The Buzz: Pax8 crowns the MIP era at Beyond26, Arrow launches partner experience centers, and Mitel names a new channel chief

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.