ICYMI: Sherweb goes global, Broadcom’s VMware reckoning arrives, and the commercial refresh just got more expensive

Hello and welcome to In Case You Missed It from ChannelBuzz.ca. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca, and this is your weekly look at the stories that matter for the Canadian IT channel community. March 30th, 2026.

Four stories this week. A Sherbrooke cloud distributor goes global after 28 years of bootstrapping. Broadcom’s VMware reckoning arrives just in time for a March 31st deadline. Intel and AMD both signal price increases that will squeeze your clients’ hardware refreshes. And two independent reports paint the same uncomfortable picture about where enterprise AI adoption actually stands.

Let’s get into it.

We’re starting this week with a feel-good Canadian story, and it’s a big one.

Sherweb, the Sherbrooke, Quebec-based cloud marketplace distributor, has secured a $125 million minority equity investment from Investissement Quebec. And here’s the detail that makes this significant: this is Sherweb’s first outside investment ever. The company has been bootstrapped and founder-owned since 1998. Twenty-eight years without a dollar of outside capital.

This comes on the heels of Sherweb’s expansion into the UK market, where they’re targeting over 11,000 MSPs. That move was built on their acquisition last year of Irish cloud distributor MicroWarehouse, so they’re not just parachuting in — they’ve got a beachhead.

Put those two announcements together and the picture is clear. This isn’t a company raising money because it needs to. This is a company that’s been profitable for nearly three decades, deciding it’s time to go global, and bringing in a strategic partner to fund the expansion and, notably, M&A.

CRN’s interview with Sherweb’s co-CEO made the ambitions explicit: AI marketplace expansion and acquisitions are on the table. For Canadian partners, this is worth watching. Sherweb has been a reliable, partner-first distributor for a long time. The question now is whether they can scale that model internationally without losing what made it work.

Now for a very different kind of story. The Broadcom VMware saga has been building for months, and this week several threads converge at once.

March 31st is the deadline for Broadcom’s termination of the VMware Cloud Service Provider program in Europe. CISPE, the European cloud infrastructure providers group, filed a formal antitrust complaint with the European Commission on March 19th, calling Broadcom’s actions — and I’m quoting here — a “death sentence” for smaller cloud providers. They’re asking for interim measures to block the shutdown while the complaint is investigated.

Broadcom’s response, per CRN, was that they “strongly disagree” and that the complaint “misrepresents the realities of the market.”

Meanwhile, Broadcom is making a very specific pitch to customers. Krish Prasad, who heads the VMware Cloud Foundation division, told CRN — and again, direct quote — “We have essentially solved the hardware shortage and the hardware cost issues with a software solution.” The argument is that VCF 9.0’s advanced memory tiering lets you offload expensive DRAM to cheaper NVMe storage, so the memory super-cycle becomes a reason to buy more VMware, not less. Prasad called it a “huge VCF tailwind.”

Here’s the irony, and it’s hard to miss. Broadcom is simultaneously telling customers they need VMware more than ever to survive the hardware crunch, while pushing licensing and program changes that are driving those same customers to look for alternatives.

And the data on customer sentiment is now documented. Independent analyst firm Virtified, founded by former Gartner VP Michael Warrilow, surveyed 450 VMware users across 14 countries and found roughly half plan to reduce their VMware usage by 2028.

That’s not channel chatter. That’s documented customer intent. Whether the EU complaint gains traction or not, the market is speaking.

Speaking of hardware getting more expensive — let’s talk silicon.

Intel had an interesting week. Their VP David Feng told CRN that the new Core Ultra Series 3 “Panther Lake” chips will help Intel regain market share in commercial PCs. The pitch: Panther Lake brings meaningful AI processing capabilities to the commercial fleet. This is Intel’s play to win back ground they’ve lost to AMD and Apple Silicon in the enterprise.

On the other hand — and this is from the same executive, same week — Intel confirmed it’s raising CPU prices for OEMs by roughly ten percent. Supply crunch, rising component costs, tariff pressure. The usual 2026 cocktail.

So Intel is counting on a commercial PC refresh cycle to reclaim market share, while simultaneously making that refresh more expensive for everyone involved.

And lest you think this is Intel-specific — AMD is also signaling GPU price increases of at least ten percent in 2026, driven by the same DRAM supply crisis.

For partners helping clients plan hardware refreshes right now, the message is straightforward: budget accordingly, and budget up. The cost pressure is structural, not temporary.

We’ll close this week with some data, and it tells a story every MSP needs to hear.

Auvik released their 2026 IT Trends Report this week. The headline finding: sixty-seven percent of IT professionals are optimistic about AI. But only five percent say AI is actually core to their operations today. Five percent. That is an enormous gap between enthusiasm and reality.

The governance picture is even more striking. Seventy-six percent of IT leaders believe their organization has an AI policy. Only forty-two percent of help desk staff agree. That’s not a gap, that’s leadership and the front line living in completely different realities about whether the rules even exist. Auvik also found that 61 percent of organizations discover unauthorized SaaS applications at least monthly. Shadow IT is not a hypothetical — it’s a standing Tuesday meeting.

And these findings aren’t isolated. The same week, Waterloo-based OpenText released a Ponemon Institute study of nearly 1,900 IT and security practitioners. Fifty-two percent of enterprises have deployed GenAI. But seventy-nine percent haven’t reached full AI maturity in cybersecurity. Only 41 percent have AI-specific data privacy policies.

Two independent studies, same week, same conclusion: AI is being deployed faster than organizations can govern it, secure it, or even agree on whether governance exists.

For MSPs, this is the opportunity in neon lights. Your clients are adopting AI. They think they have policies. Their front-line staff disagrees. Someone needs to fill that gap.

That’s your In Case You Missed It for March 30th, 2026. Sherweb going global, Broadcom’s VMware reckoning, the silicon squeeze, and the AI governance gap — confirmed from two independent angles.

Links to everything we talked about today are in the show notes at ChannelBuzz.ca.

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I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca. I’ll see you in the channel.