The Buzz: AppDirect buys Soul Machines, CyberFOX lands TD SYNNEX deal, RSA takes on AI agent identity

Welcome to The Buzz from ChannelBuzz.ca, I’m Robert Dutt, today is Thursday, October 1, and here’s what’s happening in the channel today.

AppDirect has acquired Soul Machines, the company best known for its digital people and AI avatar technology. The deal was announced Tuesday at AppDirect’s Thrive conference in Los Angeles, and terms were not disclosed. According to AppDirect, Soul Machines’ technology and its library of more than 40 LLM-agnostic AI advisors will be folded into the company’s Devs.ai platform, with the goal of letting businesses build AI-generated, customer-facing experiences on top of AppDirect’s marketplace, catalog, and billing infrastructure. AppDirect is positioning the acquisition as an acceleration of its AI strategy, giving the ISVs, advisors, and service providers in its ecosystem a way to deliver agentic AI experiences without building avatar or agent technology themselves. Soul Machines will operate as a wholly owned AppDirect subsidiary. Worth noting: a lot of Canadian distributors, resellers, and cloud marketplaces sit on top of AppDirect infrastructure without thinking much about it. If buying experiences on those platforms shift from a catalog listing to a conversational AI advisor, the front end of the marketplace economy starts to change, and the company that owns that front end gains the leverage.

CyberFOX has signed a distribution agreement with TD SYNNEX covering its full security portfolio across North America. Announced Tuesday, the deal puts CyberFOX’s AutoElevate privileged access management platform, its password manager, its DNS filtering service, and its Timus SASE platform into the TD SYNNEX line card. CyberFOX’s Os Haque says the agreement is aimed at giving partners a single distribution point for the pieces of a managed security stack that historically come from separate vendors, while TD SYNNEX’s Cheryl Day says the portfolio speaks to the identity and access challenges partners raise most often. The practical significance on this side of the border is straightforward: TD SYNNEX is one of the largest security distributors in the Canadian market, and privileged access management is increasingly the entry point for larger managed security engagements. Consolidating password management, DNS filtering, and SASE alongside it in one distribution relationship lowers the friction of quoting and renewing those components together, which is the kind of bundling MSPs are being pushed toward as clients flatten their vendor lists.

RSA has launched RSA Agent ID, a platform for securing and governing AI agents, with an initial focus on highly regulated industries. Announced Tuesday, the platform is designed to discover AI agents operating on a network, register them, control what they can access, and generate the audit trails that regulated organizations need to prove what their agents did and why. RSA says it is closing what it calls the agentic identity gap, the space where software agents act with privileges no human ever reviewed, and put its thesis bluntly in the announcement: hope is not an AI strategy. The timing is notable, because this is the week the channel spent talking about exactly this problem. Okta has rebuilt its partner program around AI agent security and services-led delivery, and vendors across the board are racing to define who governs non-human identities. For MSPs with clients in financial services, healthcare, or the public sector, the question is coming regardless of which vendor wins: when a client deploys agents that move money, touch patient data, or draft procurement decisions, someone has to be accountable for what those agents can access. Increasingly, that someone is the MSP.

In Brief – Fortinet has officially opened its $30 million cybersecurity innovation hub in downtown Calgary, a 122,000 square foot facility for security research, training, and the company’s Canadian cloud presence. Opengear, a Digi International company, has signed a pan-European distribution agreement with Ingram Micro. NinjaTech AI has launched Ninja Enterprise, bundling AI employees and the GPU capacity behind them into one fixed yearly fee. Microsoft’s Charles Lamanna says AI agents will become the primary customer for business software, warning that many applications will lose pricing leverage as a result. And spending management company Fraxion has acquired Yellow Dog Software, which makes inventory management software for the hospitality and retail sectors. Full details and links in the show notes or the blog post.

If you haven‘t heard it yet, Okta’s Ryan Sydor was on In The Channel yesterday, walking through how Okta is rebuilding its partner program for the age of AI agents. We also have full coverage of last week’s Oktane conference on In The Channel — check out our interview with channel chief Laura Padilla on the new partner program, and more to come this week.

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