ICYMI: Ingram Micro bets big on agentic AI, memory pricing pain deepens, and the channel gets mental health community

Hello and welcome to In Case You Missed It from ChannelBuzz.ca. Your Monday morning recap where we catch you up on some of the channel news and trend headlines you may have missed in the last week. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca. Today is Monday, March 9, 2026. Let’s get your week started right.

Ingram Micro closed out fiscal 2025 with some pretty strong numbers. The distributor reported fourth quarter net sales of just under $14.9 billion, up 11.5% year over year and above the high end of its guidance range. For the full year, net sales came in at $52.6 billion, up nearly 10%. The company attributed the growth to strong demand across its core distribution business, an uptick in cloud marketplace revenue, and continued traction from its Xvantage digital platform, which management now says drives “billions of dollars” in transacted revenue. But the detail that caught my attention is a word, not a figure. During the earnings call, Ingram introduced the name AgenTeq – T-E-Q, by the way – as its branding for its agentic AI capabilities within the Xvantage platform. AgenTeq encompasses over 400 AI and ML models that Ingram’s been building, including a tool called the Sales Brief Agent, which gives Ingram sales teams real-time AI-generated intelligence on partner and customer accounts to help uncover growth opportunities. And in a detail worth noting for this audience, the Sales Brief Agent was initially piloted here in Canada before its planned global rollout in the first half of this year. We’re still learning what AgenTeq means in practical terms for channel partners and it’s early days for the branding, but the combination of its financial results and the platform investment suggests Ingram is placing a very deliberate bet on AI-driven distribution. A story we’ll be following up very soon here on In The Channel.

If you listened last week, you heard us lead with the component shortage story. Cisco rewriting partner contract terms, Lenovo warning of March price hikes, Western Digital’s entire 2026 production already spoken for. The situation has not gotten better. In fact, it’s getting worse and faster than most of us expected. Dell COO Jeff Clarke told analysts last week the company’s compressing discounting and that quotes are now valid for “the shortest period of time they’ve ever been.” HP’s CFO disclosed that memory costs have doubled in a single quarter and now represent about 35% of PC production costs, up from 15 to 18% a few months ago. And Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan says there’s no relief coming until 2028, a timeline backed by both SK Hynix and Micron. The takeaway for partners hasn’t changed from last week, but it’s more urgent now. Shorten your quote windows, have the pricing conversation with customers early, and assume that anything you quote today can and will cost more by the time it ships. Grab your helmet.

Switching gears to something that doesn’t come up nearly enough. A new community initiative called MSP Well was formally launched this week at The Channel Company’s XChange conference in Orlando. MSP Well is a peer-support community dedicated to mental health and resilience among IT, MSP, and MSSP professionals. It was co-founded by Joe Ussia, CEO of Infinite IT Solutions, James Mignacca, CEO of Canadian vendor Cavelo, and Miguel Ribeiro of VBS IT Services. As Ussia put it, “the channel talks constantly about tools, threats, and uptime, but rarely about the human cost to the people doing the work.” MSP Well aims to change that, offering peer support, a Discord community, an anonymous call line, and partnerships with certified counsellors. It’s a meaningful initiative, and it’s something we’re looking forward to following up on here on In The Channel.

And finally, ServiceNow says it has built an AI agent that’s now resolving 90% of inbound IT tickets on its own internal employee help desk. The system handles high-volume Level 1 issues like password resets, software access, VPN connectivity, and hardware troubleshooting, with resolution rates above 99% in those categories. When it gets stuck, it escalates rather than guessing. It’s an internal deployment for now, with general availability scheduled for the second half of the year. ServiceNow’s annual Knowledge conference takes place in May, and I’d expect we’ll hear a lot more about it there.

Those are some of the things we were paying attention to last week. This week on In The Channel, we take a look at Check Point’s recent acquisition spree and how it all comes together with their chief strategy officer, Roi Karo. Sit down with frequent guest Tony Anscombe from ESET to talk about the current threat landscape. And break down the most meaningful findings of the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Index report. I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca. Have a great week!