The Buzz: Acronis names former WatchGuard CEO, Virtuozzo shrinks cloud infrastructure, Proofpoint expands MSP security

Welcome to The Buzz from ChannelBuzz.ca, I’m Robert Dutt, today is Friday, October 16, 2026, and here’s what’s happening in the channel today.

There’s a significant leadership change at Acronis, one of the largest technology platform providers serving managed service providers.

The company has appointed Prakash Panjwani as its new chief executive officer, effective immediately.

He replaces Jan-Jaap Jager, who will remain an Acronis shareholder.

Panjwani is a familiar name in the cybersecurity business, particularly for anyone who’s followed WatchGuard over the years.

He spent roughly a decade as WatchGuard’s CEO, helping transform the company from a firewall-focused vendor into a much broader security platform provider.

That included expansion into endpoint security, extended detection and response, and managed detection and response.

Before WatchGuard, Panjwani also served as CEO of SafeNet.

And that background is particularly interesting given the direction Acronis has been taking.

The company has been steadily bringing together data protection, cybersecurity, infrastructure management and service automation.

The objective is to give MSPs more of the capabilities they need through a single platform, reducing the number of separate tools and management environments they have to operate.

That’s a familiar strategy across the MSP technology market.

But the challenge is making the different components work together well enough that partners actually become more efficient.

Acronis says Panjwani’s experience integrating security technologies, building channel businesses and driving growth through acquisitions makes him well suited to its next stage of development.

For MSPs, there are several questions worth watching.

Will Acronis accelerate its expansion into managed security?

Will it continue adding capabilities through acquisitions?

And how will it balance a broader platform strategy with the need to keep its products straightforward and profitable for service providers?

The company hasn’t announced specific changes to its partner program, pricing or product roadmap.

But the choice of CEO offers a pretty clear indication of the experience Acronis wants leading its business.

And incidentally, if Panjwani’s former employer sounds familiar, yesterday’s In The Channel featured current WatchGuard CEO Joe Smolarski.

More on that conversation in a moment.

Virtuozzo, meanwhile, is making it possible to deploy its cloud infrastructure platform on considerably smaller systems.

The company has released version eight of Virtuozzo Infrastructure System, with a new lite deployment option that can operate on just one or two servers.

That may sound like a relatively small technical change.

But it has potentially significant implications for the economics of delivering managed infrastructure.

Traditional infrastructure deployments can require multiple servers and shared storage, even when the customer’s actual workload is fairly modest.

That can make it difficult to justify the initial investment for smaller organizations or individual locations.

Virtuozzo’s new option combines compute, management and storage on the same server, using local disks rather than requiring a separate storage network.

The company is targeting smaller businesses, branch offices and customers that need infrastructure running on their own premises.

Version eight also updates Nvidia GPU support, allowing providers to run dedicated and shared GPU workloads on the same host.

And Virtuozzo’s built-in migration tool for VMware vSphere eight is now generally available.

That makes the release particularly relevant to partners looking for alternatives to VMware.

Virtuozzo says a one-server configuration can deliver approximately fifty-three percent lower total cost of ownership than VMware.

Of course, that’s a vendor-provided comparison, and the actual economics will depend on the customer’s requirements.

There’s also an important distinction between a smaller deployment and a highly available one.

A single-server configuration doesn’t provide the same resilience as a multi-node cluster.

Customers that need automatic virtual-machine failover will still require additional infrastructure.

But for MSPs and smaller cloud providers, this could create opportunities to offer managed infrastructure, private cloud services and localized AI workloads at a lower entry point.

And in a market where both infrastructure costs and data-location requirements are getting more attention, that flexibility may be increasingly valuable.

Proofpoint is also expanding its security platform for managed service providers, with a new set of capabilities focused on Microsoft 365.

The company says the additions are designed to strengthen the security foundations organizations need before expanding their use of AI.

And the most interesting part is that many of those foundations involve problems MSPs have been dealing with for years.

Things like excessive permissions, outdated guest accounts and files that are shared more broadly than they should be.

Those problems become more significant when AI applications can access and work with the same information.

Proofpoint is introducing a capability called Tenant Risk Exposure within its 365 Permission Manager.

It will give MSPs and administrators a clearer picture of risky sharing settings and permissions across customer environments.

That includes anonymous access, external users, public groups, inactive guests and accounts that no longer have an appropriate owner.

The company is also adding more explanation to its AI-powered email-security assessments.

The idea is to help technicians understand why a message was classified as suspicious or legitimate, making it easier to investigate unusual decisions or false positives.

And Proofpoint is extending its adaptive security awareness training into Microsoft Teams.

It also has a new AI Cyber Assistant coming to its management console, designed to help MSPs with product configuration, support and customer consultations.

These additions build on the dedicated MSP business Proofpoint established after acquiring Hornetsecurity.

The larger story is that securing Microsoft 365 increasingly involves more than stopping malicious email.

MSPs also need to understand how information is shared, who can access it, and what happens when AI systems start working with that data.

And they need to manage those controls efficiently across multiple customer environments.

Proofpoint says the new capabilities will roll out during the fourth quarter.

In Brief – Commvault is adding threat-hunting capabilities to Microsoft 365 backups, helping organizations identify compromised data and determine which recovery points are safe to restore.

Descope has launched Agentic Identity Hub three-point-oh, with new governance and access controls for internal AI agents and the systems they connect to.

Intermedia has expanded its healthcare communications offering with AI-powered patient engagement and connections to fifteen electronic health record and practice-management systems.

And VanishID has introduced an automated response playbook designed to counter attackers who impersonate corporate help-desk personnel when contacting employees.

Full details and links in the show notes or the blog post.

If you haven’t heard it yet, yesterday’s In The Channel features WatchGuard CEO Joe Smolarski, discussing how AI governance is becoming a new managed-service opportunity.

We talk about how MSPs can help customers identify and secure the AI tools employees are already using, why Joe believes AI governance should become a separately monetized service, and how WatchGuard is adapting its roadmap to support those opportunities.

That’s how we’re seeing the headlines today. I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, thanks for listening. Have a great day.