—sort of along the lines of the data center example you just gave—opportunities that are worth pursuing, that are worth looking at, but maybe not quite the highest profile? Alan Ashby: I mean, 100%. It’s easy to get excited with what we’re doing in AI. The market’s obviously kind of dictating a lot of that, but there’s a lot of opportunity, a lot of money to be made for our partners to be able to focus on classical data center architecture. We’ve got some great solutions. Our Dell Private Cloud is one that’s extremely exciting for partners, the opportunity to be able to help those customers through that process and think through that. I also am extremely excited with what we’re doing around the security front with our data protection portfolio, our PowerProtect product lines. Security is one that I think in the age of AI, we need to think through security differently. There’s some additional opportunities for partners to think about how do they provide those services, those extra value pieces to help make sure all of these customers are ready for what could be an AI security threat. Robert Dutt: I assume there’s a better together story to be told there between the hardware, the infrastructure, and the cyber protection. Alan Ashby: 100%. That’s one of the biggest values that we have at Dell. There’s inherent value between the products themselves being able to support each other differently, but also they have the large Dell value prop with the Dell supply chain, our security chain, how we build products. Everything provides value across the entire portfolio. Robert Dutt: What’s the single biggest misconception you see customers have around the idea of deploying on-prem AI in particular? Alan Ashby: That’s interesting. The big one I would say is where do I get started and how big do I need to get started? I think that we saw early days, a lot of customers thought initially you had to just get in line for supply on large GPU systems when you could run a lot of workloads, really interesting and exciting AI workloads on a server with a PCIe-based GPU, and now even more so with some of the other platforms with workstations or GB300, GB10. The biggest misconception is just thinking about how big I have to get started. I would encourage almost every executive, every leader of every company to start thinking differently about you probably should have an AI PC in your office and on your desk. You should have one of our, I always call it an AI supercomputer on your desk with the GB10. It’s about who’s going to be the most curious. There’s nothing that limits you from capabilities with what the models can do today. We really just need people to start using and playing and practicing and helping support the overall value to the customers and to our partners. Robert Dutt: It’s an interesting concept that a computer with a better NPU or GPU on board can unlock that curiosity towards AI and ultimately drag to infrastructure refresh down the road, I think. Alan Ashby: I think the key thing is you don’t have to be a coder. You don’t have to be a developer. Really today, anybody could be a developer. You could build your own application if you wanted to. You can build your own dashboards if you wanted to. You can run it 100% on-prem if you wanted to. You can use a coding assistant to help you manage through that. All you have to do is understand how to talk to it. How do you manage it like an individual and how do you manage it like an agent? It’s a secondary employee that helps you basically give you superpowers. Robert Dutt: If an MSP wants to get serious about the data center and AI with Dell, what’s the first step if they’re already in terms of certification, competency, that kind of thing that they should be looking at? Alan Ashby: Yeah, again, the portfolio is changing very quickly. I would say that table stakes obviously is having a good understanding of our compute platforms with what we’ve got put together with NVIDIA. That’d probably be step one. Step two would be thinking about what you can provide from a storage perspective and how you take advantage of both PowerScale and ObjectScale and all the way up through our lightning file systems, having good understanding how you can deploy that for your customers at scale. Then the other one would be how do you work closely with the Dell teams? That’s one of the things that is always encouraging for partners to think through is Dell has this incredibly large sales force that can help give them scale, give them opportunity. How do you share as a partner? How do you share your value back to the Dell teams? Make sure that they understand where you can be supportive of their customer experience. How do you work collaboratively with the Dell teams across the ecosystem? So forth. Tons of opportunity. We’re always looking for partners that have the right skill sets and the right capabilities. Our Dell teams want to bring them into customer accounts because we need their support. We need their help. Robert Dutt: Acknowledging this might be a wide range, what are some of those common threads that make for a good partner for you in terms of skill sets, areas of focus, that kind of thing? Alan Ashby: Yeah, I think it’s evolving over time. Today, I look at partners that have unique skill sets are incredibly important. Partners that have a competency across our portfolio. Table stakes of having competencies around our compute platform, our storage platforms, but then thinking even deeper, how do you have competency around some of our more isolated platforms like what we do in our unstructured storage space with PowerScale and ObjectScale and access scale that we announced today? Same thing with our data protection portfolio, our cyber resilience platforms, our SRP platforms, like partners that have deep technical specialty expertise in those areas, they’re always going to be needed and valued in our partner ecosystem. AI is one other area to differentiate a partner from, but there’s a lot of those opportunities. Even today with our Dell Private Cloud, I always tell partners that whenever you see a pivot change in our portfolio, like we did when we launched the Dell Private Cloud, this is an opportunity to differentiate yourself as a partner from other partners. To jump in early and be able to build the skill sets that our Dell team is looking for out of a partner to support their customers. Our Dell teams are always looking for those partners that can help lead the charge, especially from a technical perspective with the customers to validate the solution themselves to be able to provide that extensive value to the customer themselves. Robert Dutt: All right. Last one for me, without naming any names or with naming names, should you feel like doing so? What’s the most creative, unexpected, surprising use case for a Dell AI factory that you’ve seen a customer deploy thus far? Alan Ashby: Wow, that’s a hard one. I mean, there’s a lot of really interesting ones I’ve seen. I mean, early days, some of the ones I thought was some of the most exciting stuff that we did with Amarillo County in Texas. It’s a county that there’s a lot of languages natively spoken there and the community there needed to provide basically language services to a very large broad-based set of individuals in the community in their native tongue. And the Dell team worked closely with those folks to make that happen. All the way down there to where we got a number of partners helping small entities, both commercial and public entities, really think about how they can drive agentic workflows and some of the things that are dealing around that with dashboarding. Chat, agents, obviously is an easy one. And then helping customers through kind of how do you do code assist models. Those are probably the really big ones that we see from a use case perspective from our partners. Robert Dutt: No shortage of opportunities. Alan Ashby: Oh my gosh, it’s unbelievable how many there are today. Robert Dutt: Thank you for taking the time. Alan Ashby: Absolutely. This is great. Thank you. Robert Dutt: There you have it. Alan Ashby from Dell. I’d like to thank Alan for his time, carving out a few minutes for me amidst the chaos of day one here at DTW. My big takeaway from that conversation is that you don’t have to be deploying a multimillion dollar PowerRack system to get into the AI game with Dell right now. Between the new desktop workstations running localized agentic workflows and the massive 13 to one server consolidation plays they’re seeing in the traditional data center, there’s a very practical immediate path towards revenue here for partners in the mid market. I’d like to thank you as always for listening to the show. If you’re enjoying our coverage from Dell Technologies World, please do take a second and follow or subscribe in the podcast app of your choice. You can find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, wherever you get your audio. And if you have a moment to leave a rating or review, always hugely appreciated. Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for channelbuzz.ca and I’ll see you in the channel.

Today’s headline news for Canadian IT solution providers: The AI supply chain squeeze: Yesterday, we brought you a special mid-day look at the new partner platform and AI Factory announcements from Dell Technologies World. But if you look past the glitz of the main stage, there was a sobering reality check delivered during the partner-specific keynote. Pete Trizzino, president of global sales at Dell Technologies, warned partners that supply constraints are officially back. Driven by voracious hyperscaler demand for AI infrastructure, the squeeze on GPUs, CPUs, and memory is tightening rapidly. In fact, Trizzino warned that the supply chain issues we are starting to see now could be significantly worse in 2027. For Canadian MSPs and VARs, this is the klaxon sounding for hardware lifecycle planning. Partners need to be having capacity conversations with their clients today, locking in orders, and potentially leveraging IT financing to bridge the gap while hardware makes its way through a congested supply chain. CIRA targets the MSP model: Closer to home, the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) is preparing to launch a new channel-oriented product platform at the ChannelNEXT conference in Toronto later this month. Led by channel executive Tim Brien, the upcoming platform marks a dedicated pivot toward a managed service provider model. As Canadian organizations face an increasingly complex threat landscape complicated by strict data privacy regulations like Law 25 and PIPEDA, the demand for sovereign, domestic cybersecurity infrastructure is accelerating. By embracing a multi-tenant channel model, CIRA aims to provide Canadian solution providers with a localized alternative for DNS and enterprise security services, removing the administrative friction of scaling broad deployments. PraisonAI zero-day and Operation Ramz: In the cybersecurity space, threat actors are actively exploiting a critical authentication bypass vulnerability in PraisonAI (CVE-2026-44338). The zero-day flaw was targeted within hours of its disclosure, meaning anyone building agentic AI pipelines with the framework needs to apply patches immediately. On a positive note, INTERPOL has announced the results of Operation Ramz, a massive cybercrime crackdown across 13 countries in the Middle East and North Africa that resulted in 201 arrests and the seizure of dozens of malware and phishing servers. In Brief: Lumina emerges from stealth: Cybersecurity startup Lumina has officially launched an AI-native platform designed to reduce alert noise by 87 percent across cloud, identity, and endpoint environments. With security operations centers overwhelmed by false positives, Lumina is using AI to automatically triage and contextualize threats, freeing up analysts to focus on genuine incidents. Nordian and Starlink partner up: Connectivity provider Nordian has signed a reseller agreement with Starlink to embed high-speed satellite internet directly into industrial equipment. Targeted at the agriculture, mining, and transportation sectors, this allows Canadian edge deployments in remote areas to maintain constant connectivity, enabling real-time telemetry and predictive maintenance. Noah Labs builds local AI: Software developer Noah Labs is building Sentinel, an AI-native integrated development environment designed to run 100 percent on-device. As data sovereignty becomes critical, Sentinel allows developers to build and test AI models locally, removing the risk of exposing sensitive proprietary data to public cloud APIs during the development phase. NSF’s deep-tech initiative: The United States National Science Foundation has announced a $1.5 billion X-Labs initiative to fund deep-tech research. The massive influx of capital is expected to heavily influence cross-border commercialization and innovation in North America, focusing on autonomous systems, quantum networking, and advanced materials. Read Full Transcript Welcome to The Buzz from ChannelBuzz.ca, I’m Robert Dutt, today is Tuesday, May 19, 2026, and here’s what’s happening in the channel today. Yesterday, we brought you a special mid-day look at Dell’s new Modern Partner Platform and the massive expansion of the Dell AI Factory. But if you look past the glitz of the main stage, there was a very sobering reality check delivered during the partner-specific keynote. Pete Trizzino, president of global sales at Dell Technologies, took the stage to warn partners that supply constraints are officially back. Driven by the voracious hyperscaler demand for AI infrastructure, the squeeze on GPUs, CPUs, and memory is tightening rapidly. In fact, Trizzino warned that the supply chain issues we are starting to see now could be significantly worse in 2027. For Canadian MSPs and VARs, this is the klaxon sounding for hardware lifecycle planning. If you are waiting until the quarter a client needs a server refresh, you are going to be too late. Partners need to be having these capacity conversations with their clients today, locking in orders, and potentially leveraging IT financing and distribution partners to bridge the gap while hardware makes its way through a congested supply chain. Closer to home, the Canadian Internet Registration Authority, or CIRA, is preparing to launch a new, heavily channel-oriented product platform later this month at the ChannelNEXT conference in Toronto. Led by channel executive Tim Brien, the upcoming platform marks a dedicated pivot toward a true managed service provider model for the national internet registry. For years, Canadian organizations have faced an increasingly complex threat landscape complicated by strict data privacy regulations like Law 25 and PIPEDA. The demand for sovereign, domestic cybersecurity infrastructure is accelerating. By embracing a multi-tenant channel model, CIRA aims to provide Canadian solution providers with a localized alternative for DNS and enterprise security services. The new program is designed to allow channel partners to self-provision services, exert granular control over technical deployments, and scale enterprise-grade security offerings to their small and medium-sized business clients. Ultimately, this move is intended to remove the administrative friction associated with scaling broad deployments, allowing partners to integrate CIRA capabilities directly into their existing recurring revenue security stacks. In the cybersecurity space, it has been a busy 24 hours. First, a major warning for developers and security teams working with autonomous agents: threat actors are actively exploiting a critical authentication bypass vulnerability in PraisonAI, tracked as CVE-2026-44338. The zero-day flaw was targeted within hours of its disclosure, meaning anyone building agentic AI pipelines with the framework needs to apply patches immediately. On a more positive note, INTERPOL has announced the results of Operation Ramz, a massive, coordinated cybercrime crackdown across thirteen countries in the Middle East and North Africa. The first-of-its-kind operation resulted in 201 arrests and the disruption of major cybercrime networks, including the seizure of dozens of malware and phishing servers that have been targeting businesses globally. In Brief: Cybersecurity startup Lumina emerges from stealth today with an AI-native platform designed to reduce alert noise. Connectivity provider Nordian has signed a reseller agreement with Starlink to embed high-speed satellite internet into industrial equipment. Software developer Noah Labs is building Sentinel, an AI-native integrated development environment designed to run entirely on-device. And the United States National Science Foundation has announced a 1.5 billion dollar X-Labs initiative to fund deep-tech research. Full details and expanded stories on all of our In Brief items can be found in the show notes or the blog post at ChannelBuzz.ca. Later today on In The Channel, we have more from Las Vegas. I’ll be sitting down with Alan Ashby, Dell’s senior director of Americas data center presales, to break down the practical realities of the AI infrastructure boom for mid-market partners. And if you haven’t heard yesterday’s episode yet, that’s probably because there wasn’t one, because outside of Dell Technologies World, it was Victoria Day back home. That’s how we’re seeing the headlines today. I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, thanks for listening. Have a great day.

Today’s headline news for Canadian IT solution providers: Dell’s ‘Modern Partner Platform’ brings AI directly to deal registration: Launching in the second half of the year, this unified portal introduces an “agentic partner experience.” Powered by a family of AI assistants, the platform connects demand signals, sales collaboration, deal registration, and pricing into a single interface. The impact on velocity: The new platform promises to reduce deal registration approvals from days to just “minutes.” It also features dynamic, real-time pricing—meaning partners can generate competitive, account-specific quotes without the friction of endless email loops with a Dell rep. AI matchmaking: Dell is using AI to analyze partner install bases and proactively surface cross-sell opportunities. In FY26 alone, Dell pushed more than 200,000 of these “demand signals” to its channel partners. Incentivizing a $6.1 trillion addressable market: Dell’s programmatic changes go live in August, aimed at helping partners capture an enterprise IT market where more than $4 trillion is delivered through the channel. Focus Accounts incentive: In a massive win for the platform MSP model, Dell is finally building a structured incentive that rewards partners for line-of-business expansion (e.g., cross-selling storage to a client device customer) rather than strictly prioritizing net-new logos. Differentiated base rebates: Partners will earn a premium rebate when selling strategic solutions. Dell explicitly named Dell Private Cloud, Dell Automation Platform, Cyber Resilience solutions, PowerStore, Z-Series networking, and premium Client+ products as the qualifiers. Advisory and SI recognition: Dell is formalizing a co-sell track that recognizes the influence of systems integrators and advisory partners who architect complex cloud and AI solutions, decoupling their reward from the ultimate hardware transaction. The ‘DeskSide Agentic AI‘ sandbox tackles spiraling token costs: On the product side, Dell announced a massive expansion of the Dell AI Factory with NVIDIA, creating an on-premise development environment aimed at organizations suffering from public cloud API sticker shock. The economics of local AI: Built using NVIDIA NIM, OpenShift, and Dell Precision workstations, this secure sandbox allows developers to build and test AI agents locally. Dell claims this setup can reduce token spend by up to 87 percent compared to the public cloud, offering an ROI break-even point in as little as three months. Ecosystem expansion: Dell is also officially weaving Hugging Face, Mistral, xAI, Palantir, and ServiceNow natively into its validated AI ecosystem. PowerRack standardizes AI infrastructure: To help partners deploy complex AI infrastructure faster, Dell introduced a new turnkey, rack-scale solution for compute, networking, and storage. Speed to value: Designed for extreme rapid deployment, PowerRack allows partners to go from delivery on the loading dock to running live customer workloads in just six and a half hours. Read Full Transcript Hello and welcome to a special mid-day Holiday Monday episode of The Buzz from ChannelBuzz.ca. I’m Robert Dutt, and today is Monday, May 18, 2026. While you’re all hopefully back home enjoying Victoria Day, I’m here live from Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas, where Dell has announced a major overhaul of its partner experience, betting heavily that AI and new incentive structures will remove friction for the channel. The centerpiece is what Dell is calling its “Modern Partner Platform,” scheduled to roll out in the second half of the year. Chief Partner Officer Denise Millard says the platform is designed to connect demand signals, sales collaboration, deal registration, and pricing into a single hub. It delivers an “agentic partner experience,” relying on a new family of AI assistants to guide partners through quoting and post-order support. Critically for velocity, Dell promises this new platform will enable automated deal registration with approvals in minutes, alongside dynamic, real-time pricing that reduces the need for partner reps to negotiate via email. The platform will also proactively surface “demand signals,” using AI to analyze a partner’s install base and suggest perfectly timed cross-sell opportunities. On the programmatic side, Dell is launching new incentives in August that align directly with the platform MSP model. A new Focus Accounts incentive will reward partners for line-of-business expansion within existing accounts, rather than strictly prioritizing net-new logos. Also, Dell is formalizing a co-sell track that rewards systems integrators and advisory partners who architect complex AI and cloud solutions, decoupling influence from the ultimate transaction. Partners will also see a new differentiated base rebate targeting strategic solutions like Dell Private Cloud, PowerStore, and Cyber Resilience products. While the partner program announcements focus on how the channel goes to market, Dell’s Day 1 product announcements focus on what they are selling, highlighted by a massive expansion of the Dell AI Factory with NVIDIA. For the channel, the most actionable announcement is the introduction of a new “DeskSide Agentic AI” sandbox. Recognizing that public cloud API costs are spiraling out of control for developers building AI agents, Dell has created an on-premise, secure sandbox utilizing NVIDIA NIM, OpenShift, and Dell Precision workstations. Dell claims this local development environment can reduce token spend by up to 87 percent compared to public cloud alternatives, offering a break-even point in as little as three months. Dell is also formalizing the Dell AI Ecosystem, bringing validated solutions from players like Hugging Face, Mistral, xAI, Palantir, and ServiceNow natively into the fold. To support these massive AI workloads, Dell introduced PowerRack, a new turnkey, rack-scale solution encompassing compute, networking, and storage. Designed for rapid deployment, PowerRack can go from delivery to running live workloads in just six and a half hours, giving partners a highly standardized, rapidly deployable AI infrastructure offering. There’s more information on all of these announcement in the show notes or the blog post for this episode, and stay tuned to the site and the podcast all week for full coverage and interviews from Dell Technologies World. And if you’re a Canadian partner on-hand here in Vegas this week, drop me a note, I’d love to have a chat. That’s how we’re seeing the headlines today. I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, thanks for listening. Have a great Victoria Day.

Jeff Taylor, executive director of global partner ecosystem and operations for Lenovo There are not many conversations where you get both the global architect of a vendor’s partner program and the Canadian channel chief in the same room. In this episode of In The Channel, recorded the week after Lenovo 360 Acceleratewrapped up in Austin, we had both: Jeff Taylor, executive director of global partner ecosystem and programs at Lenovo, and Craig Taylor, senior director and Canada channel chief. The headlining number from the conversation is the dramatic simplification of Lenovo’s incentive structure. Jeff confirmed that Lenovo has reduced its active global incentives from 2,300 down to approximately 200 – a 92 per cent reduction – while maintaining the same total investment pool. The analogy he reached for: the same pizza, fewer slices, each one bigger. The earning power stays; the complexity goes. For Canadian partners, Craig noted that over 90 per cent either maintained or improved their tier status in the move to the new Lenovo 360 Authorized, Gold, and Platinum structure. Craig Taylor, senior director and Canada channel chief at Lenovo The conversation moved quickly into services. Lenovo is targeting a 15 to 20 per cent partner revenue mix from services and solutions within the next one to two years. Craig pointed to TruScale as the on-ramp, noting Canadian partner feedback has consistently positioned it as more flexible than competing offerings in market. On AI, Jeff described a “reimagination of enablement” – moving partner portals from static, backward-looking data tools into agentic AI-driven platforms that are intuitive and forward-looking. Craig pointed to Lenovo’s CIO Playbook as the practical tool helping Canadian partners move customers from proof of concept to proof of execution on their AI investments. Read Full Transcript Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last sixteen years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor at ChannelBuzz.ca and your host for the show. You want to understand how a global technology vendor thinks about its partner program, not the press release version, but the actual mechanics of how design decisions get made and how they land in markets like Canada. Today’s conversation is a fairly rare opportunity. We have at the same time the global architect of the Lenovo partner ecosystem and the Canadian channel chief. Jeff Taylor is executive director of global partner ecosystem and operations for Lenovo, responsible for the Lenovo 360 framework that governs how the company works with partners worldwide and for the new consolidated partner ecosystems and program structure for the international markets that Lenovo unveiled earlier this year. Craig Taylor is senior director and Canada channel chief at Lenovo, a 2026 CRN channel chief and the person responsible for translating all that global framework into real outcomes for Canadian partners on the ground. We recorded this conversation just after Lenovo 360 Accelerate, the company’s annual North American partner event wrapped up in Austin, Texas. So this is about as fresh a read on the state of the Lenovo partner ecosystems you’re gonna get. We covered the dramatic simplification of Lenovo’s incentive structure, the push towards services-led selling and recurring revenue, how AI is reshaping both the partner conversation with customers and Lenovo’s own approach to enablement, and how Canadian partners should be thinking about a volatile period in hardware pricing. And yes, they’re both named Taylor. We had asked some questions. Let’s get right into it. My chat with Jeff Taylor and Craig Taylor. [Music] Gentlemen, thank you for taking the time. Jeff Taylor: Hey Robert, how are you? Robert Dutt: Very well, thank you. Craig Taylor: Excellent. Good afternoon, Robert. Robert Dutt: Interesting situation, one of those channel journalist dream situations, chatting with both the global architect of the partner program and the Canadian channel chief at the same time. And as fate would have it, you’re both just coming back from Austin. Jeff, for people who weren’t there in the room for Accelerate this year, the event was themed “unified as one” — pretty deliberate choice of words, I dare say. What were you trying to signal with that framing? Jeff Taylor: Yeah, well, I mean, obviously one with our partners is probably the first and foremost thing, but also to represent Lenovo holistically. From Motorola all the way through our devices, tablets, PCs, etc. and then into the data center. So we are one company and as an extension of that, one company includes our partners and the whole intent of the event was to bring everybody together and unify. Feedback has been really, really positive and it’s, you know, it’s only been a week, but lots of really good discourse and wonderful event. Robert Dutt: Craig, from a Canadian perspective, what did the Canadian attendance look like and what did Austin feel like compared to previous Accelerate events from a Canadian partner point of view? Craig Taylor: Yeah, our Canadian partners had very positive feedback to Jeff’s point. We’re always very well represented in these types of North American based events. We always punch above our weight class, I’d like to say. So all of the key strategic partners across our ecosystem were there in present and actively participating in our discussions as to how we’re going to strategize for our next fiscal year. Robert Dutt: Jeff, one thing that stood out for me from Austin was the choice of putting Jay McBain, Steve Brazier and Tiffany Bova on stage together, three analysts who ostensibly compete against each other in the market. Curious what the goal was in putting them together and what came out of that conversation that you think partners should take away. Jeff Taylor: Yeah, I think a couple of things. First of all, the moderator of that panel was with Alex Smith. So we had four great analysts all on the stage at the same time. I think if you take a step back and just look at the theme overall, what we’re trying to accomplish at Accelerate, it was really about industry topics. So we had representatives from the US Department of Energy as an example, talking about power and what’s happening at a governmental level. And part of that was to get these four analysts together who, as you say, they mix in a lot of the same circles, but they’d never been on the stage at the same time. And the idea was to propagate a little bit. And in some cases, they were aligned in a lot of their messages to the channel. In some cases, they differed. And it was a really lively and engaging conversation. And folks at Lenovo, we engage with these folks all the time, but having them all together, kind of representing their unique perspectives on the market right now was super valuable and engaging. Robert Dutt: So to dig into what you guys have been doing on the partner side of things, back in March, you announced the new consolidated partner ecosystem and programs, International Markets Organization. Now that Accelerate’s happened, partners have had a chance to hear it explained in person. What’s the clearest way to explain what operationally changed and what didn’t? Because from the outside, centralize where it makes sense can go a lot of different directions. Jeff Taylor: Yeah, look, I think the easiest way to explain it is we now have a single common framework across the globe. That framework is a guidepost, very intentionally set up as a framework, because execution has to remain local. And the input, the guidance, the feedback that we receive from our Canadian partners, from Craig, representing the viewpoints of those Canadian partners is absolutely critical to what we’re doing. And so by, you know, over time, as we had a lot of different markets and a lot of different geographies kind of expand over time as the company grew, there was similar objectives happening in multiple markets. And maybe the execution model was slightly different. And we thought by kind of bringing some of that together, we could simplify and we could gain efficiencies for our partners. But it’s really important to understand that the execution happens locally, sales happens locally, channel partners happen locally. And so it’s one really about standardizing the framework and not centralizing execution. Robert Dutt: How has that landed here in Canada, both with Canadian partners and in terms of how things operate for you, Craig? Craig Taylor: Yeah, the feedback has been really positive, Rob. You know, from a Canadian perspective, it’s all about leveraging our local teams and our local relationships, which haven’t changed. And feedback from our partner community is we are often best in class when it comes to how we represent our organization in front of the partner ecosystem. What I think is what more exciting for me now is we’re elevating those relationships to be consistent as to how we’re going to market with our partners. Consistency in the programs, consistency in the incentives, and also how quickly we can execute. What that means is our partner facing team can spend more time in market with our partners trying to win opportunities together with our mutual customers. Jeff Taylor: And if I could add, Rob, real quick, I mean, this was a very thoughtful process. This wasn’t something that happened kind of quick and without a lot of forethought. We have been working on this for years through the introduction of Lenovo 360 as that kind of framework itself. And then over time, as we’ve built some meat on the skeleton, the timing was just really right for us to go do this. But again, that premise of local execution is probably the most important thing. Robert Dutt: Well, I know that internally you guys have kind of had the mantra of “global might, local fight” internally for a while now, kind of being applied to the partner org, it seems here. I guess I’m still a little curious where there is a certain tension between global consistency and local relevance. You’ve kind of unpacked it, but where does that actually land in terms of which side takes the lead? Jeff Taylor: Yeah. So let me give you some real tangible numbers and examples. Three years ago in market across the globe, we had 2,300 active incentives in the market. I’m going to repeat that. We had 2,300 active incentives in the market. So if you think of your investment pool as a pizza, right, and you divide that 2,300 ways, the relative impact of those individual slices can be quite small. Now, what we found in talking to markets was that there was absolutely a consistency and intent. And maybe that intent was new customer acquisition, or maybe it was growth targets, or maybe it was something else. There was consistency in intent, but the execution was different, and that created operational complexity. It created our ability to report seamlessly and consistently over time more of a challenge than simplification. So in just the last two years, we’ve gone from that 2,300 partner incentives to about 200. So almost a 92% reduction without any change in investments, any negative change in investments, because the intent was still there, right? The intent was consistent across the globe. So that’s one where we centrally can look at the forest through the trees. We can see an opportunity for simplification. Then we can bring that to the markets while still driving that strategic intent that we want to accomplish with our partners. So that’s just one example. Craig Taylor: Yeah, well said. Just to add to that, Rob, one of the things that was very important was to make sure we had local input to the global framework that was being created at Jeff’s level. So we had many conversations as to what our market needs and demands were, and make sure that we shaped it to be properly represented within the framework. That worked out very, very well. We also are allowed to have some nuances in this organization as well. And so what we’re allowed to do is perhaps if a certain pathway doesn’t make sense to the Canadian market, for example, being more of an SMB-based market, we’re going to pivot and we’re going to make those changes to make sure that we service our partners the best that we should. And kind of beef up that SMB-facing side of things. Robert Dutt: Yeah, that makes sense. Jeff Taylor: It’s really interesting. It’s interesting, Robert. From day one, we called Lenovo 360 a framework and not a program from day one. And the whole idea was that we wanted to ask three basic questions like, how do you best engage with your partners? How do you best connect with your partners and how do you best grow with your partners? But depending on the conversation, the answers to those three questions might be different. So as an example, if you’re talking to a traditional hardware solution provider, you have answers for those three questions. If you’re talking to a GSI or an MSP or an MSSP, same questions may be very different answers. And so the whole idea with this framework was to be able to flex accordingly. And that went down all the way to the market level. So Craig mentioned that Canadian being more oriented towards an SMB type of approach, the framework has to flex to be able to support that. Whereas in other markets, it may flex a slightly different way, but it’s still all about engaging, connecting and growing. Robert Dutt: OK, back to your pizza point, Jeff, and one of my favorite, probably apocryphal Yogi Berra quotes, “cut my pizza in four slices, please, I can’t eat eight.” Curious, though, for a partner who looks at it and says, “all right, well, I used to have three incentives applied to my business and now there’s only really the one. The math doesn’t work for me.” What’s sort of the answer for them? Because the earning power says we didn’t take away the earning power. Jeff Taylor: So again, it’s the intent stays the same. The earning power stayed the same. The whole idea now is operationally, it should be easier for… the intent was that it would be easier for the partners to have a path towards that earning power. So instead of Jenga or a very complicated jigsaw puzzle, the intent here was to simplify that. So it’s a clear path to that earning potential with the same intent around growth, acquisition, those types of things. Craig Taylor: Yeah. And Robert, one of the things our partners have been asking us for is to provide more direction, focus as to where they want us to go win together in the market. And I think by simplifying these programs, it’s also allowed us to provide more focus to our partner community in the ecosystem to make sure that we’re winning together in the areas that we want to win. Jeff Taylor: And Robert, it goes beyond just traditional incentives programs, too. So we’ve simplified things like our certification programs. I’m going to get this number slightly wrong, but in the ballpark, in the last two years, we’ve driven 80,000 new certifications globally through some of the simplified changes that we’ve made. So all of these things, it’s look at the globe and then apply it locally. And again, with the full intent of making it as easy as possible for the partner. Robert Dutt: As with most partner programs slash framework changes, updates, you’ve acknowledged that some partners will land at a different tier under the new structure. How are you managing the transition and what should a partner do if they feel the new placement doesn’t reflect where they’re actually at in the relationship with Lenovo? Jeff Taylor: We’re very conscious about that. And I think, Robert, you know, any time there’s even a small change in some type of construct within the program, there’s some unfortunate circumstances associated with that. But we really tried to minimize it. And I’ll just give another example to hit a tier level. We have a volume requirement. OK, that’s the framework. But what that volume requirement is, it’s going to differ by market. So, you know, it might be very different in the U.S. than it is in France, than it is in Canada, than it is in Indonesia, as an example. And the whole intent there was through our analysis was to kind of minimize those impacts as much as possible while still creating the right type of incentive and the right value associated with each of those tier levels. Craig Taylor: And to that point, Robert, it was very thoughtful in Canada as to what the thresholds should be in order to properly reflect our market. And what’s happened as a result of that is over 90 percent of the partners have either maintained or actually improved their tier status as a result of the simplification and restructuring. What we’re doing with that remaining 10 or less than 10 percent is getting out in front of our foot, making sure that we have those discussions, working together through joint business plans to determine how we’re going to get them not only to the next threshold, but have a future plan to get us to the one after that and up-tier them as we continue our relationships with them. Robert Dutt: The services shift. Jeff, you put out a specific target there in recent interviews. 15 to 20 percent of partner revenue mix coming from services and solutions over the next year or two. The services business, as I understand it, has grown in the channel for the last five years or so with channel growth outpacing overall growth. That’s certainly real numbers and real growth. What’s driving customers towards the as-a-service and TruScale model specifically right now? Jeff Taylor: Yeah, I think it’s one word. It’s complementary. Our strategic approach is to have complementary services to those of our partners. We want to be able to ensure that our mutual end users are getting the best possible experience that they can get. In many cases, those services are provided 100 percent by the partner themselves. But in other cases where they don’t have those capabilities, our job is to complement those with the service capabilities that we have. The idea is that, first of all, I think you know Robert, the services space, like the TAM, is massive. There’s so much opportunity really for everybody to play in a meaningful way. You just have to be smart about it. I think that’s the first thing. The second thing is communicate. If there is an instance in which maybe there’s a perception of competing for services revenue, we’re going to communicate. We’re going to talk. We’re going to figure out what the best solution is for that end user and then move forward that way. Craig Taylor: Yeah, the other thing I would add and maybe another word for thought is flexibility as well. Feedback from our Canadian partners is that the Lenovo TruScale offering is much more flexible than other competitive offerings in market. Because we understand that not all customers look and feel the same. So this allows our partners to scale with us during their journey as they create more of a services-led go-to-market motion for their customers. Jeff Taylor: One of the conversations, Robert, that came out, you mentioned the Accelerate event last week in Austin. Obviously, a lot of discussions around AI and a lot of discussions around how do we best build an AI practice to go serve customers, whether they’re small businesses or large enterprises. And that’s a really scary thing for a lot of solution providers right now because they see that market exploding and they want to get it right. And this is a great example of where Lenovo can come in and partner with our partners on developing an AI practice that includes not just hardware and software, but also services. Robert Dutt: Craig, for a Canadian partner to whom Lenovo still means primarily ThinkPads and infrastructure hardware, what’s the first move usually looked like for a partner who wants to shift towards services with you guys and where are most partners sitting today against that 15-20% target? Craig Taylor: Yeah, great question. I think Jeff mentioned it earlier. It’s about communication. Often, it’s a miss when we don’t understand the partner services capabilities. We are a channel-led organization. We’ll continue to be with our services engagement in order to scale and address the Canadian customers. We need the channel and we will continue to work with the channel in order to win in services, but we have to understand what it is they can offer. So our team is working very closely with our partner community through this joint business partner plan in order to understand and make sure that we’re aligning their services capabilities with the needs of those customers. That’s first. Second of all is internally, we’re making sure that we have a motto of sell with, sell for, and sell through the channel. And so our Lenovo customer-facing sales teams understand the importance and the value that our partners are bringing to our mutual customers. And together, we’re winning more than we ever have before. Jeff Taylor: Hey Robert, there’s almost like a macroeconomic driver here as well. So partners are, and we’re seeing this globally, that there’s a realization that to maximize the value, to increase the multiple on their valuation, a move towards MRR or ARR models is extremely important, right? And those are services-led models. And so we are seeing a lot of these traditional partners who are very accustomed as us being a PC or an infrastructure provider, really needing our help in moving towards this recurring revenue model that’s going to increase their valuation and their multiples. So we’re seeing that trend everywhere right now, probably more so in North America than anywhere else, but it’s definitely happening globally. Robert Dutt: To that point where I wanted to go next was the MSP pathway. 3,000 partners signed up globally, 150 million or so last year for you guys, real proof point. You’re expanding to new geographies. What can you tell me about where that pathway is at in Canada? And as you’ve expanded geographically, are there any new developments on the Canadian front, either announced at Accelerate or along the way? Jeff Taylor: Why don’t I take kind of the big picture and then Craig can go deeper into Canada? Again, this move towards recurring revenue models is happening everywhere. And so not only has Lenovo’s growth in that space been even better than expected, dare I say, we’re seeing it, the growth of MSPs just in pure numbers globally is growing very, very rapidly. And again, I think it’s this financial macroeconomic driver that’s making that happen. To go back to our framework around engaging, connecting and growing, those answers are so different with an MSP than they are with maybe a traditional Lenovo partner. And so we spent the first year developing this program by listening, literally going to conferences, setting up a booth. We had MSPs coming up to us saying, “What are you doing here?” And we would be like, “We’re just listening. We just want to hear what motivates you and what is your business driver.” And so that was the genesis of creating this program because we wanted it to be bespoke specifically for those MSPs that are just operating in a kind of a different way than traditional VARs or traditional service providers. And now I’ll hand it over to Craig. Craig Taylor: Yeah, no well said. And you’ll see that the way that we’ve set up the Lenovo 360 for MSP pathway is the solutions hub within our online support and the way that we work with those partners looks different. The incentive stack is aligned to the needs, as per Jeff’s saying, and we have dedicated campaigns and road shows and community engagements in order to make sure that we’re addressing the needs of those MSP partners. What’s most exciting in Canada is it’s actually opened up a new route to market for us and new partner relationships where we haven’t had them before. You know, I would say that until this pathway was created, we were probably under penetrated from a Lenovo Canada perspective within the MSP community. Now the opportunity is vast. The partners, those MSP related partners are interested in working with Lenovo more than ever. And I think together we’re going to go win in the market. Robert Dutt: Are we still in the early innings of operationalizing that and realizing that or is that something that’s sort of matured with the program being out there? Craig Taylor: I think we already had a head start. And so, you know, some of the relationships with the key MSP partners in the Canadian ecosystem, those relationships already existed. I think this is now an opportunity just to extend our reach and better support the masses of MSP partners that are in the Canadian marketplace. So we’re well down the path, but no pun intended. But I think this framework actually allows us to go even deeper and have more intimate relationships with this set of partners. Jeff Taylor: I think globally, if I could interject here, we’re probably in the second inning of a nine inning game. There’s so much more we can and we’ll be doing with this MSP community. And at the same time, there’s tens of thousands of MSPs out there. So the opportunity is huge and our interest and our investment kind of matches that opportunity. But we still have many innings to play here. So we’re excited about it. Robert Dutt: I don’t know if you guys have noticed over the last few months, but memory costs have been a little bit volatile. You guys, you know, Ryan McCurdy was out in front of that publicly and the Top Choice Express model guidance for pricing some of the ISG deals. Real things that partners are navigating. How do you counsel a partner who’s trying to manage customer conversations when prices can shift before product ships? And what specific tools or protections do partners have inside Lenovo right now that they need to know about? Jeff Taylor: Yeah, again, I’ll just kind of take the big picture here. Lenovo culturally within our partner community has always been one based on trust and communication always. And we’ve navigated tough waters before, whether that was the pandemic or this situation that’s affecting the entire industry. And our approach is complete candor, open communication. We don’t hide behind any potential downside or any risk. We’re very communicative up front as we get information, we share that information. That can at times be frustrating for partners, but at the same time, if they, you know, at the end of the day, when they take a step back, they really appreciate Lenovo just being super transparent. It is a tricky deal right now. It is complicated and things are moving very quickly. I do not envy our sales folks and I don’t envy our partner sellers out there right now because there’s a lot of tricky, tough conversations that have to happen. You had mentioned Top Choice and Top Choice Express. We have invested in a model for Top Choice Express where we do have a supply. We can commit to an order to ship SLA that other vendors can’t right now. And again, I think that’s very well received by the partner community. It may be that the exact configuration is slightly different, but at a time like this, it’s a great way for us to service those customers collectively with our partners and with a high quality solution from Lenovo. Craig Taylor: Yeah, just to add to that as well, I would say resiliency and agility have always been built into our supply chain. We currently manufacture in over 30 locations in 10 different markets worldwide. That global footprint allows us to be more agile as we go to market during these challenging times. Recently, Gartner has rated us as the number eight most robust supply chain in the world. I think that’s going to work to our advantage as we go and continue through these challenging times. Robert Dutt: Switching to AI, you guys have posted 72% year-over-year growth in AI-related revenue. I want to unpack that a little bit. Jeff, where’s that coming from? Is that AI PC, infrastructure services, mix of all three through the hybrid AI advantage program and the Nvidia work? What does the enablement for a partner who wants to build an AI practice actually look like? Jeff Taylor: Lots of questions in there, so let me make sure I can get them all back. In terms of our mix, it really is cross portfolio. We are leading the way in AI PC, which is fantastic. I think we’ve just scratched the surface on that device side. I still think some consumers and users are wondering, what is the real AI value here? Those use cases will continue to come and we’ll continue to see that market expand. In terms of our infrastructure business, everywhere from being able to service the big hyperscalers all the way into the enterprise and the SMB space is a testament to the strength of our portfolio. That growth is represented from everywhere from the hyperscalers to enterprise to mid-market to SMB. Again, on the services side, we talked about that a little bit ago. It’s really about partnering to make that happen. We are very fortunate to have partners. You had mentioned Nvidia, also Intel, also AMD, all the silicon guys are very much working with us on making sure that, A, the solutions are there, and that, B, the way we’re enabling those solutions, which is also a little bit different, Robert. We have to be enabling around outcomes and not around feeds and speeds. You have to be talking to customers about what are they trying to accomplish. It’s not feeds and speeds anymore. How we’re enabling our partners, Craig had mentioned our Lenovo 360 Solution Hub as an example. It is an outcome-based platform where our partners can come in and learn what’s available from an outcome’s perspective. The solutions, the hardware and the software is really incidental to the conversation around the outcome itself. I think all of those things play together. Robert Dutt: Craig, where do you find Canadian partners are with AI at this point? There’s a spectrum with some building real AI practices, many still figuring out what the first customer conversation looks like. So I guess both acknowledging there’s a range of answers, where do you find partners are at? What’s the realistic, most common entry point for a mid-market focused Canadian partner? Craig Taylor: Yeah, to answer the first part of the question, it is a vast spectrum as to where each partner is on their AI journey. But rest assured, because of the Lenovo services portfolio, we can actually support each of those partners independently and complement their offerings as they scale their AI journey. I would suggest that many of them probably are moving from proof of concept with their customers to now proof of execution with their customers. More and more, there’s a demand on measuring an ROI on the AI investments that have been made. And I think that’s where partners and customers are looking for Lenovo for some direction. We recently created a CIO playbook, which actually helps our customers and partners be able to capture what that ROI is and what the financial returns are getting as a result of their AI investments. And feedback from that from our partner community has been very good. The other thing I would suggest is that because these AI workloads are now going from modeling into the cloud, now into being actually practically used within the customer sets, it creates a massive opportunity for our infrastructure solutions group business. And you heard Jeff mention that several times. One of the things we’re doing with our partner community is making sure that we’re over-investing with their technical architects and solution architects within the partner community to drive even more familiarity with the Lenovo solutions around AI playbook to make sure that we’re being suggested, recommended, and considered when customers are coming to them for advice. Robert Dutt: Jeff, Austin’s in the rearview mirror. You got the program changes out. New org is in place. What have you done for me lately? What does the rest of 2026 look like? And what would tell you by year end that this consolidation worked the way you wanted it to? Jeff Taylor: Yeah, first, I’m going to take a nap. I’m tired. There’s a lot that has to happen. I mean, the first thing is we have a commitment to our partners and to our partners like Craig, our internal partners, that everything continues to move from a local perspective, that we want to make sure that whatever changes we’re making, services our geographies, services our markets, and most importantly, services our partners. So that’s kind of the first priority in my mind to go do that. The second thing, and we briefly mentioned this before, is I think the world of enablement is changing quite a bit. And I think AI is driving that. And we throw around the word transformation quite a bit and things still aren’t really transformative. They’re more evolutionary. I actually think at this point, we’re at a transformative part in terms of channel management. So we are investing heavily in our digital platforms to move from just kind of basic LLM models into AI agents and eventually into agentic AI that’s going to completely change the way that we enable all of our partners, big and small. It’ll be more efficient. It’ll be more intuitive. It’ll be more timely. It’ll be more forward-looking than backwards-looking. I think, Robert, you know most portals are somewhat static and kind of represents yesterday and not tomorrow. I think all of that is going to change. And so a big focus for myself and working very closely with our IT and digital transformations organizations is this reimagination of enablement in this world of AI. And you’ll see more and more from Lenovo in that regard. Robert Dutt: I think that is going to be one of the most interesting things from a partner program structure point of view over the next couple of years is how you and your peers address those challenges and really potentially change the shape of what programs and enablement look like. It’s exciting. Jeff Taylor: It really is an exciting time for us channel nerds that have been around for forever. This is like, “Yes, we’re going to be able to rock the world. It’s going to be great.” Robert Dutt: Craig, for a Canadian partner listening to this, what’s the one thing that you want them to do differently or think differently in their relationship with Lenovo over the next little while? Craig Taylor: Yeah, I think we’ve talked about some of them already. We need to continue to protect and grow the core, which is our client computing and PC business. We have to grow at a premium to market. And I think we’re well positioned for that. I need the channel community to help us to continue to accelerate our ISG, our infrastructure solutions group business, around the data center to make sure we continue to drive relevance, focus on those technical relationships and leverage Top Choice Express, which will better service all of our customers by getting the right products in their hands quicker. We talked about helping our customers and our partners on this services-led selling journey. So we’re going to spend more time on that. But the last two, I think, are probably where a majority of my focus will be for the second half of the year. The one is continuing to make sure that we demonstrate ourselves as the easiest partner to do business with. So whether it be through our portfolio like Top Seller and Top Choice, whether it be the program optimization that Jeff and his team are doing fabulous work on, or whether it be the alignment of our portfolio coming together to represent one Lenovo, that’s going to be the key to our success and where our partners should continue to challenge us. Internally, I’m challenging my team to operate and act like an owner of your own business. And so we’re empowering our people to make decisions in market in front of their partners in order to have a more agile relationship with those customers. We’re enabling them with the right tools. And then finally, we’re educating them properly to make sure they represent this more complex portfolio of offerings that continues to be positioned in the marketplace and satisfy our customers’ business outcomes. So a lot for the second half of the year, but I’m very bullish that we’re positioned properly for success. Jeff Taylor: Robert, if you don’t mind, I would add just one quick thing there. And you had mentioned, like, we are in difficult times right now with memory and price increases and things like that. Partners are smart. They are going to lean on the partners that they trust, and they’re going to lean on the partners that have been there with them, or their partners that have been with them through these difficult times previously. And while nobody wants this situation, I think Lenovo is actually in a really good spot right now because we are that trusted advisor and have been for years. It’s not just words, right? It’s years and years and years of building relationships, the work that Craig and his team have done in Canada. You know, we have these relationships that allow us to navigate these waters maybe better than others. Robert Dutt: And my last super serious question to end this is, I’m basing this on an inference off a small sample size of two. But do you guys have any problems finding Taylors to run the channel orgs in all of the countries you operate in worldwide? Jeff Taylor: Go ahead, Craig. Say what you always say. Craig Taylor: Listen, I like to tease Jeff that he’s my dad, but our age delta is probably much more closer than makes that physically possible. But hey, listen, we’re going to take the best of the best. We happen to get two Taylors on this call with you, Robert. That’s what you’re getting today. And we’ll look for more next time we meet. Jeff Taylor: He’s definitely the better of the two. So it’s a funny thing. We were actually talking in Austin about how we might be able to mess with you a little bit, but we just don’t have to. Robert Dutt: Good to know. And Craig, I’ll send you the audio clip of him saying you’re the better one for your performance review. Craig Taylor: As long as that is your final edit, Rob, I’m happy. Robert Dutt: Gentlemen, thank you for taking the time. It’s been a fun conversation and we covered a lot of ground very well. Thank you. Jeff Taylor: Yeah, thank you, Robert. Craig Taylor: Yeah, look forward to seeing you soon, Robert. Thank you. Robert Dutt: There you have it. Jeff Taylor and Craig Taylor, both from Lenovo. I’d like to thank both Jeff and Craig for the time. It’s genuinely not that often you get the global and local perspective on the same conversation at the same time. And I thought the dynamic made for a richer discussion than either could have delivered on their own. A few things were taken away from this one. The incentive consolidation is real and it’s significant. Going from 2,300 active global incentives down to about 200, a 92% reduction, while keeping the total investment pool intact. Meaningful simplification. Jeff’s pizza framing is a good one. Same amount of pizza, fewer slices, each one bigger and more impactful. Earning power stays, operational complexity goes. If your business has been navigating a patchwork of overlapping incentives, the cleaner path to earning should be welcome. On the tier transition, Craig was direct that over 90% of Canadian partners either maintained or improved their status in the move to the new authorized gold and platinum structure. If you’re in the 10% that didn’t, the message was clear. Get in front of your Lenovo rep, build a joint business plan. There’s a path forward, but you have to start the conversation. The services shift didn’t seem like a someday conversation. Lenovo’s targeting 15 to 20% of its partner revenues from services and solutions over the next one to two years. TruScale is available and more flexible than a lot of partners probably realize. The partners who are going to win here are the ones who can articulate their own services capabilities clearly, so Lenovo can align around them rather than compete with them. On AI, I found Jeff’s forward-looking comments on agentic AI and the reimagination of enablement genuinely fascinating. Most partner portals are, as he said, static. They show you yesterday, not tomorrow. That is going to change. And how it changes will shape how partner programs actually function. Worth paying attention to across the industry. And for the hardware volatility piece, Top Choice Express is the practical answer right now for partners trying to manage customer conversations when prices are moving before product ships. If you’re not comfortable with it already, your first call tomorrow should be with your Lenovo rep. Oh, and yes, we did keep the clip of Jeff saying that Craig is the better Taylor. It’s in the edit. You’re welcome, Craig. If you enjoyed this episode, please follow or subscribe to the podcast wherever you get your podcasts. We’re on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, most of the major directories. Ratings and reviews are always appreciated and genuinely do help the show find a wider audience in the Canadian channel community. Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca and I’ll see you in the channel.

Today’s headline news for Canadian IT solution providers: HPE unifies distribution model: Hewlett Packard Enterprise announced a major shift in its distribution strategy, naming Ingram Micro and TD SYNNEX as its two global distributors. The move transitions HPE to a unified distribution model designed to deliver greater consistency and operational support for partners worldwide, accelerating enablement across the vendor’s networking, cloud, and AI portfolios. N-able names new innovation and AI chiefs: Managed services software provider N-able has expanded its executive leadership team, announcing the appointments of Robert Johnston as Chief Innovation Officer and Nicole Reineke as Chief AI Officer. The new roles are intended to reinforce the company’s focus on business resilience and embed advanced AI automation directly into its platform ecosystem. HYCU turns backup data into security intelligence: Data resilience vendor HYCU launched HYCU aiR, an AI-native solution that transforms backup data into actionable security intelligence, allowing MSPs to run rapid security posture checks across a prospect’s environment. By reading backup data as a security intelligence layer, partners can deliver overlapping intelligence as a natural extension of backup contracts. CIRA prepares sovereign channel platform: The Canadian Internet Registration Authority will officially unveil a new channel-based cybersecurity platform for MSPs at the upcoming ChannelNEXT event in Toronto. The move provides Canadian IT providers with a homegrown, sovereign option for DNS firewalling and cybersecurity awareness training. Object First launches backup monitoring cloud: Object First has launched a new cloud platform designed to help partners monitor and manage distributed data backups across their client environments. Plugable names CRO to build B2B channel: Peripherals maker Plugable has expanded its B2B strategy with the appointment of Matthew Dargis as Chief Revenue Officer. Dargis is tasked with building out a new field sales organization to capture enterprise market share. Keeper Security updates MSP program: Keeper Security has introduced its 2026 MSP Partner Program, rolling out a new tiered discount structure based on annualized revenue. MTech Cyber launches SMB assessment tool: Montreal-based MTech Cyber has released a new assessment platform, Can104.com, to help IT providers validate security protections for small business clients. Read Full Transcript Welcome to The Buzz from ChannelBuzz.ca, I’m Robert Dutt, today is Friday, May 15, and here’s what’s happening in the channel today. Hewlett Packard Enterprise announced a major shift in its distribution strategy yesterday, naming Ingram Micro and TD SYNNEX as its two global distributors. The move transitions HPE to a unified distribution model designed to deliver greater consistency and operational support for partners worldwide. According to the vendor, this structure will be anchored by these two global leaders but complemented by regional and specialist distributors to maximize partner capabilities. The change signals a streamlined approach to enablement, with HPE expecting the unified model to drive additional investments in partner resources across its full portfolio. This includes helping distributors build deeper expertise in high-demand areas like networking, cloud, and AI. For Canadian IT solution providers, a simplified global distribution tier could mean more predictable engagements, faster quoting, and improved access to cross-sell opportunities, particularly within the HPE Networking portfolio, as priorities evolve across different customer sizes and industries. Managed services software provider N-able has expanded its executive leadership team, announcing the appointments of Robert Johnston as Chief Innovation Officer and Nicole Reineke as Chief AI Officer. The dual appointments highlight a strategic pivot toward embedding artificial intelligence and advanced automation directly into the company’s platform ecosystem. N-able noted the new roles are intended to reinforce the company’s focus on business resilience and innovation as IT providers face increasingly complex cyber and operational challenges. Designating a dedicated Chief AI Officer is a notable step in the MSP software space, signaling that AI is moving from a roadmap feature to a core architectural priority. IT solution providers running their practices on N-able can expect a more aggressive rollout of AI-driven capabilities designed to streamline technician workflows and improve automated threat response. Data resilience vendor HYCU launched HYCU aiR yesterday, an AI-native solution that transforms backup data into actionable security and compliance intelligence. Rather than relying on point solutions for data security posture management or insider risk, aiR allows organizations to query their existing backup data across dozens of SaaS applications to identify sensitive data exposure, identity drift, and unmonitored AI agent activity. For managed service providers, this alters the backup conversation. Partners can use the platform to run rapid assessments across a prospect’s environment, identifying compliance exposures within days. According to the company, midmarket customers are often priced out of standalone security tools that cover a fraction of the estate. By reading backup data as a security intelligence layer across more than 100 workloads, partners can deliver overlapping intelligence as a natural extension of backup contracts, providing a tangible way to govern shadow AI and secure data pipelines. In Brief – The Canadian Internet Registration Authority will unveil a new channel-based cybersecurity platform for MSPs at the ChannelNEXT event in Toronto later this month. Object First has launched a new cloud platform designed to help partners monitor and manage distributed data backups. Peripherals maker Plugable has expanded its B2B strategy with the appointment of Matthew Dargis as Chief Revenue Officer to build out a new field sales organization. Keeper Security has introduced its 2026 MSP Partner Program with a new tier-based discount structure tied to annualized global revenue. Montreal-based managed service provider MTech Cyber has released an assessment platform designed to help IT providers validate security protections for small business clients. Full details and links in the show notes or the blog post. Later today on In The Channel, we’ll feature a conversation with Lenovo’s global partner ecosystem head Jeff Taylor and Canada channel chief Craig Taylor on the vendor’s massive incentive consolidation and the shift to services-led revenue. And if you haven’t heard it yet, on yesterday’s episode of In The Channel, we sat down with ESET’s Cameron Tousley and Pedro Kertzman to discuss why cyber threat intelligence belongs in the MSP practice. That’s how we’re seeing the headlines today. I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, thanks for listening. Have a great day.

Cameron Tousley, director of MSP channels for ESET North America For most MSPs, the quarterly client conversation looks something like this: here are the alerts we handled, here is your uptime number, here is a dashboard of things we blocked. Useful, certainly – but not exactly the stuff of trusted advisor relationships. Cameron Tousley, director of MSP channels for ESET North America, has a phrase for the upgrade: move from statistical talks to threat briefings. In this episode of In The Channel, he and Pedro Kertzman, threat intelligence specialist at ESET, join host Robert Dutt to explain what that actually looks like in practice – and why the window for MSPs to make that transition may be narrowing. Pedro Kertzman, threat intelligence specialist at ESET The occasion is ESET’s eCrime Reports, a threat intelligence offering that tracks cybercriminal activity at the affiliate level – the individuals buying malware-as-a-service and executing the actual attacks. Kertzman explains why that granularity matters: affiliates signal tactical shifts before attacks scale, giving security-forward MSPs a genuine early-warning advantage. Tousley adds the client conversation layer: knowing that a specific threat group is targeting your customer’s vertical via a specific attack method is a meaningfully different conversation than “we blocked 4,000 threats this month.” There’s also an uncomfortable wrinkle for MSPs specifically: as Pedro notes, affiliates increasingly exploit MSP tooling itself as a vector – compromising credentials to access managed environments quietly, hitting dozens of small clients while staying well below the radar of law enforcement attention focused on high-profile infrastructure targets. For the smaller MSP without a dedicated analyst, the entry point is more accessible than it sounds. Indicators of compromise can be automated directly into client firewalls without a full threat intelligence platform. WeLiveSecurity and the live threat feed built into ESET Protect offer a low-barrier starting point for shops that are earlier in their security maturity journey. Tousley’s closing frame is the one worth sitting with: the Canadian MSP market is being reshaped by consolidation at a pace that isn’t slowing. The independents that survive will be the ones having more sophisticated conversations with their clients. Evolve or sell. Read Full Transcript Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca, and your host for the show. Cyber Threat Intelligence, CTI, has long been framed as an enterprise discipline. Dedicated team, security operations center, analysts who live in the data. But the threat landscape doesn’t really respect that boundary anymore. The tooling is getting more accessible, the attacks are getting more targeted at smaller organizations, and as we’ve talked about on the show before, the MSP stack itself has become a threat vector. So the question for the typical Canadian MSP isn’t really “Is threat intelligence relevant to me?” It’s “What do I actually do with it?” To dig into that, I sat down with two people from ESET. Cameron Tousley is director of MSP channels for ESET North America, and he lives squarely in the business conversation around what MSPs need to grow and differentiate. Pedro Kertzman is ESET’s resident CTI subject matter expert, and I’ll note that Pedro usually sits on the other side of the interview chair as the host of his own podcast on threat intelligence. So this was a bit of a role reversal for him. We talked about ESET’s eCrime reports, the idea of tracking cyber criminal activity at the affiliate level rather than just the group level, what proactive threat intelligence actually looks like for a 15-person MSP shop, and what Cameron described as the “evolve or sell” reality facing the MSP market right now. Let’s get right into it. Cameron, Pedro, thanks for joining us. I appreciate it. Cameron Tousley: Thanks for having us. Pedro Kertzman: Great to be here. Robert Dutt: Before we get into what ESET is specifically bringing to market, Cameron, can you give our listeners a sense for where the threat intelligence conversation is right now in the channel? Is this still primarily an enterprise kind of discussion or has something really shifted in terms of how MSPs and MSSPs are thinking about and talking about CTI? Cameron Tousley: I think that the market is evolving as a whole, no matter if you’re in the SMB segment or enterprise. I mean, it’s evolving everywhere. The beautiful thing is technology is getting cheaper, it’s getting more accessible. People are able with the advent of AI to kind of do more with less staff and things like that, and then allow their staff to kind of become more specialized. Enter in the topic of CTI. I just think that there’s an appetite from certain, and probably more evolving larger MSPs, to start incorporating more for their clients. I think they’ve always probably wanted to educate them, but it’s always that, “Hey man, just make sure I have uptime and the help desk is active when I need it.” And that’s the conversation. Fast forward to now and it’s becoming a little bit more relevant to want to consume CTI. So I’ll kind of start there and I’ll take a pause. I don’t know if Pedro’s got any other comments on that. Pedro Kertzman: No, I 100% agree. I think the threat landscape now with the maturity of the CTI offerings, MSPs can see that the things they’re trying to protect their customers against are more clearly explained and delivered in a way that they can see through CTI offerings now. So I think it’s just a natural evolution within the cybersecurity space to start leveraging that expertise as well. Robert Dutt: Without getting too far into pure positioning, how would you characterize what differentiates your approach to threat intelligence, sort of at the methodology level? What’s the philosophy behind how you’re researching and tracking threats and what you’re bringing to market with this CTI package? Cameron Tousley: Yeah, I’d say first off, our reach. We’re a global company. We have a product line, yeah, but we have 11 threat intel centers and those are also R&D centers too. So it’s a wealth of knowledge. Then we have researchers outside of that that are just remote, and so our tentacles are everywhere and that means something for somebody choosing a cybersecurity vendor or a platform because our researchers, they’re looking at a bunch of different avenues. They’re looking at the major threat acting groups. We have an offering we’ll talk about here in a few minutes, that centers on tracking affiliates because malicious activity, malware-as-a-service, is just like MSPs provide a service. So if I’m an affiliate—and I’ll define that real quick, an affiliate being the people that are buying the malware service and then going and distributing it and causing zero-day attacks—those are affiliates. So the real key part is what they do, not necessarily always the major malware-as-a-service group because that’s just one large avenue, but then you can’t predict what your customers are going to go and do on the black market. So yeah, I think we have a really exciting offering on our threat intelligence called eCrime and it comes in a feed and reports and it’s amazing. It really centers on the affiliate level and that is going to help get the conversations to be more quality with customers. It’s going to help an MSP who provides more, let’s call it reactive security at best, generalized services—which no knock against them, that’s just the model—and that’s going to help propel them into the more proactive security and having more quality cybersecurity-forward conversations with their customers of all sizes. Robert Dutt: Let’s delve a little bit more into that. Can you walk me through a scenario, even hypothetical or composite, where that affiliate-level insight would practically change the outcome for an MSP or one of their customers? How does this show up for an MSP basically? Pedro Kertzman: Yeah. So basically, I’ll take a step back a little bit just to explain how this threat ecosystem works. So the affiliates will be the ones really on the end of the line bringing that malware they got from a quote-unquote threat actor market or affiliate programs, more technically speaking per se, but they will be the ones delivering or sending that payload forward to whatever companies that they are trying to attack. So knowing how these guys work is basically going to give the companies, and the MSPs of course working for their security, the ability to stop the attack in the early stages, because the affiliates will be the ones trying to break in, acquire through whatever methods—credentials stolen or compromised credentials. So they are responsible, quote-unquote, within these affiliate programs to get the foot inside the door. So if you’re knowledgeable about how they act, what kind of techniques they use to get that foot in, you’re basically stopping the attacks before they actually become super massive, widespread attacks or super dangerous attacks. It’s kind of the proactive security instead of the reactive security. Cameron Tousley: Yeah, that’s a good comment. And then I’ll just throw one more little thing on that. I was talking about the conversations you can have with your clients, everything Pedro said, plus it’s like, you could have a specific conversation about, “Hey, this is what we blocked this month, but these are the threat acting groups, and here are the patterns, here’s the kind of malware that’s out there right now. By the way, you’re in the healthcare vertical, this threat acting group is targeting healthcare and doing this specific type of attack—happens to be phishing or fileless or whatever the complex attack is.” So they got to get really granular in the conversation. It can’t just be a super high-level one, because then your user’s not going to know what to do with that information. But if you coach them on the end-of-the-line issue and where it’s sourcing from, to Pedro’s point, you get ahead of that attack early, you might even prevent stuff that would have normally been a real headache. Robert Dutt: And you need to position yourself at least somewhat as the hero in so much as you’re saying, “Here’s the people who are attacking you, here’s what they’re doing, here’s what we’re doing proactively to counter that.” Cameron Tousley: Absolutely. Yeah, that’s a huge value to your end customer. The one that normally would have not cared about security and it’s more of an annoyance, now they’re paranoid about it, just like the MSP, just like the vendors, we’re all trying to get ahead of it. So I think that that provides a lot of value, and the average MSP is probably not going to do that. So you don’t necessarily have to go spend a ton of money, you just have to consume the information that’s out there maybe for free, and then maybe some of the paid services like the eCrime reports without buying our full threat intelligence platform, you can just do that. And that is like a huge value on its own to track exactly what we’re talking about right now. Robert Dutt: So taking a step back, I think some of this certainly informs and colors the question we go to ask, but I’m a 15-person MSP somewhere. I’ve got solid endpoint protection, an RMM stack I like, maybe managed SOC coverage, that kind of model. What’s the case, in addition to what we’ve already discussed, for why threat intelligence should be on my radar as a distinct capability I need to think about, bring to my customers and offer? Pedro Kertzman: Yeah, I think especially because again, talking specifically about the eCrime reports, we’re talking about the ones that are really perpetrating the attacks or executing the attacks. When you understand how your adversaries really act, you don’t need to always rely on the expertise of a super senior CTI analyst. There are ways that also, depending on your vendor, you can automate the expertise to just be pumping, let’s say, IOCs or IP addresses into your existing end users’ firewalls. If you manage a bunch of other firewalls for your end users, you can pump that eCrime knowledge into those firewalls in the form of IP addresses, domains, and things like that. But understanding that it’s going to be a proactive approach so they don’t get a foot in the door first, it’s kind of that decision beforehand that will give the MSPs, or MSSPs with 15 or so employees, that kind of extra leverage against those frontline attackers. Robert Dutt: I’m really interested in the idea of using intelligence and these eCrime reports as a client-facing tool, not just something that’s consumed internally, especially for that smaller MSP—something that you’re using in your QBR or whatever business review you have with customers to show your value. I’m curious, is that something you’re seeing happening today or is it a realistic use case, or is it a stretch for most MSPs right now? Cameron Tousley: I think it’s realistic. Now, let’s set the tone here. An MSP, they may not have the budget nor the expertise nor the staff to be buying a full-blown threat intelligence offering even like ours, but they can use certain parts of it like the eCrime reports. So that’s a good jumping-in point for the MSPs that are growing, or if you have 15 people on staff and there’s a good deal of them on the technical side, you may want to run your SOC in-house. Maybe that’s something you want to do. I think for them, the maturing MSP and definitely the MSSP, a threat intelligence offering is something that you will probably want to consume if you’re doing everything in-house. Now, I think there’s an argument for even if you’re going to go out-of-house and use the vendor, I still think there are free sources. We have customers that are using free platforms but running a paid feed through it. This is really dynamic. It’s flexible. It can fit to every different audience for the most part, except for the ones who are just not staffed for it and they’re probably outsourcing everything and they just don’t want to do it. They know that they are never going to be able to staff a 24×7 team and they’re also never going to be able to consume as much information as is coming in. But there are also other free resources, like I said, associated with our threat intelligence platform, like the eCrime reports, but there’s white papers that we produce. There are periodic threat reports. We do all kinds of analysis. And then on our welivesecurity.com blog, we publish all kinds of free information. And the really cool thing for existing ESET customers is through our ESET security platform, ESET Protect, we run a live feed through there and it shows you like, “Hey, here’s the latest news on WeLiveSecurity. Here is something you need to be aware of, there’s a vulnerability in the wild.” So we run some of the security stuff and this news right through a window inside of our platform, which I think is really big value added. Pedro Kertzman: Awesome. Yeah, I would add, if I can, Rob, we do have monthly digests as well on the CTI offerings, even for not super deep-down technical people. Let’s say more executives or CSMs, let’s say account managers on the MSSP or MSP side. It’s kind of an executive-ready type of report. So it’s more about the threat landscape overview. I think it helps them show that they are expanding their offerings on the security side and they’re knowledgeable about it as well. Again, doesn’t need to go in the nitty-gritty like in the weeds of IOCs and all that, but understanding, for example, that now the ecosystem on the other side is somebody providing the malware, somebody going and executing it. So just to show how they see these movements, I think it’s sometimes important enough to show that they are expanding their coverage for their end users. Robert Dutt: The reports, the eCrime reports, have been in the market about a month now, I guess. I’m curious what you’re actually hearing from MSPs and MSSPs as they’re digging into them. Are people using them the way you expected or are there surprises that you’re seeing in how they’re engaging, what they’re doing, how they’re thinking about this information? Pedro Kertzman: That’s a good question. I think because of the name, we got out of the gate with police forces reaching out to us, but in theory, it’s not the best kind of deep analysis that we’re going to give them, because they have a lot of expertise. So then we have the APT reports that would bring more detailed analysis for them. So it was interesting to see that people are kind of eager on the end-user side to see how the threat landscape, especially related to financial crimes or eCrime, are really, let’s say, hot right now. The MSPs are kind of following that trend, not as jumping on like the police forces were, but they are starting to inquire about the new eCrime reports for sure. Cameron Tousley: Yeah, I’d agree. I think the defender agencies, I’ll call them, the ones that are fighting the same battle we are, but maybe physically, but now they’re fighting the eCrime too. As they’re learning, this is a great tool for them. We find that they’re excited about it. It’s relatively new, so we’re going to see more and more adoption of it. But plenty of people who are in evaluation are like, “Hey, can I run a free month of this? I want to check it out and see what I’m going to get.” And we’re getting a lot of good feedback on it right now. I’d say on the MSSP/MSP side, again, it’s new for them too. And they do a lot of different things. So for them, they’re like, “I need to slice out some time to check this out as well because this is interesting. I don’t know if anybody else is really doing anything quite like this.” So for them to be able to check it out and add it to their offering, I think what’s going to happen is that they’ll get hooked on something like that and they’ll want more. And we’re already working on more. So our teams are hard at work. We’re adding new feeds, new reporting structures, new ways to consume it. And reasonably priced packages and things like that. Even ones where you have somebody on retainer where you can go to and get a very long deep dive on what you’re reading periodically throughout any given month. So I think with that, you’ll see a lot of internal IT large agencies adopt it. I think you’ll see some MSSPs adopt it. And you might even see some general MSPs who are evolving up that chain do the same thing. So it’s kind of a report and an offering for everybody there. Pedro Kertzman: Yeah, I think you mentioned something important, Cam. We do offer trials for the eCrime reports as well, right? If they want to test it out. Cameron Tousley: Yeah, try it before you buy it. Yeah. Robert Dutt: It sounds like you’re also thinking about ways that you can slice this, dice this, package it out to that smaller MSP or that MSP who’s not a pure-play security player going forward. I was going to ask, what do you see as coming next in CTI and in your eCrime reports? I think that’s certainly a hint. Anything else that you see sort of in the pipeline or where you’d like it to go, where partners would like to see it go? Cameron Tousley: Yeah, I’ll take a stab at this one because my heart’s near and dear to the MSP community. That’s what I’ve been working in. That’s a segment for quite a long time now for ESET. And so what I’m reading and what I’m theorizing on is that there’s other kinds of technologies that are pretty complex, have gotten more simple in the way that they’re still doing complex processes, like an EDR, right? It’s an investigative tool, and then you pair it with AI and then things become easier for the team managing it. I think it’s going to be the same thing here where you’re going to have an AI paired with it, which we have our own agentic AI agent in this offering now, which is very, very cool, and it’s built in our security platform. But for this, I think it’s going to make consuming information easier, generalizing it, summarizing it, and making sure you can spin it into a quick executive summary. My theory is click of a button, right? So I’m going to have a dashboard. I’m going to say, “Hey, I want an executive summary on this event.” So you’re basically just filtering, and then the end result is you hit that AI generate button and then it generates something that’s quality, and you can do it at various user levels, maybe various role levels. I’ll hit the CTO button or I’ll hit the CEO button and they’ll be a little bit different, obviously. So I think that it’s going to get simpler and managed intelligence as a service, that’s next. It’s already a term that’s being thrown out there a little bit if you look for it. So it’s just not mainstream yet. And I think it will be here in a short period of time. Pedro Kertzman: A hundred percent. And just to double down a little bit as well, Rob. I think especially for the smaller MSPs, let’s say you hit a critical infrastructure, you stop a pipeline or anything like that, you’re going to have federal agencies going after you, right? But then when you hit a mom-and-pop shop, nobody really cares. And those guys are often served through these smaller MSPs. So I think getting a better understanding of the threat landscape that especially targets those small businesses, I think it’s just a natural progression of the change in the threat landscape. Robert Dutt: Well, and you bring up a point that I kind of pulled on a little bit with your friend, Tony Anscombe, not too long ago. There’s so much data about how many attacks right now are taking advantage of the MSP tooling as a threat vector. And so I think that also speaks to a need for an MSP who wants to be mature and responsible about these kinds of things to have a better grip on who’s looking, what they’re looking at, and how that maps to what they’re doing. Pedro Kertzman: A hundred percent. And just to link this specifically about eCrime and affiliates, affiliates would be the ones exploiting those RMM tools, right? Because it’s something that is already deployed in the environment. If they get the credentials that got stolen for whatever reason, they have access to those tools and then they can deploy malware that they bought from those affiliate programs inside of the victim’s networks. Robert Dutt: And it’s funny, almost a reversal of back in the day, I can remember as a Mac user, there was a saying that Apple engaged in security through obscurity. What you describe is almost the opposite of that. It’s insecurity to a degree through obscurity. In that if I’m an attacker, I know that if I go after Colonial Pipeline to use your example, I’m all over the front page and there’s going to be a lot of government agencies who have a lot of serious, serious questions for me. If I take out an MSP tool that gives me access to a bunch of very small clients though, maybe I fly under the radar just a little bit more. Cameron Tousley: Oh yeah. Robert Dutt: This is my last question. If there’s one shift in thinking that you’d want a Canadian MSP to walk away with after this conversation, in terms of how they think about these reports, in terms of how they think about the role of threat intelligence in their business, you know, one thing they should reconsider about how they’re approaching their security practice, what would that be? Pedro Kertzman: So I think first, Rob, that’s kind of more of a mindset type of thing. CTI still sounds super complex to a lot of people. I would say there are two main flavors. One, if you really want to dig into techniques and all that, yes, you can get fairly technical and sophisticated, but there are really simple ways to ingest cyber threat intelligence into existing automated tools. You can, of course, do a POC with one, two, whatever vendors you want to do. Once you find that real value for your customers, your end users, then it’s automated. We’re talking about data feeds ingesting directly into a firewall. If you don’t have a CTI central brain kind of thing, which the market knows as a TIP (threat intel platform), you don’t need to go that route, the sophisticated route. There are simple ways to use threat intelligence. And honestly, it’s super valuable because it’s just, again, automated. You’re outsourcing the knowledge to the vendor directly who’s going to execute that, like a firewall, for example. Cameron Tousley: Yeah, I think that’s some really good commentary. And I have a lot of business conversations with MSP business owners and I follow the market, and the consolidation, there’s tons of it. And there has been for a few years, but it’s just insane right now. And I think that there’s this thing going around, it’s like, look, evolve or sell. Because you have the advent of AI and that’s speeding everything up tenfold. And just don’t be afraid. If you want to continue to run your business, don’t worry, you’re going to have clients out there in your locale that probably love you. But they’re also going to have people calling them as these other MSPs get bigger, and these national ones that swallow other little smaller companies and then their go-to market will be, “Well, let’s go down market, down market,” because we can’t always go up market, that’s pretty hard to do. But down market is like shooting fish in a barrel kind of thing. So that means it’s a risk for the smaller MSPs that are not going to sell out, that want to be in business another 10 or 15 years. So don’t be afraid, utilize AI to research it. They say don’t use AI as Google, I disagree a little bit, but you can use it for a lot of things. This can summarize: what is this offering? Can I use it? Ask it really basic questions to get acquainted, and then take the next step and call your vendor and just have a conversation with them and say, “What are all my options? I am in this locale, I serve these kind of verticals, here’s my sizing, here’s the tools I use.” You’ve got to throw everything out on the table because then your vendor, somebody like a technical or business contact, can jump in and say, “Look, I think that you should check out this part of this larger offering. And here’s what I’ll do for you. And here’s what you’re going to do. We’ll give you a game plan, right? You’re going to trial it in the following ways, we’re going to pair you up with a technical person to teach you a little bit and be your co-pilot—Microsoft gets enough press.” But really kind of jump in, try it out. Don’t be afraid. Because if you want to be around another 10 or 15 years, you have to make the leap. And you don’t have to do anything big, but you have to start adopting some of this security-forward thinking so that you can have threat briefings with your clients and not statistical talks. There was just that MSP summit and there was actually a panel on what the next gen of MSPs is doing. And it was funny to hear it because they’re like, “Well, we’re focused on outcomes.” And I totally agree, but I know some of the older MSPs are like, “Well, we’re focused on outcomes too.” But I think it’s the talk track. You’re all saying the same thing, but you need some more complex tools in some ways to be able to have these more outcome-based discussions. Like, “Hey, I not only blocked X amount of threats, I kept your uptime up in this way, and that allowed you to keep productivity up. So by my clock here, you were able to achieve all those things that you wanted to achieve in our initial meeting, we’re on track.” That’s the conversation you want to have in addition to that little bit of the threat briefings peppered in. Robert Dutt: All right. Some great advice there. Gentlemen, thank you both for taking the time. I appreciate it. Cameron Tousley: Thank you, Rob. Pedro Kertzman: Great to be here. Cameron Tousley: Absolutely. It was a pleasure. Thanks so much. Robert Dutt: There you have it, Cameron Tousley and Pedro Kertzman from ESET. I’d like to thank both Cameron and Pedro for their time. They did exactly what we set out to do with this conversation, kept it firmly in the strategy lane with technical depth in service of the business point rather than the other way around. A few things to leave you with. The framing that stuck with me most was Cameron’s distinction between statistics talk and threat briefings. The idea that your quarterly client review shifts from “here’s how many threats we blocked” to “here’s the specific group targeting your vertical right now. Here’s how their affiliate operates, and here’s what we’ve already done about it.” That’s a real upgrade in how an MSP demonstrates value. It moves you from uptime vendor to trusted advisor and that’s a conversation your competitors probably aren’t having yet. On the technical side, Pedro’s explanation of affiliate-level tracking is worth sitting with. The headline ransomware groups get the attention, but it’s the affiliates, the ones buying malware-as-a-service and doing the actual execution who determine the tactics on the ground. Tracking them is what gives you an early warning before the attack scales. And as I noted during the conversation, there’s a certain logic in how attackers exploit the MSP model specifically. Go after the tooling, stay under the radar, quietly compromise a hundred small clients instead of one high-profile target. Obscurity in that scenario is working against you. For the smaller MSP who’s heard all of this and thought, “I’m not staffed for this,” Pedro’s entry point is worth considering. You don’t need a full threat intelligence platform or a dedicated analyst to start. Automate the ingestion of indicators of compromise directly into your clients’ firewalls. Let the tooling do the work. It’s not glamorous, but it’s real, actionable and it’s a lot more than most of your competitors are doing. And Cameron’s closing thought, “evolve or sell,” is the frame I’d put around all of it. The consolidation wave hitting the MSP market right now is not slowing down. The shops that survive as independents will be the ones that have more sophisticated conversations with their customers. Threat intelligence is one of the things that helps you have those conversations. If you found this one useful, please follow or subscribe to the podcast wherever you listen. We’re on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, all the major podcast directories. Ratings and reviews are always appreciated. Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca and I’ll see you in the channel.

Today’s headline news for Canadian IT solution providers: Acronis has launched Cyber Frame, a new hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platform built specifically for managed service providers. The platform allows MSPs to build and deliver infrastructure services with native integration into Acronis’ cyber protection and remote monitoring and management (RMM) tools. Acronis says it is designed to give service providers an alternative to legacy virtualization and hyperscaler cost pressures, offering better margin control and options for both fully hosted and partner-hosted deployments. Citrix has introduced Citrix Platform Flex, a new persona-based secure access model intended to help organizations move away from static, one-size-fits-all IT delivery. The new platform is built to align IT resources more closely with evolving business needs, delivering secure access, managed services, and observability with more flexible and predictable pricing. It acknowledges that different worker profiles require vastly different access parameters in a modern hybrid environment. Upwind has launched its new AI Agentic Pack, adding agent-driven capabilities to its cloud security platform. The tools are designed to help security teams investigate threats, validate active exposures, and prioritize remediation, leaning into the growing industry trend of using autonomous agents to compress the window between threat discovery and response. Nerdio vice president of MSP sales Will Ominsky warned in a Redmond Channel Partner interview today that MSPs who figure out how to monetize AI by the end of 2026 will grab massive market share. He noted that partners who only experiment with AI internally—without building client-facing, revenue-generating AI practices—will be left behind in the coming wave of SMB adoption. Boomi and Red Hat have announced a strategic collaboration to deliver an integrated stack for deploying agentic AI at scale. The partnership combines Boomi’s Agentstudio with Red Hat AI, providing organizations with a framework to orchestrate AI workflows securely without losing control of their data governance or allowing cloud consumption costs to spiral. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security is reportedly scrutinizing Instructure after a massive ransomware attack disrupted its Canvas online learning platform. The breach highlights the growing vulnerability of critical SaaS infrastructure and the widespread supply chain impact when platforms are targeted during peak usage periods, such as university finals week. Canadian cybersecurity provider Plurilock has announced CAD $1.13 million in new critical services contracts. The wins reflect continued momentum for the AI-native security firm as it expands its footprint across both public and private sector environments, capitalizing on the growing need for identity-centric security. [powerpresss] Read Full Transcript Welcome to The Buzz from ChannelBuzz.ca, I’m Robert Dutt, today is Thursday, May 14, 2026, and here’s what’s happening in the channel today. Acronis has launched Cyber Frame, a new hyperconverged infrastructure and infrastructure-as-a-service platform built specifically for managed service providers. The launch comes at a critical time for the channel, as many service providers are actively seeking alternatives to legacy virtualization platforms following recent industry shakeups and pricing model changes. Cyber Frame allows MSPs to build and deliver infrastructure services with native, seamless integration into Acronis’ existing cyber protection and remote monitoring and management tools. Rather than dealing with the unpredictable costs of hyperscale public clouds or the complexity of managing disparate vendor stacks, MSPs can use Cyber Frame to consolidate their service delivery. Acronis says the platform is designed to give service providers significantly better margin control and simplified management. It offers flexible deployment options, allowing partners to choose between a fully hosted model managed by Acronis, or a partner-hosted deployment running on the MSP’s own hardware in their local data center. By combining compute, storage, networking, and security into a single unified platform, Acronis is positioning Cyber Frame as a way for MSPs to scale their infrastructure offerings profitably while maintaining the tight security posture that modern SMB clients demand. Citrix has introduced Citrix Platform Flex, a new persona-based secure access model intended to help organizations move away from static, one-size-fits-all IT delivery. In today’s hybrid work environment, the access requirements for a call center employee, a traveling executive, and a remote software engineer are vastly different. Citrix built Platform Flex to recognize these distinctions, allowing IT teams to align resources, security controls, and application delivery specifically to the varying needs of different worker profiles. The new platform delivers secure application access, managed services, and comprehensive observability under a model designed for more flexible and predictable pricing. By shifting away from rigid licensing structures that often force companies to over-provision resources for basic users, Citrix aims to help enterprises optimize their cloud and infrastructure spending. Platform Flex also incorporates advanced analytics and security policies that adapt in real-time based on user behavior and location. For channel partners, this persona-driven approach provides a clear framework to help enterprise customers rationalize their IT investments, simplify the management of distributed workforces, and ensure that security protocols do not impede productivity for end users who require high-performance access to specialized applications. Upwind has launched its new AI Agentic Pack, adding autonomous, agent-driven capabilities to its cloud security platform. As cloud environments grow increasingly complex and security operations centers face unprecedented alert fatigue, the cybersecurity industry is rapidly shifting toward agentic AI to help manage the load. Upwind’s new tools are specifically designed to help security teams autonomously investigate threats, validate whether theoretical vulnerabilities are actually exposed to active exploitation, and prioritize remediation efforts based on real-world risk. Instead of simply generating more alerts for human analysts to sift through, the Agentic Pack leverages artificial intelligence to actively investigate the root cause of an incident, map the attack path across cloud infrastructure, and propose actionable fixes. This launch leans heavily into the growing necessity of using autonomous agents to drastically compress the window between threat discovery and response. With malicious actors utilizing AI to accelerate their attacks, defenders require matching speed to counter them. For managed security service providers, Upwind’s agentic capabilities offer a pathway to scale their operations, handle a higher volume of telemetry without adding headcount, and provide faster threat containment for their clients. In brief: Nerdio vice president of MSP sales Will Ominsky warned in a Redmond Channel Partner interview today that MSPs who figure out how to monetize AI by the end of 2026 will grab massive market share.  Boomi and Red Hat have announced a strategic collaboration to deliver an integrated stack for deploying agentic AI at scale.  The U.S. Department of Homeland Security is reportedly scrutinizing Instructure after a massive ransomware attack disrupted its Canvas online learning platform.  And Canadian cybersecurity provider Plurilock has announced 1.13 million dollars in new critical services contracts.  Later today on in the channel, we’re talking eCrime Reports and Threat Intelligence with Camerous Tousley and Pedro Kertzman of ESET. And if you missed it yesterday, check out my conversation with Auvik‘s Steve Petryschuk on the gap between MSPs’ expectation around AI, and the reality they have realized to date. That’s how we’re seeing the headlines today. I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, thanks for listening. Have a great day.

Steve Petryschuk, vice president of product and market strategy at Auvik Every year brings a new wave of IT industry reports, but Auvik’s 2026 IT Trends Report – titled “Beyond the Hype: The Real State of IT in 2026” – lands as something of a reality check. The headline finding is striking: while 67% of IT professionals say they are optimistic about AI’s potential, only 5% say it is actually core to their daily operations. That gap between ambition and execution is what Auvik is calling the “Maturity Mirage.” The governance picture is even more telling. Auvik’s research found that 76% of IT leaders believe their organization has an AI policy in place – but only 42% of frontline help desk staff agree. That disconnect isn’t just a communications problem. It’s the open door through which Shadow AI enters the environment, and Auvik’s own platform telemetry counted over 100,000 shadow AI applications discovered in customer networks in 2025 alone. In this episode of In The Channel, Steve Petryschuk, vice president of product and market strategy at Auvik, joins Robert Dutt to dig into what the data actually means for Canadian MSPs. They discuss why documentation is the unglamorous foundation that any real AI readiness strategy has to be built on, what the MSP execution advantage looks like in the numbers, and how the “Maturity Mirage” framing can help partners have more honest – and more productive – conversations with clients about where they actually stand. Read Full Transcript Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last sixteen years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca, and your host for the show. Every year we look to the major vendor reports to see where the industry’s head is at, but Auvik’s 2026 IT Trends Report, titled “Beyond the Hype,” feels a little different this time around. It’s a bit of a reality check for the AI era. We’ve been hearing about the AI revolution for some time now, but Auvik’s data shows a massive gap between what leadership thinks is happening and what’s actually hitting the help desk. We’re talking about a world where 76% of executives swear they have an AI policy, while more than half of their frontline staff have never even seen it. That disconnect isn’t just a communications problem. For an MSP, it’s a massive opening for shadow AI to walk in through the front door. To dig into this maturity mirage and what it means for your service desk – and your bottom line – I’m joined today by Steve Petryschuk. Steve is vice president of product and market strategy at Auvik, and he’s been at the center of translating this data into a roadmap for partners. We talk about why documentation is actually the most important AI tool, the rising risk of competency debt in junior techs, and why the Canadian mid-market might actually have an execution advantage over the big enterprise players. Let’s get right into it. My chat with Steve Petryschuk. [MUSIC] Robert Dutt: Steve, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it. Steve Petryschuk: Thanks so much for having me. Robert Dutt: The report highlights a significant gap in AI policy awareness – something we’re seeing across multiple industry reports. In this case, 76% of leaders believe they have a solid AI policy in place, while only 42% of frontline staff agree that policy even exists. Is that a communication failure, or is the policy just not mapping to how people are actually doing the work? Steve Petryschuk: I think it’s a bit of both. I’d start with communication failure as the primary driver. We don’t always have visibility into when policy violations are occurring, so how do you enforce that policy – or even communicate that enforcement – without that visibility? It starts with just making sure people know the policy exists, and then building some implementation around enforcement. Robert Dutt: Only 5% of respondents say AI is core to their operations today, despite plenty of optimism in the data. What are the specific readiness hurdles keeping AI in the pilot phase for so many MSPs? Steve Petryschuk: This is probably one of the most interesting findings in the report – that disconnect between enthusiasm around AI and how little has actually been operationalized. I think it starts with trust. Most MSPs don’t yet have the trust to let AI operate solo, and that makes sense, because we’re the ones managing the client relationships and the consequences when things go wrong. Until we build that trust, we’ll remain at that pilot stage. So I see it as a phased approach. You start in areas where humans remain in the loop – at least for now – so you can build comfort with the system. But equally important is ensuring you’re giving AI good inputs, because this is still very much a garbage-in, garbage-out situation. If your inputs aren’t clean, your outputs won’t be either, and that’ll hold you back from ever making AI a core part of operations. Robert Dutt: Does the fact that most tools MSPs are using today are either adding AI functionality or on the roadmap to do so – does that help build that trust, or does it require something more fundamental? Steve Petryschuk: There are a lot of vendors adding AI on top of their tools, but I think the more useful question is: how do you embed AI into the existing workflows your team is already using? Rather than treating it as a bolt-on, think about the processes you’re already familiar with – can AI assist you within those workflows and demonstrate value day to day? That’s how you start to build trust incrementally. Once you see it working in familiar territory, you can expand from there. Robert Dutt: And as you build that trust – once you’ve got those first steps working the way you want – how does an MSP move from having an AI policy on paper to implementing the technical controls a client or auditor can actually verify? Steve Petryschuk: It starts with visibility. Before you can enforce a policy, you need to uncover all the AI tools in the environment – both sanctioned and shadow. As shadow IT has evolved into shadow AI, that discovery step is critical. From there, you can move toward real-time policy reminders before committing to more active, automated guardrails. Eventually, you get to a point where you’re blocking non-sanctioned AI tools and allowing sanctioned ones. Most MSPs I talk to are still a long way from that, but they’re at least starting with the visibility angle – and that’s the right starting point. Robert Dutt: On that topic, Auvik’s telemetry found over 100,000 shadow AI applications in customer networks last year. Is shadow AI replacing shadow IT as the primary risk, or is it effectively the same problem in a new form? Steve Petryschuk: It’s a problem that’s evolved. Shadow IT and shadow AI are directly related, but you can’t just do a find-and-replace on the terminology – the risks aren’t identical. A lot of the core concerns are the same: understanding what applications are in use, where data is going, what’s being ingested. But the business impact of shadow AI gone wrong is significantly higher. Think about LLMs being trained on data you didn’t know was out there, or agents with access to multiple systems inadvertently moving sensitive client data – or worse, surfacing Client A’s data in a report for Client B. The risks aren’t entirely new, but the consequences of something going wrong are considerably greater. Robert Dutt: That’s an interesting angle – it’s not just that the data is out there, but that it can be actively executed against you. The accidental cross-contamination between clients is a particularly pointed example for MSPs. The report also found that around 60% of IT teams discover unauthorized SaaS at least monthly. From a visibility standpoint, does this signal that the perimeter approach is effectively dead? And if so, what does a modern visibility strategy look like for an MSP managing, say, 50 clients? Steve Petryschuk: The traditional perimeter has been eroding for a while. Work happens at the endpoint now, and that’s where visibility needs to focus – continuous discovery of the applications end users are running day to day. It doesn’t mean you’re auditing every minute of every day, but it’s not a point-in-time snapshot either. It’s an ongoing picture that gives you something useful whether you’re responding to a support ticket or walking a client through a QBR – “here’s all the shadow AI we’ve uncovered.” That discovery needs to happen as close to where work is actually getting done as possible: within the applications being used, and on the endpoints where people are working. Robert Dutt: Interestingly, despite all the shadow AI conversation, MSPs in the report still ranked shadow IT as the number one underestimated risk. Why do you think business leaders continue to miss the gravity of it, even as sensitive data flows into AI tools? Steve Petryschuk: I think it’s one of those areas where it’s easier to turn a blind eye until there’s a triggering security incident. Until something actually happens to you, it’s always someone else’s problem. You hear about it, you read about it, but “it’s not going to happen here.” The honest version of that is: it hasn’t happened here yet. And until you’ve had that personal experience where shadow IT – or shadow AI – bites you, the tendency is to underestimate the risk. Robert Dutt: There’s an interesting budget paradox in the data – almost half of IT teams said their budgets were growing, but a similar proportion cited lack of time as their biggest blocker. Where’s the money going if it’s not buying back time for staff? Steve Petryschuk: It’s a great question, and the report didn’t specifically dig into the causes of that disconnect. But based on conversations with partners and broader industry trends, I think a lot of those budget increases are simply going to maintain the status quo – salary increases, rising tooling costs, price increases still catching up from the inflation cycle of a couple of years ago. The budgets are growing, but that growth is being absorbed by keeping the lights on: keeping the tools running, keeping the teams intact. The magnitude of the increases isn’t enough to fundamentally change how work gets done, and without changing how you work, you won’t get that time back. Robert Dutt: Here’s one where MSPs can take a bit of a victory lap – corporate IT teams are apparently half as likely to be making new investments compared to MSPs. Does that suggest the managed services model is structurally better at converting budget into operational progress, or is this more of a “you have to automate to survive” story? Steve Petryschuk: Part of it is the MSP’s willingness to adapt and experiment – we tend to be a little ahead of the curve on new technology adoption. But I also think it’s a macroeconomic confidence indicator. Historically, MSPs tend to hold up better – and even do well – in times of broader economic uncertainty. So when there’s turbulence around them, MSPs are more likely to say, “We’ve seen this before, we’ll be okay,” and that confidence translates into a willingness to make new investments even when others are pulling back. Robert Dutt: And there’s something to be said for the maturity of the managed services model at this point – you can look at a rough environment, recognize the pattern, and not panic. Steve Petryschuk: That’s exactly right. Robert Dutt: The report found that just over 50% of IT teams are still spending ten or more hours a week on basic user tickets. What role do you see AI playing in actually moving that needle – going from hyped solution to genuinely freeing up technician time? Steve Petryschuk: Let’s set aside the panacea of fully automated ticket resolution for now – the scenario where a ticket comes in and no one ever touches it. Maybe we get there eventually, and for simple things like password resets, some level of automation is already feasible. But the more realistic near-term win is using AI to gather all the context a technician would normally have to collect manually. Agents can pull together that background information and surface a recommended next action, so that by the time a technician picks up the ticket, their job is less “figure out what to do” and more “confirm this is the right call and execute.” That’s an easier step, it’s probably already happening in some service desks today, and it starts to build trust in AI recommendations over time – which feeds back into that adoption flywheel we talked about earlier. Robert Dutt: And as those recommendations get better, you get more comfortable with the idea that yes, that’s the right answer for this type of issue – and eventually that trust extends further. Steve Petryschuk: Exactly. Robert Dutt: On the workforce side, the report showed a hollowing out of the hybrid model in favour of office-first or remote-first. From a network management perspective, does office-first actually make IT any simpler, or is distributed support just the permanent baseline now? Steve Petryschuk: I think distributed support is the permanent baseline. For MSPs, it doesn’t really matter whether the client is in the office or working from home – we’re still supporting them remotely either way. Network complexity doesn’t change much. And even in a fully return-to-office environment, users are still moving around, travelling to events, going on the road. Looking at the Canadian context specifically – we’re still laggards in the office-first shift compared to some of our global peers, despite what you hear in the media. There’s still a significant amount of distributed work happening here, and I think the problem of managing that distributed environment is a long way from going away. Robert Dutt: You’ve framed AI as a “senior IT associate in your pocket” for junior techs – which is a much more interesting way to look at it than “it’s going to eliminate entry-level jobs.” But even with that framing, is there still a risk of competency debt? Where the next generation of technicians ends up leaning so heavily on AI diagnostics that they lose the ability to evaluate whether the recommended action is actually right? Steve Petryschuk: The risk is absolutely there. But it’s not entirely a new problem – technology has always built on previous technology, and skills evolve accordingly. How many technicians today can troubleshoot at the processor level? Not many. The craft changes. What matters is teaching junior technicians the right fundamentals for the AI era: basic problem-solving skills, the ability to recognize a plausible answer from an implausible one, and how to use AI tooling effectively. The actual knowledge base evolves, but you still need a baseline of IT competency to function well. And that pipeline from junior to senior really matters – if we hollow out the junior tier, we’ll eventually run out of senior technicians too. Robert Dutt: Since we’re both flying the Maple Leaf – did you see anything specifically Canadian in the data? Anything unique or peculiar to the Canadian market? Steve Petryschuk: The survey data doesn’t specifically break out geographies, but based on conversations with MSPs across Canada, the US, and Europe, I don’t think we’re significantly ahead or behind on AI adoption – we’re facing many of the same governance challenges. Policies aren’t always making it to day-to-day operations, and visibility into which AI tools are actually in use remains a challenge for most. Where I do see a Canadian distinction is in the regulatory and legal landscape. I was recently at an event for professional engineers in Ontario where AI regulation came up – and the picture is interesting. The EU is taking an aggressive regulatory stance; the US is moving toward a more relaxed one. Canada, unsurprisingly, is finding its way somewhere in the middle. That’s probably the most Canadian answer I can give. Robert Dutt: Hopefully the middle ground lands well. Last question – looking at all the data, if an MSP owner can only fix one thing in their operations this year, what yields the biggest ROI? Steve Petryschuk: Documentation. You need an up-to-date source of truth, because that’s what AI has to build on to operate effectively in your environment. Visibility actually improves when documentation improves – they’re closely related. But if you don’t have a solid, well-maintained source of truth, you’re going to get that garbage-in, garbage-out scenario no matter how good the AI tools are. So if there’s one thing to focus on, it’s making sure you know what your sources of truth are, and that they’re accurate and up to date. That gives you the foundation everything else builds on. Robert Dutt: I appreciate that bit of advice. Steve, thank you for taking the time and walking us through the numbers. Steve Petryschuk: Thanks so much for having me on. [MUSIC] Robert Dutt: There you have it – Steve Petryschuk from Auvik. I’d like to thank Steve for his time. And honestly, I think “AI as a senior associate in your pocket” is going to be the quote of the month. The big takeaway for me is that we need to stop thinking about AI as a cool project and start treating it as a documentation problem. If your source of truth is a mess, your AI is just going to be a very fast, very confident hallucination machine. For those of you running MSPs in Canada, the maturity mirage is your best sales tool right now. If you can show your client that their budget increase is being swallowed by reactive noise because they don’t have visibility, you’ve moved from being a vendor to being a business advisor. Thanks for spending some time with us today. If you found this conversation useful, you can find more in the full show notes at ChannelBuzz.ca. You can find the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and pretty much everywhere you get your audio. If you have a moment, leaving a rating or review really does help us reach more of the community. Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.

Today’s headline news for Canadian IT solution providers: SonicWall is making its Gen 8 security platform available in virtualized environments for the first time with the launch of the NSv XS, a subscription-based virtual firewall purpose-built for MSPs and MSSPs delivering managed security to small and distributed environments. The NSv XS supports VMware ESXi, Hyper-V, KVM, AWS, Azure, and Proxmox and ships in three service tiers designed around recurring revenue models. The top tier adds co-managed security from SonicWall’s SonicSentry NOC team plus embedded cyber warranty coverage through Cysurance. SonicWall’s 2026 Cyber Protect Report found high and medium severity attacks surged 20.8% last year, and with 52% of enterprises now running most of their infrastructure in the cloud, the NSv XS is explicitly designed to close that gap. Huntress and specialty insurance firm Acrisure have launched a new cyber insurance program offering eligible organizations access to Cyber or Tech E&O policies with no deductible and a streamlined application process. Organizations running qualifying Huntress Managed EDR and ITDR solutions may benefit from simplified underwriting – demonstrating active security posture translates to better insurance terms. The two companies are positioning the program as a response to growing AI-driven cyber threats and an alternative to the traditionally complex process of securing adequate cyber coverage. Intruder has released its 2026 Attack Surface Management Index, based on anonymized data from 3,000 customers. The headline number: 26% of organizations have exposed MySQL databases, a known target for ransomware and data extortion. Midmarket companies in the 5,000-10,000 employee range take an average of 56 days to remediate exposures – nearly four times slower than small enterprises. Banks closed gaps in an average of 11 days; insurance and pharma firms averaged more than 40. The report frames this against the emergence of autonomous AI models capable of independently discovering zero-day vulnerabilities – which makes a 56-day remediation window a meaningful risk. ThreatDown has launched identity threat detection and response for MSPs, adding credential-based attack detection to its managed security stack. ITDR joins ThreatDown’s existing endpoint protection capabilities as attackers increasingly target identity infrastructure rather than devices directly. Cycode has announced new capabilities for AI-driven development, declaring “shift left is dead” and repositioning its application security platform around the AI development lifecycle. The move reflects a broader rethinking of where security fits as AI-generated code accelerates development velocity and introduces new risk vectors. Toronto-based MSP roll-up AYCE Capital has acquired a cybersecurity advisory firm to anchor a portfolio-wide center of excellence in vCISO and managed security operations. The move signals a push to build differentiated security capabilities across its MSP portfolio rather than sourcing them piecemeal. MSPAlliance has launched new service lines under its Cyber Verify program, expanding the compliance and assurance framework available to managed service providers. The additions give MSPs more structured pathways to demonstrate security and operational maturity to enterprise and regulated-industry clients. Read Full Transcript Welcome to The Buzz from ChannelBuzz.ca, I’m Robert Dutt, today is Wednesday, May 13, 2026, and here’s what’s happening in the channel today. SonicWall yesterday announced the NSv XS, a new virtual firewall extending its Gen 8 platform to cloud environments, with managed service providers and MSSPs as the primary target. The product allows partners to deploy firewall security wherever customer workloads run – public cloud, private cloud, branch offices, and distributed infrastructure – under a management model designed for multi-tenant operations. According to SonicWall, the NSv XS carries the same Gen 8 security engine found in its physical appliances into a lightweight virtual form factor, which the company says closes a growing gap as customer environments increasingly span both physical and cloud boundaries that legacy appliances can’t follow. The announcement is a practical one for the channel: a cloud-native firewall with the Gen 8 engine that can be managed centrally simplifies both the sales conversation around security coverage and the operational overhead of delivering it across heterogeneous customer environments. Also yesterday, Huntress announced a partnership with insurance firm Acrisure to connect cybersecurity posture directly to cyber insurance outcomes for eligible organizations. Under the program, customers running the Huntress managed security platform can access Cyber and Tech Errors and Omissions policies through Acrisure with no deductible – with policy terms tied to the customer’s verified security posture rather than a generic underwriting baseline. According to Huntress, the program is built on the premise that organizations that have actually deployed layered security controls should not be underwritten at the same rates as those that haven’t. The arrangement is worth watching for solution providers who have been looking for cyber insurance integrations that go beyond co-marketing – this one appears to operationalize the connection between managed security delivery and insurance terms in a way that could strengthen both the MSP’s value proposition and the client’s risk profile. Intruder rounded out a busy Tuesday by releasing its 2026 Attack Surface Management Index, drawing on anonymized data from 3,000 organizations to assess how quickly companies are identifying and closing their exposed attack surfaces. The headline finding: more than one in four organizations still have MySQL databases exposed and accessible from the internet – a foundational configuration risk that the report says reflects a broader struggle to maintain visibility over sprawling and distributed infrastructure. According to Intruder, the data shows that human remediation is falling further behind the pace of automated exploitation, a trend the company calls the “Mythos Era” – a period in which attacker tooling has measurably outpaced defender workflows. The report gives solution providers a concrete, data-backed framework to bring into client conversations, particularly for customers still relying on point-in-time scanning rather than continuous monitoring. In Brief –  ThreatDown yesterday launched an identity threat detection and response platform, extending its security stack to cover credential-based attacks across Microsoft Entra ID, Okta, and Active Directory.  Cycode is declaring “shift left is dead,” releasing new agentic development lifecycle security capabilities designed to protect AI-driven software pipelines from code generation through deployment.  Toronto-based AYCE Capital yesterday announced the acquisition of a cybersecurity advisory firm to anchor a portfolio-wide security center of excellence.  MSPAlliance last week added Service Lines to its Cyber Verify platform, letting MSPs map audited controls directly to the services they deliver for cleaner, client-ready compliance reporting.  Full details and links in the show notes or the blog post. Later today on In The Channel, we’re sitting down with Steve Petryschuk from Auvik to dig into their 2026 IT Trends Report and what the data reveals about the gap between AI ambition and AI maturity in managed services. And if you haven’t heard it yet, yesterday’s episode is a good one – Joel Abramson from Top Down Ventures joins me to discuss the close of their C$38 million MSP-focused founders fund and why they believe managed service providers are the primary delivery vehicle for AI to the small and mid-market. That’s how we’re seeing the headlines today. I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, thanks for listening. Have a great day.

Joel Abramson, managing partner at Top Down Ventures Today’s In The Channel episode lands on the same morning that Vancouver-based Top Down Ventures announces the close of Founders Fund I at C$38 million – oversubscribed against an original target of US$25 million, and positioned as the first institutional venture fund focused exclusively on early-stage software and AI for the managed service provider ecosystem. Managing partner Joel Abramson joined the show to walk through the fund’s thesis and what it means for the channel. Abramson co-founded and led Fully Managed through more than a dozen acquisitions before its $137 million acquisition by Telus Business Solutions in 2021. He joins general partners Chris Day (founder of IT Glue and ScalePad) and Mark Scott (founder of N-able) at Top Down – three operators who between them have spent about 75 years building and scaling companies inside the MSP ecosystem. The fund’s first exit – zofiQ to ConnectWise, which closed in January 2026 – returned 5.3 times the invested capital in roughly six months. Abramson describes it as a case study in what Top Down looks for: founders solving singular problems with exceptional depth, validated by real MSP operators rather than generalist investors. The macro thesis is equally compelling. The global IT services market is projected to grow from $600 billion to over $1 trillion by 2030. And in 2026, SMB IT spend is on track to outpace enterprise IT spend for the first time ever – a shift Abramson contrasts with what he calls the “SaaSpocalypse” in enterprise, where headcount reductions are translating directly into fewer SaaS licenses. The fund’s LP base of more than 100 MSP operators – including Pax8 – acts as a flywheel for validating investments, sourcing design partners, and connecting portfolio companies with the customers best positioned to stress-test what they’re building. Find Top Down Ventures, including their newsletter and annual research report, at topdown.com. Read Full Transcript Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last sixteen years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca and your host for the show. If you caught The Buzz this morning – and you really should have – you already know the headline. Vancouver-based Top Down Ventures has closed Founders Fund I at $38 million Canadian, oversubscribed, as the first institutional venture fund focused exclusively on early-stage software and AI for the managed service provider ecosystem. The story behind it, though, is rich. Top Down was founded with three partners with deep roots in the Canadian channel community: Chris Day of IT Glue and ScalePad, Mark Scott who founded N-able, and today’s guest, Joel Abramson, who ran Fully Managed through more than a dozen acquisitions before its $137 million sale to Telus Business Solutions in 2021. The fund already has its first exit in the books. zofiQ, an agentic AI platform for MSP service desks that ConnectWise acquired just six months after Top Down’s investment, at 5.3 times the invested capital. Joel joined me this morning to talk about why MSP software needs its own dedicated venture fund, what the first exit tells us about where agentic AI is headed, and one market shift that has the team genuinely excited about the decade ahead. Let’s get right into it. My chat with Joel Abramson. Joel, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it. Joel Abramson: Great to be here, Rob. Robert Dutt: I wanted to start with the origin story here. I think it’s an interesting one in that you had a big role in building and running Fully Managed through a dozen or so acquisitions, then sold – instead of going off and retiring on a boat somewhere or that sort of thing, you ended up in venture investing in specifically MSP software. Can you walk me through how that happened? How did Top Down come together? Was this something that you sought out or something that Chris Day pulled you into? How did that happen? Joel Abramson: Yeah, well, let’s be clear – I do love being on boats. To tell the origin story, you get to go through a 25-year journey of the MSP ecosystem itself, because there are three general partners: Mark Scott, Chris Day, and myself, Joel Abramson. Our journey dates back to the early 2000s when Mark Scott started N-able, and he was one of the pioneers that really helped value-added resellers and break-fix IT service providers become MSPs. I meet people every time I’m out on the road who have a story about working with N-able – transitioning their revenue model from break-fix to recurring. N-able is a phenomenal company today and I think Mark’s legacy lives on there. Mark started that company and then exited just before the SolarWinds acquisition. Then he went on to start a service provider called CareWorks – an MSP focused on senior care facilities. A really interesting vertical, as well as broad SMB. But I’ll pause his story and focus on Chris, because Chris is founder and chairman and really sets the vision for Top Down. Chris had an MSP as well back in the early 2000s. Eventually that was Fully Managed, and that’s where I joined him. I had a small – much less successful – MSP called Packetsafe Networks, and I rolled my little MSP into Chris’s marquee MSP, Fully Managed, and together we set on this journey. We wanted to bring that company to ten cities with $10 million in revenue in each city and then sell it to a Canadian telco – and it’s not revisionist history, it was actually the goal. But then a couple of years into our shared journey at Fully Managed, Chris got pulled into building software. It was because I’d built a bunch of software for Fully Managed to run on, and he made the mistake – or the fortuitous opportunity – of showing it to his peer group. His peer group was like, “I want to use that.” So he said, “Okay, well, I’ll build it for you.” He started building a documentation platform from the ground up and called it IT Glue, and that was a phenomenal ride for him – taking it from a couple of peer group mates trying it out to selling to Kaseya in 2018 and building a very large company in a relatively short amount of time. Not without a tremendous amount of hard work and grind. He was on the road with pop-up banners signing up logo by logo by logo in the early days, but eventually the movement just took shape and every MSP realized that they needed a documentation platform, and IT Glue took off. So IT Glue exits to Kaseya in 2018. Chris has to make that decision: do I want to golf and travel for the rest of my life, or what brings me joy? And so he actually started Top Down as a way to re-engage back with the MSP community. He had an early portfolio of three companies: Warranty Master, a company he had started with his brother; Backup Radar; and Quoter. Together those three early companies started to grow at their own individual pace. Keep in mind, we’re still running Fully Managed over here – I’m running it for him. Then we ended up putting Fully Managed together with Mark Scott’s MSP, and that’s how the three of us came together. Then yes, we did a number of acquisitions. We grew Fully Managed to be $100 million in revenue. It wasn’t the straight line Chris and I had talked about – ten cities in ten years – but it was maybe seven cities. The bridge version: Telus came in and said they wanted to acquire Canada’s largest MSP, which was Fully Managed at the time. They had done a bunch of research and nine months later we consummated that transaction, at the end of 2021. I’d been working with Chris for a number of years on the early-stage portfolio, because we’d get a couple of calls every month with people saying, “Hey, I’m starting this project, Chris, are you interested in taking a look?” So we started to build this reputation as investors in early-stage MSP software companies. We tried some other stuff – everything from consumer packaged goods (we still have a couple of investments) to starting a country music label, which we’ll save for another time. But we always knew our home, I think, was in the MSP space. After the Fully Managed exit, we decided we wanted to really compound our impact. We had this idea of a venture fund – and maybe I’ll pause there, because I can continue the journey, but we’ll wait and see if you have any questions up to that point. Robert Dutt: Understandable. It’s a wild journey, and it really is back to the heart of the early days of the MSP movement – as you say, from break-fix and VAR models. I guess tell me a little bit about where you’re at now. The fund is positioned as the first institutional VC targeting early-stage software and AI for this ecosystem. Why do you think this space needs a dedicated fund? What does a generalist venture fund miss or get wrong when they’re looking at the space? Joel Abramson: We’ve been doing early-stage investing for a few years – five years. At the same time, Warranty Master became ScalePad, and ScalePad started to gain really, really great momentum. ScalePad brought in a growth equity partner, Integrity Growth Partners, who are just phenomenal folks. They capitalized the business and that grew ScalePad from $10 million to $50 million. They were great partners, great board members, and we watched these guys – we were like, wow, we’ve been through this journey a couple of times. They add a lot of value, and we’re really excited about that relationship. We were doing our thing with the early-stage companies, and so we looked across the ecosystem. We said, there is a ton of capital that’s ready to invest in companies in the MSP ecosystem when they get to a certain scale – that was kind of the scale that ScalePad had gotten to. Then we looked down and said, well, what about the guys that are just starting out? There’s not a ton of support. There’s a ConnectWise pitch contest that grants $60,000 or $70,000 to early-stage companies. And there are early-stage investors – we’ve seen companies like Pax8 and Huntress go through many rounds of financing and they started somewhere. But we saw that the strongest source of capital in the MSP ecosystem was actually coming from angel investors. It was Joe Paniterri and Kevin Blake and Channel Angels, and they had done a number of deals, bringing together really early-stage capital and putting $100,000 into a business fueled from a number of different folks. That’s really, really cool. But where’s all the venture? You look across horizontal software and there are funds of venture that just pour in. In the big markets – the Valley and New York – and then in secondary markets, there are funds focused on those areas. But we saw early-stage MSP software companies as vastly overlooked. So we said, what if we could bring together capital from the MSP ecosystem? Because we’ve made plenty of millionaires just by acquiring them with Fully Managed. You look at how that scales out across the ecosystem: you’ve got Evergreen and Integris and Thrive and all these folks buying up MSPs. The stats are over 200 search funds, family offices, and MSP aggregators buying MSPs right now. That’s generating a lot of wealth for a lot of people. Then you have MSPs that are super profitable and people are making good cash flow. Then you have all the software companies that have exited with similar stories to Chris’s. There’s actually quite a bit of capital that could be put to work back into the ecosystem if we just found a way to harness it and focus it on innovation. We said, instead of doing a couple of deals a year, what if we could make 8 to 10 investments a year by bringing capital together? And then what if we could build a system around that to take everything we’ve learned working with early-stage companies – applying those practices, bringing folks together for design partners, early customers, advice, and partnerships in the MSP ecosystem? So we set out to raise a $25 million venture fund, and we said we were going to focus on educating the MSP ecosystem on what investing in a venture fund looks like, because it’s really just going to fuel innovation for MSPs themselves. Our goal was to have half the fund raised from the MSP community and half from outside – similar to what it was at Fully Managed: let’s tell the world about what a great opportunity exists in MSP. We were super successful in the first bucket. We got really well received by the MSP community. We have over 100 LPs in the fund and we exceeded our target of $25 million. In the second bucket, we still have a lot of work to do. We’re one year into our Outliers podcast, we’ve produced one white paper, and we’ve had hundreds and hundreds of conversations in the institutional community, educating funds of funds and family offices on the opportunity for early-stage MSP software investing. We only got a couple of participants in this fund – which is all right, because it shows the strength of the MSP ecosystem. We still oversubscribed our target. But we’re excited to continue that journey of educating institutional investors for our second fund and beyond. Robert Dutt: You mentioned you’re in at the early stage. Where in the lifecycle do you typically start looking, and what does a target portfolio company look like at the point you’re getting involved? Joel Abramson: I’ve only been doing this for a few years, so I’m still learning some of the language, Rob. But we talk about early stage being right at inception – which is called pre-seed, the first money into a company. Maybe they have an idea of what they want to build, a prototype, a business plan, some people, but they haven’t actually started that path to launch – all the way up to around that first million or million and a half of revenue, where they’d be called a late-seed investment or an early Series A. So maybe it’s the second money in, or in a Series A it could be the third. But really we’re focused on the early stage where we can leverage the strength of our LP base – a lot of strong MSPs – as well as the strength of the community that Top Down works to enable and bring together. That can be for design partners, early customers, folks to help with advice, and then partnerships in the MSP ecosystem. Maybe a company is working with ScalePad to solve a problem and ScalePad can help by bringing that product to its customer base. It’s really about building the things that matter most to MSPs. And that’s why I think we love this ecosystem so much – it’s a partnership of vendors and service providers. If we look forward to how AI is going to impact things, you have small and medium businesses at the frontline – all the enablement use cases there, all the cybersecurity use cases. Then you have the service provider layer, which is MSPs helping them with all those things. Then you have a middle layer of supply chain software like the companies we invest in. And on top of that, you have the hyperscalers, the cloud companies, the frontier companies. That four-tiered system really matters, because without the innovation from Microsoft and Anthropic, the macro doesn’t move forward. But very rarely is it going to go straight from there into frontline workers’ hands. The two layers in between – the layer we invest in, and the MSPs themselves – are really what’s helping bring the value from the top to the end market. We think it’s an incredibly resilient ecosystem. We think there’s nobody better positioned to help with AI transformation than MSPs. And that layer between the frontier companies and the hyperscalers and the MSPs is really important – that’s where innovation happens on their behalf, and that’s the kind of companies we’re investing in. Robert Dutt: One example of that would be zofiQ, which I think was your first exit – and some pretty startling numbers there: a six-month turnaround, selling to ConnectWise, bringing back more than 5x what you put in. What did you see in that company that made you say “we’re in,” and what did the ConnectWise acquisition tell you about the market for PSA and agentic AI and where that’s all headed? Joel Abramson: It starts with Lee and his team. We get the fortunate opportunity to look at a lot of things that are being built and we’re still learning, trying to keep pace. As the last couple of years have played out, we’ve been students of what people are building and how they’re looking at solving problems, armed with the knowledge of the last 25 years of the ecosystem. When we met Lee, we were really impressed with him as a founder. He had a strong track record of purpose-building solutions. When Chris and I sat down with him, it was obvious he was solving singular problems with a tremendous amount of depth, versus some of the other folks we’d seen building solutions who were really going an inch deep and a mile wide. Knowing how mission-critical these solutions are to MSPs – that for every time they mess up a service ticket, they put that customer relationship at risk – we knew that Lee’s approach was just bang on. He was obsessed with solving singular use cases. It showed in the team he put together, the technology he built, and what customers were saying about the product. It’s very atypical to make an investment and then six months later have it acquired. When it was all going down and we were talking to the ConnectWise folks, it was bittersweet. We’re so happy to see ConnectWise gain this incredible capability, but we were sad to know we weren’t going to have Lee in the Top Down portfolio anymore. Ultimately, thrilled – because what it means for ConnectWise is that they can get this really powerful technology into a lot of people’s hands. That has a tremendous impact for the ecosystem, the end market, the MSPs partnered with ConnectWise. They can get this great innovative technology out into the market much faster than Lee could on his own, just going out and telling the story and waiting for the momentum to build. Thrilled for ConnectWise, thrilled for Lee and the team to jump into an organization like ConnectWise. And proud that we were able to play a tiny part on that journey. Robert Dutt: zofiQ was automating the service desk with AI agents. From what you saw inside that experience with them, and looking across the portfolio now, I’m curious – especially given your background running an MSP – when you’re talking to MSPs about what some of these companies are doing, how ready are they to adopt and operationalize this kind of agentic tooling? Both in terms of willingness and interest, which I’m sure is high, and actual aptitude and ability to make the operational changes that come with it? Joel Abramson: It totally depends on the MSP’s maturity. I’ve been through the life cycle of MSP maturity many times – two steps forward, one step back, a bunch of times. Every MSP is on a similar treadmill of growing and maturing, then having to embrace new technology, then getting hit by outside factors: whether it’s COVID, the move to remote work, the push back to the office, or the change in technology. It’s not a static industry, but it is an industrial-strength ecosystem because it’s so mission-critical for the customers MSPs serve. Everybody is at their own part of the journey. Companies like zofiQ come around and they focus on building the right technology, then working with the ideal MSPs that are at a place where they can embrace it. I go back to an inspirational investor, Dave Lahn, who always talks about the different buckets of work: the hero work, all the work that supports the hero work, and then all the work that should be done but isn’t. I think about MSPs with that third bucket. As a 20-year MSP operator, there were all these things I knew I wanted to do but could never get around to because we were always fighting fires, then trying to do proactive work, then project work – it compounds and you never had enough hands for the work that should be done that isn’t. I think that’s one of the huge opportunities with AI – actually getting that work done, staying on top of it, and providing more stable, secure environments for MSP customers. If AI is the great enabler for MSPs themselves, then how exciting is it to be in a position where I can’t think of a service provider that supports small and medium businesses that’s better positioned to bring AI enablement down to that market than an MSP. I doubt it’s the accountant, I doubt it’s the janitor or the maintenance people. I think it’s the MSP, because you’re already talking technology. As MSPs continue to evolve from the server room to boardroom conversations, AI is an incredible hook to get into that conversation. That’s why the work ScalePad does around customer success and supporting the strategy conversations is so critical. But the next wave of companies we see are really around helping MSPs actually deliver AI use cases successfully to their customers. That transformation will take place for a long, long time. Robert Dutt: Your base of limited partners includes more than 100 MSP operators, including Pax8. That’s unusual for a VC fund. Was that a deliberate choice? And how does having operators as limited partners actually change how you source and evaluate deals? Joel Abramson: It just makes us so strong. We have the brainpower of over 100 people there for us to tap and leverage. At our Horizons event in November – where we bring all of our LPs together – I’ve never seen a more aligned group of individuals, focused on supporting the supply chain of an ecosystem, come together and have meaningful conversations without any real individual agenda. We think about it as a flywheel. We have a group of limited partners with all of our capital in this fund together. Of course we all want to make money – but I think what drives that outcome is supporting innovation and figuring out exactly where the best place to put capital is today that can have the largest impact tomorrow. zofiQ is a perfect example. Here’s a strong founder with a huge problem, solving it at the deepest level, that MSPs are going to be able to take forward and dramatically impact their businesses and their customer experience. That, to me, is the genesis of venture investing: aligning all those things and putting the right pieces together. We think about the strength of the mindshare of our LPs, figuring out ways to connect them with our portfolio companies, ways to validate our thesis and investments by harnessing that energy, and then making the right investments and providing the right support throughout a portfolio company’s lifecycle, thanks to that really, really strong LP base. Robert Dutt: So if I’m an MSP owner listening to this – not an investor per se, just someone running a managed services shop – why should I be paying attention to what you guys are doing and what you’re funding? What’s the typical practical downstream impact on my business? Joel Abramson: You could look at our portfolio with a degree of confidence that these companies are getting great support to build great products, that they’re talking to top MSP operators around the world to help shape what gets built. The average MSP is the benefactor of that, because it means they’re getting great product built that they can use in their MSP or deploy to their customers. We’re doing this to earn and keep the reputation that a Top Down-backed company means tier-one innovation, great people behind it, that it’s been validated and tested – and that MSPs themselves can be the benefactor of that by leveraging this technology. Robert Dutt: You closed this fund at about $38 million, oversubscribed, in what you called a slog of an environment – and I get that. What does that tell you about where institutional capital is actually flowing in 2026? And what does a successful Fund I set up for Fund II? Joel Abramson: A lot of institutional capital is flowing towards the frontier companies and the supply chain of AI. We think that’s great, because just like the Microsofts and Googles that have powered the ecosystem for the last ten years, we think heavily capitalized AI companies are fantastic for the downstream companies – the software companies we’re investing in, the AI companies we’re investing in, the MSPs themselves, and the SMB layer. Capital flows down as well. As vertical-focused funds like ours demonstrate a strong track record, more institutional capital will flow into vehicles like ours. Certainly a lot of capital is tied up at the top right now, but we see that as a great thing because we’re not super concerned about the capital cycles of the next three months. We’re much more concerned about the capital cycles of the next two decades. As we’ve mobilized a non-insignificant pool of capital to support early-stage MSP software companies, we strive to earn the right to have a second fund with a more diverse group of participants, and subsequent funds beyond that – as long as we continue to find the right companies to partner with and add value along the way. Robert Dutt: And that seems like – just with the names you’ve mentioned and the names I can think of off the top of my head – a target-rich environment. There are lots of companies building specifically for the MSP market for obvious reasons. But I’m curious: without necessarily naming names or tipping your hand, what problem or product category are you most excited about in the MSP software pipeline right now? Where’s the white space that’s still underbuilt? Joel Abramson: In our research paper, we talk about two big macro things happening in the market right now. One: we think this market – let’s broaden it to IT services, not just MSP – is going from a $600 billion addressable market to a $1.3 trillion addressable market, certainly $1 trillion by 2030. That’s a huge market. On the MSP side specifically, we have four or five scaled companies at or above a billion in revenue. Ninja is on its way up there. N-able, of course, is a big company. But you’re talking about a much larger addressable market – there’s still empty canvas where new companies can scale up to fill the middle and eventually be alongside some of those platforms. We expect those platforms to continue to grow and thrive, and we hope to build or invest in companies that can partner with them to take advantage of their distribution and ultimately make small and medium businesses better through MSPs. All that said, what are some of those categories? I don’t think it’s new MSPs starting up and buying PSA – that market is fairly saturated. Nor do I think it’s more EDR or XDR – those are pretty saturated markets too. There’s still market share that will trade, don’t get me wrong, and innovation will build on top of it. But doubling the market requires new products, new revenue streams, and obviously AI is a critical part of that. Whether it’s the evolution of agentic service work to do all the work that should be done but isn’t, or raising productivity levels so the service is that much better, or helping the average SMB with a sophisticated IT strategy that evolves into an AI strategy – we see the category of AI services enablement for MSPs as a huge, huge opportunity. In the enterprise, we’re living through what I call the SaaSpocalypse – the idea that big SaaS companies are going to see fewer licenses because people are going to downsize headcount and thus take an impact on their top line. But we see the SMB market as more resilient, because my accountant with 60 people and one person in marketing – they’re not going to downsize that one-person marketing department. That person is actually just going to get that much better thanks to all the tools they’re using. SMB IT spend is expected to outpace enterprise IT spend for the first time ever in 2026. We believe that’s because of the resiliency of the SMB market – the idea that when a big tech company lays off 5,000 people, those people don’t all sail off into the sunset. A lot of them move into the SMB economy and start small businesses. Maybe the IT folks start an MSP. So we see the SMB part of the economy continuing to thrive, and it’s showing itself this year – thanks to this crazy stat that SMB IT spend will outpace enterprise IT spend for the first time ever. For all those reasons, we’re very excited about the opportunities it creates in the companies that we’re invested in. Robert Dutt: That is a crazy stat, and it’s worth underlining – because of where you and your peers and so much of this community is focused, right in that SMB space. And closer to home, as a Canadian podcast, we’re very much a nation of SMBs. So it really is super impactful here. Joel Abramson: Yeah, I would agree. Robert Dutt: For people who want to follow what you guys are doing – whether they’re founders, MSPs, or just interested in what’s coming in terms of new AI-first MSP software – where do they find you? How can they find out more? Joel Abramson: TopDown.com. We publish a newsletter and try to share all the learnings we’re gaining each quarter. We publish a white paper annually. We have a conference in November called Horizons – if you’re interested in investing in the MSP ecosystem, our goal is to bring everybody together as peers. We do a lot of dinners and events around the big MSP events. Our goal is always to bring everyone together as peers, not in a supplier relationship where you’re being sold to – just everybody trying to solve this thing together. The community aspect of the MSP ecosystem is so strong, and that’s how you engage. I’m pretty easy to find and always interested in a conversation with anybody from inside the ecosystem or outside, as we try to build this thing one brick at a time toward 1.3 trillion of addressable market. Robert Dutt: Brilliant. Go get that. Go build that. I appreciate you taking the time, Joel. Joel Abramson: Thank you so much for having me. Robert Dutt: There you have it – Joel Abramson from Top Down Ventures. I’d like to thank Joel for his time this morning. Thank you as always for listening to In The Channel. A few things stuck with me from this conversation. First, the framework Joel described: frontier AI companies at the top, then the supply chain software layer that Top Down invests in, then MSPs, then SMBs at the front line. It’s a clean way to think about how AI value actually gets delivered to small and medium businesses. And the point that MSPs are the most natural vehicle for that delivery is hard to argue with – from where I sit, and probably from where you sit too. Second, that stat about SMB IT spend outpacing enterprise IT for the first time ever this year. If we’re in what Joel calls the SaaSpocalypse for the enterprise, we’re in a resilience story for SMB. For an audience of MSPs, that’s your market, and that’s your moment. And the zofiQ story. A six-month hold, 5.3 times the invested capital to ConnectWise. What Joel said about what made it work – going deep into a singular problem rather than an inch deep and a mile wide – is as much a product philosophy lesson as it is a venture capital story. If you want to follow what Top Down is doing, find them at TopDown.com, where they publish a regular newsletter and annual white paper on the state of MSP capital. Their Horizons conference runs every November if you’re engaged in this ecosystem as a founder, an operator, or an investor. If you’re enjoying the show, please give the podcast a follow or subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or most of the major podcast directories. Ratings and reviews are always encouraged. Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.

Today’s headline news for Canadian IT solution providers: Top Down Ventures closes C$38M Founders Fund I: Top Down Ventures has announced the final close of its Founders Fund I at $38 million Canadian, oversubscribed against its original target. According to the firm, this is the first institutional fund focused exclusively on early-stage software and AI for the MSP ecosystem, backed by more than 100 MSP operators including Pax8. The fund’s first exit – zofiQ to ConnectWise – returned 5.3x the invested capital in roughly six months. Canada now second globally for ransomware, Fortinet reports: New data from Fortinet‘s 2026 Global Threat Landscape Report and its companion 2026 Cybersecurity Skills Gap Report show Canada has moved from third to second globally for ransomware attacks, with 374 organizations extorted and 17 billion total cyberattacks recorded in 2025. According to Fortinet, AI-accelerated threats are compressing time-to-exploit by two to four times, while 47 percent of Canadian IT leaders cite a cybersecurity skills shortage as a top cause of breaches. Barracuda: one in three emails now malicious or spam: Barracuda‘s 2026 Email Threats Report, based on analysis of 3.1 billion emails, finds that 48 percent of malicious email activity is phishing, 34 percent of organizations experience account takeover at least monthly, and 70 percent of malicious PDFs now hide phishing links inside QR codes. According to Barracuda, attackers are shifting toward stealthier, trust-based tactics designed to bypass traditional filters, creating growing demand for layered email protection and automated response. Calian completes Computex acquisition: Ottawa-based Calian Group has officially completed its acquisition of U.S. managed service provider Computex. The deal expands Calian’s American IT services footprint and adds to its cybersecurity capabilities. Crogl begins private rollout of AI SOC platform: Crogl has initiated a private rollout of its new AI-powered SOC platform, positioning it to help service providers automate threat response and reduce alert fatigue for lean security teams. Pax8 and NinjaOne announce MSP partnership: Pax8 and NinjaOne have announced a partnership starting as a referral motion, giving MSPs a path to RMM and unified IT operations tools while the companies work toward future marketplace integration. TD SYNNEX secures reserved NVIDIA GPU access for MSPs: TD SYNNEX has arranged reserved NVIDIA GPU capacity for channel partners through a deal with Nebius AI Cloud, giving MSPs a route to AI infrastructure services without buying hardware or competing with hyperscalers for supply. Read Full Transcript Welcome to The Buzz from ChannelBuzz.ca, I’m Robert Dutt, today is Tuesday, May 12, 2026, and here’s what’s happening in the channel today. Top Down Ventures has announced the final close of its Founders Fund I, pulling in 38 million Canadian dollars and oversubscribing its original target. According to the firm, this is the first institutional fund focused exclusively on early-stage software and artificial intelligence for the managed service provider ecosystem, which it values as a roughly 1 trillion dollar global IT services category. The fund is backed by a limited partner base of more than 100 MSP operators, including distribution giant Pax8. Top Down noted that closing the fund in the current economic environment was a challenge, but the oversubscription signals clear institutional interest in the MSP software space. The firm also pointed to its first exit as a proof point – zofiQ, an agentic AI platform for MSP service desks, was acquired by ConnectWise just six months after Top Down’s initial investment, returning 5.3 times the invested capital. Having dedicated institutional capital purpose-built for the ecosystem means the next generation of MSP tooling gets funded by people who actually understand the problem. For solution providers thinking about where the platform wars are heading over the next five years, this fund is part of that story. New data released yesterday by Fortinet paints a stark picture of Canada’s position in the global threat landscape. According to the company’s 2026 Global Threat Landscape Report and its companion 2026 Cybersecurity Skills Gap Report, Canada has moved from third to second globally in ransomware attacks, with 374 Canadian organizations extorted last year. Total cyberattacks against Canadian targets surged to 17 billion in 2025, up from 13.7 billion the year before. Fortinet’s FortiGuard Labs says the time-to-exploit for critical vulnerabilities is now running two to four times faster than it was, driven by threat actors deploying agentic AI to accelerate reconnaissance and execution. The skills picture compounds the problem: 47 percent of Canadian IT leaders cited a lack of cybersecurity talent as a top cause of breaches, and 49 percent say they struggle to hire staff with specific AI security experience. That combination – faster attacks, a shrinking talent pool – is exactly the kind of environment where a strong MSP security practice becomes a business necessity for SMB clients, not a nice-to-have. Derek Manky, chief security strategist and global vice president of threat intelligence at FortiGuard Labs, called it an “industrialized defense” challenge. New research from Barracuda released this morning adds another dimension to the threat picture. Based on an analysis of 3.1 billion emails, the company’s 2026 Email Threats Report finds that one in three emails is now malicious or unwanted spam. According to Barracuda, 48 percent of malicious email activity is phishing, 34 percent of organizations experience account takeover at least once per month, and 90 percent of high-volume phishing campaigns now use phishing-as-a-service kits. Perhaps most notable for the managed services conversation: 70 percent of malicious PDFs now hide phishing links inside QR codes, a tactic specifically designed to bypass traditional email filters. Barracuda positions the core finding as a shift in attacker strategy – away from noisy malware and toward stealthier, trust-based techniques that use compromised accounts and familiar file formats to slip past defenses. The report identifies growing demand for layered email and identity protection combined with automated response, which points directly to an opportunity for service providers helping customers with lean IT teams who are already stretched managing alert volume. In Brief – Calian Group has completed its acquisition of U.S. managed service provider Computex, expanding the Ottawa-based firm’s American footprint and cybersecurity capabilities. Crogl has begun a private rollout of its AI-powered SOC platform, positioning it to help service providers automate threat response and cut alert fatigue. Pax8 and NinjaOne have announced a partnership starting as a referral motion, giving MSPs a path to RMM and unified IT operations tools while the companies work toward future marketplace integration. TD SYNNEX has given MSPs reserved access to NVIDIA GPU capacity through a deal with Nebius AI Cloud, letting channel partners deliver AI infrastructure services without buying hardware or competing with hyperscalers for GPU supply. Full details and links in the show notes or the blog post. Later today on In The Channel, I sit down with Joel Abramson, managing partner at Top Down Ventures, to go deeper on the Founders Fund close – the LP flywheel strategy, the zofiQ exit, and what it means for the companies building the next generation of MSP software. And if you missed it yesterday, check out my conversation with Steven Kiss, partner and national ServiceNow practice leader at EY Canada, on what building Canada’s first ServiceNow elite partner teaches you about what is coming next in the agentic enterprise. That’s how we’re seeing the headlines today. I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, thanks for listening. Have a great day.

Steven Kiss, partner and national ServiceNow practice leader at EY Canada This is the final episode in our Knowledge 2026 coverage series, recorded live in Las Vegas. If you haven‘t caught the earlier episodes, we’d suggest starting with our conversations with ServiceNow SVP of global partnerships and channels Michael Park and ServiceNow AVP of Canada Cristin Gooderham – both published last week. Steven Kiss is a partner at EY Canada and leads the firm’s ServiceNow practice nationally. His path to EY is worth knowing: in 2013 he co-founded SuMO IT Solutions, which grew into Canada’s largest ServiceNow boutique and became the country’s first gold and first elite ServiceNow partner. EY acquired SuMO in May 2021, making this conversation’s recording date – almost exactly five years later – a quietly meaningful one. EY is a global elite ServiceNow partner and the reigning worldwide partner of the year for banking, risk, and security. Steven’s strength in this conversation is that he speaks as a practitioner, not a spokesperson. He describes EY using ServiceNow internally as client zero – targeting eighty-five to ninety percent deflection of HR interactions, with employees getting instant answers to questions that used to require a chain of emails. He’s watching the agentic AI transition from the inside of a four-hundred-thousand-person organization. On the practice-building side, his advice is consistent and direct: configuration over customization, accelerators over custom builds, and outcomes over deliverables. The partners who survive the AI transition, he argues, are the ones who learn to translate technology capability into business value – not the ones who can deploy the most modules the fastest. His closing advice to Canadian MSPs and solution providers is worth the listen on its own: before you talk about what you can build, stop and ask what the client is actually trying to accomplish. It’s the philosophy that built SuMO – and it’s the one he’d hand to any partner trying to figure out where they fit in the agentic business era. Read Full Transcript Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last sixteen years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca, and your host for the show. This episode wraps up our coverage from last week’s ServiceNow Knowledge 2026 conference in Las Vegas. If you’ve been following along, you’ve heard from ServiceNow’s global channel chief on how the partner model is evolving around the Agentic Business, and from ServiceNow’s Canadian leader on what all the big announcements mean for Canadian enterprises and partners specifically. This conversation is a different angle altogether – what does this moment look like from someone who’s actually been building a ServiceNow practice in Canada for over a decade? My guest is Steven Kiss, partner and national ServiceNow practice leader at EY Canada. What makes this conversation different from a lot of partner-perspective interviews is his backstory. Steven didn’t arrive at EY through the traditional consulting path. In 2013, he co-founded SuMO IT Solutions, which became Canada’s largest ServiceNow boutique – the first gold and first elite partner in the country. EY acquired SuMO in May 2021, and Steven has been running the national ServiceNow practice from inside one of the world’s largest professional services firms ever since. EY is a global elite ServiceNow partner and the reigning worldwide partner of the year in banking, risk, and security. That combination – born in a boutique, operating at GSI scale, winning in regulated verticals – gives him a perspective on where the channel is headed that’s worth hearing whether you’re running a five-person shop or a fifty-person one. Let’s get right into it – my chat with Steven Kiss. Steven, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it. Steven Kiss: My pleasure, Rob. Good to be here. Robert Dutt: I want to start off with a little bit of the background. You didn’t arrive at EY through the traditional consulting angle. It’s neat that you built out a ServiceNow specialist in SuMO IT, which was then acquired. For listeners who don’t know the backstory, can you give us the elevator pitch version of what happened? And also, what does the EY ServiceNow footprint in Canada look like today? Steven Kiss: Yeah, absolutely. I’d love to tell you that story. It goes back to 2013, where we saw an obvious opening in the market. ServiceNow was coming on strong, really starting its momentum. We had a lot of legacy HP folks and HP Service Manager, et cetera. With ServiceNow, I think there was a real opportunity to see the market redefine and reshape itself. We launched in October 2013 with just a handful of employees, and really being focused on the goal of building the best service management partner organization in the country – that was the fuel that allowed us to grow. It wasn’t about how do we grow the quickest, have the most people, have the most certifications, be the most profitable. We really just wanted to be the place that people would come to when they wanted to modernize and accelerate their transformation. And then it grew into, I would say, Canada’s largest ServiceNow boutique. We were the first gold partner in the country, and then we became the first elite partner in the country. Then up to the point in May 2021 – which is our fifth anniversary coming up in a couple of days – we completed the acquisition by EY, where we brought 85 professionals into the EY Canada organization. That’s just the high-level story. Robert Dutt: That’s the backstory. Where’s that business at now? What does it look like in terms of scope and scale? Steven Kiss: It’s been an incredible ride. We brought in the things that made the boutique partner super successful, which meant very deep technical skills, then expanding as the ServiceNow platform expanded. But there’s a true opportunity within an organization like EY to leverage that front-end consulting engine. EY as a legacy consulting organization is in the market every day talking about HR, cyber risk, supply chain optimization, any part of the business. What that offered them was the ability to operationalize consulting – in the real world, solve the problem for the customer by using technology. We’ve been able to grow with that through activation and integration within the firm. It’s been an incredible ride and it still continues to grow and expand today. Significant growth over the past five years. Robert Dutt: The big theme here was obviously the Agentic Business – the argument that the pilot era is over and we’re moving towards autonomous AI deployment that shows real value. From where you sit, working with Canadian enterprises day to day, how does that land with what you’re seeing, with where people are? Are your clients there yet, or is this still aspirational for most? Steven Kiss: Well, I think let’s put it this way. I think people have a sense of what they’d like to accomplish when we talk about the agentic enterprise – the vision of the future, the aspirational vision of tomorrow. I think that’s somewhat clear in people’s minds. It may not be fully aligned from executive to executive across the board, but I think they have an aspirational thought of what it is. A couple of years ago, Gartner put out a quote – and I hate to misquote it – but something along the lines of the vast adoption of AI in an enterprise will come from the platforms people are already using. And of course, we’ve seen that: ServiceNow, who’s been in the AI space for years and years, and other platforms that enterprises trust are obviously incorporating AI capabilities. You’ve got departmental efficiencies in a lot of cases, but I don’t think you have the end-to-end benefit of AI all the way through. You’ve got pockets of it, but the enterprise benefits are not yet being realized. A hundred percent, like everybody says, we’re in the pilots and the kicking of the tires phase. But I think we have to think broader. This is not about how do I get my department to operate better, faster, stronger, cheaper – it’s really about the execution from request all the way through to fulfillment across the enterprise. We have the same actual goals as what we’ve had for years: breaking down silos, creating efficiencies across the enterprise, now with an expectation of accelerating all that. The good news is it’s at least a familiar challenge – a familiar motion – to break down those silos and get everyone rowing in the same direction. Robert Dutt: A hundred percent. And I think that’s exactly it. How do you see your role, or the role of other partners, in helping organizations get that alignment across executives and get everyone prioritizing and identifying the steps? Steven Kiss: Yeah, this is very interesting. This is where I look back on the earlier question about boutique versus the Big Four mindset now. I think of us very much along these lines. I’ve seen from the inside what organizations like EY have done. We’re a global operation – four hundred thousand people. Yes, we look at it from the Canadian lens because of being in Canada, but we’ve seen firsthand how these pockets of AI innovation turn into more enterprise workflows. Again, we’re four hundred thousand people, so any time we can see even single-digit efficiencies, that adds up to real dollars – and more importantly, less frustration for the people inside these workflows. We’re able to take these case studies and things that we’ve seen as client zero to our clients. We go, “Look, we are also a global operation. We have global employees. We understand the frictions from the inside.” And I think being able to tap into that front-end consulting engine I mentioned a few moments ago – we are already in the market talking to the people who own that business problem, the person who feels the pain of it, potentially the budget to solve it. We’re able to bring our expertise to that story and explain how we would solve that problem. I think the adoption of platforms like ServiceNow reduces the obstacles to get there, simply because we can leverage the “using technology you already own” mindset. You don’t have to buy yet again another tool, another platform, train more people. It’s already been security vetted. You already know how to support it. Your people are used to using it. Why not simply extend it into these areas? That’s been a huge benefit of the conversations we’re having. Robert Dutt: A big theme here – and whether you want to call it eating your own dog food or drinking your own champagne, ServiceNow tends to call it “Now on Now,” running the business on the product – I’m curious how you guys use ServiceNow internally, and especially as some of the new agentic capabilities roll in, how you’re thinking about it from an internal lens as a way to both learn and to add value to the organization. Steven Kiss: Yeah, absolutely. It continues the thought from before – AI, obviously, is going into every department. There isn’t a department that’s not looking at it. We’re doing the exact same thing internally. We are a client of ServiceNow in addition to being a global elite partner, and we have the luxury of being able to look at it from the point of view of scale. Initially people are looking at it from the departments that are – I don’t want to necessarily say early adopters, but potentially early adopters – and IT would be one. If you think about what happened a generation ago with IT service management moving into enterprise service management, it’s the exact same thing. IT is one of the most framework-driven departments in an organization. We ourselves have deployed ServiceNow in IT for request management, traditional help desk support, ticketing, case summarization – things of that nature have been huge. HR has also been a huge accelerated adoption area with ServiceNow – onboarding new employees and things of that nature. We also see ourselves moving very aggressively toward the target outcome of deflecting eighty-five to ninety percent of HR interactions. Things as basic as “What is the value of my flex benefit account?” or “How many days of vacation do I have?” – these are all things that the human in us wants to know nearly every day, but getting to that answer is not as easy as it should be. I have to send an email and I have to hope I get an answer. Now I can just simply ask and get the answer back. Looking at the employee from the human nature element is guiding where we’re taking it next. It’s really exciting where I’ve seen EY go from five years ago to today, and I think we’re going to see further acceleration in these areas. Robert Dutt: You guys just won Worldwide Partner of the Year for banking and risk. Very specific distinction – not just great implementation partner, but specifically in high-stakes, regulated space. Take your victory lap. What does that actually mean in terms of what you think you’re doing that more generalist partners aren’t? Steven Kiss: It’s incredible. And Rob, I hate to point it out – you also missed security in there. So it’s risk, security, and banking, which means we’re on the resilience side. If I take risk and security together, it’s not functional deployments of these things – it’s understanding the mindset of what resilience means to organizations, especially regulated industries like banking. This is a perfect example where these things actually come together. I think what separates us, in addition to the obvious large footprint in the banking and financial services sector to begin with, is again leveraging that front-end consulting engine. It’s one of our largest sectors. It’s where we’ve got a ton of innovation going, especially internally at EY with our AI innovation centers, et cetera. There’s a lot of horsepower and investment directed at these. I think they’re also the sectors that are investing the most themselves. So there’s a very strong partnership. It’s truly amazing for us. We work with very large financial institutions to help them get to success in these areas. I think it’s also not about deployment of modules. It’s not about people at hours. It’s really about outcomes and value – being able to really understand our clients, understand their business, understand their greatest challenges, connecting those issues across levels in the organization so we can understand what success looks like for them. We also have banking innovation departments with people who spend all day, every day just thinking about what the future of banking looks like. Being able to apply the value proposition of the ServiceNow alliance as part of those conversations is a huge differentiator. And this is the third year that we are the banking partner of the year, so we see continued success there. Robert Dutt: Close to home – I keep thinking about regulated industries in Canada, data sovereignty, public sector sensitivity, OSFI E-21, all of these things. Given that you guys have practice strength in exactly those regulated environments, where do you see the biggest near-term deployment opportunities for ServiceNow in Canada specifically? And what do you see as the blockers that are still there? Steven Kiss: Yeah, absolutely. I’ll start with blockers. I think organizations need to realize that they’ve got to get their data in order. This is the foundational element that’s going to stop rapid deployment if they don’t have it in place. They’re just going to be behind – and I don’t think the market is going to tolerate falling behind. The people who are proactive at investing in what tomorrow is going to look like will be the winners from a business perspective. That’s foundationally it. When you start talking about OSFI E-21 and regulation, they’re very defined on what the needs are, but I don’t think those needs are defined fully – we can’t see so many years out. They will constantly evolve, because we ourselves don’t ultimately know what AI is going to look like. So how would the regulations? They’re going to constantly evolve and mature. And I think the benefit of what I’ve seen in platforms like ServiceNow is the endless ability to evolve with the times without ripping and replacing. The investments will be leveraged and built upon and refined. I haven’t seen any other organization plow as much R&D into their platform as ServiceNow has. It’s not build your own house. They’ve defined it and created the frameworks, and configuration – not customization – is going to get us where we need to go. That’s a huge differentiator. But again, it’s ultimately going to come down to navigating the endless evolution of these regulatory needs. Robert Dutt: One of the big announcements this week – Action Fabric and the MCP integration layer – opens the door for partners to build proprietary IP on top of the platform and bring it to market as their own. Curious how you’re thinking about that. Is that something you’re doing – building reusable accelerators or industry-specific agents that you’re bringing to clients? And how do you think about the build-versus-configure question as that evolves? Steven Kiss: Yeah. I’ll start at the end and you can keep me on the straight and narrow with the rest of the question. With clients, it’s very much about having a framework of success as you start to deploy. And as I said previously – configuration, not customization. Leveraging as much out of the box as possible, and industry-leading practices are going to drive how we deploy things. This is not about individual whims. There is a well-worn path in front of you – follow it, adapt around it, and then you are going to be running, not walking. The organizations that adapt and create that framework of success are going to be the very successful ones. As it relates to building blocks to create IP at the partner level on top of the platform – I think we’ve seen this for years with different degrees of success – because you’re essentially thinking about it from a productizing perspective. You have to accept the fact that if you are in the productized business, you are a product organization. You need size, scale, ongoing investment. You have to have that commitment internally. I’m a big fan of innovation where it doesn’t ratchet down the foundational capabilities of the platform. I’m a big supporter of accelerators that allow clients to get to the finish line faster – and these don’t necessarily mean we’re creating a product that locks clients into certain capabilities, because we’ve seen the negative side of that over the past five, seven, ten years. Accelerators that provide an industry-leading process to the conversation, that allow us to move the client toward the outcome of what this thing should look like – those are very positive. And once again, if you think about EY, the brand is very strong in risk, security, the resilience story. Partnering with an organization known for that just accelerates the path to the finish line. Robert Dutt: Outside of what we’ve already talked about – or even within it – what have been your big takeaways from the event? What caught your ear the most and changed the way you think about something, or that you think is going to lead you to do something new or different in the practice once you get back home? Steven Kiss: The show, a hundred percent. A couple of things. First of all, the way ServiceNow is actually driving the market forward. In some ways it’s very Apple-esque – the old Steve Jobs quote, “our customers don’t tell us what they need, we’re there to help guide them.” I’ve seen that with things like AI Control Tower. Everybody’s excited about the possibilities of AI, but we can’t just let it loose. It has to be governed. And we have to be able to, over our Monday morning lattes, look at a single system and understand where our position of risk is. Number two – the areas of regulated industries and having a recommended path forward for clients operating in those sectors, being able to guide them through that in an accelerated way so we’re not waiting years to get there. Organizations are looking at this like an arms race – everyone’s running. So let’s make sure they don’t trip and get them there. Those are probably the areas where I’m the most excited about continuing to see the innovation and investment from ServiceNow. It’s something that I don’t think has ever been seen at that level. The way they’ve adapted to the AI story has been incredibly impressive – not following, very much leading. And I think it’s just very exciting. Robert Dutt: Last one for me. Our audience is primarily VARs, MSPs, smaller solution providers – not GSIs, but folks who are watching what you guys at the big integrators are doing because it tells them something about where the market’s going. Especially given your former life leading SuMO and being in that boutique partner role – if you were advising a mid-sized MSP or other partner right now, who’s trying to figure out their AI strategy and where ServiceNow might fit within it, what would be the most important thing you’d tell them? Steven Kiss: I think at the end of the day, a laser focus on the client and what success looks like for them. This is not about the technology – the technology is the enabler to get to success. Our secret sauce as we were building our boutique was really to say: yes, you come to us and ask us, “Hey, we want to deploy a module, we want to do this thing, we need a couple of people that are skilled at this.” I would always stop and say that’s great, we would love to have that conversation – but before we get there, what is it you’re trying to accomplish? Who in your organization benefits – customers, employees, vendors, partners? Tell me how it’s done today and tell me what you think it’s going to look like tomorrow. That’s going to be the best way we can advise you and get you there, because we want to be part of your success and create a long-term partnership. This is not about having more certifications than you do as a differentiator. This is not about being able to code quicker. It’s really about understanding what success looks like. Yes, you make yourself successful because you understand how to deploy – and the functional component of that is selling a deliverable, people, hours. But unless you’re able to translate that into outcomes and value, and articulate the problem that this solves, there’s no way you’re going to justify budget for the next thing you’re trying to do. If you simply focus on the functional execution part and not the business side of it, you will be left behind. You have to constantly think about that. It can be exhausting sometimes, especially for partners that are more technology-driven and not business or consulting-driven. That is a comfort zone you have to get out of. And I think if you do that, you’ll find it’s a very refreshing way to guide your organization through these next steps. Robert Dutt: That’s great advice. And I think we’re seeing a lot of momentum towards partners being encouraged to think that way. So I appreciate it being amplified. Steven, thanks for taking the time once again. Hope the rest of the show goes well for you. Steven Kiss: Thank you very much. I appreciate it. Thank you for the time as well. Robert Dutt: There you have it – Steven Kiss, partner and national ServiceNow practice leader at EY Canada, recorded live at Knowledge 2026 in Las Vegas. I’d like to thank Steven for his time – and for being one of the more candid guests we’ve had on this show about what it actually takes to build and sustain a practice in this market. And thank you for listening. Three things from this conversation worth sitting with. First – EY as its own test lab. The detail that stuck with me most wasn’t about client work. It was Steven describing what EY is doing internally with ServiceNow – targeting eighty-five to ninety percent deflection of HR interactions, so that a question like “what’s the value of my flex benefit account?” or “how many vacation days do I have?” gets answered instantly rather than through a chain of emails. That’s a four-hundred-thousand-person organization using itself as client zero. When he talks about AI adoption in enterprises, he’s talking about something he’s watching from the inside. That credibility comes through. Second – configuration, not customization. Steven returned to this idea more than once, and it’s worth repeating. His argument is that the partners who try to build elaborate custom solutions on top of the ServiceNow platform are going to get left behind by the partners who master what’s already there, build accelerators that help clients move faster, and focus relentlessly on business outcomes rather than technical deliverables. It’s a discipline that’s easier to say than to build into a practice culture. And third – the advice he’d give any mid-sized MSP or solution provider right now. It comes straight from the SuMO playbook. Before you talk about what you can build or deploy, stop and ask the client what they’re actually trying to accomplish. Who benefits? How does it work today? What does tomorrow look like? That’s not a sales technique – it’s an operating philosophy. And it’s the thing he says separates partners who justify the next engagement from partners who get left behind. That wraps up our Knowledge 2026 coverage series. Thanks for spending the week with us in Las Vegas. If you’re finding In The Channel useful, we’d love for you to follow or subscribe wherever you’re listening. We’re on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and most major directories. Ratings and reviews are always appreciated and always read. Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.

Cristin Gooderham, area vice president of Canada enterprise sales at ServiceNow This week’s In The Channel episodes have been coming live from ServiceNow’s Knowledge 2026 conference in Las Vegas, where the company made its most aggressive platform repositioning in years – moving from workflow automation into what it’s calling the Agentic Business: autonomous AI agents doing real enterprise work, governed by a platform layer that sits above everything else running in your organization. The big announcements – AI Control Tower, Action Fabric, the Go Live AI guarantee – were covered extensively earlier this week. This conversation is a different question: what does all of that actually mean if your customers are Canadian? Cristin Gooderham is area vice president of Canada enterprise sales at ServiceNow. In this conversation, she makes a case worth sitting with: the traits that have historically made Canadian enterprises slower adopters – governance-first thinking, regulatory sensitivity, preference for proven approaches – are actually an advantage in this specific moment. When the lead pitch for enterprise AI is governance and control, Canada is ahead of the curve, not behind it. She also touches on the partner ecosystem dynamic, describing a market that saw boutique ServiceNow specialists absorbed by larger integrators over the past few years, and is now seeing a new generation of AI-first specialists starting to emerge and fill that gap. For Canadian solution providers trying to figure out where they fit in the ServiceNow ecosystem, that’s an encouraging signal. And on the security side, the completed acquisitions of Armis and Veza aren’t just product additions – they’re an active attempt to bring a new category of security-domain partners into an ecosystem that hasn’t historically included them. This episode is part of our Knowledge 2026 coverage series. Also in the series: our conversation with ServiceNow SVP of global partnerships and channels Michael Park, and on Monday, EY Canada partner and national ServiceNow practice leader Steven Kiss. Read Full Transcript Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last sixteen years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca, and your host for the show. This week I’ve been at ServiceNow’s Knowledge 2026 conference in Las Vegas, where the company spent the week making the case for what it’s calling the Agentic Business – the argument that the AI pilot era is over and autonomous agents doing real enterprise work, governed by a platform layer, is the new reality. Yesterday, you heard from ServiceNow’s global channel chief on what it means for the partner model. This episode is a different question: what does it actually mean if you’re a Canadian enterprise or a Canadian partner? My guest is Cristin Gooderham, area vice president for Canada enterprise sales at ServiceNow. She’s leading the company’s go-to-market motion in Canada at what is genuinely a pivotal moment – a week where the platform her team sells just repositioned itself as the governance layer for all enterprise AI, not just workflow automation. We talked about where Canadian organizations actually are on this journey, what makes this market different from the US, and where she sees the near-term opportunity for Canadian partners. Let’s get right into it – my chat with Cristin Gooderham. Cristin, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it. Cristin Gooderham: I’m very excited to be here. Thank you so much for taking the time with me. Robert Dutt: Well, and thanks for having me out to Knowledge to get a sense of what’s going on here. When you look at where Canadian enterprises are right now on AI adoption – a big theme obviously this week is moving from proof of concepts to proving actual value – where do you see the Canadian market in that regard? Are we ahead, behind, or is it more complicated than that? Cristin Gooderham: I wouldn’t say we’re behind. I would say we’re right on pace with what I’ve seen from my US counterparts. We have some organizations that are driving full force ahead, and then we do have some that are still stuck in that POC landscape where they’re really still struggling to define what they want AI to be for them – which is probably the biggest thing. Where we’ve seen organizations really do a tremendous job is where they’ve come with a very strong point of view of what their business challenge was and tried to look at it from an AI perspective, versus “I wonder what AI could solve for me.” Robert Dutt: The more concrete the approach, the better it sounds like. Cristin Gooderham: Absolutely. Tying everything to a business outcome that can actually, particularly if it can support revenue, is where we see organizations find not just the energy but the funding to put towards it. Robert Dutt: Bill McDermott’s framing this morning was the AI blind spot – organizations running agents without governance visibility, which has kind of been the state of play up until now. Given what you know about Canadian enterprises – whether it’s regulatory caution, public sector sensitivity, or just Canadian conservatism in terms of not wanting to be first out on that limb – do you think that message lands differently in Canada than it does in the US or other markets? Cristin Gooderham: I think for ServiceNow it lands even stronger in the Canadian market because of that conservatism. The reality is platforms like ServiceNow are really bringing to the market true visibility into your AI asset estate and the ability to actually govern and audit what is going on with your AI agents. No one is going to win the AI race by having all the agents – that’s just not a realistic expectation. But having visibility into what all those agents are doing, particularly once they start talking to each other – I think Canadian organizations are going to be very interested to have a view of that estate before they make massive investments in AI. We’ve already had those discussions with a lot of clients who really want to understand: of course we want to get AI, of course we want to find efficiency gains, but we need to do it in a way that we can govern it. That’s been a very key message, and it’s great to hear Bill reiterating it here because that’s really what ServiceNow can bring to the table. Robert Dutt: How live has that governance discussion been with clients to date? Cristin Gooderham: I would say the discussion has been very live. The implementation and action of it – we are working diligently on that piece. Where we’ve seen success is with clients in particular verticals that are far more mature with ServiceNow than others. Our banks in Canada, for example, have been invested in ServiceNow and really viewing us as a strategic platform since as early as 2010 in some cases. They’ve made investments not just from an IT point of view but have expanded into the security and risk areas of our platform. Those are the ones where we’re having the most productive discussions and are really moving quickly beyond proof of value into true value. Robert Dutt: I’m curious to what degree you see the regulatory environment as backfilling that as well – how often is it being driven by existing or coming regulation, especially in regulated industries? Cristin Gooderham: As always, the laws are typically behind the technology. What I’ve seen is that our own customers are taking a very forward-facing look at it because they know that regulation will be something to consider. We’ve had tremendous discussions on AI processing data, data at rest, Canadian sovereignty of the data. That has been a really hot topic. There’s no strong directive coming from the federal government to say all data must reside in Canada at all times. But the AI component has made it very interesting, and it’s a discussion we’re having constantly with customers. Robert Dutt: A stat that came up yesterday was that ninety percent of ServiceNow implementations globally are partner-involved or partner-delivered. What does that mix look like in Canada? What can you tell me about GSIs versus smaller partners? Are you seeing a new breed of more specialized, AI-focused partners emerging that are punching above their weight? Cristin Gooderham: The partner ecosystem in Canada is absolutely a complete mix – everything from global GSIs down to extremely unique niche partners. Over the last few years, we did see a tremendous amount of our really strong boutique partners actually get acquired by global GSIs. When I got to ServiceNow six years ago, we had a tremendous amount of point partners – ServiceNow-specialized and very focused on a particular part of our platform. That went away for a bit because so many GSIs were excited about the opportunity to expand their ServiceNow practices. Now we’re seeing the resurgence of those smaller point solution partners coming back with a ServiceNow-only, AI-first view, which has been really exciting to see. Robert Dutt: I wonder if this becomes a cycle that repeats itself as those folks grow up and we see another wave of consolidation down the road. Cristin Gooderham: Potentially, absolutely. But the opportunity for partners in Canada to focus on ServiceNow is tremendous. We’re really excited to see some of these up-and-coming partners. We had two recently launched in Western Canada – both Ardent Labs and Skymark – taking a ServiceNow-only focus, which is a very different approach than the GSIs. The GSIs are fantastic, but they look holistically. A ServiceNow-dedicated partner can really make an impact in ways a GSI won’t necessarily prioritize. Robert Dutt: One trend we’re seeing across the channel is multi-partner engagement becoming more common. You’re nodding as I say that. I’m curious what you’re seeing in terms of situations where a big GSI tags in more specialized partners to fill the bench and meet customer needs. Cristin Gooderham: It is absolutely critical and something we at ServiceNow fully support. We do it ourselves – we have our own expert services, and a lot of times we will engage niche partners to fill particular gaps. One of the areas where I see our partner ecosystem doing that a tremendous amount is in the security and risk space, because some partners are phenomenal on the overall platform but security and risk is a different skill set – it’s even a different vocabulary. I love seeing partners collaborate because it’s usually the best option for the customer. It’s the best outcome for everybody: the partners are successful, the customer is successful, and therefore ServiceNow is successful. Robert Dutt: I realize this is not how one builds out a business model, but I’m curious – as you said, there’s a rising generation of ServiceNow-focused partners. If you were to point to the greenfield, the underserviced opportunity in the Canadian market today, what would it be? Cristin Gooderham: So I’ve touched on it already – security and risk. With our acquisitions of both Armis and Veza, that is an area where we’re going to continue to invest. If ServiceNow partners are looking to expand their skill set, that is where we need additional help. When we started having the AI Control Tower discussion late last year, it was at every executive briefing the thing that made every CIO sit up and pay attention. So anything in that space is really where we’re going to need to see continued partner enablement and adoption, and hopefully new partners coming in to pick it up. Beyond that, as we continue to make moves into the CRM space, those are also going to be areas where we need additional partners. We have phenomenal partners from the US that come up and do work here, but as an opportunity for more Canadian jobs, that’s definitely an area I would point Canadian partners toward. Robert Dutt: The AI Factory and NVIDIA partnership that came up – how do you see that through a Canadian lens? Cristin Gooderham: I think the key piece is that NVIDIA and ServiceNow together have a great story. We know most of our customers are investing in NVIDIA – a number of the telcos, we’ve already had discussions with them. So it’s really an opportunity for us to continue to expand our AI footprint and help create really positive three-way relationships. As NVIDIA becomes more and more critical in every market, it’s fantastic to see that they see the value in ServiceNow – and our customers are seeing the same thing. Robert Dutt: Data sovereignty – big issue in the Canadian market. It sounded from your earlier comments like it’s not quite a hard regulatory concern yet, but how do you see it playing out? What are customers asking you about? Cristin Gooderham: Data sovereignty is a hot topic in every customer engagement we have. In the public sector space it has a tremendous amount of weight. We’ve seen a real shift from the federal government in terms of their position on sovereignty – they haven’t come out and defined very strongly what data sovereignty looks like, but it’s absolutely something we’re focused on. We announced earlier last year a large investment in Canada to build out our own isolated full stack to host all of our public sector clients, ensuring Canadians on Canadian soil are managing the data. But it does stop somewhat short of true sovereignty. The benefit of SaaS is the ability to push upgrades to customers at any given time – as soon as you move to true data sovereignty, that piece closes off. It doesn’t make it a negative, it’s just something clients need to make decisions on. Robert Dutt: With AI Control Tower coming online and the way Bill was repositioning the company around that governance layer – as almost the orchestrator of the ecosystem – how does that change the partner role? Cristin Gooderham: I don’t think it changes the partner role tremendously. As you heard in the keynote this morning, we’ve always been the platform of platforms, and we’re still advocating that message. It’s just refined itself to really focus on securing and governing the AI estate, as opposed to a more open approach. Partners are still going to be critical to help us get customers to success. But it does mean that retraining and focus into those areas – understanding the security and governance piece – is going to be critical moving forward. Robert Dutt: The security piece is so big in the channel writ large. Do you see it as another entry point for new partners to come into the ServiceNow ecosystem and add what you’re doing to what they’re doing with other vendors and their own managed services? Cristin Gooderham: Absolutely. Where I think there’s a really interesting opportunity is for more security-focused partners that perhaps haven’t focused on ServiceNow before – they’re focused on multiple different point solutions – to actually start looking at ServiceNow as another tool to put in their bag. We are having expanded security conversations all the time. I think it’s very clear through our acquisitions that this is going to be a continued focus. A security partner like Arctiq, for example – they’re already engaged a lot with us, and I believe they’re already engaged with Armis. This could be a really interesting push for them to take on more of ServiceNow. The good part is that there’s no shortage of security tools out there to take on. The challenge as a partner is the same thing – there’s no shortage of security tools to take on. Robert Dutt: Is that mindshare conversation with security-focused partners already happening, or is there a strategy to identify the right partners and get on their radar? Cristin Gooderham: Those conversations are already happening – not necessarily with the more niche individual security partners yet, but a number of the GSIs have very strong security and risk practices. We’ve had a lot of reach out from Canadian partners at organizations like KPMG, where they run a security and risk practice and are very excited about these acquisitions and wanting to discuss how this folds into their practice. So there’s definitely opportunity at every level of partner. Robert Dutt: We talked a little bit about governance, and I noticed that Bell Canada is presenting tomorrow on the subject of their governance guardrails implementation. What can you tell me about that relationship and what they’ve done? Are we starting to see a cluster of organizations moving toward that space, or is Bell still more of a bellwether? Cristin Gooderham: When we talk about Bell, we have to talk about two different angles. We have Bell as a customer – Bell Business, who are a phenomenal customer we’ve engaged with in a very long-term relationship and who have made a huge investment to innovate on the ServiceNow platform. And then underneath Bell we also have their partner, Acteamo, which is a fully Bell-backed organization that is a services partner in the Canadian ecosystem. So there’s Bell as the customer and Bell as the partner. We have phenomenal relationships with both, and we’re very excited to see what Acteamo is doing in the ecosystem. I know they’re looking to expand not only across Canada but even into the US to bring some of the learnings from working with Bell Canada to other telcos. Robert Dutt: When you’re talking to Canadian solution providers who’ve seen the announcements this week and are trying to figure out where they fit in the whole Agentic Business picture – what’s your advice on where to focus, where to build practice, where the opportunity is richest and most accessible right now in the Canadian market? Cristin Gooderham: I’ll go back to what I said at the very beginning – focus on business outcomes. Nobody is interested in a discussion on agentic AI to modernize your CMDB. It’s truly about finding problems in the organization where AI can lead to either revenue generation or true cost savings. Where partners will be successful is if they can quickly identify – whether it’s verticalized opportunities across oil and gas, telco, or retail – areas where they’ve had success before and can bring that to customers. I don’t know that there’s a single point of entry. The challenge with AI is that it can do so many things. But Canadians like to start small. They like to be able to prove something out quickly, and then they like to move fast. So I would always caution partners: look for opportunities to do just that. Start small, move quickly, and then progress to the next step. Robert Dutt: That’s great advice. I appreciate your time, especially given how busy things are. You really helped put a Canadian lens on a lot of what we’ve heard this week. Cristin Gooderham: Thank you so much. Robert Dutt: There you have it – Cristin Gooderham, area vice president for Canada enterprise sales at ServiceNow, recorded live at Knowledge 2026 in Las Vegas. I’d like to thank Cristin for her time during what was clearly a very busy week for the ServiceNow team. And thank you for listening. A few things worth pulling out of this one. First – the Canadian conservatism point. Cristin made the case that the traits that have historically made Canadian enterprises slower adopters – caution around governance, preference for proven approaches, regulatory sensitivity – are actually an advantage in this specific moment. The agentic AI conversation leads with governance. That’s a message that lands here before it lands anywhere else, and that’s an opening for partners. Second – the partner ecosystem observation. What she described is a market that went through a consolidation phase where boutique ServiceNow specialists got absorbed by larger integrators, and is now seeing a new generation of AI-first specialists starting to emerge and fill that gap again. If you’re a mid-sized Canadian solution provider trying to figure out where you fit, that’s encouraging news. And third – security as the door. The Armis and Veza acquisitions she referenced aren’t just product additions. They’re a signal that ServiceNow is actively trying to pull in a new category of security-domain partners who haven’t historically been in the ServiceNow ecosystem. If your practice is in that space, it’s worth paying attention. More from Knowledge 2026 on Monday, when I’ll have my conversation with Steven Kiss, partner and national ServiceNow practice leader at EY Canada – a conversation about what the boutique-to-big-four journey actually teaches you about where the channel is headed next. If you’re finding In The Channel useful, we’d love for you to follow or subscribe wherever you’re listening. We’re on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and most major directories. Ratings and reviews are always appreciated and always read. Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.

Today’s headline news for Canadian IT solution providers: inforcer launches Copilot Manager: inforcer has released its new Copilot Manager feature, giving MSPs in-depth visibility into Microsoft 365 Copilot adoption and shadow AI usage across customer tenants. According to the company, as many as 80% of SMB employees are using unauthorized AI tools at work, and IBM research cited by inforcer suggests organizations with high shadow AI exposure average $670,000 more in breach costs. The tool builds on the company’s earlier Copilot Readiness Assessment and has already been trialed in beta by more than 200 MSPs globally. SUSE launches Sovereign Partners Specialization: SUSE has announced a new Sovereign Partners Specialization at its SUSECON 2026 conference in Prague, designed for MSPs and channel partners operating in sovereign cloud environments. The specialization is structured as an agile layer on top of SUSE’s existing partner program, targeting partners who already hold sovereign field certifications and know the SUSE technology stack. For Canadian solution providers, the timing aligns with accelerating data sovereignty requirements under OSFI E-21 and Quebec’s Law 25. Cayosoft launches Microsoft Migration Services: Cayosoft has launched a full-cycle Microsoft identity migration service delivered in partnership with XMS Solutions, covering Active Directory, Entra ID, Microsoft 365, Exchange, SharePoint, and Teams. According to the company, the offering addresses the security exposure that persists after migrations that close on schedule but leave behind broken permissions and unmanaged identity drift. The service spans pre-migration assessment through post-migration monitoring and governance. Kaseya unveils Agentic IT Management Platform: Kaseya has announced what it is calling the first Agentic IT Management Platform, powered by a proprietary dataset the company calls Kaseya Intelligence, combining real-world IT data with an execution layer designed to act autonomously on behalf of MSPs. GuidePoint Security wins CrowdStrike Americas Partner of the Year: GuidePoint Security has been named CrowdStrike’s 2026 Americas Partner of the Year after the two companies surpassed $1 billion in cumulative joint sales, a milestone the company is positioning as validation of its managed security practice. Dyna Software showcases Platform Copilot at Knowledge 2026: Dyna Software is demonstrating Platform Copilot at ServiceNow Knowledge 2026, positioning the tool as a way to generate ServiceNow environment configurations from natural language inputs and images, reducing prototyping time for implementation partners. Kyndryl pushes AI deeper into IT operations: Kyndryl has announced updates expanding autonomous AI capabilities across its global IT operations practice, extending AI-assisted resolution workflows for its managed services engagements. Upwind adds Windows Server runtime visibility: Upwind has launched runtime visibility support for Windows Server virtual machines running across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform, closing a cross-platform gap in its cloud-native security coverage. Read Full Transcript Welcome to The Buzz from ChannelBuzz.ca, I’m Robert Dutt, today is Friday, May 8, 2026, and here’s what’s happening in the channel today. Managing Microsoft 365 Copilot is becoming a genuine operational challenge for MSPs, and a company called inforcer is positioning itself as the answer with the launch of its new Copilot Manager feature. The company, which makes Microsoft 365 multi-tenant management software for managed service providers, says Copilot Manager gives partners in-depth visibility into Copilot adoption trends across all client tenants, and – critically – the ability to monitor shadow AI usage. According to inforcer, as many as eighty percent of SMB employees are bringing their own AI tools to work, using unauthorized or open-source applications that increase the risk of data leakage. The company cites IBM research suggesting one in five organizations have experienced a breach due to shadow AI, with those carrying high shadow AI exposure averaging six hundred and seventy thousand dollars more in breach costs. The business case here is straightforward for solution providers. Copilot has crossed twenty million paid seats. The licensing is in motion. What most MSPs lack is the infrastructure to make Copilot governance a repeatable, billable service rather than a one-time check-in conversation. Copilot Manager has already been trialed in beta by more than two hundred MSPs globally, and the company says it builds directly on a Copilot Readiness Assessment tool released last year, giving partners a documented progression from pre-sales evaluation through ongoing managed AI services. SUSE has launched a new Sovereign Partners Specialization as part of its channel program, a move that carries meaningful implications for the Canadian market. The announcement came at the company’s annual SUSECON conference in Prague last month, with details emerging publicly this week. SUSE is positioning the specialization as an agile layer on top of its existing partner program, designed specifically for early-mover partners who already hold sovereign field certifications and are invested in the sovereign technology market. According to Hayley Wienszczak, SUSE’s head of global partner programs and success, the initial go-to-market will focus on existing SUSE MSPs who know the technology stack, working jointly to onboard the first reference customers onto a full SUSE sovereign stack. More than ninety-eight percent of SUSE’s business runs through partners, and the company is framing the sovereign play as an opportunity to lock in that partner ecosystem around an emerging but fast-growing requirement. For Canadian MSPs, the timing aligns with accelerating regulatory pressure around data sovereignty – OSFI’s E-21 guideline on technology and third-party risk, Quebec’s Law 25, and federal Protected B requirements are all pushing enterprise buyers toward environments where data residency is a verifiable, contractual commitment rather than a vendor promise. SUSE is also opening co-sell registration to ISVs and system integrators alongside MSPs as part of the same program update. Earlier this week, Cayosoft launched a full-cycle Microsoft identity migration service that it says is designed to address the ongoing risk that sits inside most Active Directory and Entra ID environments. The offering, called Cayosoft Microsoft Migration Services, is being delivered in partnership with XMS Solutions, a long-time provider of migration and cybersecurity services. According to the company, the service covers Active Directory, Entra ID, Microsoft 365, Exchange, SharePoint, Teams, and related identity infrastructure, and spans the complete lifecycle from pre-migration assessment through phased execution, data integrity validation, and post-migration monitoring, governance, and recovery. The launch targets a specific and frequently mismanaged problem: migrations that declare success on go-live day while leaving behind broken permissions, duplicated identities, and poorly governed access that creates security exposure for months afterward. Cayosoft is specifically calling out M&A, divestitures, and consolidation scenarios as high-risk contexts. For Microsoft-focused channel partners, the model Cayosoft is describing – migration as the front door into a longer-term identity management and recovery engagement – represents a services motion that can extend well beyond the initial project. Partners who have historically treated Active Directory migrations as one-time engagements may find this a useful framework for repackaging that work as an ongoing managed practice. In Brief Kaseya has unveiled what it is calling the first Agentic IT Management Platform, powered by a proprietary dataset the company calls Kaseya Intelligence.  GuidePoint Security has been named CrowdStrike’s 2026 Americas Partner of the Year after the two companies surpassed one billion dollars in cumulative joint sales.  Dyna Software is showcasing its Platform Copilot at ServiceNow Knowledge 2026, positioning the tool as a way to generate ServiceNow configurations from natural language and images.  Kyndryl has announced updates pushing AI deeper into its IT operations practice, expanding autonomous resolution capabilities across its global managed services engagements.  Upwind has launched new runtime visibility support for Windows Server virtual machines across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform, addressing a gap in cross-platform endpoint coverage.  Full details and links in the show notes or the blog post. Later today on In The Channel, we continue our Knowledge 2026 series with Cristin Gooderham, area vice president of Canada enterprise sales at ServiceNow, on what the shift to agentic business looks like from a Canadian market perspective. And if you haven’t heard it yet, yesterday on In The Channel we published my conversation with Michael Park, ServiceNow’s global channel chief, on why the company put its AI product leader in charge of the channel – and what that means for how partners get built and compensated going forward.  That’s how we’re seeing the headlines today. I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, thanks for listening. Have a great day.

Michael Park, senior vice president of global partnerships and channels at ServiceNow Recorded live at ServiceNow‘s Knowledge 2026 conference in Las Vegas, this episode features Michael Park, ServiceNow’s senior vice president of global partnerships and channels – a channel chief who came not from sales or alliances, but from leading AI go-to-market strategy for ServiceNow itself. Park explains why that appointment was intentional: scaling the partner organization for the agentic era requires the same mindset he applied to bringing AI to market – sitting at the intersection of customer demand, business model, and technology innovation, and being willing to rethink locked-in patterns. The conversation covers the mechanics of ServiceNow’s new Go Live AI guarantee – a 100-day production commitment that Park confirms is a program, not a promotion. In its current form, ServiceNow primes the delivery with partners sub-primed into the model. The stated intent is to eventually syndicate priming capability out to the partner network directly. Park also addresses the compression of traditional services work – implementation, configuration, and upgrades – and the new competencies partners will need to build around AI Control Tower administration, Action Fabric and MCP integration, and outcome-driven services built on platform telemetry. On partner economics, Park makes the case that focused ServiceNow partners will see higher operating margins as the same platform skill set applies across every buying center – IT, HR, CRM, procurement – reducing the per-resource cost of expanding into new practice areas. Also discussed: the opportunity for security-domain partners who haven‘t traditionally engaged with ServiceNow to build new practices anchored in the Armis and Veza acquisitions, and the recent change making AI certification native to every ServiceNow product tier rather than a premium add-on. Read Full Transcript Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last sixteen years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca and your host for the show. I’m recording this from Las Vegas, where I’ve spent the last few days at ServiceNow’s Knowledge 2026 conference. The big theme of the week has been what ServiceNow is calling the Agentic Business – the idea that we’ve moved past the AI pilot era and into a world where autonomous AI agents are doing real work, governed by a platform layer that sits above everything else running in your enterprise. That governance layer – ServiceNow’s AI Control Tower – is central to how the company is repositioning itself. And it raises a real question for the channel. If ServiceNow is now the arbiter of how AI gets governed and orchestrated across the enterprise, what does that mean for partners? Who do they want to work with? How does the delivery model change? And how do you build a services business in a world where the traditional implementation and configuration work is being compressed by AI itself? My guest today is the person who has to answer those questions for a living. Michael Park is the senior vice president of global partnerships and channels at ServiceNow. What makes his appointment interesting is that he didn’t come up through channel sales or alliances. He most recently led AI go-to-market strategy for ServiceNow before being tapped to run the partner organization. It’s a deliberate choice, and it says something about how the company is thinking about what the channel needs to be right now. Let’s get right into it – my chat with Michael Park. Michael, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it. Michael Park: Great to be here. Robert Dutt: You have an interesting background coming into leading the partner organization, coming from the product strategy side – and particularly given where we sit, with the topic du jour being AI product strategy. Was that an intentional path on ServiceNow’s part? And if it was, what does it say about how the organization at large is thinking about where the partner organization needs to be right now? Michael Park: Yeah, I think it was intentional by Bill and the management team. The AI stuff is relatively new. And having the opportunity to lead AI go-to-market from the beginning, and helping the organization as a whole go from zero to where we are now with it – when you’re first in, you learn a lot. The good and the bad. And I think that first year in the job, I did over 500 actual customer meetings, just explaining what AI is, how to get to value with it, what the platform is. And so I think when we started looking at where the market’s going, we realized that ServiceNow is on a wonderful trajectory for where we’ve come over the last twenty years. But for the next generation, what we need to do is take everything we know and figure out how we build for scale to enable the partners to execute with even greater scale. And so a big part of that was taking what I know, moving it over to the channel, and then driving the channel. And so as you heard yesterday from the mantra of our whole operating strategy – we must be first customer obsessed, and we do it in a way that we’re AI led. But then we deliver it in a way that we’re partner empowered. And so it’s a very simple mantra that keeps the GPC, the Global Partner and Channel organization, grounded in what we’re here to do. Robert Dutt: A lot of channel chiefs tend to come up through sales, maybe through alliances, occasionally through marketing. When you’re coming in from the lens that you have – having led AI product – what do you see that you think a traditional channel chief might not? Where are the blind spots, since that was one of the words of the day on the main stage earlier, in how the industry has been thinking about how partner programs and partner value are structured? Michael Park: Well, if you go back all the way through my resume, I’ve been in and out of product, marketing, and sales jobs. And so my special skill is that I’ve been able to sit at the intersection of customer demand, the business model, and technology innovation – and I can translate between those three. And so really the only difference with AI right now is the pattern for thirty years has really been the same as new technologies come in. It’s just happening a lot faster. The floor of adoption has become easier because of the way you can administer an LLM, which has raised the ceiling on what the art of the possible is. And so I think what I would say is it’s not so much about the skill set of a channel leader or a product leader. It’s the ability to think in an agile way, to really free your mind from a locked-in pattern – to understand the need, the technology, and the business model, and say, hey, is there a better way to create a new outcome here? And that’s where I’m seeing the real great leaders emerge. I also think the other thing about AI is that the change management required to administer value creation at this kind of speed requires real conviction and the ability to really understand change management. Because the tech is the tech – but changing the behavior, the mindset of somebody, while there’s also the looming threat of job insecurity, everything else going on in this world, things changing so fast for a lot of people that aren’t used to changing fast – it’s as much about the leadership mindset of change management as it is the adoption of the new technology. Robert Dutt: With AI Control Tower, it seems like there’s a real effort to position ServiceNow as the governance layer – even more so than before – sitting above everything else running in an enterprise. Does that change what you need from partners, who you partner with, or how you deepen relationships as you build out the orchestration-plus-governance story? Michael Park: I think the channel is always evolving to meet the needs of the market. And what is happening now is you’ve seen this enormous surge of token consumption happen in the last two years. Now, whether you’re getting the return on investment for all those tokens you’re paying for is another question altogether. But the other constant we see in the enterprise is that there’s not one platform. There are multiple platforms people are using, multiple elements, multiple agents being built. And one of the inconsistencies there is – do you have a consistent way of setting thresholds on token consumption across platforms in a unified way? Do you have a way to administer compliance and security or risk management protocols over MCP servers that different groups are building on different platforms? Can you administer a regulatory or company-specific compliance policy across multiple agents on multiple platforms? And today’s answer is no, no, no, no. So we see this incredible opportunity – because, Rob, in many ways we’re already in the game. We have this product called IRM, integrated risk management, where we do cross-company compliance and risk management and security modeling for many industries – banking, healthcare, manufacturing, etc. And so this is just a natural-order expansion of where we’re coming from in the context of integrated risk management, and even IT services management, because at the end of the day that’s a catalog of IT assets being managed, with life cycles being managed in relation to employees. So AI Control Tower is just the next evolution, saying: regardless of what the asset is in the AI world, we will tag it, we will track it, and we will administer policy, compliance, performance, and risk management over it – the same way we’ve done for IT, the same way we do for integrated risk. So those partners that have been with us on that journey, it’s a natural progression for them. But then with the acquisition of Veza and Armis, it takes us into an even deeper realm of security. With Veza, with identity – so that as every agent stands up and more non-human identities are set up, we have secure identity management over every one of those assets, easily administered as part of AI Control Tower. And then with Armis, the OT element – really being able to tag beyond just IT, any asset in the enterprise, and administer the same process with AI Control Tower – makes it very, very powerful in what we can do in a multi-vendor way. Like our game, as you heard from Bill today, is we’re friendly to all, because we can administer a common policy over anybody that wants to play with it. And that’s a slightly different approach right now. Robert Dutt: Security and governance – such a big area, such a hot spot in the channel, and one that a really broad variety of partners play in. Do you see an opportunity to reach out to partners who maybe historically haven’t been in the ServiceNow sphere, as a result of going deeper into the security space? Michael Park: Lots and lots of opportunity. If you look at the history of ServiceNow up until recently, most of our channel was activated as a mechanism to implement software – ServiceNow software that ServiceNow direct sales sold. But now that we’re surpassing the fifteen billion dollar mark and continuing to grow at twenty percent, the opportunity for us to scale has to be more leveraged through different partner ecosystems, many of which we’re not even tapped into yet. So there’s going to be growth for the existing partners who continue to grow with us. And then as we get into new buying centers, there are going to be lots of partners already existing in the security domain who will be able to use Veza and Armis and the new AI Control Tower as a way to extend their security practice and build new practices on ServiceNow that they haven’t had before. And what I like about that is they have domain expertise in security that we don’t – but we have a platform and technology that they don’t. And the two make well together, just as much as one of our more traditional partners who really understands ServiceNow but is entering a new domain. Robert Dutt: One of the big topics here at the event writ large has been getting past proof of concept – past “the board’s excited about AI, so we have to do AI” – to AI that actually proves its value in business outcomes. Can you tell me a little bit about what you’re doing in terms of enablement to help partners realize that opportunity and have the skill sets and tools they need? Michael Park: Yeah, this goes to the operating strategy of what we call AI led. And for us, AI led starts with my own organization, GPC. When I took the job a year ago, one of the operating strategies I laid down is: if we cannot ourselves be AI fluent in the way we operate with our partners, we cannot expect our partners to be AI fluent. So we’ve been using the ServiceNow technology, we’ve been using Claude, we’ve been using Copilot, we’ve been using a couple of other vendors to basically operate the ServiceNow Global Partners and Channels group. The content we create, the policies we administer, the training we do – it’s all been agentified now. In the last year, we’ve been able to identify about thirty-four percent of the redundant work that doesn’t add a lot of value. We’ve administered it away – either automated it or built AI agents to do that work. And we’re reorienting our people toward the more value-added work that is literally facing the partner, to help them drive business. And if you go out and talk to partners, they will tell you – yeah, we’re kind of seeing that from ServiceNow. We expect that over time our partners will also pick that up. So if you think about the opportunity for partners – all that we’ve done is also shaping into the enablement we’re building. For example, we have a hundred billion workflows today that are already operating, most of which are not yet agentified. So we don’t have to go build from scratch. We have to go agentify the workflows that are already running. It’s a huge opportunity for partners that we cannot possibly administer directly on our own without them. One of the unique things about ServiceNow is that ninety percent of the deployments we do are actually done through partners. Only ten percent is direct. So the partner already plays an important role. But we want them to go beyond that – because in this new world of AI, as we talked about in the keynote, the installation, implementation, configuration, and upgrade work will get agentified in the next two years. So the services they’ve been driving for twenty or thirty years are going to get compressed into a smaller order effect. But the new services we need require the skill sets we were just talking about – knowing how to use AI Control Tower, administering data graph connections, learning how to use multiple models of inference to plug in and call the ServiceNow workflow. These are all new value-added services that will help re-engineer a company. And it was also why I was reinforcing the value calculator assessment tool – you can’t just sell AI. You have to be able to articulate what the ROI is, what the benefit is, quantified from the telemetry of what you’re getting out of the platform. We’ve delivered that baseline telemetry and asked partners to take it, learn it, and make it theirs. It’s not a completed product – we expect them to put their special sauce on it and then bring it to the customer. And then on top of that, we announced outcome-driven services, which is using that analytics baseline to drive into defining the business outcome and quantifying it – rather than just billing time and materials the old school way. Robert Dutt: As that shift happens – as workflows become more autonomous, more agentic, and per-seat starts to feel like a legacy metric – how does that change how you think about partner incentives and compensation? Does the model shift toward outcome-based, consumption-based, something else? And how do you make sure partners can actually build a business around that transition? Michael Park: The way we measure partner value contribution today is what we call sourced. The partner is sourcing value to ServiceNow – they’re bringing us a customer. Whether that’s licenses or consumption of AI, it’s still sourced. So the metrics we hold partners accountable to – sourced and adoption – don’t change. What changes is the speed. What we expect now is that partners won’t source something that takes three years to deliver. We expect partners to source in a hundred days, deliver the first point of value in a hundred days, then do the next one in a hundred days, and then the next one and the next one. So in five hundred days you’ve had five points of sourced value creation and adoption – versus the old way, where you do one source point and three years later you come out with some kind of value. And so that I think is the new model. And this is where ServiceNow’s platform is uniquely suited. If you go learn the ServiceNow platform, you can start in IT, move to HR, move to CRM, move to procurement. But the tools to build the agents, the tools to do the data connectors, the querying and reporting, the declarative modeling, the tools to call MCP – it’s the exact same across every different buying center. So the business model leverage for the partner is: once they’re trained up on the ServiceNow platform, they can administer and monetize any kind of workflow above it using the same skill set. The economics will be a higher operating cash flow margin per dollar of resource invested in the ServiceNow practice versus any other technology out there. Robert Dutt: You opened the door with the words “hundred days” there. One of the big things you teed up on Monday, and then Bill talked about this morning, was the Go Live AI guarantee – the idea of a hundred days to real, active, measurable ROI on AI, as a guarantee. How does that work with partners? What’s the mechanic? Is there a co-delivery model, a financial backstop? And what does a partner need to do to carry that guarantee to a customer? Michael Park: We had a number of partners step into the offer. We shared it with our most accredited partners first and asked them if they’d be interested. And we had quite a few step in. We will prime. So the first way out, ServiceNow will prime that particular service. It’s a paid service the customer pays for. Upon delivery of the hundred days of service is when the last leg of that service bill comes. The way the model will work with a partner is the partner will be sub-primed into the prime model for some period of time, until we can get the operating model strong. Then as we do that – as we get the tooling and the procedures right – we’ll syndicate that out to the partner network so they can do it on their own and actually prime on their own. But the first way, we need to prime just to get it right. The key is making sure we’re taking that learning and thinking about scaling and syndicating the model so that it’s not taking services from the partner – it’s actually replacing the proof of concept. Because typically a proof of concept takes about a hundred days. But if the platform’s already in, on ServiceNow, and the workflow’s already running, and all we have to do is activate the AI agent – which as you saw on stage is already built – then the risk is just turning it on out of the box. So the precondition of this service is that you have to deploy the out-of-the-box stuff we built, because we’re confident and we’ve seen enough that we know we can get the partner and the customer to value under a hundred days. And then the beauty is: once you’ve got that point of value in the hundred days and you’ve proven it, the next projects come online very quickly. What we believe will happen is the hundred days leads to an expansion of book of business for the partners, because once that’s in, the customer will want to start more projects. Robert Dutt: By nature, you’re saying that over time this is going to trickle down to situations where partners are prime. I’m assuming this is an ongoing thing – more program than promo, it sounds like. Michael Park: Yeah – it’s a program, it’s not a promo. The promo was the Control Tower offer. That was the promo, direct to customer. But the prime offer is going to be there for a while. The last meeting I was just in, a partner said, “we’re all in because we’re already doing it – we’re going to run this in parallel to you guys. But what we like about it is if you’re going to run a program around it and create that brand and your sellers are going to activate it, we will come in behind you.” So I think the smarter partners are already on board starting to do it that way. Because the key is we can easily get this into a customer who is already up and running with ServiceNow on the core workflows – all we’re doing is activating the agentic workflow on top of it. Robert Dutt: Action Fabric was another one of the big announcements – opening the platform to external AI models via MCP. It’s interesting – you’ve got that opening motion going one way with Action Fabric, and then the opening going the other way with AI Control Tower keeping an eye on things from above. Michael Park: Correct. Robert Dutt: Specifically around the MCP side – are you seeing partners start to build proprietary agent skills or vertical IP on top of ServiceNow that they’re bringing to market as their own? And is that something you’re actively encouraging as a route to market? Michael Park: It’s actually called Action Fabric – I think Bill described it as Agent Fabric, but regardless of what you call it, it is basically calling the full power of the automation runtime of ServiceNow. What I think will happen is lots of different kinds of partners will be able to use their domain expertise in a particular industry, geography, or segment, identify a problem to be solved, use an LLM to gain inference off the data sets that feed it, and then very easily call the ServiceNow runtime to deliver the workflow. And hopefully AI Control Tower will sit on top of that and administer all the other AI components that might be feeding other workflows around it. The key is to set up for flexibility in different patterns. Some people will come in through an MCP server because they’re building something on the outside. Others will choose to use ServiceNow’s build-agent capability and build inside the ServiceNow platform. Others will basically say, I’m already building on five other agent platforms and I’m just going to put AI Control Tower on top to administer common control. The design point is to create flexibility for the customer – to give them the options they need without slowing them down or forcing them into a particular angle. The flip side is: if we just say “here’s ServiceNow, build whatever MCP server you want” without Action Fabric, that’s going to create all kinds of problems. Everyone will create MCP servers against ServiceNow that aren’t properly administered, there’ll be performance issues, and then the question becomes, “that ServiceNow stuff’s not working” – and we’ll be saying, yeah, because you built an MCP server the wrong way. So part of this is about setting patterns that can be replicated with high security, high scale, and high repeatability, by either the customer or the partner, in safe, secure, high-performance ways. Robert Dutt: Last one for me – a partner comes to you and says, I want to be one of your top AI delivery partners in the next couple of years. What do you need them to build, to be, to do, to have, that maybe they don’t today? Michael Park: We have a certification path to all of the different kinds of skills a partner may choose to be in. And we just introduced our new SKU structure for ServiceNow products. In the past, you actually had to buy the highest tier SKU to get AI. What changed just a few weeks ago is that even in the base tier product, AI is naturally embedded. So AI – and certification – becomes a consequence of every single product we sell now. What we’ve done in getting partners ready for that is: the AI certification used to stand separately. You had to go get it. Now it’s natively built into every product they’re getting activated on. And the beauty is that our products are all built from the same platform – so once you learn the AI capability natively in IT, it’s the same capability in HR, in procurement, in ERP. That makes getting the partner ecosystem up to speed technically much, much easier. Robert Dutt: Michael, I’m sure it’s a busy week and a half for you, but I appreciate your taking the time. Michael Park: Happy to. Thanks for the time. Robert Dutt: There you have it – Michael Park, senior vice president of global partnerships and channels from ServiceNow, live at Knowledge 2026 in Las Vegas. I’d like to thank Michael for his time, especially in the middle of what is clearly a very full week for the ServiceNow team. And thank you for listening. A few things I’d pull out of this conversation as worth sitting with. First, on the Go Live AI guarantee – Michael was pretty explicit that this is a program, not a promotion. The current model has ServiceNow as prime, with partners sub-primed into the delivery. But the stated intent is to syndicate that model out so partners can eventually carry it themselves. If you’re a ServiceNow partner and you’re not already thinking about how your practice gets certified to prime a hundred-day engagement, that’s a conversation worth starting now rather than later. Second, the services compression point is real and worth taking seriously. Michael said it plainly – implementation, configuration, and upgrade work is going to get compressed in the next two years. The partners who come out ahead are going to be the ones who’ve already built the new competencies: AI Control Tower administration, Action Fabric and MCP integration, outcome-driven services built on telemetry. Those are the new billable skills. And third, I found the economics argument compelling. The platform leverage point – that the same skill set applies across IT, HR, CRM, procurement, and every other buying center on the ServiceNow platform – is a real differentiator for partners who go deep on ServiceNow versus spreading across multiple vendors. Five sourced value points in five hundred days versus one in three years is a different kind of business. More from Knowledge 2026 coming later this week, including the Canadian and GSI perspective on what all these announcements actually mean for the local market back home. If you’re finding In The Channel useful, we’d love for you to follow or subscribe wherever you’re listening. We’re on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and most major directories. Ratings and reviews are always appreciated and always read. Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.

Today’s headline news for Canadian IT solution providers: WatchGuard acquires Perimeters.io: WatchGuard Technologies announced Wednesday it has acquired identity threat management startup Perimeters.io. According to the company, the deal introduces WatchGuard Cloud Detection and Response (CloudDR), an AI-first solution built for MSPs to handle identity threats and shadow AI across more than 40 enterprise applications, including Microsoft 365, OpenAI, and Salesforce. The move allows Canadian partners to protect customer identities and govern AI adoption without adding significant overhead to their managed security stacks. Meter launches $100M partner fund: Networking startup Meter launched a one hundred million dollar partner fund Wednesday, positioning it as a financial mechanism to accelerate channel growth and challenge established networking vendors. Solution providers can leverage the fund to offer customers a pure Networking-as-a-Service model, where Meter owns and manages the hardware, software, and upgrades. The move gives partners a concrete commercial argument to shift mid-market client conversations from capital expenditures to predictable operating expenses. ServiceNow and Tanium announce Autonomous IT solution: At ServiceNow Knowledge 2026 in Las Vegas, ServiceNow and Tanium announced a joint offering called ITOM AI Prime powered by Tanium, integrating Tanium’s Autonomous IT Platform with ServiceNow’s IT Operations Management workflows and AI agents. According to the companies, the integration creates a closed loop between real-time endpoint intelligence and workflow orchestration, allowing issues to be detected, resolved, and verified without manual intervention. The announcement came alongside Day 2 keynote remarks from ServiceNow president Amit Zavery, who confirmed full MCP client connectivity support as part of the company’s Workflow Data Fabric. GTIA board updates: The Global Technology Industry Association has appointed Andrew Allen, Jennifer Baier Anaya, and Jennifer Roy to its board of directors. The newly elected voting members join Chair Scott Barlow and Vice Chair Rob Rae to advance the strategic direction of the IT channel. NVIDIA and Corning partnership: NVIDIA and Corning have announced a long-term partnership aimed at strengthening U.S. manufacturing for artificial intelligence infrastructure. The collaboration is expected to address ongoing supply chain constraints for essential AI hardware components. SAP acquires Dremio and Prior Labs: Enterprise software giant SAP has acquired data management company Dremio and AI startup Prior Labs to build out infrastructure capabilities for enterprise AI initiatives. According to SAP, the technology will be integrated to create a more unified data layer for its ERP customers, enabling generative AI applications without requiring complex data movement. Millennium Micro at ITSec: Millennium Micro‘s Philippe Fortier, director of Quebec and Maritimes, outlined the operational impact of Quebec’s new baseline cybersecurity regulations on MSPs during a keynote at ITSec 2026. The session focused on helping regional partners navigate the compliance burden for their SMB clients. Apple processor exploration: Apple is reportedly exploring partnerships with Intel and Samsung to manufacture its next generation of device processors, in a potential shift from the company’s long-standing reliance on TSMC. Read Full Transcript Welcome to The Buzz from ChannelBuzz.ca, I’m Robert Dutt, today is Thursday, May 7, 2026, and here’s what’s happening in the channel today. WatchGuard Technologies announced yesterday that it has acquired Perimeters.io, marking a significant expansion into identity threat management. According to the company, the deal introduces WatchGuard Cloud Detection and Response, or CloudDR, an AI-first solution built specifically for managed service providers to handle identity threats and shadow AI. The new offering reportedly covers more than forty enterprise applications, including Microsoft 365, OpenAI, and Salesforce. In a statement, WatchGuard noted that this acquisition is designed to integrate identity threat detection and response, or ITDR, directly into its existing unified security platform. The company is positioning CloudDR as a tool that enables partners to detect anomalous behavior and unauthorized access across distributed cloud environments. This matters locally because managing SaaS sprawl and unauthorized AI usage is rapidly becoming a primary operational headache for the channel. Integrating these capabilities into an existing platform reduces the need to bolt on disparate security tools. The move allows Canadian partners to protect customer identities and govern AI adoption without adding significant overhead or vendor complexity to their managed security stacks. Networking startup Meter launched a one hundred million dollar partner fund yesterday, signaling a direct challenge to traditional networking vendors. The company is positioning the fund as a financial mechanism to accelerate channel growth and disrupt established enterprise networking deployments. According to Meter, the capital is designed to remove the friction of upfront hardware costs for customers while ensuring partners are compensated immediately. Solution providers can leverage the fund to offer customers a pure Networking-as-a-Service model, where Meter owns and manages the hardware, software, and upgrades. The channel implication here is substantial. Traditional networking deployments often tie up significant customer capital and require solution providers to manage complex hardware refresh cycles. Meter’s approach gives networking-focused partners a compelling commercial argument when competing for mid-market infrastructure deals – shifting client conversations from capital expenditures to predictable operating expenses while preserving their own margin and cash flow. ServiceNow’s Knowledge 2026 conference in Las Vegas closed its second day of major announcements yesterday, with the company unveiling a joint Autonomous IT solution alongside endpoint intelligence vendor Tanium. The new offering, called ITOM AI Prime powered by Tanium, integrates Tanium’s Autonomous IT Platform with ServiceNow’s IT Operations Management workflows and AI agents. According to the companies, the integration creates a closed loop between Tanium’s real-time endpoint intelligence and ServiceNow’s workflow orchestration, allowing issues to be detected, resolved, and verified without manual intervention. ServiceNow noted it is already a Tanium customer, with the company stating its 90 percent autonomous Level 1 service desk runs on the platform. The announcement came alongside Day 2 keynote remarks from ServiceNow president Amit Zavery, who outlined what the company calls its Blueprint for Agentic Business – a platform strategy built around connecting enterprise data, applying governance controls, and enabling AI to act across systems of record. Zavery also confirmed full MCP client connectivity support as part of the company’s Workflow Data Fabric. For channel partners who are building managed services practices around IT automation, the tighter Tanium integration is a signal of where platform-level AI operations are heading. In Brief The Global Technology Industry Association has appointed Andrew Allen, Jennifer Baier Anaya, and Jennifer Roy to its board of directors. NVIDIA and Corning have announced a long-term partnership to strengthen U.S. manufacturing for artificial intelligence infrastructure. SAP has acquired data management company Dremio and AI startup Prior Labs to build out infrastructure capabilities for enterprise AI initiatives. Millennium Micro’s Philippe Fortier, director of Quebec and Maritimes, outlined the operational impact of Quebec’s new baseline cybersecurity regulations on managed service providers during a keynote at ITSec 2026. Apple is reportedly exploring partnerships with Intel and Samsung to manufacture its next generation of device processors. Full details and links in the show notes or the blog post. Later today on In The Channel, we go deep on the ServiceNow partner model with the company’s senior vice president of global partnerships and channels, Michael Park – including the mechanics of the 100-day Go Live AI guarantee and what the compression of traditional services work actually means for solution providers. And if you haven‘t heard it yet, yesterday’s episode with Cynomi Chief Evangelist Tim Coach on third-party risk management is worth your time – specifically the recurring revenue opportunity hiding in your clients’ vendor stack. That’s how we’re seeing the headlines today. I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, thanks for listening. Have a great day.

Bill McDermott, CEO of ServiceNow This is a Reporter’s Notebook episode – no guest, just some thoughts from the ground at ServiceNow‘s Knowledge 2026conference in Las Vegas. Earlier on Tuesday I spent about 40 minutes in a press fireside chat with ServiceNow chairman and CEO Bill McDermott. He’s one of the most practiced executives in enterprise technology, and he came with big takes. This episode skips the valuation conversation and focuses on what he said about where the industry is going. Three arguments are worth pulling out. First: the AI race isn’t won by the best model – it’s won by whoever can make AI deterministic and governable enough to actually run an enterprise on. “Governance isn’t a feature. It’s the whole ball game.” Second: AI isn’t optional, it’s arithmetic. With a projected shortage of 50 million workers globally by 2030, McDermott’s argument is that AI isn’t coming for your job – it’s coming to fill the jobs there won’t be enough people to do. Third: ServiceNow’s platform, with a hundred billion workflows already running, was always the foundation AI needed to land on. The stat that lingered longest: by McDermott’s own accounting, only one in ten enterprises has actually moved AI into a real, impactful business process. Which means for most of your customers, the agentic business isn’t something they’re navigating yet. It’s something they’re aspiring to. And that’s the channel opportunity. Read Full Transcript Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last sixteen years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca, and your host for the show. A rare double-up on In The Channel today. We’ve already dropped a great interview with Tim Coach from Cynomi on third party risk management. But this is something different altogether.  This is a what I like to call a Reporter’s Notebook episode – no guest, just me and some thoughts I want to share from my time on the ground at ServiceNow’s Knowledge 2026 conference in Las Vegas.  Specifically,  I spent about 40 minutes in a room with ServiceNow chairman and CEO Bill McDermott, along with my peers in the indsutry press, in a fireside chat format. You know, I’m always somehow just a tiny bit disappointed when there’s not an actual fireplace. But I digress. McDermott is one of the most practiced and polished executives in enterprise technology – he knows exactly what he’s doing when he talks to press. But he’s also genuinely quotable in a way that a lot of enterprise CEOs aren’t, and I came out of that session with a few things I wanted to think out loud about. Fair warning: he spent a meaningful amount of time on the ServiceNow valuation story and the disconnect between where Wall Street has the stock and where he thinks the business is going. I’m going to mostly skip that part. You’re solution providers, not analysts or institutional investors. What I want to talk about is what he said about where the industry is going, because I thought it was worth unpacking. So. The line that’s stuck with me since I walked out of that room. “Governance isn’t a feature. It’s the whole ball game.” That’s the sentence I’d put on the poster if I were running ServiceNow’s marketing right now. And it’s not just a pithy line – it’s the entire strategic argument the company is making, distilled down to nine words. Here’s the bet McDermott is making, and I think it’s worth understanding because it has real implications for how you think about the next few years of your business. The first bet is that the AI race isn’t going to be won by the best model. It’s going to be won by whoever can make AI safe enough, governed enough, and deterministic enough to actually run an enterprise on. He drew a distinction that I thought was clarifying. He said – and I’m quoting – “You can’t have a probabilistic solution for an enterprise. It has to be deterministic and it has to be right every time.” That’s the core argument against the pure large language model play. An LLM gives you the best answer it can given the data it has. It’s probabilistic by nature. That’s fine for a lot of things. It is not fine when you’re running IT service management for a bank, or HR workflows for a public sector organization, or customer operations for a telco. ServiceNow’s argument is that the governance layer – what they’re now calling the AI Control Tower – is the thing that makes AI enterprise-safe. Not just a nice add-on. The precondition. The second bet is that AI isn’t optional. It’s arithmetic. McDermott came back to this a few times. There’s a projected shortage of 50 million workers globally by 2030. The workforce isn’t growing fast enough to meet demand. Birth rates are declining. The enterprise can’t staff its way out of the problem it’s about to have. And so the argument isn’t “AI will help you be more efficient.” The argument is “AI is the only answer to a math problem that is already in motion.” He put it bluntly: AI isn’t coming for your job. AI is coming to do the jobs there won’t be enough people to fill. That’s a different pitch, and for a lot of your customers, it’s a more honest one. Is it a glass-half-full take? Sure. But considering the number of glass-completely-empty takes around AI and what it may do to the workforce of the future, I think it’s worth considering. The third bet is the one that I find most interesting, and it was stated less explicitly, but I think it’s the most important one for your business. The bet is that ServiceNow was built for this moment. That the platform that’s been processing workflow for twenty years – the one that already has a hundred billion flows running, most of them untagged and unidentified – was always the foundation that AI needed to land on. He said it directly at one point: “This platform was always waiting for AI.” And I think what he’s really saying is: the hard part isn’t the AI. The hard part is knowing what to do with it. Knowing which workflows to activate. Knowing how to govern what you activate. Knowing how to quantify the outcome. And ServiceNow’s argument is that twenty years of enterprise workflow data, and the relationships and trust that come with it, is a moat that a hyperscaler or a pure-play AI company cannot replicate. There was a moment in the session – a little lighter – where McDermott talked about his relationship with Jensen Huang. He joked that every time he appears on stage with Jensen, NVIDIA’s market cap goes up by about a trillion dollars. He then pointed out that his own company’s multiple hasn’t quite kept pace with that. He was being self-deprecating in the way powerful people can afford to be. But the point underneath it was real: the NVIDIA partnership gives ServiceNow something the pure platform story couldn’t – a direct line into the AI infrastructure conversation, not just the AI governance conversation. There was one stat he dropped that I’ve been chewing on since then, a statisitical representation of the challenge that he faces, and that you face. And also of the opportunity, for those who play the game wisely. Only one in ten enterprises, by McDermott’s accounting, have actually moved from AI experimentation into AI that has genuinely impacted a core business process with real agentic workflows. One in ten. This is the CEO of the company that just staked its entire conference on the theme of “Welcome to Agentic Business” telling a room full of press that nine out of ten enterprises aren’t there yet. He wasn’t being pessimistic – he was making the case for the runway. But I thought it was an unusually honest thing to say out loud, and it’s worth noting. Because if one in ten is the number, then for most of your customers, the “agentic business” isn’t something they’re navigating. But it’s probably something they’re aspiring to. And the opportunity for the channel isn’t to tell them about it. It’s to get them there. And that’s exactly what the Go Live AI guarantee, and the AI Control Tower, and the whole machinery of what ServiceNow announced this week is designed to do. Give the channel a way to close the gap between the aspiration and the reality, at a predictable pace, with a quantifiable outcome. If you want a bit more on the Go Live AI guarantee and the AI Control Tower, we covered it in this morning’s episode of The Buzz, and tune in right here tomorrow, because ServiceNow’s channel leader, Michael Park, has a lot to say about the mechanices of the Go Live AI guarantee in particular. One last quote I’ll leave you with. Someone in the room asked McDermott how he stays energized given the complexity of everything happening right now. He didn’t hesitate. “This is the best time I’ve ever seen for innovation in the enterprise.” He’s a CEO, so you take that with appropriate seasoning. But I was in the room, and I’ll tell you – to me it felt like he meant it. More from Knowledge 2026 coming this week, so keep your favorite podcast app nearby. If you’re finding In The Channel useful, please follow or subscribe wherever you’re listening – we’re on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and most major directories. Ratings and reviews are always welcome. Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.

Tim Coach, chief evangelist at Cynomi For most managed service providers, the security services story has followed a familiar arc: endpoint protection, email security, security awareness training. Each category added value, then became table stakes. Third-party risk management – TPRM – is what comes next, and according to Cynomi Chief Evangelist Tim Coach, it may be the stickiest revenue category yet. The case is straightforward. Every business relies on a web of vendors, software providers, and service partners. Each one is a potential vulnerability. And most SMBs have no formal process for knowing how well those third parties are managing their own security – or what happens to them downstream if one of those vendors gets breached. Research from Cynomi suggests 45 percent of organizations will face supply chain attacks, and 30 percent of data breaches already involve a third party. The attack surface has shifted to the things organizations trust most. For Canadian MSPs, the regulatory pressure is specific and near-term. OSFI’s Guideline E-21, with a September 2026 compliance deadline for federally regulated financial institutions, puts third-party oversight explicitly on the agenda. The cascade effect on their vendors – and the MSPs serving those vendors – is already in motion. Perhaps the sharpest signal in this conversation: cyber underwriters are now denying SMB coverage not because of anything the SMB did, but because they are connected to an MSP. The managed service provider, long positioned as the path to better insurance outcomes, has become a risk factor in its own right. Coach’s recommended first move for any MSP building into TPRM isn’t a vendor questionnaire – it’s a Business Impact Analysis. Understand how the client actually makes money, which vendors are critical to those revenue processes, and what an hour of downtime costs. That reframes the conversation from technical widgets to revenue, cost, and risk – the language every business owner speaks. – UPLOAD AUDIO Read Full Transcript Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca, your host for the show. My guest today is Tim Coach, Chief Evangelist at Cynomi, a vCISO platform purpose-built for MSPs and MSSPs. Tim brings an unusually grounded perspective to the space. He’s an engineer by training who spent nearly two decades building, running, and consulting on managed service practices before landing at Cynomi after seeing the platform first-hand and recognizing it could have solved one of his biggest operational headaches as an MSP owner – the CISO bottleneck, the point at which growth stalls because the security function can’t scale without adding expensive headcount. That personal history shapes everything he thinks about TPRM, third-party risk management, which is increasingly being talked about as the next major revenue category for MSPs after human cyber risk. Today we’re talking about what building a TPRM practice actually looks like, why cyber insurance has quietly flipped the MSP value equation, and why the right starting point isn’t a vendor questionnaire at all. Let’s get right into it, my chat with Tim Coach. Tim, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it. Tim Coach: I absolutely love to be on. Thanks so much for having me, and for having Cynomi on your webinars. We’re always happy to do these things and educate the community. Robert Dutt: You’ve spent a long time in and around the MSP community. How did you end up at Cynomi specifically, and what was it about the opportunity around TPRM that pulled you in? Tim Coach: TPRM was eventually in the process – let me back up. What got me into the community was my engineering background. I went to college for what was called network communications back in those days. Basically I’m a network guy – I always point at the front-end programming guy and say, “It’s your fault,” and the programming guy says, “No, no, it’s the network’s fault.” So I did that for a large-scale nationwide company for many years, and then I fired my MSP. The owner was like, “Well, if you’re so good, why don’t you come over here and run this?” And I said okay. It took me about 24 hours to realize I didn’t have a clue what was going on – the place was chaos. But through process and procedure, and a military background, I knew I could get it under control. I ended up with a business partner from that experience, and we spent about 20 years rebuilding and consulting with MSPs. About five years ago, I just needed something different. The kids were a little older. I started looking at what else was out there, talked to a couple of mentors in the space – I’m sure if I mentioned their names everyone would know them – and they said, “You should come over and do this.” So I jumped. I went to work for a Canadian company, grew them quite a bit in the first year, then moved to an Australian company, grew them, and then went back to consulting for a short time. David from Cynomi was recommended to me as a consulting connection. We were going back and forth and he said, “Why don’t you come on board?” And I said, “I’m not really interested in selling a widget” – and it’s a security widget, right? There are so many great widgets and great personalities in the security space already. Probably not my jam. But he said, “No, no – let’s look at it.” And he showed me what Cynomi did, and I was blown away. The reason I was blown away is that at my most successful MSP, we hit a stopping point in our growth. The reason was our CISO – and this was before CISO was even a cool term. He was our bottleneck. Not because he was inefficient as a person, but because of the way he had to work: 80 pages of Excel spreadsheets and hours and hours of questionnaires. When I first saw Cynomi, I thought, “Here’s a way I could have doubled the size of my company with the same staff, the same CISO.” That’s what really inspired me to come on board – seeing that dashboard and connecting it to the personal pain I’d experienced around the security bottleneck. Now with the addition of TPRM, that excites me even more, because back in my MSP days I had a lot of bank clients, and banks are SOC 2 all over the place. Part of SOC 2 is that you have to have TPRM – you have to be responsible for everybody in the chain. So now we’ve built out a platform that lets the MSP, MSSP, ITSP, or whatever SP you want to put in front of those letters, easily manage vendor relationships and understand where clients are in their security posture. Robert Dutt: You may not feel it’s cool, but it’s certainly foundational security. Tim Coach: And that’s the problem, right? That’s why we’re still talking about security – because nobody knows how to talk business. They all talk widgets, bits and bobs: here’s this cool firewall, MDR, XDR. But you know what your clients don’t care about? The widgets. They care about being secure. Until we can bridge that gap – until Cynomi brings something that says, here’s an easy way to get to the data and details you need, here’s CISO-level intelligence so the MSP can translate it into business terms for the doctor’s office, the manufacturing company, whatever vertical you want – we’re going to keep having this same conversation. Robert Dutt: Let’s do a little bit of that with TPRM itself. Let’s take a step back and look at it from the viewpoint of an MSP who’s heard the acronym but hasn’t really dug in yet. Third-party risk management – what are we actually talking about, and what problem does it solve? Tim Coach: What a lot of people need to understand – and I try to say this in a way that’s easy to grasp – is: manage security first, and compliance becomes a default. What I mean is that you need a baseline, whether it’s CIS Controls, Cyber Essentials Plus, CMMC 2.0, one of the financial frameworks, HIPAA, whatever applies. You need a baseline you’re actively managing your security against. In the process of meeting that baseline, compliance follows. What we’re increasingly seeing is that certification bodies, auditors, and insurance underwriters all want to see that your solutions and partners are just as secure as you are. I was at Canalys Barcelona last year and someone made a statement that blew me away: for the first time ever, we’re seeing insurance underwriters deny coverage to an SMB because they’re connected to an MSP – and the MSP is what they consider the risk. We went from being the most important people in the room, essential workers, to being the risk factor. And on top of that, helping clients with their insurance has been one of our foot-in-the-door conversations for the last decade. That’s where TPRM comes in. The frameworks and insurance underwriters now want to see not just that you’re secure, but that everyone you’re working with is secure. The problem has always been how you manage that. Back in my day, you had to call the vendor, find the right person, ask for evidence of their SOC 2 compliance, get bounced around, end up with legal, sign an NDA, and eventually get the report. Now people share that information a bit more freely, but you still need a central place to manage it – so when an auditor or insurance broker asks, you can point to it and say, “Here it is.” We do a community call every Wednesday at noon Eastern, and we’ve had a gentleman on a couple of times who has written books specifically on TPRM. He’s sounding the alarms – not bad alarms, just “it’s coming.” But like a lot of SMBs, MSPs are having to drag their clients toward where they need to be. Once you make it easy for the MSP, you make it easy for the SMB, and you finally have a way to prove you’re taking those measures. Robert Dutt: Supply chain attacks have certainly been a theme in the channel for a while – Kaseya, SolarWinds, MOVEit. But TPRM as a formal managed service element feels newer. The insurance side sounds like a big driver. What else changed to make it go from a theoretical concern to something MSPs can actually build a practice around? Tim Coach: I firmly believe you cannot be a business partner without knowing how your partner makes money and how you need to protect them. I can’t protect them if I don’t know what they’re using. It’s the old adage: if two people are managing something, nobody’s managing it. TPRM is really the next step for the ITSP to move from a transactional relationship to a true business partnership – ensuring that everyone your clients are using is also protected. Because what happens is what always happens: it doesn’t matter what you have hard-coded in the contract about not being responsible for X. When something goes wrong, the SMB comes back and says, “But I thought you were managing this.” We go over it in the contract reviews, sure, but the conversation still happens. When you’re genuinely talking business – saying, “I’m going to protect how you operate quarter after quarter, year after year” – you’re protecting their entire environment, not just your piece of it. That’s when you move to a real business relationship instead of a sales relationship where every conversation is an upsell or a cross-sell. We’ve done it to ourselves a little bit, honestly. It’s like an insurance agent in Oklahoma trying to sell hurricane insurance. That’s not what we should be doing as business partners. TPRM allows us to have a full understanding of the client’s environment and make sure everything is protected – or at minimum, that the gaps are known by everyone. Robert Dutt: Cynomi has described TPRM as the next major revenue category after human cyber risk. Can you walk me through what the recurring revenue model actually looks like, and what makes it sticky? Tim Coach: Everything leads to MRR – that’s business. But you have to start with a project. You need to understand where the client is in their security journey before you can manage them ongoing. SMBs don’t do things for free, and neither do our partners. This is a revenue generator. But it’s a revenue generator because it actively has to be managed. I always say: I can’t throw a server at security. I can’t throw a firewall at it and declare myself secure. The best analogy I’ve heard for security is a block of Swiss cheese. There are holes, and you can stick a fork through those holes quite a way. But if you slice that block and turn every slice 90 degrees, the holes are still there – they’re just not as deep or vulnerable. That’s TPRM. There is no set-it-and-forget-it. It has to be actively managed, and that active management is where the recurring revenue lives. Robert Dutt: What does a typical engagement look like early on, for an MSP starting from zero with a client? Where does the work begin, and what surprises people about the scope as they go deeper? Tim Coach: Everything begins with an assessment. With Cynomi’s tools, we can use Cyber Essentials Plus or CIS Controls as a self-regulating baseline and add a couple of hours to the initial assessment to incorporate the security piece. We all do assessments upfront to understand what we’re getting into – or what needs to be fixed before we really dig in. Once you’re in the security layer, the next step is TPRM. And TPRM brings with it something I think is critically important: the Business Impact Analysis. It’s not enough to ask, “What does your client do?” They make dog food – do they? Or is that just the end product? When I was an MSP, I had a metal manufacturer that cut and stamped metal. But if you asked their CFO what the business was, he’d say, “Making pallets – I make more on pallets than on the stamping work.” I used this example in a presentation just yesterday. Years ago I was walking through a manufacturer’s facility and asked about a machine: “What does that one do?” “That runs the software that completes our product.” “Why isn’t it plugged into the network?” “It’s a Windows 98 machine.” “Why are you still running that?” “Because it runs decade-old German software that costs ten million dollars to replace. And we only have that one machine.” If you’re not walking through and genuinely understanding how they make money, you don’t know where the risks are. And that’s what TPRM forces you to do. Ideally, I’d love to sell a project that includes a full security assessment, a BIA, TPRM, BCP, IR planning, all of it from day one. But it doesn’t happen that way. You have to phase it. Once you understand the BIA and what they’re actually doing, you understand where the software and systems that carry real business risk are, and you can start building that into their security posture. It’s the same principle: why hack an individual when you can hack the software that manages all the individuals? Why try to crack one account when you can compromise an MSP’s RMM tool and get access to everybody? If you go into a business without understanding their software environment and vendor posture, you at minimum need to be able to tell them where the risks are. Because the language they speak is revenue, cost, and risk. TPRM is a risk if it’s not being managed – and that’s why we’re seeing so much attention on it lately, even though some of us have been doing this for decades. We just used to call it vendor management. Robert Dutt: We’ve talked a lot on the show about MSP tools as an attack surface – RMM agents, remote access tools, backup platforms. The MSP is supposed to be managing the client’s vendor risk, but the MSP’s own toolchain is also someone else’s third-party risk. How should MSPs be thinking about that? Tim Coach: It comes back to the BIA again. What are they using? What’s creating the security gaps, and how do you build better overall management around it? There’s a project in there, but every project should lead to MRR – period. It still has to be managed. Remember when Exchange servers went away and everyone panicked about where the revenue was going to go? There was still an entire environment to manage. We always made some revenue on hardware, though that’s gotten harder – the real money is in managing the ongoing environment. TPRM is the same thing: it’s a significant security gap in the overall posture of your clients, and that gap has to be actively managed. Robert Dutt: Pushing on that a little further – TPRM platforms are pulling in a pretty comprehensive map of an organization’s vendor ecosystem: the gaps, what’s been remediated, basically a full picture of the landscape. If one of those platforms gets compromised, that’s not just a breach – that’s a pretty rich target list for an attacker. How do you think about that? Tim Coach: Think about a CNC factory. Their job is building molds to produce a specific part, and the software on their server has all the schematics fully built out. What happens if that software gets hacked? You lose all the schematics for the CNC machine – so suddenly you can’t produce anything. And if the attacker gets in early enough in the process, the downstream supply chain impact goes way beyond that one facility. That’s the risk. If you’ve got $200,000 five-axis CNC machines – and I may have a little experience with this – and you’re not protecting the software running them, and you don’t understand from a TPRM perspective what the vulnerabilities look like, that’s an ongoing, persistent risk. You always have to be managing it. Robert Dutt: Sitting where Cynomi is, how do you think about the security side of running a TPRM solution, and what should MSPs be asking vendors in this space about that? Tim Coach: Efficiency. How efficient can you make it? I’ll probably get in trouble for saying this, but we’ve essentially stupid-proofed the first few levels. We’ve built it out for you. And look – I know AI is a word we’ve managed to avoid for about the last half hour, but AI is meant to enhance the human. It’s a tool. What we’ve done at Cynomi is build AI agents and intelligence into the platform to make this work manageable at a lower labor level. If I can take work that previously required a CISO – an expensive asset – and bring it down to a tier-two technician, my margins go up because my labor costs go down. That said, we’re not replacing the CISO. I used to work with a company that built a component for Apache helicopters – no public-facing anything. If a tier-two tech runs a report showing no web security for that client and flags it as a critical gap, the CISO might be the only person who knows that client has no public-facing presence by design. That context matters. The CISO still needs to be the final approval layer. What Cynomi has done is open up bandwidth for other people to do the groundwork, so you can grow your company without adding another six-figure salary. When your staff becomes more efficient, the CISO is less of a bottleneck – which was the original problem we started with. Robert Dutt: For the Canadians listening, there are some very specific regulatory drivers on the table right now. OSFI’s Guideline E-21 has a September 2026 compliance deadline for federally regulated financial institutions. Can you talk about the role you see TPRM playing in responding to that kind of regulation? Tim Coach: What we’re seeing is that the insurance underwriters, auditors, and regulators are the ones setting the standard, and the industry has to meet it – but the industry isn’t yet at a point where it can easily meet a TPRM standard. So what will probably happen, whether it’s Canada, the US, the UK, or EMEA, is a pattern we’ve seen before: they’ll release a guideline, there’ll be a period of voluntary adoption, and then they’ll give it teeth. Like HIPAA – they threw it out there, and eventually it got enforcement. The thing I’ve always loved is watching the auditors, because they’re typically running a couple of years ahead of the regulation. If you stop treating auditors like your mortal enemy – “they’re here to expose everything I’m doing wrong” – and start paying attention to what they’re flagging, you can get ahead of the game. Auditors are a leading indicator. It’ll always come down to government forcing the policy, and then insurance trying to find a way out of paying claims when it’s not followed. But if you’re watching the auditors and TPRM is showing up in their reviews, you already know what’s coming. Robert Dutt: For an MSP listening to this and thinking, “I should be doing this” – what’s the realistic first move? Not the ideal end state, but the practical starting point? Tim Coach: Start with the BIA – the Business Impact Analysis. Research suggests every SMB has three to five critical processes that drive about 80% of their revenue. Do they actually know what those are? Probably not. They make dog food. They take care of kids. Whatever it is – they don’t actually know how they make money. I have an old client who’s also a friend – he works in retirement planning. If you asked how he makes money, you’d assume it’s from managing portfolios. It’s not. He makes money by selling the policy, and the insurance company pays him a commission on that. If you don’t start by understanding the BIA, you don’t really know what solutions your clients are dependent on. Start with: who is your critical software outside of us? Who maintains it? Do we have a relationship with them? Does it connect directly to how you make money? And tie it to cost of downtime. If a doctor’s office goes down for four hours – and in a medical practice you call them providers, not doctors, right? Speaking their language, not ours – what does that cost? If the pallet machine on an assembly line goes down, and that pallet machine is the only thing holding product so the rest of the line can keep moving, what’s the cost per hour? If you don’t know that, you don’t actually understand how to service your client. You’re still talking bits and bobs instead of revenue, cost, and risk. Robert Dutt: Future-looking question to wrap up: where do you see this category going over the next couple of years? Is TPRM a standalone practice, or does it fold into a broader vCISO or governance offering? Tim Coach: I think it’s going to be both. For more mature MSPs, it’ll be baked right into their silver, gold, and platinum packages – TPRM is just part of what you get at a certain tier. For others, especially those that aren’t at a full vCISO-as-a-service level yet, it’ll be available as a standalone – a meaningful piece of the security posture they can deliver to clients without committing to the full stack. Growth and maturity, right? As people build their practices, the more advanced will have it embedded. But there’s also a real path for someone starting out to say, “I need to at least get this piece right, because it’s critical to the overall security posture of my clients.” Robert Dutt: Fascinating. It’s an interesting area of technology and – to your greater point – business. I appreciate you taking the time to share some thoughts on how service providers can get involved. Tim Coach: Thanks for having me on. I always appreciate it. Robert Dutt: There you have it – Tim Coach from Cynomi. I’d like to thank Tim for taking the time today. He’s been around the MSP space long enough that when he points at something and says it’s the next thing, it’s worth listening. A few things I want to make sure land from this conversation. The first is the Business Impact Analysis as the true starting point. Before you think about vendor questionnaires or risk scoring tools, you need to understand how your client actually generates revenue – which processes drive the majority of the business, and which vendors are load-bearing in that equation. That’s not a security conversation. That’s a business conversation. And that’s the shift that moves an MSP from tool vendor to genuine business partner. The second is the insurance signal. When underwriters start denying SMB coverage not because of something the SMB did, but because they’re connected to an MSP – that’s a warning and an opportunity in the same breath. MSPs who can demonstrate they’re actively managing their clients’ third-party risk have a new and better story to tell. And the frame to carry with you: security first, compliance becomes a default. Build the practice to the right security baseline and the compliance checkboxes largely take care of themselves. In The Channel is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and most major podcast directories. If you’re finding value here, ratings and reviews are always appreciated – they help other people in the Canadian IT channel find the show. Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.

Reporting live from ServiceNow’s Knowledge 2026 conference in Las Vegas, the message from CEO Bill McDermott and NVIDIA‘s Jensen Huang was clear: the era of AI pilots is over. ServiceNow is repositioning itself as the AI Control Tower — the governance layer that sits above every AI agent an organization is running, regardless of where those agents were built. McDermott’s framing centered on what he called the “AI blind spot” — the growing reality that most enterprises are deploying agents without meaningful visibility into what those agents are actually doing. A live demo on stage showed a real-time prompt injection attack being detected and shut down by the platform. The most concrete channel announcement is the new “Go Live AI” offer — a total satisfaction guarantee committing to 100 days to production. Not a pilot, not a proof of concept. For solution providers, this is a commercial tool designed to help move customers from evaluation to commitment by absorbing some of the delivery risk. Jensen Huang’s argument was that AI should be used to “elevate ambition,” not just reduce costs — a framing that gives partners a more expansive conversation to have with clients about what outcomes are now possible. The morning’s most compelling demo came from FedEx CEO Raj Subramaniam, who showed ServiceNow’s new AI agent Otto resolving a distribution hub staffing gap in minutes that historically took three days. FedEx reported 2,000 incidents offloaded, 3,000-plus hours saved, and 85 percent accuracy in production. For Canadian solution providers, ServiceNow is offering two new tools: a governance platform to make AI deployments defensible, and a commercial guarantee to make those deployments sellable. More on what this means for the Canadian market in this week’s In The Channel interviews from the show. In brief:  Zoho research reveals Canada’s “false comfort zone” in workforce security. Released ahead of World Password Day, Zoho’s State of Workforce Password Security 2026 report—based on over 3,300 respondents including 174 in Canada—finds that while the Canadian attack rate (30%) is slightly better than the global average, significant vulnerabilities remain. The standout finding is the AI belief-to-deployment gap: while 89% of Canadian organizations believe AI will strengthen their security posture, only 46% are actually ready to deploy AI-powered security today. The primary blockers aren’t budget, but legacy infrastructure (52%) and migration complexity (48%). The report also highlights that 73% of Canadian organizations lack complete identity visibility across their workforce, leaving them exposed to orphaned accounts and unmanaged third-party access in highly integrated North American supply chains. Syncro and Guardz embed cybersecurity directly into the MSP workflow. Announced this morning, the two companies have launched a native integration that brings the Guardz cybersecurity platform inside the Syncro RMM/PSA environment. The move is designed to eliminate the “toggle tax” of managing separate security consoles, but the real channel hook is the automated billing: the integration uses Syncro’s Universal Billing to automate client invoicing for security services, removing the manual reconciliation that often eats into MSP margins. Coming on the heels of the Guardz 2026 MSP Threat Report—which found that 90% of SMBs have at least one user with compromised credentials—the partnership aims to make proactive security a standard, billable part of the daily workflow. Huntress distribution deals are now officially live. The managed security platform’s expansion into major distribution is now official. Huntress has signed deals with Ingram Micro, Vertosoft, Liquid PC, and QBS Software. For the Canadian reseller community, the Ingram Micro partnership is the headline, providing a more streamlined procurement path for the Huntress Agentic Security Platform and its 24/7 SOC. The move signals a transition for Huntress from an MSP-centric “challenger” brand to a broader mid-market and public sector player, using distribution scale to reach resellers who haven‘t traditionally played in the “security-only” vendor space. Kiteworks names Oracle veteran Julia Rasekhi to lead partner strategy. The Content Communications Governance (CCG) platform—which has a significant Canadian footprint—has appointed Julia Rasekhi as its new senior vice president of Strategic Partnerships and Strategy. Rasekhi joins after 17 years at Oracle, and her mandate is to accelerate a transition toward partner-led growth for the company’s regulatory compliance and file sharing platform. As enterprise security increasingly moves from “network” to “content,” the hire suggests Kiteworks is looking to scale its GSI and reseller relationships to meet new data sovereignty and CPCSC requirements in Canada and globally. Read Full Transcript Welcome to The Buzz from ChannelBuzz.ca, I’m Robert Dutt, today is Wednesday, May 6, 2026, and here’s what’s happening in the channel today. I’m reporting live from Las Vegas, where ServiceNow’s annual Knowledge conference got underway this morning with what may be one of the boldest keynotes I’ve seen at an enterprise software show in years. CEO Bill McDermott took the stage alongside NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang to make a simple but sweeping argument: the AI pilot era is over, and “Agentic Business” — where autonomous AI agents actually do the work — is here now. The repositioning McDermott is making is significant. ServiceNow is no longer pitching itself as just a workflow platform. It is now positioning itself as the AI Control Tower — the governance layer that sits above all the AI your organization is running, whether it was built on ServiceNow or not. The framing McDermott used was the “AI Blind Spot” — the idea that most organizations are deploying agents without any real visibility into what those agents are actually doing. A live demo on stage showed a real-time prompt injection attack being detected and shut down by the platform. The point was clear: if you don’t have a control layer, you don’t have an AI strategy, you have an AI liability. The most concrete announcement for the channel is what ServiceNow is calling its “Go Live AI” offer — essentially a total satisfaction guarantee. This is, as far as I know, the first time a major enterprise software company has put a guarantee like this in writing. The commitment is 100 days to production — not a pilot, not a proof of concept — an actual deployed agentic workflow. If you’re a partner trying to move customers off the fence on AI investments, this is a commercial tool. ServiceNow is essentially absorbing some of the delivery risk to help you close. Jensen Huang’s contribution to the morning was framing the economic case. He pushed back on the idea that AI is purely a cost-cutting play, arguing instead that enterprises should be using AI to “elevate ambition” — to do things they couldn’t do at all before, not just do existing things cheaper. The NVIDIA partnership is powering a new layer ServiceNow is calling the AI Factory, which provides the compute and model infrastructure underneath the platform’s agentic layer. The most vivid demo of the morning came from FedEx CEO Raj Subramaniam, who walked through a live scenario showing ServiceNow’s new AI agent — called Otto — solving a staffing gap at a FedEx distribution hub in real time. The gap that historically took three days to resolve was closed in minutes. FedEx reported 2,000 incidents offloaded, over 3,000 hours saved, and 85 percent accuracy. Those are the kinds of numbers that end the “pilot conversation” fast. For Canadian solution providers, the takeaway is this: ServiceNow is giving the channel two new tools. A governance platform to make AI deployments defensible, and a commercial guarantee to make those deployments sellable. I’ll have more on what this means for Canadian partners specifically in my In The Channel interviews from the show later this week. And there was plenty going on aside from here at Knwoledge 26. In brief today:  First, New research from Zoho highlights a “false comfort zone” for Canadian workforce security, with local attack rates sitting at 30 percent. While 89 percent of Canadians believe AI will strengthen their security, only 46 percent are ready to deploy it due to legacy infrastructure bottlenecks. Second, Syncro and Guardz have announced a major partnership, embedding the Guardz cybersecurity platform directly into the Syncro MSP workflow. The integration includes automated client invoicing through Syncro’s Universal Billing to help MSPs capture security margin without the reconciliation headache. Third, Huntress distribution deals are now officially live with partners like Ingram Micro, Vertosoft, and Liquid PC. For the Canadian channel, the Ingram Micro relationship is the headline, signaling Huntress’s move to scale beyond its MSP roots into the broader mid-market. And finally, Kiteworks has appointed 17-year Oracle veteran Julia Rasekhi as its new SVP of Strategic Partnerships. This newly created role is a clear signal that the content governance player is shifting toward an aggressive, partner-led growth strategy in regulated markets. Full details and links in the show notes or the blog post. Later today on In The Channel, we take a look at third-party risk management, and why it’s both an opportunity for managed service providers, and a threat as insurance providers get serious about supply chain risk, with Tim Coach from Cynomi. And if you haven’t heard it yet, check out yesterday’s episode with Frances Edmonds, HP Canada’s sustabiility leader, on just how important sustainability is on Canadian procurement documents. That’s how we’re seeing the headlines today. I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, thanks for listening. Have a great day.