ICYMI: Nearly 60% of channel partners expect a Q1 profit crash, Check Point adds Canadian data region

Welcome to In Case You Missed It from ChannelBuzz.ca. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca. Today is Monday, March 16th, 2026. Let’s get your week started right.

This week’s In Case You Missed It is brought to you by ESET Canada. ESET’s Women in Cybersecurity Scholarship is now open for 2026, with three $5,000 awards available to women pursuing careers in cybersecurity. Applications close April 8th. Learn more and apply at eset dot come slash ca. ESET – protecting progress.

If you needed a single data point to explain the mood in the channel right now, Omdia may have just provided it. A new global survey from the analyst firm found that close to 60 percent of channel partners expect their Q1 profits to decline by double digits compared to last year. Less than a third predict that profits will grow at all.

The revenue picture is slightly more encouraging – 45 percent expect Q1 revenues to increase year over year, and about a third are forecasting double-digit revenue growth. But there’s a dangerous disconnect between topline and bottom line, and the reason is straightforward: costs are rising faster than partners can pass them through.

Hardware vendors are increasingly refusing to hold pricing until the point of shipment, and in some cases are cancelling orders even after a purchase order has been received. If you’re locked into contractual pricing with a customer, you quoted a price, the vendor changed theirs, and you’re absorbing the difference.

Layer in Middle East conflict pushing oil prices higher, component shortages showing no signs of easing for at least another 12 months, and the downstream effects on cloud providers, MSPs, and SaaS companies all being forced to raise their own prices – and Omdia’s Alastair Edwards warns the risk of channel bankruptcies is set to increase dramatically. If you haven’t stress-tested your quoting and procurement processes for a world where vendor pricing is no longer reliable, that conversation needs to happen now.

Check Point Software launched a dedicated Canada data region last week for its CloudGuard Web Application Firewall. All configurations, logs, and security data generated by Canadian customers using CloudGuard WAF will now stay within Canadian borders.

This is a data sovereignty play, and the timing isn’t accidental. Data residency is becoming a real differentiator in how Canadian organizations evaluate security vendors. Whether it’s regulatory pressure, customer demand, or the reality that storing data with U.S.-headquartered cloud providers carries CLOUD Act risk, the partners who can have an honest conversation about where data lives are the ones winning deals.

For Check Point partners, it removes one of the more common objections. And in a broader sense, it’s another signal that global security vendors are recognizing that having a data region in Canada actually matters to this market.

CRN published its annual MSP 500 list last week, and several Canadian companies made the cut. WBM Technologies out of Saskatoon landed on the Elite 150 – now in its 75th year and still reinventing itself. Bulletproof, a GLI company based in New Brunswick, made the Security 100. Nucleus Networks, which has expanded from Vancouver to five cities across Western Canada, appeared on the Pioneer 250. Arctiq, Converge, and Premier Cloud also showed up across the three categories.

We don’t dwell on awards lists on this podcast, but the MSP 500 is one of the few that gives Canadian partners real visibility alongside the larger U.S. players. If you’re building your practice and wondering whether you’re on the right track, it’s worth looking at who made it and asking what they’re doing that you could learn from.

Since our friends at ESET Canada are sponsoring this episode, it’s worth flagging something they’re doing that goes beyond product. The ESET Women in Cybersecurity Scholarship is now open for 2026, with three $5,000 awards available to women in Canada pursuing careers in cybersecurity. The deadline to apply is April 8th.

This is the 11th year of the program. 

Since 2021, ESET has supported 14 women in Canada with more than $50,000 in scholarship funding. Last year’s Trailblazer recipient, Constance Prevot, is now a working SOC analyst while finishing her degree at Concordia. If you know someone who should apply, point them to eset.com/ca. Link’s in the show notes.

Finally, two moments from the past week that remind us this industry is built by people, not just products.

The Canadian channel lost Rob Megaw last week. Rob was the president of Compu-SOLVE Technologies in Midland, Ontario, and had led the company for more than 30 years – from its early days as a local ISP and PC repair shop through its evolution into a managed services provider. That’s the Canadian channel story in miniature, and our condolences go out to his family and the Compu-SOLVE team.

On a more hopeful note, CIOCAN announced the CanadianCIO Fawn Annan Memorial Award, recognizing women in IT leadership whose work reflects Fawn’s enormous contribution to Canada’s technology community. Fawn founded the CanadianCIO of the Year Awards and the CIO Hall of Fame. Nominations are open, and we’ll have a link in the show notes.

Those are some of the things we were paying attention to last week. 

This week on In The Channel: Zero Networks goes all-in on the channel and why Canadian partners should pay attention. Barracuda’s Merium Khalid walks us through their latest threat report. And Jeff Collins from WanAware makes the case that you’re hitting every SLA metric and your customer still thinks you’re failing. 

For ChannelBuzz.ca, I’m Robert Dutt. Have a great week, and I’ll see you in the channel.