VMware Canada Country Manager Sean Forkan discusses changes made since he took the job to restore the company’s momentum in Canada, and talked about where they are going in the months ahead.
Pivotal executive and proud tech geek Chad Sakac gave the keynote at the Dell Technologies Forum in Toronto on Tuesday, deconstructing the present process of technological change, and counselling customers on a strategy of how to address scary change that transcended the Dell companies, which involves embracing change in their companies and providing ways to encourage it from the bottom up.
BlackBerry’s recent Partner Summit had clear objectives of articulating the company’s vision around their new Spark platform to partners, together with both the technology roadmap and the sales strategy around it. They also wanted to introduce the new sales leadership in Canada to partners.
D3, which has been in business since 2002, has always had channel partners, but has decided to get more systematic about recruiting and training them. They have hired Peter Marini as their first channel leader, and launched their first channel program.
Canadian partners selling into approximately 1,000 designated accounts in the Commercial segment in Canada will receive additional incents, and Partner of Record Status if they win the deal. The same status is not yet there for Enterprise accounts, but the company says that they are working on it.
Canadian businesses still aren’t that far along the path to digital transformation. The plus side for partners is that many of them know it, and fear the consequences.
Data quality vendor Naveego has announced a collaboration with Sisense around one customer, and while this is not even a formal partnership, they believe that their synergies with BI vendors and ability to work easily with their platforms make such strategic partnerships an important part of their future.
Blancco is looking Ingram Micro to help them put together a select channel of MSPs and VARs to offer their erasure-as-a-service offering. Softchoice has been announced as a Canadian channel partner.
IBM pledges that all aspects of their and Red Hat’s vendor and channel partnerships will continue, including their channel partnerships, and vendor relationships.
They include earlier integrations with Lakeside Software and PrinterLogic, which have been available as custom orders, but which are now part of the basic IGEL OS.
Lenovo’s ThinkSystem servers have long been certified on SAP HANA, but this is the first certification of their ThinkAgile HCI line with Nutanix, which they see as both a strong validation that HCI is ready for the enterprise, and a great market opportunity.
HYCU was created to develop and sell a custom-built backup solution for Nutanix, and this new program is designed to parallel the go-to-market strategy for the upper SMB and midmarket that Nutanix launched with their Velocity program in June.
Pax8 bolsters MSP choices in email archiving and Office 365 backup with Dropsuite, while emphasizing that they have some technology and pricing features that partners should find attractive.
Kaspersky Web Traffic Security is a complete rewrite of the code base of the prior application in the Kaspersky Security for Internet Gateway, which adds additional security engines and the latest machine learning and deep learning technologies.
TP-Link adds a new cloud controller to the Omada line they introduced almost a year ago. Aimed at SMBs, the Omada family is a hybrid cloud platform to manage decentralized wireless networks.
Lexmark has unveiled three new Lexmark Cloud Services on a new purpose-built cloud platform, with more services to come. While one service, Lexmark Cloud Print Management, is direct, the other two are channel, provided free for partners to offer, and where they fully control the contracting with the customer.
NetApp asked its partners to place bets this year on the cloud, on HCI and on all-flash, with the first two acknowledged as being a significant ask for some partners. Almost two quarters in, the company said that results so far have been good.
NetApp made a flurry of announcements on Wednesday at Insight extending their data fabric, with special relevance to developers and architects, emphasizing their cloud-first focus, and articulating their hybrid and multi-cloud proposition.
NetApp introduced multiple announcements upgrading their data fabric on Wednesday, with the most interesting likely being the availability of the technology they acquired with Plexistor in 2017 that uses persistent memory to generate ultra-low latency and much higher performance.
While digital transformation has become a motherhood term in the tech industry, NetApp CEO George Kurian kicked off the opening keynote at NetApp Insight by saying NetApp is now emphasizing that successful digital transformation requires adherence to four core principles.
