Zoho’s plans to put data centres in Canada to appeal to both larger organizations with stricter data sovereignty rules and smaller ones with regulatory requirements was delayed for several years, but now the company is confident it will open new markets for them.
Iboss is looking to expand its channel with its new Go-to-Market model, particularly by strengthening their enterprise partners with partners who focus on the midmarket and smaller businesses.
As it celebrates its 25th birthday, NetSuite is promoting opportunities for customers to grow by using more of its offerings, and for partners to grow by going deeper into “micro-verticals.”
The integration of the existing OpenText program with the acquired assets from Micro Focus makes the new channel more diverse, and includes features like the OpenText Aviator Thrust program for Partners, to enable partners to build solutions with OpenText Cloud API services.
The highlight was Okta AI – AI for Identity, which is not a product per se, but a comprehensive set of AI features and capabilities that enable many of the other new offerings on Okta’ clouds they announced at the event.
Alteryx looks to build on the momentum in the Generative AI space it built earlier this year when it was in the vanguard of actually getting product into general availability.
Nutanix adds a series of new incents and enablement supports designed to make partners fully autonomous, efficient, and able to support customer success.
While the previous Go Purple partner program was more of a bare-bones effort, the new Luminary Partner Program is better attuned to the company’s Cloud First strategy, and more complete, although formal certifications won’t arrive till next year.
Leostream has been in business over 20 years but sold mainly direct, with a minor partner presence, so the company has now established a channel program and transferred their Business Development team to manage partners.
At VMware Explore, VMware’s channel leaders took stock of recent changes to channel enablement, and provided a brief road map as well.
Former CEO Asaf Ganot takes over the product strategy lead role while also becoming chairman, in what both he and Ayres term a leadership partnership to drive the company to new heights.
With more than one full year under his belt leading VMware Canada, Reeves gave his take on the company’s positioning in Canada and what the major announcements will mean for Canadian customers and partners.
VMware has long had a large GSI business but since early 2022 they have been working hard to deepen that, moving beyond determining value by services revenue, and getting more involved with GSI offerings.
In addition to VMware Edge Cloud Orchestrator, new Edge announcements include a new retail edge solution and a new managed connectivity services which will appeal to service provider partners.
VMware Private AI Foundation with NVIDIA is built on VMware Cloud Foundation, optimized for AI and will run fully secure Generative AI applications.
Multi-cloud has become one of VMware’s top focus areas, and the new and enhanced offerings include vSAN Max, which allows storage to be disaggregated and scale independently from compute, as well as new multi-cloud virtual private clouds for storage and networking.
VMware sees this as a ‘new Tanzu’ and views its enhancements as fundamental to their multi-cloud story going forward.
Powell said that in addition to VMware honing in on a more partner-driven strategy, the new announcements at VMware Explore, and the philosophy behind them, will also open up new opportunities for partners.
This is Pure’s first out-of-the box option around a specific use case for Azure Cloud as they move beyond general purpose hybrid storage.
CommandCTRL is Liquidware’s new SaaS real-time remediation solution, and features both a DVR-like function that is more effective than snapshots and new ChatGPT functionality that was built in after the beta began almost a year ago.
