The Information Builders partnership is the first in a strategy designed to provide Scale partners with additional software services, turning their hardware platform into an App Store of sorts.
The new release of IP Office also makes some architectural and administrative changes designed to make things easier for Avaya channel partners who sell the product.
ERP vendor Exact Macola has been aggressively ramping up its channel presence over the last three years. This move to an online self-paced training system was in response to partner requests.
Encryption has been basically limited to larger enterprises because of its complexity, but with their new Safeguard Encryption 8 offering, Sophos has reworked it to be simple enough for mid-market and SMB companies.
The HC V240, HDS’ first hyper-converged appliance, is based on the VMware stack, but the hyper-converged road map is likely to broaden out beyond that.
Ingram Micro Canada will help Big Blue drive its Power architecture into the midmarket through the channel via an expanded partnership.
Hitachi Data Systems has greatly deepened its strategic relationship with SAP around HANA in the last several years, and its new announcements, which cover from the low end of the market to the high, broaden that portfolio.
Avnet broadens Isilon SD Edge’s route to market with an offering which puts the Isilon Edge OS on select validated commodity hardware.
Epicor has doubled the size of its Canadian business over the last couple years, and while most of its business in the U.S. is direct, the growing Canadian business is going entirely through channel partners.
Citrix is adding a new, incremental front-end discount for new opportunities among both new and existing customers. They are also reworking their MDF program, and redoing their CAR program to simplify it and increase partner opportunities.
Vectra, which goes to market entirely through partners, is looking to add a select number of security partners to its channel, and support them through their new channel program.
Imation, Nexsan’s parent company, has recently undergone a major reorganization, designed to give it greater focus and make it competitive in a tough storage market. A key part of that is integrating the core Nexsan portfolio with Transporter Sync and Share technology. Access to that technology is one element of the enhanced partner program.
The new appliance, built on the ProLiant DL 380, brings a new interface to HPE hyper-converged products, which the company says is extremely user-friendly and easy to use.
Avaya’s program changes give more partners ways to make more money, but also step up the requirement to have happy, satisfied customers.
The new service combines one sandbox Dell has used internally, and being productized for the first time, with two licensed third party sandboxes, on the principle that modern threats that try and evade sandboxes won’t be able to evade three different ones at the same time.
The new HYBRID Sites complete the integration of ShoreTel’s cloud and on-prem solutions which began with the new ShoreTel Connect branding last year. They improve partners’ selling ability with the single solution, and its suitability for larger deployments.
Flash-focused Nimble Storage has announced its new Nimble AF-Series of All Flash arrays, a family of four models which adds predictive analytics. Nimble thinks it will position them better in the enterprise market.
While some of the channel changes announced at Citrix Summit have less relevance to Canada than in other geos, the core themes Citrix emphasized of increased focus and channel co-operation found a welcome reception.
Citrix said at its partner event that its new focus on its core business – the secure delivery of apps and data – turned around 2015, and led to a very strong close to the year. They then laid out how they intend to continue that in 2016.
The mid-market is the key area of focus for Avaya Canada’s channel this year, but networking, cloud and video are also on the priority list.
