Dell unveiled a host of new products at this year’s CES including new monitors and consumer notebooks, but for the channel, the main story is new commercial notebooks with consumer features taken from Dell’s XPS line.
The acquisition expands Avnet’s line card, adding training authorization for some vendors who they already carried. It also will strengthen them in new solution areas, and in the government space.
HP names a well-known Canadian channel veteran as the replacement for Lloyd Bryant in Canada.
Dell is sending a message to its Canadian partners and customers that it intends to double down on innovation notwithstanding its growing even larger with the pending acquisition of EMC.
Cyphort, which sells entirely through partners, has increased its business by 300 per cent over the last year, and looks to continue that strong growth in 2016, including the enlistment of its first partners in Canada.
The increasing impact of style and functionality from the consumer segment to the commercial PC space is not a new trend, but HP believes it has taken it to a new level with its latest announcements, designed to appeal to millennial customers both in their esthetics and through a new commitment to improving the notebook PC as a communications device.
Hybrid cloud has been a strength for Dell, and in the new year they expect multi-cloud opportunities to expand significantly, providing more opportunities for channel partners.
With major changes on the horizon, Michael Kerr stresses that EMC partners need to be able to articulate the business outcomes of the increasing complex technology available to them.
The hyperconverged startup emphasizes the end product, a highly scalable out-of-the-box private cloud initially focused on development and testing environments, rather than the hyperconverged label itself, which they think has been somewhat overused.
VMware’s decision to stop OEMing the Artisan’s Neverfail technology for VMware vCenter Server Heartbeat has led Artisan to provide such capabilities in its core product, including application protection for vCloud Server Virtual Machines.
Essentials for Office 365 now provides a unified backup for Exchange, Sharepoint and Onedrive, all the major applications where content lives.
Programmatic initiatives to back trending areas is something VMware is telling partners they can expect to see more of in 2016.
Avaya recently introduced its new Avaya Midmarket Select Program. But the program itself is only part of the company’s strategy to significantly increase its presence in the mid-market space in Canada.
The mid-market is the key area of focus for Avaya Canada’s channel this year, but networking, cloud and video are also on the priority list.
Dell’s global channel chief lays out her suggestions on how to best mentor younger female employees.
Ingram buys the software it had been licensing since 2013, and in addition gets around 500 skilled Odin employees and greater exposure to telco and carrier channels.
Two of the three new reference architectures are Cisco Validated Design-backed, a first for the SmartStack solutions, which Nimble expects will help partners in several ways.
Additional new capabilities include expansion of support for NetApp and EMC NAS Devices, and the ability to add Lockdown capabilities that override native Windows File System permissions.
SAP’s new HANA-powered CRM solution for SMBs, which will hit general availability in both the U.S. and Canada in 2016, is drawing lots of interest. ChannelBuzz takes a look at why.
The Intel partnership will generate both three global IoT solutions labs for customers, with the North American one being in Houston, as well as a roadmap of jointly HPE-Intel developed IoT solutions.
