Key members of CompTIA’s Canadian community sat down with ChannelBuzz at the association’s ChannelCon 15 event in Chicago this week to discuss what they are working on this year.
AVG emphasizes that having a foot in two separate sectors helps partners drive their business, and notes that AVG’s requirement their channel account people be certified in Channel Management through CompTIA is one aspect of their commitment to being easy to work with.
DataMAPt is looking to recruit primarily VAR partners, is focused mainly on the SMB space, and pledged rock bottom pricing to partners and commitment to a channel model.
The startup’s cloud brokerage services integrates cloud service providers looking to sell capacity with customers who license their platform to provide their own branded services. Channel partners like MSPs are the third part of the equation, but to date have been the slowest to come on board.
Diablo’s Memory1 technology leverage its unique memory-channel architecture, to get DRAM performance out of NAND flash and reduce server CAPEX costs by up to 75 per cent.
CompTIA’s Todd Thibodeaux laid out five steps that everyone in the IT business needs to do to overcome the many obstacles to getting customers to embrace transformation.
Vijilan formally entered the North American market in June, with a security service that layers on top of a managed service for their MSP and solution provider partners, who are their entire route to market.
Datto also reported a significant increase in support from key Canadian partners, part of the ramifications from their recent increased investment in the Canadian market.
Three distribution partners have been announced, two of whom are based in Quebec, although they have resellers across Canada and in the U.S. as well. All are focused security specialists, rather than broadline distributors.
The new CS 250 is a much-enhanced followup to the appliance HP first announced in December at HP Discover, and which came to market earlier this year.
nGenx has mainly sold through a telco agent channel in the past, but has redesigned its partner program to also appeal to MSPs, and plans to sign up a large number of them.
Version 4.3 expands hypervisor support and adds a VM Coordinator for workload management analytics and improved ability to classify workloads in a histogram.
Citrix denies that last week’s Co-operation Agreement will have negative implications for partners, and says that strong showings by newly-specialized partners has the company on track to achieve this year’s channel goals.
The new AER 3100 offers a more powerful, higher value option for micro and small branch offices.
While Sage is doing well in Canada, new cloud initiatives should strengthen it further. A cloud option for their Sage X3 offering is now available. Sage Live, a new type of cloud accounting product is now available in the U.S., will soon be in Canada, and will require new types of value-added partners.
Mistakes were made in the last five years in terms of channel strategy, Sage admits. The vendor says it has learned from those mistakes, is now led by senior executives committed to a partner-driven strategy, and that VARs and consultants will soon see this by their deeds, not just by their words.
Sage emphasized that even as it moves its technology forward, it will not forget the SMB customers who built up its business. Sage also is making an effort to pick up new customers among millennials, and to increase its presence in the U.S.
Sage says that while it is pursuing change on multiple fronts, it has taken concrete steps to deliver a more agile culture of innovation, which is already seeing strong returns.
Sage has announced a new global program for its independent software partners, which replaces multiple previous product, region and company-based initiatives, and which the company pledges will be the first of a series of initiatives which will make partners of all types much more central than before.
In what Sage is styling the first new approach to accounting since the invention of double-entry bookkeeping, Sage Live, which was developed in partnership with Salesforce and announced this spring, has now, indeed, gone Live. The catch is that it’s not live yet in Canada, but should be, fairly soon
