Cobalt provides pentesting through a platform, which delivers results quickly because they have a very large team of pentesters, and in response to solution provider interest, they have created a channel program to support partners.
A study commissioned by Intel specifically in Canada found that most channel partners have suffered from the pandemic. There was a fair amount of optimism for the year ahead however, although many partners said they need help to realize emerging opportunities in the cloud, IoT and AI.
Barracuda rebrands an improved version of the Managed Workplace RMM product they acquired from Avast in 2019 as Barracuda RMM, and delivers the multi-tenanted version of CloudGen Access they promised when ZTNA vendor Fyde was acquired in November.
Major new innovations include Creator Workflows, a low-code app tool which becomes the fourth member of ServiceNow’s Workflow portfolio, and new AI-based ITOM Predictive AIOps, AI Search and Virtual Agent tools.
Zerto is announcing a series of interrelated changes involving new rebates, deal registration, and more strategic partner management, with the goal being to encourage partners to work more closely with Zerto.
Fortinet’s big product news, the launch of FortOS 7.0, actually took place a month ago, although its importance meant it was strongly emphasized at the event, but their channel announcements, including new specializations and the expansion of consumption-based billing to new products, were new.
Algoblu uses some novel hardware-centric technology to virtualize the network, enabling telcos to pool network resources and splice them into separate SLA levels that allow more customized service levels. They are just starting to build out their North American channel, which in China consists of telcos, MSPs and CSPs.
The first formal integration between Qumulo and Commvault came at the request of customers who had been making do-it-yourself integrations, which will work much better now that the joint solution has been properly integrated and optimized.
EPOS, which took the US and gaming products in the 2020 split of Sennheiser, had never had a structured overall program in the Sennheiser days, but has reworked the program, believing that was necessary to scale their growth.
Vade Secure, which has over a billion mailboxes under management, mainly through ISP partnerships that also give them data for a very strong filter, came into the North American market last year, and is targeting SMB-focused MSPs.
Equinix Metal launches with integrations from hardware providers Dell and Pure storage, and with software ones from Mirantis Container Cloud and Cohesity Helios, but they expect many more beyond these early adopters.
iXsystems’ open source storage model both facilitates the economics of the new program, and brings in leads that their internal people nurture until they are ready to close, then pass them on to partners who have brought in a deal of equivalent value.
The HPE SimpliVity 4.1.0 release also provides new container integration with the Kubernetes CSI Plugin for HPE SimpliVity.
MSP Foundations is an eight-week long instructor-led course offered through Pax8 Academy, the first of multiple such courses which the cloud distributor plans to roll out this year.
Infocyte adds a Microsoft 365 protection solution to their platform to fill what partners had said was the biggest gap in the need for a solution that was both effective and easy to use.
WireGuard provides higher end capabilities that have 5x the performance of OpenVPN, while having the latter’s ease of use to configure.
The Evolve2 30 is a superior version to the existing Evolve 30, with better collaboration features, passive noise cancellation, durability and flexibility, although the older model will also remain in production.
The big theme around this release is expanded protection against ransomware, which is the focus of the new Sophos integration, but the release also contains major expansions of partnerships with Nutanix and Oracle.
Appgate’s first partner program since their spinoff from Cyxtera last year is explicitly focused on empowering and rewarding solution architects and sales engineers, to make them advocates of the company’s SDP technology.
Benchmark’s strength in the Canadian market is in the Greater Toronto Area and Ottawa, and that dovetails nicely with Hunters’ expansion strategy, which is focused on building up business on the eastern side of the continent first.
