The Buzz: Cisco details November price increases, ThinkOn expands sovereign cloud opportunity, Digitate advances AI operations

Robert Dutt: Welcome to The Buzz from ChannelBuzz.ca. I’m Robert Dutt. Today is Thursday, October 29, 2026.

We’re looking at three developments for the Canadian IT channel: Cisco’s upcoming price increases, a Canadian cloud partnership focused on data sovereignty, and new AI agents designed to automate enterprise IT operations.

First, Cisco is preparing another round of price increases, effective November seventh.

CRN first reported the changes last week, including mid-single-digit increases on affected networking and security software, along with selected hardware.

But during Cisco Partner Summit in Vancouver this week, the company offered some additional perspective on how those increases will affect its overall portfolio.

Cisco chief financial officer Mark Patterson discussed the changes during a session with Tim Coogan, the company’s senior vice president of global partner sales.

Patterson said Cisco continues to face increasing costs for memory, printed circuit boards, power supplies and logistics. With demand for AI infrastructure putting additional pressure on supply chains, those costs are becoming more difficult to avoid.

But he emphasized that raising prices is a last resort, and that Cisco is taking steps to limit the impact.

Those efforts include more than thirty initiatives aimed at improving memory efficiency. Patterson pointed to one example involving Cisco’s Wi-Fi 7 products, where engineering work has reduced memory requirements by approximately fifty percent.

And when Cisco does increase prices, Patterson said it’s trying to be selective rather than applying the same adjustment across its entire portfolio.

Some products will see mid-single-digit increases, but many others won’t see an increase at all.

In fact, Patterson said that when Cisco measures the November seventh adjustment against its overall global price list, it will be the smallest of the company’s recent rounds of price increases.

That’s an important distinction for partners. The increase on an individual product isn’t necessarily representative of the change across Cisco’s entire portfolio.

It also means partners need to understand which products are affected, particularly where they have customer quotes or projects already in progress.

And coming out of a Partner Summit where Cisco spent considerable time discussing partner profitability, it’s an interesting reminder that improving the economics of the channel involves more than incentives and rebates. Partners also have to manage the costs of the products and services they’re delivering.

Next, Canadian cloud provider ThinkOn has announced a partnership with Preservica focused on digital preservation and data sovereignty for Canadian government organizations.

The partnership combines ThinkOn’s Canadian cloud infrastructure with Preservica’s technology for preserving permanent digital records.

The companies say the offering will help government organizations manage long-term records preservation, maintain access to important information, and keep that data under Canadian jurisdiction.

And there’s a direct channel component to the announcement.

ThinkOn plans to bring the solution to market through its network of more than two hundred channel partners.

For partners already working with government customers, that creates an opportunity to extend existing infrastructure and cloud relationships into information governance and digital preservation.

It also gives those partners another way to address data sovereignty requirements, which continue to be an important consideration for Canadian public-sector organizations.

The opportunity here isn’t necessarily just selling another cloud service. It’s helping customers manage information that may need to remain accessible, trustworthy and under their control for decades.

Our third story is another example of how agentic AI is moving from assisting IT teams toward taking a more active role in their operations.

Digitate has introduced ignio Hummingbird, an update to its AI operations platform that adds new capabilities for autonomous action.

The company is targeting workflows including service desk operations, incident management and patch planning.

The idea is to move beyond identifying problems and recommending what someone should do about them, toward AI agents that can execute approved tasks within defined governance controls.

It’s a direction we’re seeing from a growing number of enterprise technology vendors, and it has some potentially significant implications for managed service providers.

Routine operational work has traditionally been an important part of managed services delivery. As more of that work becomes automated, providers will need to consider how they differentiate their services and demonstrate their value.

And there’s also the question of oversight. Giving AI agents the ability to act on enterprise systems creates opportunities for efficiency, but it also makes governance, accountability and security particularly important.

Those are questions service providers will increasingly have to address as they build AI into their own operations and the services they deliver to customers.

Later today on In The Channel, we’re continuing our conversations from Cisco Partner Summit with Raj Juneja and Erin Gertner, Cisco Canada’s president and channel chief respectively, looking at Cisco’s evolving partner strategy and the opportunities it creates.

And if you haven‘t heard it yet, yesterday’s episode featured Cisco’s Andrew Sage discussing how agentic AI is transforming technology distribution, including the work Cisco is doing with Ingram Micro and TD SYNNEX.

You’ll find that interview, along with links to today’s announcements, at ChannelBuzz.ca.

That’s how wer’re seeing the headlines. I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca. Thanks for listening. Have a great day.