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.
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.
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.
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.
Cisco’s Sonya Mazzaferro offers some thoughts on how the vendor and its partners have adopted to the changing collaboration needs of SME customers over the last year through the flexibility of Webex Work.
Big changes afoot at Dell Technologies in Canada, with Mike Sharun, who had spent the last 23 years at Dell and EMC, announcing he will retire in the spring, with Pam Pelletier named as his replacement.
While there are over 200 new features, the addition of Continuous Data Projection journaling, the ability to create an immutable Linux repository, and new support for Google Cloud Storage and AWS and Azure archive tiers will likely get the most attention.
The new company, which will be called Arcserve, brings together two 100% channel companies, with StorageCraft’s business being mainly in North America, and Arcserve’s being outside it, and StorageCraft being more focused on MSPs while Arcserve has mainly worked with VARs.
Victor Baez, vice president of global cloud channel sales at Ingram Micro discusses the company’s customer success plans and more in this edition of the podcast
Taimur Rashid, who joins Redis from Microsoft, talks with ChannelBuzz about his plans to expand the company’s business in the AI space, which he said is still very small compared to its total potential.
Blancco, which has been transitioning to a channel-first model, has added the AWS Marketplace to their distribution relationship with Carahsoft. It will apply in both the U.S. and Canada.
HYCU enters a very crowded Office 365 backup market, but believes that the capabilities within their Protégé platform and some design features to address specific market needs, will provide them needed differentiation.
WatchGuard enhances their existing UTM and MFA capabilities on Cloud Platform, while adding ThreatSync’s threat correlation service to the platform, which will have even greater import when Panda’s technology is added to it later this year.
Citrix global channel chief Bronwyn Hastings talks with ChannelBuzz about what they see as the key opportunities for partners in the year ahead, and how the company will help partners to meet them.
The company’s channel leadership is emphasizing that the changes this year are all about simplifying and improving the partner experience.
The new SaaS solutions are the same code as the on-prem software, and extend One Identity’s strategy of giving customers maximum choice in their road to the cloud.
Iboss just took a new funding round, and is aggressively pushing market expansion with some of that money, hiring new sales and marketing people, and looking to expand its channel with skilled partners.
The revamped solution increases its speed massively, and provides other efficiencies, and the new capabilities should make partners more strategic to their customers.
RocketCyber provides Pax8 with a 24/7 SOC-as-a-Service explicitly designed for MSPs serving the SMB market.
Metallic also continues its global rollout, with support for nine new EMEA countries, brining the total of countries supported to 23.
