Salesforce concluded a series of announcements over the last several days with two specifically around Generative AI, including Slack GPT, which will bring Generative AI to Slack, and an expansion of their existing partnership with Accenture which will result in an acceleration hub for generative AI.
The new Conga Revenue Lifecycle Cloud fundamentally reworks Conga’s solution portfolio by rearchitecting all their applications into microservices, while the expanded partnership with Accenture turns what had been reactive joint sales to customers into common sales and engineering activity where the two companies will collaborate much more extensively than in the past.
HP leader Enrique Lores and senior HP leaders used the HP Amplify opening keynote to lay out the company’s vision going forward and their strategy to get there.
Salesforce outlined their strategy around Generative AI at their TrailBlazer DX developer event, which includes new product and partnering and ecosystem strategy.
The major changes are to their AP Bill Automation solution and to automated usage billing for subscriptions.
The new integration of Lenovo ThinkSystem Ready Nodes in ThinkSystem Servers with WEKA Data Platform software provides a broad horizontal play.
The new program has been simplified, reducing the number of tiers, and while benefits for top tier partners have been increased, it is also now easier for new partners to enter the program
MLSE and AWS demonstrated the further extension of a partnership they announced last year, to provide new types of mixed and augmented reality capabilities around basketball and hockey, with further capabilities for these as well as the other sports that make up the MLSE empire on the way.
The new program is designed to enhance partner enablement as an increasingly broad partner ecosystem pursues IBM’s strategic focus on the hybrid cloud and AI.
ThoughtSpot also made a deeper commitment to the AWS platform with the hiring of Britny Holloway as Director of AWS Global Alliances, while Rajesh Dhiman is now Senior Director, Global Systems Integrators.
While the large majority of organizations in the survey agreed it was important for organizations to control their data to extract value from it, few of them did so, with only 3% reaching the desirable highest level of maturity.
The new tools are part of Ivanti’s efforts to get more value out of its channel by making it more effective.
While the Quantum announcement is the most interesting from a technology perspective, today Dell is also announcing new Dell PowerEdge servers for high-performance computing, and an HPC service offering, Dell APEX High Performance Computing.
Barrenechea, commenting on OpenText’s ongoing transition from an on-prem company to a cloud one, joked that being reborn in the cloud is better than being born in the cloud.
OpenText welcomed a record high number of partners for the live return of their OpenText World event, notwithstanding the fact that the event was also available online in a hybrid format.
These include support for the new VMware vSphere 8 and VM vSAN announcements, and result in an improved VxRail which has jointly engineered support for vSPhere’s DPUs. They also include the addition of VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid services to Dell APEX, and the addition to the Dell Validated Design portfolio of Dell Validated Designs for AI.
Volini described the proposed changes to the channel program as fundamental and ‘down to the studs,’ with the idea being to drive more partner business, particularly to non-traditional buyers.
BalkanID will start out focused on the mid-market but plans to expand that, as they further develop their solution from automated IGA to fully automated telemetry.
Intel also provided updates on several important projects and other future items, which are still some distance on the horizon.
No-code Avaya Virtual Agents make it easy for organizations to both acquire and deploy virtual agents, which improve the customer user experience, something which grades out poorly in customer surveys.
