A new family of Generative AI solutions, Now Assist, is the headliner here, but Vancouver also includes many other announcements, especially around security.
Gelsinger combined his vision for the company’s future with new announcements and the short and medium term road map to highlight the extensive changes coming, particularly from the rise of AI.
Intel’s announcements at their just-concluded Intel Innovation Forum included new Core Ultra processors, formerly known as Meteor Lake, which are a key part of what Intel highlighted as a major AI PC initiative that should appeal to a broad range of partners.
Lenovo, which is in attendance at the Intel Innovation 2023 event here in San Jose, made a very significant announcement of their own, beefing up their AI portfolio on multiple fronts at an event where AI was centre stage.
The solution, Octavia, is in the early stages of beta, and will eventually launch with both a full featured enterprise version and a free version which will not have all of the enterprise features.
SAS is not only doubling down on its reseller channel, but its strategic vendor channel as well, extending partnerships to strengthen their mutual position in Generative AI and other advanced use cases.
Generative AI, with its focus on content creation, is particularly well suited to marketing and, responsibly managed, can enhance all aspects of the marketing process.
SAS Viya Workbench is a lightweight development environment to execute code quickly and efficiently in a cloud-native, efficient and secure environment. SAS App Factory is a rapid application development productivity framework for creating fit AI-driven applications.
SAS has used EIS before for the government business in the U.S., and has also just added Carahsoft to further serve this market, but TD SYNNEX is their first distributor who will handle most of their partners rather than having SAS deal with them direct, in a relationship that will see channel-only offerings from SAS come to market.
While the previous Go Purple partner program was more of a bare-bones effort, the new Luminary Partner Program is better attuned to the company’s Cloud First strategy, and more complete, although formal certifications won’t arrive till next year.
Leostream has been in business over 20 years but sold mainly direct, with a minor partner presence, so the company has now established a channel program and transferred their Business Development team to manage partners.
Michael Porat comes in to further drive Salt’s growing API business by extending their strategic vendor partnerships and centralizing and enhancing their channel management.
Precryption technology is a more efficient way of finding threats in encrypted network traffic, which examines the data before it is encrypted, and has wide appeal to reseller and strategic alliance partners alike.
The Aruba Instant On AP22D, a Wi-Fi 6 access point, and the Aruba Instant On 1960 stackable switch are both SMB products laden with enterprise technology, and are aimed at SMB customers who want performance.
Netsurion has been around for many years, but this is the first distribution deal for the MDR provider, and they chose a new company with a white glove model whose founder has already succeeded in distribution with the same model.
Ewington won’t exactly be a new face, having been at HP and then HPE for 27 years, including many channel facing roles, and having been acting in this position on an interim basis since February, but his past experience provides him with views how partners can be made more effective.
The Brand Store is a completely remade version of a product inriver has had for many years, and while not itself a lucrative opportunity for their partner base, it will contribute to the overall value of the inriver solution and to partners’ advisory roles.
Datamotive sets itself apart from competitors in the cross-cloud recovery and migration space with a recovery SLA of 10 minutes and 100% data consistency.
NVIDIA is the third member of this collaboration, which brings multiple new turnkey Generative AI and multi-cloud solutions to market.
Tintri has also switched to a 100% channel model, and is currently restructuring their channel program.
