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Brad Shapiro, senior vice president and chief sales officer of HPE Financial Services
HPE Financial Services is making a concerted push to be less of a “best-kept secret” and more of a deal-closing engine for partners.
At HPE Discover 2026, Brad Shapiro, senior vice president and chief sales officer of HPE Financial Services, walked In the Channel through several new partner-facing offers unveiled at Monday’s Partner Growth Summit.
The standout is the 90/9 Advantage structure: 90 days with no payments, followed by nine months at 1 per cent of the original equipment cost, before shifting to level payments. Shapiro said the program is designed to blunt the sting of recent price hikes by pushing costs into future budget cycles without requiring customers to find new money mid-year.
On the networking side, HPFS is stacking three offers to help HPE take share from competitors: 0 per cent financing on Mist or Aruba Central software, a “10 per cent better than cash” hardware financing rate, and a competitive takeout program that monetizes displaced gear.
The used equipment angle is particularly timely. Shapiro noted that memory shortages have driven up resale values for retiring gear, creating an offset against new hardware costs. “It’s the equivalent of the car market in the early COVID days,” he said.
HPFS also expanded its approved credit capacity by 150 per cent, a move Shapiro said was driven by partner frustration with re-approval cycles as component prices fluctuated.
The interview also touched on HPFS’s partner pledge – Shapiro said his team does not receive quota retirement until the partner gets paid – and the growing importance of IT asset disposition and chain of custody as Canadian customers navigate AI-driven infrastructure refreshes.
Read Full TranscriptRobert Dutt: This episode of In The Channel is brought to you by HPE Discover 2026. Check out our full coverage of the event on ChannelBuzz.ca. You’ll find our HPE Discover 2026 news hub on the menu bar at the top of the page.
Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca, and your host for the show.
Today, my guest is Brad Shapiro, Senior Vice President and Chief Sales Officer of HPE Financial Services, the captive financing arm of HPE. Brad is responsible for the global partner-facing financing strategy and programs that help resellers and MSPs close bigger deals and get paid faster. We sat down at HPE Discover last week to talk about the new partner portal enhancements HPEFS rolled out at Partner Growth Summit, the thinking behind the company’s aggressive credit expansion, and how IT asset disposition fits into the overall AI infrastructure refresh wave that’s starting to hit customer budgets.
Let’s get right into it. My chat with Brad Shapiro.
Brad, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it.
Brad Shapiro: Sure. Glad to be here, Rob.
Robert Dutt: You guys rolled out some meaningful enhancements to the HPEFS partner side on Monday: payment structures, promotional pricing, and competitive pricing tiered to the partner’s relationship level. Canada is on the first wave of that for July 1. I understand a bunch of Canadian partners are having a party for that. For a Canadian reseller or MSP who wasn’t here this week, what does it actually change in how they can put a deal together for their customers?
Brad Shapiro: Yeah, sure. So as you said, lots of exciting announcements here for Discover. And I think first and foremost, what HPEFS has put together is really focused on helping the HPE partners sell more in a couple of key areas. So we’ve all seen, you know, with commodity prices going up and the price increases around products, we’ve got some really interesting offers that have gained a lot of traction in the market.
The 90/9 Advantage is one of the key ones. And that offering partners can offer to their customers is 90 days of no payments, nine months at 1% of the original equipment cost, and then it goes to level payments after. So while we can’t address that the product prices are increasing, what we are doing is providing help for customers who didn’t plan for this in the budget cycle, right? CFOs didn’t say, “Oh, here’s more money because prices are going up.” So it allows the end-user customer to kind of plan for this into the next budget cycle and beyond so they can get the compute power they need. So that’s a key one.
The other area, when we look at the networking space, right, we’re very excited about, you know, Aruba and Juniper coming together in the new HPE networking, and they’ve got some tremendous offerings out there. But to really help them and help customers avoid kind of a double payment, like we want to go take market share, we want to be aggressive.
So the first offer is 0% financing on the networking software, whether that’s Mist or Aruba Central. Then we have on the hardware side 10% better than cash as a financing offer. So that’s a really cool offer. And then we’ve added a really aggressive focus on IT asset disposition. So we want to go in, help customers by monetizing the competitor’s assets, taking those out, and then putting HPE networking assets in. So when you combine those three offers—0% on software, 10% better than cash on hardware, and a competitive takeout on the competitor’s products—we think we’re really helping partners go and address and partner up with HPE networking and be aggressive in the market to help HPE take share.
Robert Dutt: Going back to the 90/9 program, what areas is that covering?
Brad Shapiro: That covers all products. So it’s really a financial structure that can address the whole portfolio. And again, it’s a very attractive offer. We’ve seen it compared to any other financing offers we put out there. We’ve seen the pipeline ramp tremendously. It’s really addressing a need that’s out there in the marketplace.
Robert Dutt: Before getting into the details of some other programs, you touched on the supply chain situation that is on every partner’s mind right now. I’m curious over the last five months or so that this has been such a big factor. What have you been hearing from partners in terms of what they’re asking for from you, and where they’re looking for help here beyond obviously some clarity and whatever break they can get?
Brad Shapiro: I’ll talk from a financial services perspective. It’s really about how can we help the partner address some of the customer concerns. One of the big ones is budgeting. It’s always been the case that there’s more to do than you have budget for. This just puts another wrinkle in it that is unprecedented. I’ve been doing this quite a long time. I’ve really not seen the market dynamic as we have it today. But that’s where financial engineering and financial structuring comes into play.
Also, a lot of customers, while the new prices have gone up, when customers are retiring assets, what many don’t realize is the used equipment that’s coming off—the used equipment market has also increased in value. We’re able to give customers a lot more money for their used gear than they’re used to. That’s been helping offset some of the increases on the new product side.
Robert Dutt: It’s the equivalent of the car market in the early COVID days.
Brad Shapiro: Absolutely. Same type of scenario.
Robert Dutt: The announcement around a 150% increase on approved credit capacity—that’s a pretty striking number. Is that part of the response to that? What’s driving you guys to go aggressively there right now? A response to that uncertainty, a response to tariffs, a response to all the things we see going on?
Brad Shapiro: It’s a response to a few things. Yes, the price increases. For a while, the component pricing was so uncertain that there was a shorter validity period for quoting. The idea of increasing the credit line created enough room so that our partners didn’t have to keep going through the cycle. What we were hearing as feedback was, “Hey, we would go get a request from HPEFS, we get it approved, then if pricing went up, then we had to go through that process again.”
We wanted to give plenty of headroom and be aggressive to allow partners to quickly get their deals done and not have to go through a process twice. It was ease of doing business, speed, and really helping them close their deals.
Robert Dutt: Not a peculiar problem for HPE and HPEFS either. That’s something that we’re hearing across the industry front as a major partner issue—the idea of customer sales cycles and “validity” not matching up in any real way.
Brad Shapiro: Yeah, absolutely. We’re trying to do our part to help partners get deals done. The good news is HPE on the BU side, on the compute side, announced a longer price validity. I know that they announced that here at Discover and there was really good feedback at the Partner Growth Summit. I think overall HPE, we’re all trying to address and help partners get their deals done with customers.
Robert Dutt: The 0% software financing tied to VM migration is interesting when it feels like you’re trying to smooth that painful transition for folks who are on a platform and looking to move somewhere new. Is that the right way to think about it, or what else are you applying to that model?
Brad Shapiro: Yeah, so I think just in general, we’re trying to provide customers a way to engage and look at our CloudOps suite—Morpheus and Zerto and OpsRamp and the whole suite—and really focus on how can we make it easy for the customer to say, “Yeah, let me try this.”
So at the end of the day, it doesn’t have to be something where they’re coming in and wiping out one versus the other. The cost differential is so great and we believe that if they can just lower the number of licenses on VMware, we can help them reduce costs. So they may look to put in our CloudOps software in certain places and reduce those VM licenses. 0% financing makes it an easier decision: “Hey, I can pay over time and it’s the same as paying cash, no interest.” It’s just another option for customers who may not have it in this year’s budget.
Robert Dutt: I’m trying to track it because it’s something that you’re kind of ramping up on though in competitive areas.
Brad Shapiro: Yeah, so what’s new from HPEFS, I would say this year versus maybe the past five or seven years, is a renewed focus on leveraging our financing capabilities to help partners sell more with HPE. We didn’t really have in the last five or seven years a lot of financing promotions. We’ve integrated with the BUs. We’ve listened to the partners. They want to see us come out with integrated offers that help drive more sales. And so we’ve been working closely with the BUs. We’ve been developing these offers over the past year. It started a little bit at last Discover, but we’re really hitting our stride now as an organization. And I think the partners are really going to benefit from that.
Robert Dutt: PGS also saw the debut of sustainability competencies for partners through HPEFS and through Partner Ready Vantage in combination there. What does earning that competency mean in practice? What does a partner get and why should they be pursuing it?
Brad Shapiro: Yeah, so from our perspective, when we think about sustainability, we think it’s a really important aspect of the overall business. We have a responsibility. And so from a partner perspective, by getting that accreditation, there’s incentives that they can get under the Partner Ready Vantage program.
And from an HPEFS perspective, we’ve created circular economy reports to help support partners and customers. And we’re proud that we’ve issued our 2,000th report to customers, and that keeps growing. So as sustainability continues to be an important part of this, I think partners have a role to play in helping their customers, but also can earn more from HPE.
Robert Dutt: What are you hearing from partners around the idea of sustainability as part of the quoting and solution offering process? It’s just something that I feel like I’m hearing more of from Canadian partners in particular because of a series of regulations and requirements, and in some public sector spaces, the way it’s being weighted.
Brad Shapiro: From my perspective, and I have a global role, so in certain geographies around the world, it’s very, very important. And it varies across geographies, but everywhere you look, it’s a growing trend in terms of importance, as you mentioned, in terms of government responses. We’re seeing more governments putting requirements in there. So my feeling is addressing sustainability is quickly becoming a must-have if you’re going to offer solutions. And so we’re right there with our partners in terms of helping them do that.
Robert Dutt: It also connects to—and this is something that we touched on a little bit earlier—the idea that every customer upgrading their network and compute stack to something that’s more capable of AI has that corresponding pile of displaced gear that they’ve got to do something with.
Brad Shapiro: Yeah.
Robert Dutt: I guess, how significant do you see the ITAD opportunity in this refresh wave in the near future, and how do you help partners get in front of that?
Brad Shapiro: Yeah, so again, I think there’s a significant opportunity, and I think HPE networking is really well positioned in that AI space. So from our perspective, in looking at the products that we can displace readily, there’s a pretty large install base. Some of our competitors have many customers out there, so the idea of putting those assets back into reuse somewhere is very real.
So we think we can do well to help that customer monetize the asset. We can also put that back into reuse, which is good for the environment, and at the same time, help customers really modernize their network, because that’s really a solid foundation you need. When you think about AI, everybody thinks about the compute side and GPUs, but the network is so critical to having that solid AI foundation, and we believe HPE networking is the right choice.
Robert Dutt: Across the board in your purview, is there a Canadian dimension here worth calling out? We’re hearing a lot more about data sovereignty driving decisions and that kind of thing about where workloads live. But does that also extend to how customers think about decommissioned hardware and where it goes?
Brad Shapiro: Yeah, look, I think from a decommissioned hardware perspective, we are very careful about chain of custody and where that ends up. And I think that’s one thing that differentiates HPE when we’re thinking about decommissioning versus many others out there. We’re a large brand. It’s really important to us to decommission in the right way, following all the regulations that are out there. So if you’re a Canadian partner or a Canadian customer, knowing that the HPE brand… we are as focused on doing those things in the right way and following the rules and regulations. Our brand reputation is at stake, and we put a lot of thought and resource, time and energy into that.
Robert Dutt: What’s the single biggest piece of feedback or most common piece of feedback you’ve been getting from partners here at Discover this week? What are they talking to you about? What are they curious about in terms of what you guys can bring to bear for their customers?
Brad Shapiro: Yeah, so I think there’s been a lot of positive feedback on the offerings that we’ve come out with. As I mentioned before, we’re showing up differently now. We’re showing up coordinated with the different business units across HPE with these offers. That’s helpful.
The other thing we’re focused on is really about the partner experience. So it’s not just having the right offers. It’s making them easy to access, operationally making it a smooth process. We want to be fast. We want to be predictable. When we put lines of credit in place, we commit to funding. We want to fund our partners fast. So my whole team doesn’t get quota retirement in sales until the partner gets paid. So it’s really important that we align our metrics and the way we’re measuring ourselves with what’s going to delight the partner and create a better experience for them.
Robert Dutt: Has there been a notable increase in terms of acceleration there on partners getting paid?
Brad Shapiro: Yeah, I would say it’s long been a focus of ours, but we’re really emphasizing it in coming out and being very deliberate about what we want to do in terms of turnaround times. We call it our partner pledge, but the idea is we want partners to know that we can be a reliable source of funding. Not only does financing help them close the deal and make the deals bigger, but then they can get paid faster as well. That really helps their metrics because most partners, most businesses, are looking at cash flow and free cash flow and all those kind of metrics. And financing with HPEFS really helps.
The other thing it does is when you think about a partner’s capacity to do business, if they’re financing through HPEFS, it’s HPEFS’s credit line that’s being used, creating more availability for the partner to sell other solutions. So it doesn’t go against their credit limits.
Robert Dutt: Not to get all “what have you done for me lately” with you, but what can partners expect from your business over the balance of 2026, as much as anyone has visibility into the near future?
Brad Shapiro: Yeah, sure. I think what partners are going to see is, again, we talked about the offerings—us showing up with very competitive offerings, us showing up looking to help partners win, and again, helping partners. We want partners to think about, “Okay, there are these financing capabilities and I want to leverage those. How do we grow the HPE business?” The HPE business for our partners should be a growth engine for them—a profitable growth engine—and HPEFS is really here to help facilitate that.
Robert Dutt: One thing I hear from folks in similar seats to you all the time is the idea that they feel their capabilities are underused or under-understood by partners. Generally speaking, obviously there are some exceptions to any rule. Does that kind of map with how you feel, and what’s the one tool, offering, or program that you offer that you think more partners would benefit from getting to know and adding to their toolkit?
Brad Shapiro: Yeah, sure. I think Phil Mottram said it. He said, “HPEFS is one of our best-kept secrets.” So, yeah, I think generally we feel like we can do a better job, but I would say even coming to this Discover—and I’ve been to many, many, many Discovers—HPEFS is showing up because the marketing team has just done a fantastic job of integrating not only HPEFS, but kind of a whole value proposition focusing around IT economics. And I think that’s been a pivotal message here at Discover.
From a partner perspective, again, I go back to all of those special financing offers that you just can’t get generally in the marketplace. You know, 0% on CloudOps software, 0% financing on Mist and Aruba Central. We’ve got a very competitive financing offer on storage. We talked about earlier the networking offerings that we have. So, across the portfolio, there are these offerings that you can only get from HPE and HPEFS.
Robert Dutt: For an MSP or reseller who hasn’t thought much about asset disposition as part of their services offering, but is thinking, “Okay, well, maybe this is something I need to get into,” what’s the entry point? Is it something they engage you on directly, or do they kind of have to build their practice first and then bring you into the picture?
Brad Shapiro: Well, I think they can engage us. If there’s an opportunity… the way I think about it is most customers are focused on, “What am I going to get that’s new? I need new technology for a project.” A lot of customers don’t have the wherewithal or focus on the disposition side. We think many customers end up giving their product away. Maybe somebody takes it and goes, “I’ll take care of it for you free of charge.” And the customer thinks, “Oh, this is great,” but there’s money in those assets, particularly now with the memory shortage. Anything with memory is going to have value. So for a partner, you don’t need to be an expert; just understand what the customer has in their environment and what they might be getting rid of. And it’s really just contacting HPEFS and we’ll do the assessment of whether there’s market value or not for the partner.
Robert Dutt: That’s kind of where I wanted to go. Anything you want to throw out there in summation or in closing?
Brad Shapiro: No, I really appreciate you having me. And it was great to get an opportunity to showcase what HPEFS is bringing to the table. I’m really excited and proud of what we’re doing and the role we can play in helping the partners grow with HPE. That’s what being a captive financing company is all about. So, looking forward to winning and growing with the partners in Canada.
Robert Dutt: All right. Thank you for taking the time.
Brad Shapiro: Thank you.
Robert Dutt: There you have it. Brad Shapiro from HPE Financial Services. I’d like to thank Brad for his time, and I’d like to thank you for listening to the podcast. If you found the conversation useful, the best way to support the show is to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts, and leave us a rating or review if you’re so inclined.
My takeaway from the conversation? HPEFS is making a deliberate shift away from being a passive financing option to an active weapon in the competitive arsenal. The 90/9 Advantage, the networking offer stack, and especially that partner pledge about quota retirement tied to partner payment speed—those are signals that HPE is serious about removing friction from channel economics. For Canadian partners, the July 1 portal rollout and the emphasis on chain of custody for ITAD are worth getting familiar with.
Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.
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Today’s headline news for Canadian IT solution providers:
HPE Discover 2026 wraps up in Las Vegas today, and if you’ve been following our coverage, you know we’ve had plenty to unpack this week. For the Friday edition of The Buzz, we doing something slightly different – a reporter’s notebook on what HPE’s channel leadership said when they were off the keynote stage.
The quote validity extension was the headline that drew the most relief, but the backstory is more interesting than the policy change itself. HPE extended standard quotes from 14 days to 30 days for compute, storage, and GreenLake, effective Monday. Simon Ewington, who leads HPE’s worldwide partner organisation, told press and partners Wednesday that the change was ‘pretty well kept secret’ – his own staff didn’t know about it either. The commodity volatility that had forced the two-week window had moderated enough that HPE could stand behind a 30-day price with confidence.
Behind the ‘Power of One’ marketing, there are mechanical changes that determine whether partners can actually make money. Juniper’s Elite Plus, Elite, and Select tiers will map to HPE Platinum, Gold, and Silver starting November 1. HPE introduced a 3x multiplier on software sales for Zerto, Morpheus, and OpsRamp, plus a 1.5x GreenLake multiplier, to help partners climb tiers faster. Smart Choice SKUs – pre-configured servers missing only drives – are a speed play for distributors.
The competitive storage take-out targets 14,000 customers under the VH Rail framing, with Alletra MP already outpacing market growth by 2x and 0% financing for three years.
Then there was candour. Ewington noted HPE is the vendor who ‘typically moves first… and then others polish.’ The distributor overlap between HPE and Juniper is only about 10%, so they’re ‘refining the landscape’ rather than forcing universal carry. Service provider growth is running 23% to 30% CAGR. And HPE’s sustainability insight dashboard gives partners a concrete tool to analyse customer environments and open carbon footprint conversations.
You can find every episode of The Buzz and In The Channel from HPE Discover on our HPE Discover news hub.
Read Full TranscriptThis epsisode of The Buzz is brought to you by HPE Discover 2026. Check out our full coverage of the event on ChannelBuzz.ca — you’ll find out HPE Discover 2026 News Hub in the menu bar at the top of the page.
Welcome to The Buzz from ChannelBuzz.ca, I’m Robert Dutt, today is Friday, June 19th, and here’s what’s happening in the channel today.
I’m recording this a bit earl in Las Vegas, because I’m on a plane all day heading home from Discover.
If you’ve been following our coverage this week, you know we’ve had a lot to unpack – the Partner Growth Summit on Monday, the networking and AI infrastructure keynote on Tuesday, and a steady drumbeat of announcements through Wednesday. For this episode, I want to do something slightly different. Think of it as a reporter’s notebook – the details, the mechanics, and the candour that came out when HPE’s channel leadership sat down with press and partners on Wednesday morning, off the keynote stage.
Let’s start with the quote validity extension, because the backstory here is as interesting than the policy change itself. HPE extended standard quote validity from 14 days to 30 days for compute, storage, and GreenLake, effective Monday. You’ve heard that already.
What you probably haven’t heard is how closely they guarded it. Simon Ewington, who runs HPE’s worldwide partner organisation, told us Wednesday that the change was a ‘pretty well kept secret.’
His own staff didn’t know about it either. They wanted zero leaks because the commodity and supply chain volatility that had forced the two-week window in the first place had finally moderated enough that HPE could stand behind a 30-day price with confidence. Keeping it quiet meant announcing it without hedging.
For partners who’ve been managing customer decision cycles that simply don’t fit a 14-day window, the relief was audible.
The Partner Growth Summit was dense enough that Ewington admitted partners told him it was ‘almost too much’ and they ‘needed an AI summary to recap everything.’ So let me pull out the operational details that actually affect how you navigate the program.
First, Juniper integration. We now have firm tier mapping: Juniper Elite Plus goes to HPE Platinum, Elite to Gold, Select to Silver, effective November 1. HPE is also launching a Routing competency – number 15 in the framework – to support that transition.
Second, multipliers. HPE introduced a 3x multiplier on software sales for Zerto, Morpheus, and OpsRamp, plus a 1.5x multiplier for GreenLake, to help partners hit higher membership tiers faster by weighting software more heavily than hardware.
Third, Smart Choice SKUs – pre-configured servers that ship missing only hard drives. It’s a speed and velocity play for distributors.
Fourth, the competitive storage take-out. HPE has identified 14,000 target customers for what they’re calling the VH Rail opportunity. Alletra MP is outpacing market growth by 2x, and they’re backing the migration with 0% financing for three years.
These aren’t marketing headlines. These are the details that determine whether you can actually make money on the portfolio.
Then there were the moments of genuine candour. Ewington’s line that HPE is the vendor who ‘typically moves first… and then others polish’ is either confidence or arrogance depending on your perspective, but it’s not ambiguous.
You may have seen recently that HP formally announced its two main global distributors as Ingram Micro and TD SYNNEX. The distributor overlap reality is worth noting: only about 10% overlap between HPE and Juniper distributors. HPE is actively ‘refining the landscape’ rather than forcing every distributor to carry everything. That’s a concession that operational integration takes time and care.
On services, HPE is expanding partner-branded services so partners own the Level 1 and 2 support relationship while HPE stays in the background for Level 3 and 4. Ewington said this largely came about because there have been some large partners who have declined to get closer to HPE because of the company’s previous retisense to allow partners to lead on services around its gear.
For service providers specifically, leadership cited 23% to 30% CAGR growth rates, and they’re opening CloudOps software to CSPs to build new services around.
And on sustainability, which came up in the context of AI’s energy demands, HPE has built an insight dashboard that lets partners analyse customer environments and open conversations about carbon footprint and efficiency. It’s a practical tool rather than a vague pledge.
If there’s a through-line to the week, it’s that HPE is trying to make ‘Power of One’ mean something operationally, not just rhetorically. The quote validity change was a trust repair. The multiplier and tier mapping are structural incentives. The distributor and services refinements are admissions that integration is hard and takes time.
Whether it all lands as promised is what we’ll be watching through the second half of this year.
That’s it for this edition of The Buzz. You can find our full HPE Discover 2026 coverage on ChannelBuzz.ca – there’s a news hub in the menu bar at the top of the page. And we’ll also have more epsidoes of In The Channel from Discover next week here on the site, including more HPE executives, and more reactions from Canadian HPE partners.
That’s how we’re seeing the headlines from HPE Discover. I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, thanks for listening. Have a great day.
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Justin McGarry, vice president of product management for compute software at HPE
At HPE Discover 2026 in Las Vegas this week, In The Channel sat down with Justin McGarry, vice president of product management for compute software at HPE, to talk about where HPE’s server management story is headed – and what it means for MSPs in the Canadian channel.
The centrepiece of that story is Compute Ops Management (COM) – HPE’s cloud-native, subscription-based platform built on iLO telemetry embedded in every ProLiant server. McGarry’s pitch is direct: COM is not just a management tool, it’s a business growth platform for MSPs who lean into it.
His primary proof point is Nitec, an MSP that helped co-develop COM’s multi-tenant capability and now manages distributed customer environments at higher margins with fewer resources than previously required. Across a broader study of roughly 300 ProLiant customers, HPE found up to 75% less downtime and approximately $150,000 in travel and resource cost savings per customer.
For MSPs serving customers with ESG or sustainability reporting obligations – increasingly common in Canadian public sector and regulated industries – COM’s AI insights module adds a forecasting layer that projects future carbon emissions and energy costs using an open-source forecasting engine. That projection can anchor a practical business case for a server refresh, as illustrated by Bookie.com, which is using COM on its path to net zero by 2030.
Two capabilities worth flagging for mixed-environment MSPs: third-party server monitoring (visibility into non-HPE OEM hardware from the same console) and Secure Gateway, a virtual appliance that aggregates iLO traffic into a single cloud egress point – solving the cloud-connectivity objection for customers in financial services, healthcare, and other regulated sectors.
On the agentic AI front, McGarry is candid that Compute Copilot is early. This week’s Discover announcement extends its reach into security advisories – surfacing recommendations and moving toward automated remediation. The fuller agentic vision is still taking shape.
McGarry’s takeaway for partners: there’s still significant runway to understand what COM can do for their businesses, and the MSPs who’ve made it a core capability are seeing it pay off.
Read Full TranscriptROBERT DUTT: This episode of In The Channel is brought to you by HPE Discover 2026. Check out our full coverage of the event at ChannelBuzz.ca. You’ll find our HPE Discover 2026 news hub in the menu bar right at the top of the page.
Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca and your host for the show.
This week I’m at HPE Discover 2026 in Las Vegas, and over the course of the show I’ve been sitting down with HPE executives and partners for a series of conversations that I’ll be releasing over the next few days.
Today’s guest is Justin McGarry, vice president of product management for compute software at HPE. Now, when HPE says compute, they mean their server business anchored by the ProLiant line, but Justin’s specific domain is the software that wraps around that hardware. The centerpiece of that is Compute Ops Management, which is HPE’s cloud-native platform for securing, automating and managing ProLiant estates. It’s built on top of iLO, HPE’s embedded server intelligence technology, and over the past few years it’s evolved into something that Justin argues is less a management tool and more a business growth engine for MSPs.
Justin came to HPE a couple years ago from VMware, where he ran global services portfolio and the go-to-market strategy, so he brings an interesting outside perspective to where HPE’s story fits in the broader enterprise infrastructure picture.
We talked about the MSP opportunity, sustainability forecasting, where Compute Copilot, the conversational AI layer for server management, actually stands today, and where HPE thinks agentic capabilities take all of this.
Let’s get right into it. My chat with Justin McGarry.
Justin, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it.
JUSTIN MCGARRY: Yeah, happy to be here, Rob. Thanks for giving me the opportunity to chat with you today. I’m sure it’s a busy week, this kind of show almost always is.
ROBERT DUTT: Absolutely. To start with, you guys have been calling the business unit Compute rather than servers for a while now. When you’re talking to partners, how do you describe what Compute is today versus maybe what it was five years ago, what it all kind of entails?
JUSTIN MCGARRY: Yeah, I mean, I’ll give you my perspective. So I joined the company about two and a half years ago now. And when I think about what we do in Compute, the foundation of that is ProLiant. So from a hardware perspective, the servers that we ship day in and day out to our customers. The other piece, from my perspective, and maybe I’m being a little selfish here, is all the software and solutions that wrap around that. So from a software perspective, I own what we call Compute Ops Management. So that is our cloud-native management platform for securing and automating those ProLiant estates. We actually do third-party monitoring as well. So other server OEMs that you have in the environment, we’ll monitor that as well. And then we have our on-premise solution for air-gapped and sovereign environments. That’s OneView. We’ve had OneView out in the market for many years now. And then, of course, the foundation of everything we do from a software perspective is with iLO, integrated lights-out. That has been out in the market now for a few decades. We continue to innovate and evolve on that. And so all of that intelligence, the data, the telemetry, that’s all foundation to what we do in our management platforms with our subscription-based cloud-native Compute Ops Management, and our sovereign air-gapped solution with OneView.
ROBERT DUTT: Okay. A couple questions around things that you guys have announced recently. You guys just highlighted a 20% energy efficiency gain with the Gen 12 platform on Xeon. So for a reseller or MSP helping a mid-market customer justify the server refresh right now, how do you see energy efficiency playing in actually closing deals? Or is it still just sort of a nice-to-have thing on the spec sheet?
JUSTIN MCGARRY: Yeah, I think customers are still really focused on sustainability. Again, if I think back to what we do from a software perspective with Compute Ops Management, one of the key assets or capabilities that we have there is what we call AI insights. And with those AI insights, we can actually help customers from a sustainability perspective be able to predict and forecast future carbon emissions. So I was at Discover in Barcelona late last year. We had a customer Booking.com on stage and Booking.com has a massive distributed environment all ProLiant-based. How are they managing, securing, automating that? They’re using Compute Ops Management. One of their key goals at a company level is they want to be net-zero by 2030. How are they going to get there? They got to make sure that they’re running an efficient, sustainable operation, certainly from a data center perspective. ProLiant is in that picture. And then how they’re managing, monitoring that, predicting their future forecasts or their carbon emissions to help them derive when they’re going to go do their refreshes. They’re using Compute Ops Management for that. So sustainability is still very much top of mind. Globally, I would say even more important in EMEA with some of those board-level sustainability targets that customers have with their ESG board-level goals that they’ve got to go and achieve.
ROBERT DUTT: Do you see that catching up at all in the North American market?
JUSTIN MCGARRY: You know, I do. I mean, I’m hearing it more in customer conversations. If I think about when I was in Discover Barcelona, a lot of the discussion there was around sovereign and sustainability. Early into the week here at Discover, I haven’t had a lot of customer meetings yet, but I’m going to kind of predict that I think some of the sustainability pieces are going to come into play, especially when you think about AI, you think about inferencing in particular out at the edge. You think about all the energy required to go in and not just do the training, but now thinking about the inferencing and workloads and use cases around GenAI. I think that’s just going to continue to become more important. And so that’s why we prioritized it in our roadmap to continue to evolve on what we’re doing from a sustainability perspective.
ROBERT DUTT: Let’s get a little bit more into Compute Ops Management. You came from VMware, which has its own management tooling story. What does COM do that’s genuinely different and what does it mean for an MSP managing, say, 100 ProLiant servers across 20 customers or whatever that profile looks like?
JUSTIN MCGARRY: Yeah, yeah. So I think what really differentiates HPE, I think, generally in the market is that we have the Compute Ops Management capability. So this was a build from the ground up, cloud-native subscription-based management tool that we brought to market a few years ago now. I think it has been very transformational in the customer conversations that we’ve been having because at the end of the day, it’s not just the hardware. It’s how you secure that, how you automate it. I think the unique differentiation that we have with Compute Ops Management is specifically with all the telemetry data and intelligence that we have at the iLO level. That is in every single ProLiant that we ship out the door. And because we have that chip in each of those ProLiants that goes out, it gives us a lot of capability to secure, automate, manage, orchestrate that environment for the customer. So I think that’s the unique value that we have in Compute Ops Management that may be a little bit different than what else you see out on the market and you reference VMware. Certainly a lot of great management capabilities there when it came to the workload level, the virtualization level. This is down at the hardware level, at the ProLiant level, helping customers manage and automate and secure that environment. When it comes to what’s in it for managed service providers, so we have a lot of success stories there that we’re continuing to build on where COM really enables multi-tenant compute management for those MSPs. They can do it from a single, secure, cloud console. They can proactively manage and monitor their customers’ environments. We have this MSP actually who will be on stage with me later today, Nitec, and the managing director there that runs that business. He started working with our team a few years ago now as we were starting to really kind of build some foundational capabilities into Compute Ops Management. He helped us with developing the concept around our MSP capability where we can manage different workspaces across an environment and have all of that visibility roll up to a single level. I think the key benefit for these partners, and of course there’s all the IT benefits and capabilities that they get. I think when I consider what Nitec has done and some of the other MSPs from a business perspective, what used to take a lot more resources for them to manage those customer environments, now they’re able to do that much more efficiently and effectively. They’re seeing a larger margin profile on these value-added services that they’re delivering to these customers as a result. And so, Compute Ops Management, you ask the folks at Nitec, that has been foundational to them being able to deliver these services effectively and at a much higher margin than they have been able to do in the past. So the story, Rob, honestly, is a very similar story to what customers achieve with using Compute Ops Management. We’ve got a study we did a little while back across about 300 ProLiant customers, up to 75% less downtime in their environment, a lot more, up to 150,000 or so in travel and resource costs saved. So just like we’re helping our customers effectively manage their environments with less resources and less cost at those distributed edge locations, we’re doing the same thing with our MSP partners. So we have a lot of opportunity there. It’s exciting to see, I would say, COM is not just a management tool, it’s a business growth platform for these MSPs who really lean into it and partner with us.
ROBERT DUTT: Obviously, you’ve got folks like Nitec who are well along the curve, it sounds like, maybe even leading the way in many ways. Where are you at in terms of reaching the long tail of the MSP channel and kind of getting that, how fully realized is the opportunity for COM in the community today?
JUSTIN MCGARRY: I think, Rob, we still have a ton of opportunity to get the message out there around Compute Ops Management. I find myself, when I am presenting to the various partner communities, there’s still a lot of opportunity to bring them up to speed on the capabilities that we have there, the benefits they can derive, and in particular, what’s in it for them. How can they go in and repeat what Nitec has done? I think if you ask Nitec, what is the one thing that they would recommend for partners to go do who are looking to scale their MSP businesses on top of a management capability like Compute Ops Management? It is getting a single kind of advocate champion in the organization to really understand what not only the product can provide to the end customer, but what are the benefits that the managed service provider can get out of using this type of capability in their environment to manage those end customers?
ROBERT DUTT: You guys just recently launched or added Copilot, an integrated conversational AI layer for server management in COM. Interesting concept. Where is that at today? Is it sort of in the “this is what the future might look like” kind of phase, or is there aspects that it’s kind of going to be genuinely useful to an MSP today?
JUSTIN MCGARRY: Yeah, I think it is very early stages with Compute Copilot. Today, it is very much a conversational AI assistant. So if I think about in my daily life how I’m using tools like Claude and my just kind of conversational interaction back and forth, Compute Copilot is very much that today. So hey, Compute Copilot, tell me about the servers I have in the environment and their health, or hey, Compute Copilot, tell me where I’m at on achieving, as I talked about the Booking.com story earlier, where am I at on my path to sustainability and meeting some of those targets? Those are some of the questions that you can ask of it today. If you asked Nitec, they would say, “Hey, all the manual effort and looking through all the manuals and documentation that HPE provides around the ProLiant infrastructure, we no longer have to go in, dig that all up and navigate our way through that.” We can ask the conversational assistant with Compute Copilot to do that. That’s the beginning. I think the future is really around agentic. So how can I interact with that Compute Copilot to say, “Hey, notice that this issue is happening in my environment. Provide me some recommendations on what I can do next.” It provides me those recommendations. And then I can say, “Hey, Compute Copilot, go and enact those recommendations.” And so I think about back to that study with those ProLiant customers and all that time and resource and effort saved, I just can’t imagine how much we can multiply that for our MSPs and for our customers once we start to get some of those agentic capabilities in place. What are the announcements we have this week, Rob, as we start to head down that agentic path is with security advisories. So security advisories, you think about the past, “Okay, I got to understand that there’s a security advisory out there. I then got to go and act on it and figure out what I need to go do in the environment to rectify that issue.” Now we’re heading down the path of, “Okay, I can get some intelligence to tell me, ‘Hey, this is happening in the environment. We can go and provide recommendations on where you need to go and implement this and then go and implement that.'” And so, yeah, I’m really excited about the opportunity that we have with agentic. I think back to your question, we’re just very much at the beginnings of where we can take capabilities like Compute Copilot.
ROBERT DUTT: Especially as that kind of stuff starts to fit into the mix, it strikes me that it’s even more important that, as you mentioned, it’s a multi-vendor kind of environment that I as an MSP, if I have customers or existing infrastructure that’s running someone else, it’s, you know, it can be covered under this as well.
JUSTIN MCGARRY: Yeah, yeah. So the third-party monitoring capability we have today is very much monitoring. So other OEM servers that you have in your environment, you can get visibility into those. And so we provide this capability today. I think we announced that about a year or so ago. I would say that is opening a lot more doors for our, certainly the conversations with the MSPs. You know, we can’t kid ourselves that at MSPs they only have one type of OEM in the environment. They might have multiple. It’s a hybrid environment. And the same can be said for our customers out there as well. And so having this third-party monitoring capability in place where I can go to that single console and not just have visibility into my ProLiant estate, but if an issue occurs, I want to be able to see that across the entire estate. The third-party monitoring capability gives us the ability to do that, Rob. And, you know, one other thing I’d add real quick, and this is something that a lot of our partners and even, I’d say, our customers, we still have some awareness-building to do around Secure Gateway. So one of the challenges that customers, when I first joined, time and time again, I have discussions with customers about cloud manageability. And the first question they say is, well, Justin, where is this all hosted? And, you know, do I really want my environment talking to the cloud? And one of the things that we developed over time is this capability called Secure Gateway. It’s a virtual appliance that can be deployed in the environment. And what that does is it actually aggregates all of the iLO traffic to that Secure Gateway. That’s then one egress connection out to the cloud instead of all of those iLOs connecting and talking to the cloud. Nine times out of ten in customer conversations I have, whether it’s financial, it’s some other regulated industry, healthcare, insurance, what have you, we are now able to overcome that hurdle with cloud management capability because we have the Secure Gateway virtual appliance that we can deploy for customers. So that’s another great capability. Combined with third-party monitoring, you deploy that virtual appliance and that’s how we’re able to have that visibility across the entire estate.
ROBERT DUTT: We touched a little bit on sustainability earlier. Back home in Canada, we have particular sensitivities around energy costs, carbon reporting, especially for public sector and anyone under provincial ESG oversight. What is the sustainability dashboard in COM? Does that move the needle here? Is it a checkbox feature? What can it kind of add to an MSP who’s trying to make sure that their customers are informed and in the right place?
JUSTIN MCGARRY: Yeah, I would say it’s a fundamental feature that we have in Compute Ops Management today. I think what really takes it to the next level is the AI insights that I mentioned. So we worked with an open-source forecasting engine model out there that we leverage to develop and engineer that capability. And what that allows you to do is be able to forecast out to the future. Hey, this is how we’ve been trending today. This is where we will end up in the future based on some of that intelligence that we have in the AI-driven insights capability. So I would say sustainability dashboard in Compute Ops Management is a very kind of foundational fundamental capability. How you take that to the next level is then being able to leverage the AI-driven insights that we have for sustainability, be able to predict what the future is going to look like from a carbon emissions, energy cost perspective, and then be able to proactively take some measures to make sure that you’re going to be able to meet or exceed those targets. And so some customers are actually looking at that and saying, okay, I’m not necessarily ready to refresh now, but based on how I’m predicting out to the future, yes, I need to make that next step from Gen 10 or even prior to that in my environment to the new Gen 12 and the cost associated with doing so. I can predict and forecast out into the future that based on my energy costs, I may be able to cover, I mean, not all of that expense to do the refresh, but certainly a part of it. And so that’s something else that I know we have had a lot of success with our customers here recently. Again, it comes back to not just having that fundamental sustainability dashboard in place, but also being able to look out into the future to a certain extent with that forecasting model that we have to predict where you’re going to go with carbon emissions, energy costs.
ROBERT DUTT: Last one for me. What do you think is the biggest untapped or under-realized opportunity in the compute software sphere for you guys right now? What’s basically the one thing that you’d want a Canadian reseller walking away from Discover this week understanding about this business that maybe they didn’t come in with?
JUSTIN MCGARRY: Yeah, I think that back to what we talked about a little bit ago, there’s still, I think, an opportunity with partners. Partners have heard maybe a little bit about Compute Ops Management, but haven’t yet gotten to the place where they fully understand the capabilities that we have there, where we have delivered on some of the things like Secure Gateway, third-party monitoring, the sustainability, AI-driven insights and the forecasting model there, where we’re going with agentic. What’s in it for them at the end of the day? What are they going to benefit from getting their customers up to speed on Compute Ops Management, using it to manage, orchestrate, secure, automate those environments? I think there’s a tremendous opportunity there to continue to, and this is on me. It’s on our teams at HPE to continue to work with our partners to bring them up to speed there. And then I think back to looking at what Nitec and others have done: really get that champion within your organization to understand not just what the customer benefits are and the outcomes that can be derived, not just from an IT perspective, but with the Booking.com story, that real business-critical impact that this software is driving. I think that’s a unique differentiator that HPE has out in the market from a ProLiant perspective with Compute Ops Management. And then the other piece for MSPs is, hey, I can go in and deliver higher-margin value-added services just by leveraging this management tool in the environment and learning from Nitec and others on how they’re doing that. So I think I feel like it’s very early stages, Rob, with the partner ecosystem. I think we have a ton of opportunity there to help them understand that COM isn’t just a management tool. It is a business growth driver for them, and helping them understand that and realize that outcome is certainly where I’m focused and where the team is focused going forward.
ROBERT DUTT: Between that runway and I think the potential for agentic getting its hooks even deeper into this and making it increasingly actionable, I think you’re right. There’s a lot still to come.
JUSTIN MCGARRY: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it’s exciting. I think there’s a tremendous opportunity with the partner ecosystem and I think, genuinely, I think we’re just getting started.
ROBERT DUTT: All right. Look forward to seeing how it evolves. Awesome. Well, I appreciate you taking the time with me, Rob. Thank you. Thank you.
ROBERT DUTT: There you have it. Justin McGarry from HPE. I’d like to thank Justin for carving out some time during what is a genuinely hectic week here at Discover. I really appreciate it. And thank you for listening. If you’d like to follow or subscribe to the podcast, you can find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, most podcast directories. Ratings and reviews are always appreciated if you have a moment.
A few things I take away from this conversation. First, Compute Ops Management is a more interesting story than the name might suggest. When you’ve got an MSP like Nitec that helped co-develop the platform’s multi-tenant capability and is now managing distributed customer environments at significantly higher margins with fewer resources, that’s a real signal worth paying attention to. Justin’s framing of COM as a business growth platform rather than a management tool is the right way to think about it.
Second, the sustainability forecasting piece is genuinely differentiated for the Canadian market. The ability to project future carbon emissions and energy costs and use that forecast to build a board-level business case for a server refresh is practical and timely, especially for customers with ESG reporting obligations.
And third, Compute Copilot is early, and Justin was honest about that. The near-term step, moving from conversational Q&A to actual agentic action on security advisories, is the right direction. It’s worth revisiting this conversation in a year to see how far that’s come.
Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.
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Today’s headline news for Canadian IT solution providers:
HPE chief technology officer for cloud and AI Fidelma Russo used her Discover general session to introduce “tokenomics” – the argument that agentic AI economics are fundamentally infrastructure economics. She told the Las Vegas audience that continuous AI agents can cost $13,000 per agent per month in the public cloud, and revealed that HPE’s own MindStone AI support platform achieved a 30x cost reduction by moving from the public cloud to HPE Private Cloud AI on-prem – a saving of roughly $100,000 per month.Vultr announced it is buying HPE and NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra rack-scale systems – the GB300 NVL72 – with 800GbE Spectrum-X networking to build out next-generation global AI data centres. Vultr CEO J.J. Kardwell called out “decentralized, latency-sensitive workloads” as a driver. The announcement contained no channel component.HPE unveiled Morpheus 9, the latest version of its GreenLake virtualization platform, with a built-in MCP server for agent-driven operations. HPE claims up to 90 percent cost reduction versus traditional virtualization, and says more than 2,000 customers and one million cores are already on VM Essentials. A platform migration program offers the first year of Morpheus and VM Essentials at no cost. Zerto’s recovery tools are positioned as an “undo” button for when autonomous AI agents make unintended infrastructure changes.Read Full TranscriptThis epsisode of The Buzz is brought to you by HPE Discover 2026. Check out our full coverage of the event on ChannelBuzz.ca — you’ll find out HPE Discover 2026 News Hub in the menu bar at the top of the page.
Welcome to The Buzz from ChannelBuzz.ca, I’m Robert Dutt, today is Thursday, June 18th, and here’s what’s happening in the channel today.
Today, day three of HPE Discover 2026 in Las Vegas, and the story is the economics of the agentic enterprise. Let’s get to it.
HPE’s chief technology officer for cloud and AI, Fidelma Russo, took the main stage yesterday morning with a message that will resonate with anyone who has watched a client’s cloud AI bill spiral: continuous agentic AI is wildly expensive in the public cloud. Russo cited a figure of $13,000 per month, per agent, for continuous reasoning operations in the public cloud. That is not a pilot. That is production infrastructure.
Her answer is HPE’s take on “tokenomics” – the idea that AI economics are fundamentally infrastructure economics. It comes down to utilization, efficiency, and scale. And HPE has proof. Russo revealed that HPE built its own AI support platform, MindStone, and moved it from the public cloud to HPE Private Cloud AI on-prem. The result: a 30-fold cost reduction, saving roughly $100,000 per month.
That is the argument for why production AI is coming to the data centre. Not because it is fashionable, but because the math stops working anywhere else.
The alternative hyperscaler announced it is buying HPE and NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra rack-scale systems – specifically the GB300 NVL72 – along with 800-gigabit Ethernet Spectrum-X networking, to build out its next generation of global AI data centres. This is a procurement deal, not a partnership, but it is serious hardware at serious scale. Vultr CEO J.J. Kardwell framed it around “decentralized, latency-sensitive workloads across Vultr’s extensive global network.”
Now clearly, this isn’t a channel story unto itself at this moment. This is pure enterprise infrastructure. But it does signal that someone is actually buying the big AI factory gear HPE has been talking about all week.
The GreenLake platform now has a built-in MCP server for agent-driven operations, and HPE says Morpheus 9 delivers up to 90 percent cost reduction compared to traditional virtualization. There are more than 2,000 customers and a million cores already running on VM Essentials. To ease the migration pain, HPE is offering the first year of Morpheus and VM Essentials at no cost through a platform migration program.
There is a caveat: Zerto’s instant recovery and migration support is Morpheus-only for now. No KVM, no Kubernetes natively. But Zerto gets an interesting new job in this agentic world. Russo positioned it as the undo button for when autonomous AI agents make unintended changes to infrastructure – roll back to a known good state instantly.
I’ll be back tomorrow with a reporter’s notebook from the channel leadership breakfast panel at Discover, as we wrap up our coverage of the event this week.
That’s how we’re seeing the headlines from HPE Discover. I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, thanks for listening. Have a great day.
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en Fallon, vice president of worldwide channel and partner ecosystem networking sales
At HPE Discover Las Vegas this week, HPE pushed its networking story to the centre of the event – from autonomous AIOps capabilities to a unified SASE platform – and the channel is central to how it plans to execute on some ambitious market share targets.
ChannelBuzz.ca sat down on-site with Ben Fallon, vice president of worldwide channel and partner ecosystem networking sales, to talk about what the announcements mean in practice for Canadian partners.
On the self-driving network vision – a major theme in the general sessions this week – Fallon pointed to HPE Aruba Mist as the concrete proof point: autonomous remediation that partners can toggle on in the dashboard for known network problems, no human click required. “Autonomous networking, with that human deciding where they want that to take place, is already real,” he said.
On the Aruba and Juniper Networks platform integration – a frequent question from partners navigating two management platforms – Fallon described a “build once, deploy twice” philosophy built on microservices architecture, keeping both platforms differentiated by use case while accelerating innovation through cross-pollination rather than forced convergence.
The SASE and security opportunity produced one of the clearest channel statements of the conversation: “Pretty much 100% of our security sales go through partners. There is no other path.” With HPE publicly targeting a $1 billion security business, Fallon said the partner base is nowhere near saturated – and that competency-based incentives within the Partner Ready Vantage program are in place to bring more networking-pedigreed partners into that conversation.
A formal partner program unification is on track for November, with a stated focus on simplifying certification, deal registration, and rebates – and new incentives aimed squarely at winning net-new networking customers away from competing vendors.
Read Full TranscriptRobert Dutt: Today’s episode of In The Channel is brought to you by HPE Discover 2026. Discover runs June 15-18 at the Venetian in Las Vegas. Discover what’s next at hpe.com/discover.
Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca, and your host for the show.
We’re coming to you this week from HPE Discover Las Vegas, where HPE has been rolling out a significant set of announcements across networking, cloud, and AI infrastructure. The embargoes are lifted, and the Partner Growth Summit is in the books, so we can actually get into the substance of things.
My guest is Ben Fallon, vice president of worldwide channel and partner ecosystem networking sales at HPE. Ben came to this role via the Juniper side of the house. He was running global partner and commercial sales for Juniper Networks when the acquisition closed, and moved into leading the combined networking channel earlier this year.
His session at Discover this week was called “Betting on HPE Networking,” which turned out to be a pretty useful frame for a conversation. We got into what self-driving networks actually mean for a partner having a Monday morning conversation with a customer, the Aruba and Mist integration story, the SASE and security opportunity, and what partners can expect when the unified program formally launches in November.
Let’s get right into it. My chat with Ben Fallon.
Ben, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it. I know it’s a busy week on site here, I’m sure.
Ben Fallon: It is. It’s a fun week. We’ve got thousands of partners here, but it’s great to be here with you.
Robert Dutt: For listeners who don’t know you or your role, can you give me a quick rundown on what you do here and how you came to be leading networking channels for HPE?
Ben Fallon: Yeah, so like you said, I lead the global networking channel for HPE. I’ve spent the last 25-odd years in the industry, have led channels for a number of the significant vendors in the market. I was part of the Juniper acquisition, most recently running one of the global sales segments, and in January moved over to lead the channel. We’ve got a fantastic opportunity in front of us.
Robert Dutt: I like that you frame it as you’re part of the Juniper acquisition. You’re not taking entire credit for them acquiring Juniper to get your talent.
Ben Fallon: Absolutely not, no. It was a bonus.
Robert Dutt: Absolutely. Your session this week is called “Betting on HPE Networking.” It’s a pretty confident way of looking at it, and obvious given the milieu. Walk me through what the bet looks like from where you sit. What are you asking partners to bet on, and why now?
Ben Fallon: Yeah, so for me, it’s like when you look at a bet, you’ve got to make sure it’s a good one. No one wants to be playing the lottery. That’s got the worst chance of winning. The more strategy that you actually bring into a game, along with some execution, increases your chance of winning. So for us, what increases the chance of winning with HPE Networking is cross-selling. The more you’re selling across the portfolio, the more you’re going to engage with our account teams, the more problems you’re going to solve for our customers. And also, that’s where you can earn the most amount of rebates, and where the program is really geared towards. So if you make a bet on us, we’re making a bet on you, and you’ll get that back in profitability and customer satisfaction.
Robert Dutt: Cross-selling within networking, across the HPE portfolio, or…
Ben Fallon: All of the above. So you can absolutely cross-sell within the portfolio, whether you’re selling campus and branch, or you want to move into selling more security solutions. Or if you’re selling the hybrid cloud solution portfolio from HPE, you need to start getting involved in networking, because it’s going to expand your opportunity, and we know the network is at the heart of all of these AI workloads.
Robert Dutt: One of the big presentations here is about taking the idea of self-driving networks from vision to reality. For a lot of partners, though, the question is always, “What do I take to my customer?” On Monday morning, how do partners translate that message around self-driving networks to a concrete conversation with staff at a customer, and make it map with their care-abouts?
Ben Fallon: Yeah, sure. Well, look, complexity is only increasing. We know there are talent shortages. We know that it’s almost an impossible task to keep up with all the vulnerabilities that are created through AI. And so you have to have AI as part of your defense. So what’s real? Let’s take something like HPE Mist, where that has autonomous actions now built into the dashboard. So we know for certain problems that come up on the network, we know how to remediate them. We don’t need a person to go and click a button. You can literally switch on a toggle, and off it goes. So autonomous networking, with that human deciding where they want that to take place, is already real.
Robert Dutt: You touch on Mist. One thing I do hear from partners sometimes is with the Aruba and Juniper integration, the two platforms you’ve got with Aruba Central and Mist, moving toward common capabilities, but it sounds like the vision is not to merge. What do you tell the partner who’s been selling one side of that equation or the other? And now that we’ve kind of got one HPE networking, what does it mean in practice, basically?
Ben Fallon: Yeah, well, you touched on self-driving. That’s a unified vision across the entire portfolio. And then we’ve got this strategy of cross-pollination. I think if you look at a lot of acquisitions over the years, they’ve spent so long arguing over maybe not a feature, but how do you actually get to that feature to be capable? And innovation dies when that happens. If you want innovation to actually accelerate, which is what we’re seeing, you take the best from each platform, and because they’re built with a microservices architecture, you can build once, deploy twice, and it becomes this incredible boon of innovation on the platform. So I’d say that is real, because customers are voting with their wallet. So there’s a decent amount of cross-pollination, but each kind of remains aimed towards its focus.
Robert Dutt: That’s it.
Ben Fallon: And really what I see with partners is they see this as a growth play in the same way that we do. This is about finding new opportunity. So they may have served some SMB customers with some on-prem part of the Aruba portfolio. Now they’re wanting to get into some mid-sized lower enterprise, and they’re seeing that Mist has some capability that helps get them there. So it’s a growth play for us, and it’s a growth play for the partner.
Robert Dutt: One of the things that caught my attention in the announcements this week was the unified SASE story – bringing SD-WAN and SSE under one management pane. You guys have talked about a billion-dollar security ambition. Pretty big number. What’s the channel’s role in getting to that? And for a partner who hasn’t historically led with networking security, what’s kind of the on-ramp or the easiest first step?
Ben Fallon: Yeah. So first of all, obviously, we’ve got this universal zero-trust network architecture, which we’re really leaning into. And it’s about bringing together the different parts of the security portfolios from across HPE. And obviously with the Juniper acquisition, that brought an even richer portfolio. For partners, pretty much 100% of our security sales go through partners, so there is no other path. And what we’re really looking for is – we have some very, very capable, specialized partners on security – I think there’s a bigger opportunity for more partners to be selling HPE networking and security solutions. We’re just getting started. We’re already posting some great numbers. We had some incredible growth just last quarter, and there’s still more partners can do. We are not saturated from the partner landscape selling our security portfolio, so lots of opportunity there.
Robert Dutt: Those additional partners in that space – do you see them being primarily folks who come in from other parts of the HPE network, existing specialists in security who maybe haven’t worked with you in the past, a little bit of both? What’s kind of the…
Ben Fallon: It’s a bit of a combination, but you always have to focus. You can’t go everywhere. And where we’re focusing is on partners that have a pedigree in networking with us, because we’re increasingly seeing that there’s a great attach opportunity, and the convergence of the network and security we think is only going to accelerate.
Robert Dutt: Are we at the point of having a formal program, that kind of thing, to bring those partners on board, or to enable and encourage the partners who are in the HPE sphere, but not yet?
Ben Fallon: Yeah, we do. We have, as part of our Partner Ready Vantage program, our broad certifications that are part of that, and that’s how you get to platinum, gold, silver, etc. But then we have competencies, and we have a number of security competencies that partners can build up that capability. They can pick different parts of the portfolio. They could be brand new to networking, but build up competency in security, and that will bring technical competence and capability, but also incremental profitability for them as well.
Robert Dutt: A lot of talk this week, obviously, about the disruption around VMware – customers reconsidering virtualization strategies and how that drives the refresh cycles within the data center on some of the compute and storage hardware, all that kind of good stuff. Does that also create a network refresh opportunity?
Ben Fallon: So there can be opportunities that do arise. I don’t know if that’s the biggest piece that’s driving growth in data center networking right now. I think the AI boom is doing a significant job there, and probably dwarfs anything else. But what you’ll see is announcements this week around how we’re, really from a technology perspective, bringing more parts of the portfolio together from across the hybrid cloud portfolio and networking. Because really, that’s what customers want. They want integrated technology that solves their problems, and that’s what we’re focused on.
Robert Dutt: From a Canadian channel perspective, where do you see the biggest networking opportunities today? I’m going to guess your answer to the last question strongly informs the answer to this one. But what are the biggest opportunities in the back half of the year? And what’s your ask of Canadian partners who are listening to this?
Ben Fallon: Yeah. Well, there are two things I think are the biggest opportunity. One is cross-selling. If you’re selling part of the HPE portfolio today, look at how you can integrate across the stack – whether that’s the full HPE stack, or whether it’s specific to networking. There’s a huge opportunity there, and we’re seeing that partners that have adopted that are growing faster than anyone else. Second, new logos – going after new customers. We’re here to win. We’re here to be number one, and we’ll do that first in wireless networking. And to do that, we need new customers. And you’ll see new incentives and new programs come out in November that will put even more wood behind the arrow – that’s going to make it an incredible opportunity for partners to go and solve the networking crimes of other vendors and bring them into the light of a self-driving network.
Robert Dutt: You guys are obviously deep into the process of integrating programs between legacy HPE and legacy Juniper. We have the November 1 date, I believe, as the formalized launch date for that becoming one. What can partners expect coming out of that at a programmatic level on the networking side?
Ben Fallon: Yeah. So what we’re doing is, first of all, looking at the experience partners have – everything from how they get certified, trying to simplify that and make sure that they’re not having to do multiple layers and duplicative actions. We’re working on the experience when it comes to things like registering a deal, getting rebates, keeping it simple. I think other vendors I’ve seen, you need a bit of a rocket science degree to figure out how all of these different programs and rebates come together. We’re focusing on keeping it simple, we’re focused on driving action, and most of all – which I think is often missed – we’re making sure that our sales teams know how to engage with partners really well and go and win deals together.
Robert Dutt: Good luck on a big week here at Discover, and thanks for taking the time once again.
Ben Fallon: Appreciated. And we love working with our Canadian partners, and just a big thank you to all of them that are on board already.
Robert Dutt: There you have it, Ben Fallon from HPE.
I’d like to thank Ben for his time. We were literally recording between sessions at Discover, and I appreciate him making it work.
And thank you for listening as well. A few things that stuck with me from this one.
The self-driving network story has been fairly abstract for a while, but his Mist example – autonomous remediation actions you can toggle on in the dashboard, no human in the loop for known problem types – it’s the most concrete I’ve heard it get. That’s actually something you can put in front of a customer.
The other thing worth sitting with: “pretty much 100% of our security sales go through partners. There is no other path.” That’s what Ben said. If you’re an HPE networking partner who hasn’t yet built a security practice, and HPE is out there talking about a billion-dollar security ambition, someone is going to capture that opportunity. Make sure it’s you.
And for partners who may have walked away from the Juniper side of the portfolio at acquisition time and have been watching from the sidelines, November is shaping up to be the moment to take another look. Simplified programs, new incentives, a unified experience. It’s worth paying attention to.
If you found the episode useful, we’d love to have you subscribe to the podcast. You’ll find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and most of the major podcast directories. If you have a moment to leave a rating or a review, it always helps.
Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.
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HPE used keynote day at HPE Discover 2026 in Las Vegas to make a clear argument: networking is the foundation of the AI era.
In the afternoon general session, Rami Rahim, HPE’s EVP and GM of Networking, led what was arguably the most channel-actionable session of the week. Using a “Millennium Tower” analogy to frame the risk of building AI on a networking foundation that wasn’t designed for it, Rahim announced four items worth flagging for Canadian partners.
First, Marvis AI cross-pollination: Mist’s Marvis AI engine is coming to the Aruba Central platform, with explicit confirmation that neither platform is being sunset. Second, a unified SASE orchestrator combining SD-WAN and Secure Service Edge under a single console and consistent zero trust policy layer – including a new AI Firewall capability that classifies GenAI application usage as sanctioned, unsanctioned, or tolerated with guardrails like prompt filtering and upload controls. Third, the QFX 5140, a new inference switch purpose-built for distributed AI at the edge, announced this week. And fourth, the HPE Network Migration Program: zero percent financing through HPE Financial Services plus asset trade-in for legacy gear – a deal closer for stalled network refresh conversations.
In the morning keynote, HPE president and CEO Antonio Neri framed the company’s direction around the “agentic enterprise” – autonomous AI agents that act without user input – and warned of the “shadow cost” of agents deployed at scale without IT governance. His GreenLake Intelligence example made it concrete: a system that sees a major all-hands meeting on the calendar and proactively prioritizes video traffic before the strain hits, based on historical telemetry.
In the press Q&A, Neri put a five-month timeline on the Juniper integration – from deal close to fully integrated data centre switching, routing, and campus portfolios – and said HPE is “better than Cisco in many ways, whether it’s campus and branch.”
For Canadian partners, data sovereignty is adding a uniquely local dimension to the private cloud AI and self-driving networks story. More on that in an upcoming In The Channel episode from the show.
Read Full TranscriptThis epsisode of In The Channel is brought to you by HPE Discover 2026. Check out our full coverage of the event on ChannelBuzz.ca — you’ll find out HPE Discover 2026 News Hub in the menu bar at the top of the page.
This episode of The Buzz is brought to you by HPE Discover 2026. HPE Discover runs June 15 to 18 at The Venetian in Las Vegas. Discover what’s next at hpe.com/discover.
Welcome to The Buzz from ChannelBuzz.ca, I’m Robert Dutt, today is Wedneday, June 17th, and here’s what’s happening in the channel today.
We covered news elsewhere in an earlier episode of the Buzz, go check that out if you haven’t already. For this one, we’re drilling down on Tuesday’s news from HPE Discover 2026.
We’re right in the middle of the week here, and I want to bring you the highlights from Tuesday – keynote day, the day HPE makes its biggest arguments. And the argument on Tuesday was pretty clear: the network – not the GPU, not the server – is the foundation of the AI era. They had product announcements to back it up. Here’s what went down.
Let’s start with the afternoon, because honestly, the networking general session led by Rami Rahim – who heads up HPE’s networking business as EVP and GM following the Juniper acquisition – was the meatiest part of the day for the channel.
The headline is what HPE is calling self-driving networks. The idea is that AI-driven networking should be able to sense, learn, optimize, and heal itself in real time, without requiring a human to manually troubleshoot every issue.
Rami opened with an analogy I thought landed pretty well. He talked about the Millennium Tower in San Francisco – the luxury condo building that started sinking after construction because the foundation wasn’t built for the environmental load it was sitting on. His point: companies that are building AI on top of networking infrastructure that wasn’t designed for it are making the same mistake. “AI innovation can only move as fast as the network allows” was the line. It’s a good one.
So what did they actually announce? Four things worth flagging.
First: Marvis AI cross-pollination. Mist’s Marvis AI engine is coming to the Aruba Central platform, and Aruba capabilities are moving the other way too. Both platforms get stronger. And the important subtext for the channel: neither platform is being sunset. HPE has been clear about that, and it’s worth saying out loud, because there’s been plenty of speculation since the Juniper deal closed.
Second: a unified SASE orchestrator. HPE is combining its SD-WAN and Secure Service Edge capabilities into a single console with a consistent zero trust policy layer across the enterprise. But the most interesting piece is what they’re calling the AI Firewall – the ability to classify your users’ GenAI applications as sanctioned, unsanctioned and blocked, or tolerated with guardrails like prompt filtering and data upload controls. They demoed it blocking a data exfiltration attempt through a GenAI app in real time. If you’re an MSP and your customers are asking you how they let people use AI tools without losing control of sensitive data, this is a concrete answer to that question.
Third: the QFX 5140. This is a new inference switch – new this week, not a prior announcement – purpose-built for distributed AI workloads at the edge. AI-optimized load balancing and congestion control, designed to connect GPUs at distributed locations. The edge inference angle is where this gets interesting for partners who are thinking about AI at branch or remote sites.
And fourth – and I want to make sure this doesn’t get buried – the HPE Network Migration Program. Zero percent financing through HPE Financial Services, plus asset trade-in for legacy non-self-driving gear. If you’ve got a customer sitting on aging campus or branch infrastructure and the refresh conversation has stalled, this is the conversation starter to go back with.
On proof points: Rami said that over 80 percent of network incidents are now either fully self-remediating or instantly identified with a resolution ready – up from around 50 percent just a few years ago. He had big customers on stage: Ohio State University, the Royal Bank of Canada, Sentara Health. The RBC quote was notable – security is now “job number one” and it has to be managed at the network layer for what they called immutable evidence. That framing works particularly well in regulated industries, which is a big part of the Canadian market.
In the press Q&A afterward, Rami was direct about where the security and networking story goes: “When we say network and security are coming together, it’s not a tagline – it’s an investment strategy.” He also acknowledged that getting customers to trust full network autonomy is an adoption curve – most start with what they call trusted actions, where the system recommends and the human approves, before moving to full automation. I actually think that’s a reassuring thing to say rather than a weakness – it matches how enterprise IT actually works.
Now let’s go back to the morning. CEO Antonio Neri’s keynote set the strategic context for everything Rami built on in the afternoon.
Neri’s frame for the whole show is what he’s calling the agentic enterprise – the shift from applications that respond to user inputs, to autonomous agents that reason across your data and take action. And his point is that infrastructure has to be built to handle that, because agents deployed at scale without IT governance become the new shadow IT problem. He used the phrase “shadow cost” – the risk of an AI-heavy workforce operating outside IT’s visibility and control. That’s a real and near-term problem for your customers, and MSPs are typically the ones who get called when it goes sideways.
The most concrete illustration he gave was GreenLake Intelligence. The example: a major internal announcement gets added to the corporate calendar. The system sees it, anticipates that a large portion of the workforce is about to jump on a video call simultaneously, and proactively prioritizes video traffic before the strain hits – based on historical telemetry, no human in the loop. It’s a small example but it makes the concept real in a way that “agentic infrastructure” as a term doesn’t always do.
In the press Q&A after the keynote, Neri was notably direct on a couple of things. On the Juniper integration, he put a specific number on it: from close of the deal on July 2nd last year, to fully integrated data centre switching, routing, and campus portfolios – five months. That’s a credible timeline, and it matters for partners who’ve been watching to see whether the deal delivers or whether it turns into the kind of slow-moving integration that disrupts customer relationships for years.
And on competitive positioning, he was unusually blunt. Asked about HPE’s networking vision going forward, he said HPE is – direct quote – “better than Cisco in many ways, whether it’s campus and branch.” That’s not something you hear a CEO say casually at a press Q&A.
Now, for the Canadian channel specifically, there’s a layer here that tends to get underplayed in the broader coverage of a show like this.
The conversation in Canada right now isn’t just “upgrade your network because AI needs faster pipes.” It’s “bring AI workloads back on-prem or to Canadian colocation, because you can’t let that data live in a US-based cloud under current conditions.” Data sovereignty is a genuine buying driver right now in a way it hasn’t been before. And HPE’s self-driving networks story, and the broader private cloud AI play, maps onto that buying driver in a way that’s worth having a direct conversation with your customers about.
I’ll have more on the Canadian channel perspective in an upcoming In The Channel episode coming later this week from HPE Discover. But the framing I’d leave you with is this: self-driving networks don’t eliminate the managed services partner – they change what that partner does. The network takes on more of the routine work, but someone still needs to watch the dashboard, make strategic decisions, and bring the human layer. That’s still your business, and if anything it’s a higher-value version of it.
One more thing before we go – and this one’s a little off the beaten path. Someone asked Antonio Neri in the press Q&A who he’s picking for the World Cup. Being Argentine, he said he’d love to see Argentina win again – but acknowledged it’s tougher with an extra game in the format this time around. His final four: England, France, Argentina, and Spain. No bias there whatsoever.
That’s how we’re seeing the headlines from HPE Discover. I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, thanks for listening. Have a great day.
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Today’s headline news for Canadian IT solution providers, aside from HPE Discover:
OpenAI launches official partner program and investment fund: OpenAI has officially introduced its new partner program alongside a $150 million investment fund aimed at expanding its enterprise ecosystem. The partner program is designed to help service providers, system integrators, and consultancies build, deploy, and manage custom AI solutions leveraging OpenAI’s models. According to the company, the initiative will provide partners with dedicated technical support, go-to-market resources, and early access to new product features. The accompanying $150 million fund will focus on investing in early-stage startups that are developing applications on top of the platform.GTIA names two Canadian Innovate Awards finalists: GTIA announced the six finalists for its inaugural Innovate Awards today, with two Canadian companies among them: GoWest.ai (Toronto, customer-facing AI category, for its CFP Service Desk and Field Technician Assistant) and Nucleus Networks (Vancouver, internal AI category). Winners receive a $20,000 USD cash prize, announced at ChannelCon 2026 on August 5 in San Diego. For more on the awards and what GTIA is looking for, check out our In The Channel conversation with Carolyn April from April 27. And to hear Jennifer Roy of Nucleus on how they’re thinking about AI, that episode is here.Cisco research highlights Canadian AI network risks: A new study from Cisco underscores an infrastructure cliff for Canadian organizations. The research found that 71 percent of Canadian respondents expect their current network capacity to hit its limits within 36 months due to AI workloads, while 91 percent cited budget constraints as the primary barrier to the required modernization. The data provides a critical conversation point for MSPs: any serious AI strategy must now be preceded by a serious network upgrade strategy.Okta integrates with Google Cloud AI: Okta has announced it is adding a dedicated identity security layer to Google Cloud AI, while its Auth0 platform is now directly integrating with Gemini for AI agent deployment. According to the company, these integrations are designed to bring enterprise-grade identity governance into the fast-moving AI ecosystem. For Canadian solution providers helping customers experiment with AI tools, this integration provides a mechanism to secure these environments and non-human identities without slowing down developer velocity.CrowdStrike open AI gateway: CrowdStrike has announced an open gateway ecosystem making Falcon AI’s control plane available across AI infrastructure, with native integrations spanning Databricks, Google Cloud, Azure API Management, and others. Simultaneously, Grant Thornton Advisors announced it is standardizing its managed security service operations on Falcon Complete, replacing legacy MDR with what CrowdStrike is positioning as agentic MDR.Acumatica channel appointment: Acumatica has appointed Roman Bukary as senior vice president of partner strategy and programs, effective immediately. Bukary brings prior experience in SaaS channel leadership and will be responsible for the strategy and ongoing evolution of Acumatica’s partner ecosystem.Coro Global Lean IT Day: Coro has launched Global Lean IT Day as an annual observance on June 16, recognizing IT professionals who manage enterprise-level cybersecurity complexity with limited team size and resources. The announcement is tied to ISC2 data showing 59 percent of organizations report critical or significant cybersecurity skills shortages, and Coro says it will release full survey findings ahead of Black Hat USA 2026.Leaseweb Canada leadership: Leaseweb Canada has named Estelle Azemard as its new chief executive officer. Azemard, who will be based in Montreal, brings more than 16 years of cloud industry experience and will lead the company’s continued growth and strategic expansion in Canada, where data sovereignty and hybrid cloud demand are both rising.Read Full TranscriptWelcome to The Buzz from ChannelBuzz.ca, I’m Robert Dutt, today is Wednesday, June 17th, and here’s what’s happening in the channel today.
We’ll have a full roundup of everything going down at HPE Discover this week in your feed in about an hour from now, but in the meantime, there’s plenty going on aside from all the news at Discover. Here’s what we think is worth keeping an eye on.
OpenAI has officially introduced its new partner program alongside a $150 million investment fund aimed at expanding its enterprise ecosystem. The partner program is designed to help service providers, system integrators, and consultancies build, deploy, and manage custom AI solutions leveraging OpenAI’s models. According to the company, the initiative will provide partners with dedicated technical support, go-to-market resources, and early access to new product features. The accompanying $150 million fund will focus on investing in early-stage startups that are developing applications on top of the platform. As enterprise demand for generative AI moves from the proof-of-concept phase to production deployment, solution providers are increasingly being asked to navigate the integration complexities of building AI agents and customized models. The launch represents a significant maturation of OpenAI’s channel strategy, moving beyond direct enterprise sales to embrace the third-party ecosystem. Formalizing a channel structure gives Canadian IT providers a clearer framework to monetize AI advisory and implementation services, allowing them to capture more margin as customer demand scales up.
The Global Technology Industry Association – GTIA – has announced the six finalists for its inaugural Innovate Awards, and Canadians have a strong showing. Two of the six companies are Canadian: GoWest.ai, the Toronto-based AI consultancy founded by West McDonald, is a finalist for its CFP Service Desk and Field Technician Assistant in the customer-facing category, while Nucleus Networks, the Vancouver-based MSP that now operates across five Canadian cities, is a finalist in the internal AI solutions category. The remaining four finalists – J&M Solutions, Sentry Technology Solutions, Framework IT, and Thrive – are all US-based. Winners in each category receive a twenty-thousand-dollar cash prize, announced live at the ChannelCon 2026 final keynote on August 5th in San Diego. One-third of the inaugural finalist class being Canadian is significant for a channel community that too often looks south of the border for proof points on what real AI deployment looks like. If you want more context on what GTIA was building toward with these awards, and what “deployed and in production” actually means in practice, we covered exactly that earlier this year on In The Channel with Carolyn April, GTIA’s vice president of research and market intelligence. And to hear how Nucleus thinks about AI inside their own MSP operations, Jennifer Roy joined us on the show in late April. Links to both episodes are in the show notes.
A new study from Cisco underscores a looming infrastructure cliff for Canadian organizations chasing AI ambitions. The research found that 71 percent of Canadian respondents expect their current network capacity to hit its limits within 36 months due to the demands of AI workloads. Even more pressing, 91 percent cited budget constraints as the primary barrier to the required modernization. This data suggests an impending reckoning where artificial intelligence software aspirations simply outpace the physical network capabilities required to move massive data sets. The strain on existing infrastructure will likely manifest in latency issues and stalled proof-of-concept projects. This presents a critical conversation point for Canadian MSPs and infrastructure partners to bring to their customers: any serious AI strategy must now be preceded by a serious network upgrade strategy. It creates a massive opportunity for the channel to re-engage clients on foundational infrastructure, turning a software conversation into a broader hardware and services engagement.
In Brief:
Okta announces dedicated identity secrity layer for Google Cloud
CrowdStrike announced open AI gateway ecosystem.
Acumatica appoints Roman Bukary as its new senior vice president of partner strategy and programs.
Coro launches the first-ever Global Lean IT Day to recognize IT professionals managing enterprise-level cybersecurity with limited resources.
Leaseweb Canada names Estelle Azemard as its new chief executive officer.
Full details and links in the show notes or the blog post.
Remember that we’ll have all The Buzz from HPE Discover in your inbox in about an hour, and shortly after that, be sure to check out today’s In The Channel, where we’ll talk to HPE’s Ben Fallon about the company’s self-driving networks strategy.
And if you haven’t heard it yet, yesterday on The Buzz we took you through all the news from HPE Partner Growth Summit at Discover 2026, and then we followed that up Tuesday with HPE North American channel chief Jeremiah Jenson, going deep on The Power of One, the announcements from the show, and his big reqquest for solution providers. Be sure you check it out if you’re working with Hewlett-Packard Enterprise.
That’s how we’re seeing the headlines today. I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, thanks for listening. Have a great day.
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Jeremiah Jenson, vice president of North Amiercan channels at HPE
This episode is the second half of a two-part conversation with Jeremiah Jenson, vice president of North America Channel and Partner Ecosystem at HPE, recorded ahead of HPE Discover 2026.
Part one – the Discover preview and HPE’s AI infrastructure themes – is Monday’s episode. This half focuses on the announcements made at the HPE Partner Growth Summit on Monday, June 16.
The centrepiece is what HPE is calling the “power of one” – one portfolio, one partner program, one integrated experience. It’s partly organizational messaging, but there’s real substance underneath: HPE spent the past 18 months merging three separate channel organizations (HPE, Aruba, and Juniper) into a single team, and the work of translating that into a coherent partner experience is now coming due.
Concretely, that means Juniper partners integrating into Partner Ready Vantage on November 1 – with tier mapping already defined – along with Zerto, Private Cloud 3000, and Private Cloud 1000 shifting to channel-only routes to market. HPE is also extending free three-year Morpheus software licenses to approximately 600 partners for internal deployment, as much about building hands-on expertise as it is about the virtualization savings.
The piece with the most direct relevance for Canadian MSPs is the new partner-branded services model: partners lead with their own brand, own the customer relationship, and HPE backs them as the invisible infrastructure layer for on-site break-fix and parts logistics.
Jenson specifically calls out Canadian partners’ customer intimacy and regional compliance knowledge as a natural fit for that services-forward model. The “one more mile” close is worth hearing directly.
Tuesday’s episode of The Buzz has the headline news breakdown – check that first if you want the full context.
Read Full Transcript[Robert Dutt]: This episode of In The Channel is brought to you by HPE Discover 2026, and we’ll be bringing you full event coverage all week right here on ChannelBuzz.ca. Don’t miss it!
Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca, and your host for the show.
Quick note before we dive into this one – if you haven‘t already listened to Tuesday’s episode of The Buzz, I’d really encourage you to go find that in your feed first. On The Buzz, we’ve got the headline rundown on HPE’s Partner Growth Summit announcements – what was announced, what moved, what the numbers are. What we’re doing here is going a level deeper with the person who actually owns this for North America.
Jeremiah Jenson is the vice president of North America Channel and Partner Ecosystem at HPE. He returned to the company about a year ago, after a previous decade-plus that included the Aruba acquisition, a stint at AWS in between, and enough perspective on how the IT channel actually works to fill several episodes on their own. This is part two of a conversation we recorded just ahead of Discover. Part one, the Discover preview and the big AI infrastructure themes, is on the feed Monday if you want the full picture.
This half is about the Partner Growth Summit announcements – what HPE is calling the power of one. One portfolio, one program, one partner experience. And specifically, what it means if you’re a Canadian reseller or MSP trying to figure out where HPE fits into your business right now and into the second half of 2026.
Let’s get right into it. My chat with Jeremiah Jenson.
Jeremiah, good to be chatting with you again.
[Jeremiah Jenson]: Yeah, good to talk to you, Rob. Thanks.
[Robert Dutt]: Let’s get into some of the stuff that was announced at Partner Growth Summit. And I guess let’s start here. You’ve now had about 18 months since the single channel org stood up, and now you’ve got the Juniper integration happening on top of that. From your seat, what did that single organization feel like to execute on? And what’s the one thing that turned out to be harder than expected?
[Jeremiah Jenson]: One, it feels very good. So a little bit of my history – I was here when the Aruba acquisition happened some 10 years ago, and then I was with a different company for a period of time, and I’ve been back for about a year and a half now. And I will say it’s been fantastic to unify the channel in a lot of ways – making it more simple and easier and more profitable for partners to understand and to do business with, but also to take advantage of the power of the portfolio. So what’s it like? Simple answer. It’s great because we have a tremendous amount of channel history and momentum and power from that piece of the business, combined with a tremendous amount of channel history, momentum, and power on the hybrid IT side, and bringing all that together in a unified way. It’s fantastic. Now, the hardest part about that is you’re dealing with big businesses and the devil being in the details. And that’s where we just spend a lot of time working on. While the big themes are unification, ease of doing business, and simplifying things along those lines, the hard part is in the detail. Like, how do we actually want to help accomplish this? And so from that, we’ve had to get a lot of very big voices in the room and get through some very meaningful things on behalf of our customers and our partners.
[Robert Dutt]: I guess, to your point on your history and the long history of HPE in this acquisition space, at least to some degree, you’ve got the muscle memory of doing the Aruba side of things and getting that integrated into the programs. And now it’s sort of doing that at a different timeline, at a different scale with Juniper.
[Jeremiah Jenson]: It’s true. We have the muscle memory of acquisitions and some history of that. I think the one thing that is really just awesome to see is how people have come together with customer and partner being front and center, and how are we iterating and innovating on their behalf, and just a unified goal of how do we move really fast? Because the opportunity in that market is too big for us to miss. And so there’s really this motivation to move very, very fast and very quickly. And that’s why we’re ahead of our integration targets. We’re very pleased with where we are in that business, unifying the channel, unifying a bunch of business processes. You’re seeing that in the programmatic announcements we made. So it’s nice to be able to take advantage of that muscle memory. We’ve done the training, now we’re doing it for real.
[Robert Dutt]: So the November 1 date is concrete, and the tier mapping for the Juniper roll into Partner Ready Vantage is clear – Elite Plus becomes Platinum, etc. But what about the Canadian partner today who’s a Juniper partner, but has never really sold HPE server or storage? What does that reality look like in practice? Is there a runway and enablement in place to help bring those folks on board? And obviously, I assume you want as many of them transacting as far across the portfolio as possible – what does it look like as the two truly become one?
[Jeremiah Jenson]: Absolutely. So one, we want them participating across the full portfolio. One program gives partners a very clear, unified path across networking, cloud, and AI. And this move that we’ve made, it’s a major simplification that gives partners a more consistent way in which they can engage across those three – whether that’s networking, cloud, or AI. And it also paints a very clear opportunity in terms of how they can take the broader portfolio to their customers to solve those business problems. I always want to keep that customer front and center, and that they have a unique opportunity to solve a broader set of customer challenges. And so the value there is that partners can work across more of the portfolio without navigating disconnected experiences. And I also want to say, we’re not forcing anybody to become something that they’re not. This is an opportunity for them, and we’ve made it simple for them to capture that opportunity and to grow their business with HPE.
[Robert Dutt]: It’s always a balancing act, right? You want to incentivize, but you don’t want to push too hard because that potentially breaks partner business models or creates challenges. But at the same time, it’s like – we’ve got all this stuff over here too. You want to sell it? That’d be cool.
[Jeremiah Jenson]: Yeah, look, I’m not twisting anybody’s arm here. I think the opportunity speaks for itself. And I think our results in the market also speak for themselves. The opportunity is there, and that opportunity stands on its own. Whether you want to invest in an AI practice or whether you have an opportunity to help customers solve a problem with compute, we have the right enablement and want to come alongside that partner and take advantage of that opportunity and help that customer. But that opportunity is real and right there for them now. The value of the opportunity, the capability of our products, how that’s meeting the market with customers – that speaks for itself. So the opportunity is there, and I want to harness it. I want to take advantage of it with our mutual partners.
[Robert Dutt]: We seem to be getting a little bit of a drumbeat going in terms of HPE products being declared channel-only in terms of go-to-market. Last year with VME Essentials, this year it’s Zerto, PC 3000, PC 1000. There’s clearly a strategic logic here beyond just adding product to the list. What’s the underlying principle on what makes a product the right candidate to be channel-only? And what does it mean for a partner that these products will only come through them and their peers?
[Jeremiah Jenson]: Well, I mean, there’s a couple of things there. Certainly we’re expanding areas where partners can lead, and that creates additional room for growth, both for them and for us. And it’s a clear signal that HPE is expanding in areas where – like I said – where partners can lead, but especially in areas that are core to the market, whether that’s private cloud or virtualization with this great VM reset that we’ve got going on, or whether that’s data protection with some of our Zerto solutions and ransomware protection, things along those lines. So this gives partners more ownership and opportunity while also creating more room for them to differentiate. I don’t want a homogeneous channel. Each partner has not made the same investments. And so each partner has a level of capability, a market that they serve, and has made investments to serve their customers in the right way. And so this partner-led opportunity with these products gives them not only ownership of the opportunity, but clear ways in which they can differentiate by investing in these product sets. So it’s an area of channel leadership. And then finally, it also speaks to our channel heritage. We trust the channel. We partner with them very closely, and we see an opportunity for us to grow our collective business by allowing them to lead.
[Robert Dutt]: To your point on the non-homogeneous nature of the channel, I think that’s represented well throughout the program and what you guys are talking about in terms of being open to embracing and facilitating multi-partner engagements when the customer needs support from different specialists in different areas to drive those outcomes.
[Jeremiah Jenson]: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think this helps partners build higher-value practices. I don’t need them just to sell another product. We have lots of products that are available for sale, but this helps them see and build a higher-value practice, whether that’s the services capability that they can bring in – because we all know customers need help transforming to new and more efficient ways of doing business in a hybrid IT environment. So it creates more ways for partners to move up that value chain, whether that’s through their services or deeper expertise that they want to build. And it matters because that creates long-term growth. As they become more valuable to the customer through their differentiated capabilities, differentiated services, or the distinct and unique value that they bring to their customers, it creates long-term growth. It helps build something that outlasts not only them, but us.
[Robert Dutt]: Part of the announcements is you’re giving up to 600 partners free Morpheus licenses to run their own environments. It’s interesting – it really sounds like it’s saying, sort of an opportunity to become your own reference customer, to drink your own champagne, to eat your own dog food, whatever your preferred analogy is there. What are the expectations around how partners use those capabilities? Is it about demos? Is it about building their own expertise? Is it about getting a chance to do some of that transformation and reinvention of their own infrastructure and tech stack so they can speak more clearly to customers about what’s possible?
[Jeremiah Jenson]: Yeah, I mean, what is going on in the virtualization market is impacting everybody – the entire channel. And I don’t mean just how various companies are going to market. It’s impacting everybody, and that includes our partners who are customers of a lot of different companies. And there’s real power in our portfolio. We see a clear opportunity not only to invest in the channel with those partners who have invested in us, those partners who have invested in the virtualization competency – we want to invest back in them with the capability that our portfolio brings to them. So these VME licenses offer them an opportunity to reset their virtualization environment and set themselves up for continued modernization. And what better story to take to their customers than, “We know this works for you because we did it ourselves.” So drinking their own champagne is a very good analogy there. And that is our expectation – not only to help partners realize the true value of the portfolio, but also enable them to modernize and take that story to their customers. And there’s no better way than to say, “I’ve done it myself and here were the outcomes that we saw.”
[Robert Dutt]: Given the scale of the HPE channel, I’m guessing there are going to be a lot of hands going up for those 600 slots.
[Jeremiah Jenson]: Well, look, what we see in VME, the Morpheus software suite, is nothing short of impressive. I’ve got a history of working with and working for companies that move very fast, that make decisions fast and execute very quickly. What I have seen in this Morpheus VME space is impressive – it’s like nothing I’ve ever seen. The roadmap, our ability to execute against that roadmap, to produce enterprise-quality and just phenomenal products at pace and at scale is incredibly impressive. And so partners that are working with VME and Morpheus today are continuing to be blown away by the capability and the roadmap. And for those partners that haven’t taken advantage of that, please take a moment for yourself and look at what we’re doing here. It’s a fantastic product and a fantastic solution to help customers with what they need most – cost savings while setting the on-ramp to modernization.
[Robert Dutt]: Especially in a moment where perhaps acquiring new tech is not going to be as easy as it has been from a hardware point of view.
[Jeremiah Jenson]: Exactly. In a moment where everybody is looking for ways to save dollars, you can cut virtualization costs by up to 90% with this product. It has very simple per-socket pricing. And so what better opportunity not only to help our partners, but to get that message out to their customers.
[Robert Dutt]: In terms of channel penetration, is this a fairly mature, realized market, or is there still a lot of greenfield out there on the channel side?
[Jeremiah Jenson]: I mean, there’s a massive opportunity. You think about the size of that virtualization market – the size of the VM reset, the virtual machine market – it’s huge. So there is a tremendous amount of headroom in this market. There is a tremendous amount of opportunity for all of us. And we have to turn that opportunity into reality. And that’s happening now.
[Robert Dutt]: Moving on to partner-branded services – this is one that really caught my interest, and I think is going to catch the interest of a lot of folks, especially those who are in the MSP mode. Can you walk me through what it actually looks like for a Canadian MSP? They’re putting their name on a support offering, HPE is the invisible backbone. What does it look like in terms of the customer call, billing, and what does HPE get out of participating in this model where it’s the partner and not HPE that’s the primary brand?
[Jeremiah Jenson]: First of all, a clear thing with partners is they have a level of customer understanding – or I often say they have a level of customer intimacy that I could never replace and don’t intend to. So partner-branded services really helps us service the customer faster with a very valuable piece of that equation, and that’s the partner. So allowing a partner to take first-call support, first-call services, and to be able to capitalize on that customer knowledge and that depth of history and customer intimacy that they have – what we have found is that just produces a better customer outcome. So E+ in North America is one of those first partners that has taken advantage of this, and we’re really just enthused and excited about what’s coming through at the customer level. That’s the piece that I want to put front and center – customers have a need for a faster answer, a faster path to resolution, and partners are part of that. And so this acceleration of this program is really helping.
From a Canadian standpoint, look, who knows more about the Canadian market than a Canadian partner serving a Canadian customer and understanding their requirements? I often say Canadians have forgotten more about Canada than I’ll ever know, and I have a tremendous amount of respect for that. So the opportunity to deploy that knowledge front and center with a customer – no better opportunity. And it plays especially important, I think, in a market like Canada where there are so many differences regionally. In any large market there are regional differences, but there are real and meaningful differences here.
[Robert Dutt]: Yeah, I mean, let’s not pretend that the United States and Canada are identical, because they’re not. There are nuances, there are real and meaningful differences.
[Jeremiah Jenson]: And whether that’s compliance or any other kind of nuance, those differences are real at the customer level. And so the opportunity for partners to service customers with that level of knowledge – whether that’s compliance or regional nuance – that speaks to the power of the channel. And it’s phenomenal to see this announcement come to life and see partners taking advantage of it.
[Robert Dutt]: So how quickly do you anticipate it expanding to a broader number of potential service provider partners who are in that partner-branded services mode with you?
[Jeremiah Jenson]: I think it really is incumbent upon us to be very deliberate about what we build with our partners. I think in the past, sometimes partners get very focused on what can I sell today. And I think the opportunity with partner-branded services is how can we build something that outlasts all of us? How can we build a foundation of services? Because once you have that services capability and once you are effectively taking that first call and you are not only the provider but you are the solution – you are the solution for when things need to be fixed – that stickiness becomes very real. So we have to really think about what do we want to build? What is the services capability that we’re building together? And from that, that will create the pace at which we grow. But there are very large partners, very sizable MSPs, as well as what I would call MSPs who have very specialized capability that want to take advantage of this.
[Robert Dutt]: Moving on to storage – you’ve got the 15% front-end takeout rebate on top of existing rebates for competitive storage displacement. That’s a notable number. How should a Canadian reseller read that? I’ve heard that it runs at least through calendar year, but is this a period-based incentive or is it a signal that HPE is ready to play offense on storage for the long haul?
[Jeremiah Jenson]: It’s the latter. We are very much on the front foot when it comes to our storage portfolio. The product is fantastic. The storage portfolio specifically is in a place that I’ve never seen it before in decades of history. And that’s phenomenal. And the results we have seen over the past several quarters – it has been several quarters of really good growth and great success here in North America. And now is the time to pour gasoline on that fire. So this is a signal of not only our existing success, but how can we be even more on the front foot and take that to our partners who want to lean in with us. Now is the time to lean in with storage and our hybrid cloud offerings and really accelerate – how we go and acquire new customers and grow that base for the future. There’s a phenomenal opportunity with our product, but there’s a bigger opportunity in what customers are demanding, and we have the right product to meet it.
[Robert Dutt]: So November 1, one experience. That’s a big promise. We’ve got one portal, one deal registration system, one development fund. There’s a lot in there. For a partner who’s been managing different login credentials and different MDF processes, what’s actually noticeably different on November 2 in terms of their relationship and running their business with HPE?
[Jeremiah Jenson]: Yeah. I mean, I say this a lot because it’s real – I spend an inordinate amount of my time thinking about how do we simplify? How do we make ourselves easier to do business with? And so one experience is really about making it easier for partners to engage, to move faster, and to grow at an accelerated rate. And it matters because partners want speed, but speed comes from consistency and getting rid of some of the administrative overhead that is in place. So this is all about reducing friction in the places where partners feel it the most. Having to log out of one website and into another – common tools, common onboarding processes, contracting, deal flow, deal registration, things along those lines. This is really all about making it easier for partners to engage and easier for us to do business together. It pains me and keeps me awake at night if they’ve got to log into multiple websites – it’s just time. It’s impacting the time in which we can get to customers and service customers. So that’s what they should expect: a common set of tools, common contracting, common deal flow, easier to engage, and moving faster with HPE.
[Robert Dutt]: We’ve heard that this is going to be AI-enabled in terms of the partner portal and partner tools and experiences. Can you tell me a little bit about what that means today, as well as – without giving away too much of the secret sauce – what you’re thinking about in terms of what AI-enabling the partner experience is going to look like for your partners in the long run?
[Jeremiah Jenson]: Yeah, I mean, we’re a leader in the AI market and we have a long history of drinking our own champagne, as we talked about earlier. And so there’s an opportunity to deploy some of our AI tools in customer- and partner-facing experiences – whether that’s websites and things along those lines. As an example – and I don’t have a very explicit example in terms of this specific process – but one of the mental models that we have is: sometimes you’ve got to send an email to an email alias when it’s a repetitive process, things along those lines. Agentic AI and the AI tools and infrastructure that we produce for customers every day can help solve those questions immediately. So how do we put some of our AI tools into that workflow and solve at pace and do things much, much faster – so we’re not waiting on someone to type up a response from some anonymous alias. And while that’s a very basic example, you begin to think about other opportunities in terms of repetitive processes that drive partners crazy. How can we simplify and make things move faster?
[Robert Dutt]: Yeah, I was going to say – it may be a basic example, but you can imagine how that multiplies over time and over opportunities and over deals when it’s repeated again and again.
[Jeremiah Jenson]: It’s really about solving real problems. We can talk high and mighty and pie in the sky and AI this and AI that, but it’s really about what, at the end of the day, some human sitting in front of a desk is experiencing. It’s solving real-world problems with technology and capability. And it’s that real-world approach to the business that we’re taking.
[Robert Dutt]: On the distribution landscape – we heard recently you’ve named TD SYNNEX and Ingram Micro as the two globals with local augmentation. Obviously those two are very strong players in the Canadian market. But how does distribution look now in Canada, and how do you see it looking in terms of additional niche or boutique players to round out the strategy?
[Jeremiah Jenson]: So distribution is a core part of how we go to market and a core part of our overall channel strategy. The global announcement of Ingram Micro and TD SYNNEX – of course they’re both headquartered here in North America and we do a lot of business with them, and we’re excited about the plans that we have together. Stay tuned. You’ll see additional announcements in terms of how we think about that landscape and how we’re accelerating with our other distribution partners. So more to come there in the very near term.
[Robert Dutt]: All right. A teaser. I love that. Last one for me. There’s a lot in these announcements and partners are going to be reading a lot of headlines, listening to a lot of stuff – probably have already, as they’re listening to this. But what’s the one big thing you would most want a Canadian partner – reseller, MSP, wherever they fit in the equation – to actually understand and act on from what HPE is announcing at Partner Growth Summit?
[Jeremiah Jenson]: I’ll answer it this way – just who I am as a person, just my personal hobby. I love long-distance trail running. I’m an ultramarathoner. And I always think about: can I run one more mile? And I’m not saying that everybody should go out there and sign up for a 50-mile or 100-mile race, but I do think about, can I run one more mile? And so to bring that back to what is my ask of whether you’re an MSP or partner or something along those lines – with a portfolio of our size, what’s one more thing that you can take to your customer? Is that data center networking? Is that moving from Juniper into the wireless space with some of our Aruba products? Is that compute? Is it that I’ve sold storage, but now I want to talk about data protection with Zerto – can I do one more? And so as we think about Discover and the announcements we’ve made this week and the momentum we have with our portfolio, that’s what I want to ask. Can you do one more? What is that one more thing that we might be able to do together that will help you grow your business, help your customer solve another business problem, and help us accomplish our mutual goals?
[Robert Dutt]: All right. I think that’s a reasonable ask. I appreciate you taking the time. Once again, thanks for walking us through some of the details of what was announced at Partner Growth Summit, and have a great rest of the week.
[Jeremiah Jenson]: Always good to talk to you, Rob. Thanks.
[Robert Dutt]: There you have it – Jeremiah Jenson, vice president of North America Channel and Partner Ecosystem at HPE. I’d like to thank Jeremiah for his time and for a pretty candid look at how HPE is thinking about the partner community as these organizations – HPE and Juniper – settle into one.
Thank you for listening. There’s a lot to process in these announcements, but the thing I keep coming back to is the frame that Jeremiah closed with – the “one more mile” idea. He’s an ultramarathoner, and the ask he’s making of the Canadian channel isn’t to boil the ocean. It’s to ask yourself if there’s one more HPE product that belongs in front of your customers. Data center networking if you’re already doing compute. Zerto if you’re already doing virtualization. Partner-branded services if you’re an MSP looking to own more of the customer relationship. One more mile, compounded across a partner base, is how the power of one actually becomes real.
We’re going to have a lot more from HPE Discover through the rest of the week, including an on-site recap coming later. So keep an eye on your feed. You’ll find the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and most of the major podcast directories. And if you’re finding the show useful, a rating or a review genuinely helps other people in the Canadian channel find us.
Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.
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Today’s headline news for Canadian IT solution providers:
HPE’s Partner Growth Summit served as the channel keynote kickoff for HPE Discover 2026 in Las Vegas on Monday, organized around the company’s “Power of One” theme – the ongoing effort to unify its HPE, Aruba, and Juniper channel organizations under a single program, experience, and portfolio. The deeper programmatic story is covered in this week’s In The Channel with Jeremiah Jenson. But Monday’s keynote also delivered a package of near-term operational and commercial changes that matter to Canadian solution providers right now.
Quote validity extends to 30 days, effective June 16th. HPE is moving its standard quote validity from 14 to 30 days for compute, storage, and GreenLake. Partner operations lead Mark Bakker explained it plainly: extreme commodity cost volatility in the first half of fiscal 2026 forced the two-week window. That’s moderating enough now for HPE to stand behind pricing for a full month. HPE also introduced Smart Choice SKUs – competitively priced configurations aligned to best available supply – and Smart Models in OCA, workload-specific templates updated continuously against current inventory.
Two new financing tools. HPE Financial Services announced a 150% increase in approved partner credit lines to support larger deal proposals. The company also highlighted its 90/9 offer – no payments for 90 days, then 1% monthly payments for nine months – which has been in market since earlier this year and is particularly relevant now for customers whose budget cycle doesn’t align with their deployment timeline.
Channel-only territory expands significantly. Building on last year’s VM Essentials channel-only move – which HPE says generated 700+ new partners and 1,300+ certifications in twelve months – HPE is adding HPE Private Cloud PC 3000, HPE Private Cloud PC 1000, and HPE Zerto software to the channel-only list. Partners earning the private cloud virtualization competency can also apply for free three-year VME licenses to deploy internally, and a new migration assistance program defers VME license costs until customer workloads are actually running on HPE virtual machines, eliminating the “double bullet” cost of mid-migration transition.
Partner Branded Services: the managed services bridge. Simon Ewington, HPE’s senior vice president of worldwide channel and partner ecosystem, used the keynote to formally highlight Partner Branded Services – a model enabling eligible partners to sell and deliver HPE infrastructure support under their own brand, with HPE providing break-fix, parts logistics, and engineering support invisibly in the background. Ewington called it “the bridge that many of you have been waiting for to managed services.” The program launched in April and is actively onboarding its first large partner.
Competitive storage incentives start July 1st. A new competitive storage takeout program offers 15% front-end margin on top of existing rebates for deals that displace a competitor’s storage product.
Partner Day One lands November 1st. HPE is branding its unified experience rollout “Partner Day One” – a single portal, digitized onboarding under three days, unified deal registration, and one MDF program, all effective November 1st. Mark Bakker’s operations team has already consolidated four quoting tools into one, cut support response times from 40 to 8 seconds, and improved payment accuracy from 84% to 98% – operational gains that will translate into the partner-facing portal experience later this year.
For the full conversation on Juniper integration, channel-only strategy, and what the unified program means for Canadian partners, listen to this week’s In The Channel with HPE’s Jeremiah Jenson.
Read Full TranscriptThis episode of The Buzz is brought to you by HPE Discover 2026. HPE Discover runs June 15 to 18 at The Venetian in Las Vegas. Discover what’s next at hpe.com/discover.
Welcome to The Buzz from ChannelBuzz.ca, I’m Robert Dutt, today is Tuesday, June 16th, and here’s what’s happening in the channel today.
HPE’s Partner Growth Summit in Las Vegas wrapped yesterday as the channel kickoff for HPE Discover 2026, and there was enough ground covered in the keynote that I’m going to take a bit more time than usual today. If you work with HPE at all – compute, storage, networking, virtualization – there are several things in here that affect how you do business with them, and some of them take effect today.
HPE is extending its standard quote validity from 14 days to 30 days for compute, storage, and GreenLake, effective today.
The backstory matters here. HPE’s partner operations lead Mark Bakker was direct on stage about why quotes were shortened in the first place. Commodity costs went through a period of extreme volatility in the first half of this year – HPE literally couldn’t hold pricing for more than two weeks. That volatility has moderated enough now that HPE is willing to stand behind a full 30-day quote. For partners who’ve been managing customer decision timelines that rarely fit a two-week window – which is most of them – this means fewer expired quotes, less rework, and more actual selling time.
HPE also introduced two supply chain tools aimed at reducing the gap between what you quote and what actually ships: Smart Choice SKUs, which are competitively priced configurations built around best available inventory; and Smart Models in OCA, which are preconfigured workload-specific templates that update continuously against current supply.
On the financing side, HPE Financial Services had two items. The first is new: a 150% increase in approved credit lines for partners, giving you more headroom to propose and win larger configurations. The second is a tool that’s been available since earlier this year but is worth highlighting in this context: the 90/9 offer. No payments for 90 days, then 1% monthly payments for nine months after that. The pitch is straightforward – customers who are committed to buying but whose budget cycle doesn’t match their deployment timeline now have a bridge.
HPE continues to expand what it routes exclusively through the partner channel, and the additions this year are significant.
Some quick context: last year at Discover, HPE moved VM Essentials – its virtualization platform – to channel-only. The results they reported Monday: more than 700 additional partners are now selling VME software compared to twelve months ago, and over 1,300 partners have taken the associated certifications since November. HPE is treating those numbers as validation and doubling down.
This year’s channel-only additions: HPE Private Cloud PC 3000, HPE Private Cloud PC 1000, and HPE Zerto software. That’s a meaningful slice of HPE’s private cloud and disaster recovery portfolio now locked to the channel. If you’re in the business of helping customers modernize workloads and protect data – the territory most MSPs already play in – HPE is putting margin and exclusivity behind you in those conversations.
Two more items in this space. For partners who want to actually deploy VME inside their own IT environment before taking it to customers, HPE is offering free three-year software licenses – nominal support charge only – to approximately 600 partners who earn the private cloud virtualization competency this year. That’s HPE backing partners to practice what they preach. And for customers who are hesitating on VME because they’re still mid-migration from another hypervisor, there’s now a migration assistance program that defers VME software license costs until workloads are actually running on HPE virtual machines. It eliminates what one speaker described as the “double bullet” – paying for two platforms at the same time during a transition. That’s a real barrier removed.
This one will resonate most with MSPs – and with partners thinking seriously about becoming one.
HPE has launched Partner Branded Services. Eligible partners can now sell and deliver HPE infrastructure support entirely under their own brand. HPE stays invisible, providing on-site break-fix, parts logistics, and deeper engineering support through a channel-only backing arrangement. The partner is the customer’s first call. The partner manages the relationship. The partner books the recurring revenue.
Simon Ewington, HPE’s senior vice president of worldwide channel and partner ecosystem, was explicit about the intent. He called it “the bridge that many of you have been waiting for to managed services.” That’s not spin – it’s HPE publicly acknowledging that its partners’ business models are shifting toward services-led, and building commercial infrastructure around that shift rather than working against it. The program launched quietly in April. HPE is onboarding its first large partner this week.
Starting July 1st, HPE is launching a competitive storage takeout program. Partners who displace a competitor’s storage product will receive 15% front-end margin on top of existing rebates. It’s targeted, it’s aggressive, and it’s designed specifically to push partners into competitive accounts rather than just protect existing HPE business.
Last item, a bit more forward-looking. HPE is calling its unified experience rollout “Partner Day One,” landing November 1st.
What that means in practice: a single partner portal covering the full HPE, Aruba, and Juniper portfolio. A fully digitized onboarding and contracting process, with enrollment time dropping from weeks to under three days. Unified deal registration. A single MDF program spanning the full portfolio.
Mark Bakker, who leads the operations team building all of this, shared some numbers that give you a concrete sense of where the backend is already heading. His team has consolidated four separate quoting and pricing tools into one. AI-assisted support response times have dropped from 40 seconds to 8 seconds. Partner compensation payment accuracy has improved from 84% to 98%. Those are internal numbers today – but they’re the foundation for what partners will start experiencing directly through the portal starting November 1st.
For the full picture on what HPE’s “Power of One” strategy actually means for your business – and there’s considerably more to it than what I’ve covered here – check out today’s In The Channel. It’s part two of my conversation with Jeremiah Jenson, vice president of North America channel and partner ecosystem at HPE, recorded this week at Discover.
Jenson walks through the Juniper integration in detail: how partner tiers are mapping across programs when everything merges November 1st, what the unified compensation structure looks like, and which Juniper specializations convert to HPE competencies. He also gets into the philosophy behind the channel-only decisions and what HPE sees as the biggest cross-portfolio opportunity for partners heading into fiscal 2027. If you’re evaluating your HPE relationship heading into the second half of the year – whether you’re deep in compute, just starting to look at networking, or somewhere in between – that episode is worth your time.
That’s how we’re seeing the headlines from HPE Discover. I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, thanks for listening. Have a great day.
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Jeremiah Jenson, vice president of North Amiercan channels at HPE
HPE Discover 2026 is underway in Las Vegas this week – June 15-18 at the Venetian Convention and Expo Center – and by Jeremiah Jenson’s account, it’s the biggest Discover yet. The event is oversubscribed, with partner demand he describes as unlike anything HPE has seen before.
Jenson is HPE’s vice president of North America channel, overseeing partner strategy across the United States and Canada. We sat down with him ahead of the show opening to preview the event for Canadian partners – whether they’re on the ground in Vegas or following along from home.
The headline theme of Discover 2026 is “architecting AI, starting with the network.” CEO Antonio Neri’s keynote frames that out on Tuesday morning, and it’s a deliberate positioning: the network isn’t the last thing you figure out when deploying AI, it’s the foundation that determines whether AI delivers real outcomes or stays a proof of concept. For channel partners, Jenson says that framing opens up more strategic conversations with customers around readiness, performance, and security.
On the partner side, the week kicks off with the Partner Growth Summit on Monday – a dedicated partner day before the main conference begins. This year’s theme is “The Power of One”: one portfolio, one program, one integrated experience through HPE’s Partner Ready Vantage. Jenson sees it as a signal of HPE’s direction on program simplification and consolidation.
Jenson’s advice to partners watching this week: don’t try to absorb everything. Pick one area – data center networking, cloud and hybrid cloud storage, or AI acceleration – and go deep on it.
A follow-up episode focused on the specific partner program announcements out of Discover is coming later this week.
Read Full TranscriptRobert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last sixteen years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca and your host for the show.
HPE Discover 2026 opens this morning in Las Vegas, running from June 15 to 18 at the Venetian Convention and Expo Center, and if you’re on the ground in Vegas today you’re probably settling in to the Partner Growth Summit as you’re listening to this.
The headline theme this year is “architecting AI, starting with the network.” HPE’s Antonio Neri takes the main stage tomorrow morning with that framing, and it’s a deliberate point of view. The network isn’t the last thing you figure out when you’re deploying AI – in HPE’s view, it’s the foundation. That’s worth unpacking.
Joining me today is Jeremiah Jenson, vice president of North America Channel at HPE, who oversees partner strategy across the United States and Canada. I chatted with Jeremiah ahead of the show, so nothing embargoed is in here – none of the announcements are really covered. We’ll get to those in future episodes. This one is about setting the stage: who’s there, what the big themes are, how the week flows, and what Canadian partners following along from home should be paying attention to.
Let’s get right into it – my chat with Jeremiah Jenson.
Jeremiah, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it.
Jeremiah Jenson: Yeah, thanks Robert.
Robert Dutt: So for listeners who may not know you, can you give us a quick rundown of your role at HPE, and especially what that means in the context of an event like Discover this week?
Jeremiah Jenson: Yeah, well, I lead HPE’s channel strategy across North America – both the United States and Canada – and that gives me a very close, direct view into what partners care about heading into Discover. My role is really to understand what partners care about and how to help them grow. I have responsibility across the full portfolio of Hewlett Packard Enterprise – compute, our hybrid IT business, all the associated software components, the networking business, and the services pieces as well. I really like to help connect our strategy to partners for ultimate delivery to customers.
Robert Dutt: Let’s start with the event itself. It’s your flagship event, and it’s a big one. What does the scale look like, and particularly from where you’re sitting and what you’re responsible for, what kind of partner presence are you expecting – both in general and on the Canadian side? Do you have a sense of what the Canadian contingent looks like, both on-site in Vegas and watching virtually?
Jeremiah Jenson: Yeah, I mean, it’s our flagship event and it’s always a major moment for the partner ecosystem across our portfolio, which includes networking, cloud, and AI. Massive event – and I would just say, first off, we’re oversubscribed. Demand for the event has been unlike anything we’ve ever seen. I have a fair bit of tenure with HPE and there is just a tremendous amount of interest, and I think that stems from the themes we’re bringing forward at Discover – helping not only our customers but partners shape and plan for the upcoming months. It’s a big moment for the HPE ecosystem.
Canadian partners play a huge role. They’re a huge part of North America, a huge part of the market. Canada is a differentiated market, and I think they’re paying quite a bit of attention to this event because it helps them shape where they want to focus next – where do they want to make that next investment, what is the next opportunity for them to help serve their customers.
Robert Dutt: I don’t want to get ahead of any of the announcements to come, but Antonio Neri’s keynote on Tuesday is publicly framed as “architecting AI starts with your network” – and that feels like a pretty deliberate point of view. It’s not just saying AI is everywhere, it’s saying the network is where AI actually gets built, actually runs, actually lives. What’s driving that framing from HPE’s perspective, and how does it translate into what channel partners are being asked to bring to their customers?
Jeremiah Jenson: AI is a huge opportunity – it’s part of every conversation, it’s part of everyday life at this point. And what we’re seeing is that customers need the right foundation in place to move from interest to real outcomes. Now is the time to build that underlying foundation, and AI success really depends on the quality, security, and intelligence of the underlying infrastructure – and in particular, the networking. Whether that’s networking for AI or AI for networking, for partners that creates a bigger opportunity to lead conversations around readiness, security, and performance.
Robert Dutt: How have you seen that conversation around AI with partners evolve since the last time HPE brought partners together for Discover?
Jeremiah Jenson: If anything, the AI opportunity has accelerated. In years past there may have been questions about where AI would ultimately land, what the impact would ultimately be. And I think the thing that has changed – or maybe the right word is accelerated – is that AI isn’t a future opportunity anymore, it is a current opportunity. It is happening now, and now is the time to talk to your customers about the business outcome they intend to drive with AI. And that has just accelerated, whether that’s in networking as we discussed, whether it’s in some of our storage capabilities that we’ve brought to market, or generalized compute or high-performance compute. The opportunity has done nothing but accelerate.
Robert Dutt: Partners are kicking off the week with the Partner Growth Summit today – later in the day on Monday – before the main conference even starts, and the general session theme is “The Power of One.” What’s the thinking behind having that dedicated partner day, and what does it mean in terms of how you’re trying to communicate with the channel right now?
Jeremiah Jenson: I love Partner Growth Summit because, first, it speaks to how sincere we are about partnerships – partners are part of our DNA, they’re part of who we are and how we go to market. The Power of One theme is really the emphasis on one portfolio, one program, and one integrated experience through Partner Ready Vantage. It’s a signal about where we’re going – with a portfolio of our size and a channel of our size, we’re on a constant quest for simplification. Partner Growth Summit is really a dedicated moment for partners to focus on what HPE’s strategy means to them, how they can implement that strategy within their business, and it’s about making HPE easier to work with, more profitable to grow with, and more efficient to operate within.
Robert Dutt: Certainly the idea of having a partner conference attached to a big customer-centric event like Discover is common practice across the industry. But it’s interesting that instead of “partner summit,” “partner conference,” or “partner day” – the names you see elsewhere – it seems quite intentional to have the word “growth” in Partner Growth Summit. Can you speak to that decision?
Jeremiah Jenson: Absolutely. Partners are powering our growth – they’re part and parcel to who we are, and how and where we’re growing. While dedicated partner days might in some cases be fairly standard, ours is very deliberate. We start with the partner strategy, from there into the broader company strategy, and then into deeper technical and customer conversations. From my standpoint, that growth element starts with the partner – painting the areas of strategic growth and strategic investment, where we are going together as one, in the markets that we want to help take advantage of.
Robert Dutt: Walk us through how the week actually plays out for someone on the ground here in Vegas. We start off Monday with the Partner Growth Summit, the main conference runs Tuesday through Thursday – what’s the rhythm and shape of the week, and what should people be watching for as it unfolds?
Jeremiah Jenson: So the week starts with Partner Growth Summit on Monday – that starts with the partner strategy, how we’re simplifying and consolidating our programs, driving efficiency, and presenting real growth opportunities, and that’s directly linked to the following days. That goes right into the broader company strategy: CEO keynote Tuesday, CTO general session Wednesday. Then the showcase and one-on-one meetings throughout. What you see is that move from partner strategy to broader company strategy and then into deeper technical and customer conversations with individual bespoke meetings throughout.
The other piece I’d highlight is that customers and partners have the opportunity to follow along remotely, so the key there is to focus on the themes, the keynotes, and the signals around where HPE is investing. And it all wraps up Wednesday night – for those who are at least in Vegas – at Allegiant Stadium. A big celebration night with our customers, our partners, and the broader HPE ecosystem, with Steve Aoki and Imagine Dragons headlining that evening. A big send-off for everyone.
Robert Dutt: Pulling back the lens to Canada specifically – you’re running North America Channel. What can you tell me about what the conversation with Canadian partners looks like heading into this show? Where is the Canadian partner community with HPE right now, and is there anything distinctive about what they should be watching for this week at Discover?
Jeremiah Jenson: It’s a great question, because the Canadian channel partner ecosystem is one that is distinct and unique, but also very deliberate and focused on customer outcomes. I always really appreciate that about that market.
Discover is both a strategy event – in terms of where are we investing, what are the strategic areas and customer opportunities – and a business event: where is demand moving, how are those themes translating into opportunity and profitability? Some of the areas I’d draw their attention to: certainly networking, and in particular data center networking – there’s a huge opportunity there with what’s happening around networking for AI. I’d also call their attention to our cloud offerings and sovereign cloud offerings, which are particularly important for a lot of Canadian businesses and Canadian partners. We’re seeing a tremendous amount of opportunity around sovereign cloud, whether that’s in the Canadian public sector or some of the other businesses we historically serve or are targeting in Canada. They’re very focused on the deliberate opportunity with their customers, and the real question is how do we translate those strategic areas into real business, real profitability, and real growth.
Robert Dutt: It’s interesting – it sounds like you’re describing the Canadian channel as sort of ahead of the curve, if anything, on selling on outcomes. That’s obviously been a focus for more than a year now. Sometimes I think the Canadian market writ large gets painted with a brush of being a little conservative in terms of adopting technology, and maybe that focus on outcomes is a way of managing that – getting through to customers who don’t necessarily want to be first out of the gate, but want something that’s proven and ready to go.
Jeremiah Jenson: Yeah, for me, I wouldn’t use the word “conservative.” I would use the word “intentional.” The Canadian partners I do business with are very exciting and forward-thinking, but intentional. They’re close with their customers – they have a level of customer intimacy that I’m often impressed with – and they’re very focused on where they can add value and help customers accomplish their business goals. So conservative is not a word I would use. They’re just very forward-thinking and intentional.
Robert Dutt: Last one – sort of a two-header, one from your perspective and one from a partner perspective. You’ve covered some of this, but just to narrow it down: if I’m a Canadian partner heading to Vegas or following along online, what’s the one thing you’d make sure you walk away from Discover this week understanding? And from your perspective, what does a successful week look like for you?
Jeremiah Jenson: If I’m a partner about to watch Discover – either in person or following along online – I would challenge yourself to personalize it: where’s the next growth opportunity for me? Hewlett Packard Enterprise offers such a huge portfolio, so the question is, what is the next opportunity I can take to my customer or customer base? I’ll point out a couple of very strategic areas: data center networking, and how we’re bringing that strong networking portfolio together; our cloud offerings, hybrid cloud software, and storage; and what we’re doing in AI, where we’re seeing massive acceleration. Pick one, and challenge yourself personally – where can I invest in myself that will help me produce a better customer outcome for the customers I serve? Pick one and be really deliberate about how you can understand that more deeply.
And for me – what does success look like coming away from this year? I want clarity of message to be impressed upon the entire North America Channel, and probably most importantly, the Canadian channel. How do we make this real for Canadian partners in their differentiated market? Clarity of message, and making sure we all walk away with the same mission, one goal, and one very clear definition of success.
Robert Dutt: Big goals for a big week. Good luck – I hope it’s a very successful Discover for you.
Jeremiah Jenson: Thanks so much for the opportunity. I’m looking forward to seeing everybody in Las Vegas.
Robert Dutt: There you have it – Jeremiah Jenson from HPE. I’d like to thank Jeremiah for his time.
Just a heads up – this is part one. We’ll be back later this week with another conversation, as Jeremiah and I are going to talk a little bit after the Partner Growth Summit’s main stage so we can get a look at the specific partner program announcements coming out of Discover. Keep an ear out for that, and of course we’ll have the news breakdown tomorrow morning on The Buzz as well.
Thanks as always for listening. A couple of things I want to leave you with from this conversation. First: the “networking for AI – or AI for the network” framing. The argument HPE is making is that the network is the enabling layer for everything your customers are trying to do with AI. That’s a positioning opportunity worth thinking about in your own customer conversations, wherever you sit in the stack. Second: Jeremiah’s challenge to partners watching or attending Discover this week – don’t try to absorb everything. Pick one area, whether that’s data center networking, cloud and hybrid cloud storage, or AI acceleration, and go deep on it. That’s how you turn a week of announcements into something you can actually bring back to your business. I thought that was good advice for following any big vendor event.
If you’re enjoying the podcast, please do subscribe or follow wherever you listen. We’re available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and most of the usual places. And if you can leave a rating or review, those are always appreciated.
Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.
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Today’s headline news for Canadian IT solution providers:
HPE Discover 2026 kicks off: HPE Discover 2026 opens today at The Venetian in Las Vegas with the Partner Growth Summit, the partner-exclusive day that precedes the main conference. The General Session – “The Power of One” – is led by HPE channel head Simon Ewington and focuses on HPE’s unified partner strategy under the HPE Partner Ready Vantage program, spanning networking, cloud, and AI. This is the first Partner Growth Summit since HPE’s $14 billion Juniper Networks acquisition closed, and HPE is presenting partners with a fully unified portfolio story for the first time. ChannelBuzz.ca is on the ground all week: Tuesday’s Buzz will feature a full Partner Growth Summit recap, and In The Channel this week features a multi-part series with Jeremiah Jenson, HPE’s vice president of North America channel and partner ecosystem, covering the Discover announcements in depth.Cato Networks launches integration hub: Cato Networks has launched a new Technology Partner Program and a Platform Integration Hub, debuting with more than 100 out-of-the-box integrations with third-party security, cloud, and networking solutions. The SASE provider says the program is designed to simplify how partners and customers connect Cato’s platform with existing enterprise technology stacks. The move is significant for Canadian MSPs and MSSPs: a robust integration catalog reduces the custom API work that often slows deployment and increases delivery costs, making it easier to position Cato alongside the broader tools in a customer’s security environment.Checkmarx flags CISO compliance pressures: A new 2026 Future of Application Security Report from Checkmarx, based on a survey of more than 2,000 developers and CISOs, found that 95 per cent of CISOs report being pressured to suppress or delay compliance-related security issues when business deadlines loom. The research also highlights how AI-generated code is expanding the attack surface faster than many security teams can manage. For Canadian MSSPs, the data reinforces the value of independent, third-party security oversight – and the case for structured application security as a managed service.Dataminr and TD SYNNEX partner on AI cyber defense: Dataminr has signed a strategic distribution agreement with TD SYNNEX, making Dataminr for Cyber Defense available to more than 35,000 North American resellers. The platform combines external risk signals with internal telemetry to help security teams prioritize threats in real time. For Canadian partners already working with TD SYNNEX, the deal adds an AI-driven threat intelligence offering to the distributor’s security portfolio at a time when customers are asking for earlier warning around cyber risk.inforcer launches Microsoft 365 TDR platform: inforcer has launched inforcer Threat Detection and Response, a new platform that gives MSPs a single environment to manage detection, incident response, and reporting across the full Microsoft 365 estate – including Entra, Defender, Purview, Teams, and SharePoint. According to the company, the platform’s advantage is its existing policy and configuration context for each tenant, which it says allows the detection engine to separate real threats from alert noise. The product launched in early access at Pax8 Beyond last week.ConnectSecure introduces Patch 360: ConnectSecure has launched Patch 360, a patch management solution designed specifically for MSPs. According to the company, the platform gives MSPs more control over patch prioritization, testing, and approval workflows, and is designed to reduce deployment risk while accelerating patching across operating systems and third-party applications.NetRise launches Discovery Partner Program: Software supply chain security firm NetRise has launched the Discovery Partner Program for VARs, MSSPs, distributors, and systems integrators. The program provides partners access to the NetRise Platform, which analyzes compiled software artifacts – including binaries, firmware, and containers – to identify components and risks that may not appear in source-code scans or vendor-provided SBOMs. NetRise is positioning the program as a way for partners to address growing customer demand for independent software supply chain verification.Read Full TranscriptThis episode of The Buzz is brought to you by HPE Discover 2026. HPE Discover runs June 15 to 18 at The Venetian in Las Vegas. Discover what’s next at hpe.com/discover.
Welcome to The Buzz from ChannelBuzz.ca, I’m Robert Dutt, today is Monday, June 15th, and here’s what’s happening in the channel today.
The biggest event on HPE’s calendar opens today at The Venetian Convention and Expo Center in Las Vegas, and ChannelBuzz.ca is on the ground for the full week. But before the main conference opens to the broader audience tomorrow, today belongs exclusively to the channel.
The HPE Partner Growth Summit – the partner-only day that kicks off Discover week – is underway as you’re hearing this. The centrepiece is the General Session called “The Power of One,” led by HPE channel head Simon Ewington alongside a lineup of HPE senior executives. The name captures the message HPE is sending its partner ecosystem heading into the back half of 2026: one comprehensive portfolio, one unified program under HPE Partner Ready Vantage, and one integrated experience across networking, cloud, and AI.
The afternoon breakout agenda is dense – covering GreenLake and hybrid cloud, Aruba networking with AI, monetizing accelerated compute and agentic workloads, and HPE’s evolving service provider story. It’s also worth noting the context: this is the first Partner Growth Summit since HPE’s $14 billion acquisition of Juniper Networks cleared regulatory review and officially closed. Partners are getting their first look at a fully unified networking and compute story from a company that can now tell it cleanly.
We’re bringing you the announcements as they happen all week.
In just a couple of hours on In The Channel, I’ll help you get ready for Discover, as I preview the event with the help of none other than Jeremiah Jenson, HPE’s vice president of North American channel and partner ecosystem.
Tomorrow on The Buzz, we’ll have all the news from Partner Growth Summit, and tomorrow’s In The Channel will also feature Jenson, as we take a deeper dive into the HPE’s partner programs and where he sees the biggest opportunities for the channel right now.
Be sure to stick with us all week as we bring you full coverage from Vegas.
Cato Networks is expanding its ecosystem with the launch of a new Technology Partner Program and a Platform Integration Hub. The SASE provider says the hub debuts with more than 100 integrations out of the box, offering streamlined connectivity with third-party security, cloud, and networking solutions. According to Cato, the program is designed to simplify how partners and customers integrate its platform with existing enterprise technology stacks, reducing friction and speeding up deployments.
A vendor-led integration effort at this scale matters for the channel. As enterprise environments grow more layered and complex, MSPs rely on platforms that connect cleanly to an existing stack rather than requiring months of custom API work. Out-of-the-box integrations mean less time troubleshooting compatibility and more time delivering security outcomes to clients. It’s worth noting that Cato’s channel chief said earlier this year that seven out of ten deals the company closes are already partner-led. A stronger integration story could deepen that dependence on the channel by making it easier for MSPs and MSSPs to position Cato alongside the other tools in a customer’s security stack.
A report released last week by application security vendor Checkmarx is putting hard numbers on a dynamic that security-focused channel partners have likely been seeing for some time. The 2026 Future of Application Security Report, based on a survey of more than 2,000 developers and CISOs, found that 95 per cent of CISOs say they have been pressured to suppress or delay compliance-related security issues when business deadlines loom. Compounding the problem: the adoption of AI-generated code is accelerating, which Checkmarx says is multiplying the attack surface in production environments faster than many security teams can manage.
The business case for external, independent security oversight has rarely been clearer. When internal security leaders are being overruled on vulnerability management, an MSP or MSSP operating as a neutral third party – accountable to security outcomes rather than product launch timelines – steps into a genuine gap. The data also validates the case for application security as a structured managed service. As AI-generated code becomes standard in the development pipeline, organizations that can’t close that gap internally will need to find a partner who can.
In Brief – Dataminr and TD SYNNEX have signed a distribution agreement that makes Dataminr for Cyber Defense available to more than 35,000 North American resellers through TD SYNNEX’s channel network.
Security vendor inforcer has launched inforcer Threat Detection and Response, a new platform designed to give MSPs a single environment to manage detection, incident response, and reporting for Microsoft 365.
ConnectSecure has introduced Patch 360, a patch management solution built specifically for MSPs that the company says reduces deployment risk while accelerating patching across operating systems and third-party applications.
NetRise has launched the Discovery Partner Program, targeting VARs, MSSPs, distributors, and systems integrators with software supply chain security capabilities built around compiled binary analysis rather than source code or vendor-provided SBOMs.
Full details and links in the show notes or the blog post.
That’s how we’re seeing the headlines today. I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, thanks for listening. Have a great day.
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Josh Singh, sales director at Turning Point Technology Services
Josh Singh didn’t arrive at Dell Technologies World simply as a partner – he arrived as someone who spent nearly eight years on the vendor side, in Dell sales roles, before crossing over to Turning Point as the company’s sales lead.
That dual perspective shapes everything about how Turning Point operates. The Vancouver-based solution provider, founded in 2012, runs exclusively on Dell in the data center – a deliberate, all-in single-vendor bet that Josh frames not as a constraint but as a competitive advantage. Nearly half of the team is ex-Dell, which means when a customer needs an answer fast, Turning Point knows exactly who to call inside Dell’s notoriously complex internal matrix. That navigational fluency, Josh argues, is the kind of differentiation that doesn’t show up in a spec sheet but shows up every time there’s urgency.
Turning Point recently formalized that depth by opening what Dell designates as its first official solution center in Canada, in their Vancouver office, giving the team and their clients hands-on access to the full portfolio – including the GB10 for deskside AI development.
On AI, Josh’s read is that the “AI factory” framing was right directionally but too large a first step for most of the Canadian market. Dell’s move toward more modular, consumable AI infrastructure – starting at one or two servers, proving a use case, then scaling – is what actually unlocks adoption for SMB customers. Small wins first, then the appetite for something bigger.
On security and resilience, Josh drew a clear line: backup is the last line of defense, and if that last line gets hit – or gets frozen by a ransomware insurance claim – you’re rebuilding from scratch. Dell’s Data Domain and its proprietary DDBoost protocol, alongside Veeam, form the core of what Turning Point puts in front of customers who need to actually recover, not just theoretically recover.
And rounding it out: the supply chain disruption, compounded by Broadcom‘s reshaping of the virtualization market, is forcing Canadian organizations to plan differently – more external awareness, more budget flexibility, earlier commitment. That’s a challenge across the industry, Josh notes. But for partners who can guide customers through it, it’s also an opening.
Read Full TranscriptRobert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last sixteen years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca, and your host for the show.
We’re continuing our series from Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas. This week, we’re deep on the partner perspective. Today’s guest brings a point of view you don’t usually get. Nearly a decade inside Dell Technologies, followed by a move to the partner side – specifically to a partner that has made one of the most deliberate, all-in single-vendor bets you’ll find in the Canadian channel.
Josh Singh leads the sales team at Turning Point Technology Services, a Vancouver-based solution provider founded in 2012 that operates exclusively on Dell in the data center. Not mostly Dell, not primarily Dell – exclusively. In a channel where diversification is almost reflexively treated as risk management, Turning Point went the other way, and they did it right at the beginning of Dell’s channel investment cycle, which turned out to be good timing.
Josh brings to that an unusual lens. He spent almost eight years in Dell’s sales roles, where he learned early that the channel was the key to his success, and that knowing how to navigate Dell’s internal matrix is an advantage that translates directly into faster, better outcomes for customers. Roughly half of Turning Point’s team is ex-Dell. They recently opened what Dell designates as its first official solution center in Canada, right there in their Vancouver office.
We talked about what it actually means to make the single-vendor bet and why it’s holding up. How the AI adoption conversation is changing for SMB customers who weren’t ready for the Dell AI Factory, but might be ready for something smaller. The security and data resilience story, and why backup shouldn’t be confused with business continuity. And what the supply chain situation, plus Broadcom’s disruption of the market, is doing to how customers have to plan.
Let’s get right into it. My chat with Josh Singh.
Josh, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it. I’m sure it’s been a busy week.
Josh Singh: It has been a busy week, and thanks for having me.
Robert Dutt: I guess to open it up, I want to start with a question that frames the perspective that you have at an event like this. Turning Point made the explicit call to go all-in on Dell on the infrastructure side, as I understand. A lot of partners diversify, carry multiple vendors, pick and choose their spots. What’s the logic behind that bet? What does a week like this one – where Dell’s making a lot of big moves around AI and the direction of the partner program and all that – feel like for a shop that’s tied its future to the Dell story?
Josh Singh: Very good question. I’ve been asked this numerous times, and it’s clear you’ve done your research on us. As you said, Robert, we are 100% Dell-exclusive in the data center. We do have other technologies that are complementary to Dell to give our clients an end-to-end ecosystem of technology, but we have doubled, tripled, and quadrupled down on Dell in the data center.
Turning Point was formed in 2012. Three founders – Lee, Sean, and Lauren – they came from a value-added reseller that sold a multitude of technologies. What they found out at the time was Dell had a portfolio that covered the end-to-end, especially in the data center. They branched out, all three of them from [Seven Group – verify company name], and they formed Turning Point. They just realized that Dell was at the beginning of their partner program. You’ll see a legacy fabric still embedded in some aspects of Dell Technologies where they still are partial to selling direct, but they have put a large amount of emphasis and investment in the channel over the last fifteen years. Turning Point was formed at the very beginning of that cycle. Since then, we have had no regrets. Dell has really come to the table as a really solid partner for us, allowing us to offer our clients the end-to-end data center strategy with Dell Technologies.
Robert Dutt: Your lens is unique too in that you have some time at Dell EMC – a viewpoint that a lot of partners don’t have in terms of having seen both sides of that fence, especially around the same vendor. What does that vendor-side time teach you about what Dell actually needs and wants from partners, and the reality of what Dell values in a partner?
Josh Singh: Yeah, that’s a really good question. I spent almost eight years at Dell in various sales roles. I learned very quickly, and early on in my Dell sales career, that the channel was the key to my success. The core reason why is I’m one individual. I have a solutions engineer, I have some overlays, and we manage a pretty large territory. I found that if I could just introduce a channel partner into the mix, I could lob it over the fence, play quarterback a little bit, get enough updates from the channel partner so I can update my leadership – because that’s really important. But I was able to scale my business significantly when I started to work with the channel.
Actually, Turning Point was one of those channel partners that I worked very closely with. So it’s a bit of a full circle moment for me to come back and I lead the sales team at Turning Point.
Robert Dutt: I have to imagine the Dell team is happy to have you, because clearly you’ve got that lens for exactly what they are looking for from you as a partner.
Josh Singh: Yeah, you know, every vendor has their own methodology and go-to-market culture. And so it does help. Actually, almost half of Turning Point’s team is ex-Dell Technologies employees. So that really gives us a unique perspective on how Dell wants to sell, how to update Dell, what’s important to them – what’s important to each level in the organization, from the sales rep to the manager, to the director, to the senior director, to the president. So we understand what is important to Dell Technologies.
And also, for our customers, it’s really important to pick the right technologies. But as we all know, this world is moving so fast and our customers need answers, and they need us to be on their requests in a really time-sensitive way. And so, typically with most vendors, you know your account executive and that individual is the key to the organization. When you come from Dell, you all of a sudden know how to navigate the matrix of Dell. And so when a customer has a question, you know exactly who to call. You can pick up the phone and get that answer in a much more time-sensitive way than navigating the matrix of Dell, which can be large and daunting.
Robert Dutt: So the secret sauce is as simple as spending more than half a decade inside the company itself.
Josh Singh: Simple. Yeah, easy peasy.
Robert Dutt: Big week for AI infrastructure here, and the Dell AI thesis – in so much as they’ve for a while been pulling on the idea of running AI models on-prem and on their infrastructure – was really amplified this week. Between that, desktop agentic AI, and the whole server and storage announcements underneath that, how does what was announced here resonate with what you guys are doing now and what your customers are asking for in terms of technology and how it’s delivered?
Josh Singh: Yeah, no, that’s a really good question. So I’ve been at Dell Technologies World almost every year, and I’m finding a big difference in the talk tracks this year. AI was a concept, it was a lot of buzzwords, it was a lot of fluff, to be honest with you as well. Everyone’s trying to chase what AI means to them. But I think this year is the first year where I started to see concepts materialize into practicality, whether it comes to data locality or infrastructure, or really how to go to the next steps of adopting AI.
The Canadian market is more pragmatic in their approach to adoption of technology – a little laggard, but not in a negative way, just a bit more conservative. And so what Dell Technologies World enables me and us to do is learn from people actually deploying AI in a much more meaningful and scalable way, for us to then be able to go back to Canada and start to talk about potential use cases, potential outcomes – because it is a very daunting topic, AI, sometimes it can be very overwhelming. So Dell Technologies World allows us to take some key facts about AI, bring them back into our local market, and then help them through that journey. And also, we’re meeting a lot of experts here as well. So it’s not just that we take these concepts and go back to Canada and try to do it ourselves – we’re really supported by the Dell channel ecosystem as well, to help our clients evolve in their AI journey.
Robert Dutt: What are the ideas that you’re hearing that specifically are making you think, “All right, this is going to change something in how we do business internally, or this is something I have to take to customer X, customer Y, customer Z,” because it maps to what they’re thinking about or where they should be thinking?
Josh Singh: Yeah. I think Dell, when they first wanted to address AI, they came out with the Dell AI Factory, and that was the message. So for a lot of Canadian organizations – which are largely SMB – adoption of an AI Factory is not consumable. It’s too large. They need to prove the model out. And then as soon as they get some small wins and successes, then they can scale out, because the smallest AI Factory was large for them.
And this is what we noticed, actually, in the last twelve months. So what Dell is doing now is making it a bit more economical, a bit more consumable – in the AI data platform, starting at one server, maybe two servers, a little PowerScale, and then using that to prove out a use case. And then once we prove out a use case, our customers say, “Hey, there’s really something to this AI thing that everybody keeps talking about.” Now they can really start to invest in a much more scalable, larger way.
So I think what Dell has released – very small products with the GB10 all the way up to that massive AI Factory – I mean, you saw when Michael Dell came out with Jensen, and he came out on stage and showed the entire portfolio of AI with a small little itty-bitty – not quite Raspberry Pi size, but not too far from that.
Robert Dutt: Really, yeah.
Josh Singh: And then having Jensen talk about the next model and how much more powerful that next model is – 100x, 100x, 100x, all the way up to that big AI Factory. So I think it just allows us to be a bit more practical in AI adoption rather than, “Mr. Customer, you have to adopt an AI Factory and that’s how you’re going to achieve AI.” So yeah.
Robert Dutt: Has some of the stuff they’re talking about – deskside AI, and specifically deskside agents – when you talk about a GB10 and the lower end of that, and even for more casual users, they would make the case down to the AI-enabled PC – how does that kind of map with how your customers are approaching AI, given that they aren’t going to be going out and buying even a bottom-end, full-on AI Factory experience as a day-one thing?
Josh Singh: Yeah. So at Turning Point, we have our data center – it’s actually a solution center. Dell has multiple across the world. There was none in Canada. So actually, with Dell leadership, we opened up Dell’s first solution center in Vancouver in our office. There was a big unveiling with the president of Dell Canada, all Dell leadership came out, and we stood up our solution center in conjunction with Dell.
So in that solution center, we have every piece of technology that Dell has – from PowerStore to PowerScale to ObjectScale. And we recently adopted the GB10 so we’re able to actually learn it, use practical use cases that actually help Turning Point, and then we can actually know how to speak to our customers as an adopter ourselves of the GB10 and some of the use cases. So anything from OpenClaw to using different language models and trying to help business productivity in that manner.
We serve customers in almost every single vertical. So we are working with healthcare – we’re doing some work right now with healthcare and looking at different use cases when it comes to X-rays and things like that. And then we also work with legal, looking at contractual ways to actually pull out data from thousands or millions of contracts to find commonalities to help an organization improve their operational efficiency.
So we’ve got our system in our solution center and we’re actually going through those use cases ourselves so that we can better serve our customers.
Robert Dutt: Given that you’ve got that data center and you’ve got that – choose your own analogy, eat your own dog food, drink your own champagne – approach to things, how have you guys approached AI internally, and what have you learned from how you’ve done that over the last year or two?
Josh Singh: So it’s a good question. Admittedly, we are a little bit at the beginning of that journey as well. So at Turning Point, as well as many of our customers, we were a bit overwhelmed with what AI meant. And so we have a practice when it comes to consultation to navigate what AI means for them. We do specific workshops to get a client to understand what they want out of AI and to conceptualize what AI is capable of doing. Now we’re really getting into how product is going to help that. So this is the next iteration of our AI journey to help our customers – going over and beyond the consultative nature of how AI works and models and inferencing and all those buzzwords that customers understand but don’t really understand. And then we’ll take whatever is the output from that workshop, and now with our solution center, we’re looking to actually take the results of that and try to replicate it using product and technology and actual outcome.
Robert Dutt: How often do you find that the outcome of the workshop – “this is what AI would do best for you” – maps with what they came in thinking AI would do best for them?
Josh Singh: It’s fascinating to see, actually, because in a lot of SMB organizations, there is no AI data scientist, there is no AI leader. So it’s essentially decision by committee. And that committee could be a storage admin, a network admin, a compute admin, an application admin, all the way up to leadership, cybersecurity, of course, for governance and compliance.
So seeing the different perspectives in these AI committees is really interesting – to watch the customer look at each other and each individual have their own expertise and go, “Oh, that’s interesting. Oh, that’s interesting. Why did I know you viewed the world through the lens of this?” And so coming in with these workshops, it’s typically not one outcome. It’s actually allowing a conversation between these committees at our customer organizations to really help push what AI means for each of those individuals. And then they branch out, actually not with Turning Point but internally, to foster more discussion. And then we come back in and help prod and push in certain areas with our AI knowledge.
But really, it’s more contextual. It’s not really about language models and things like that. It’s more about blue sky – like, what do we want to do? And what’s success for you, and what’s success for you, and what’s success for you? You’ll notice that success for each of these individuals is very different. So it’s been fascinating for us to watch.
Robert Dutt: It’s funny how often some of these things do – for all the technology behind it – come down to breaking down internal silos.
Josh Singh: Yes, yes, yeah. It’s a big part of our job. We help bridge technology to business, to legal, to cybersecurity, all the way up to business goals. So it’s really – it’s an honor to work in this industry and see those conversations play out.
Robert Dutt: We saw some fairly significant changes to the partner program and the rollout of the Modern Partner Platform – in terms of the agentic AI stuff that’s rolling into the partner portal and the partner experience, deal registration improvements, a whole bunch of things – especially where you guys are at as a boutique, exclusively Dell-focused operation on the data center side. What did you see in there that really caught your interest – “okay, that’s going to make my life better”? And in a more art-of-the-possible mode, what do you think AI appearing in partner platforms is going to mean in the long run in terms of what you can do, and what you can get from the overall experience you have with key vendors like Dell?
Josh Singh: Yeah, good question. So they haven’t fully rolled out the One Dell Way platform yet – they’re chipping away at it. First is with CSG on the client side, and they’re starting that internally. So we haven’t actually seen the result of a lot of that change yet. But I do know theoretically what the plan is for that, and I think it’s going to be really advantageous for us.
We are seeing a little bit of the benefits right now where human intervention – as vendors start to consolidate a bit more in sales and back office – the role of the sales rep is changing. There are a lot of tasks that that sales rep now has to do. And so they can sometimes be the bottleneck of operational efficiency. Let’s talk about deal registration, for example: they will get an email, and if they’re busy in meetings, by the time they get to that email and press OK, it could be twenty-four, it could be forty-eight hours, it could be seventy-two hours if that person’s out of town. So then you have to chase – and with how fast IT is moving with our customers, we can’t afford to wait that long.
So we’re starting to see a bit more intelligence and automation in how deal registrations are approved. It is a bit of a complicated topic because the channel relies on Dell’s ability to recognize who our accounts are, who our loyal customers are. And so there have been some conflicts since then. But I do see that Dell is on it and they are working it out. And I do love the transparency and honesty from Dell in owning up where mistakes were made and correcting them in the field. So I am seeing some AI adoption when it comes to the partner program, but it’s not fully rolled out yet. So I am looking forward to seeing what they come out with.
Robert Dutt: In terms of future state – whether it’s stuff that they’re already discussing or stuff that’s just possible but not yet on the roadmap – what would be the most impactful for you and your organization to move to a more automated, more agentic motion with a key vendor like Dell?
Josh Singh: Yeah. I’m sure you’ve heard of Dell Sales Chat. It’s basically their version of GPT, but it references all of Dell’s information – presentations, documents, white papers, service briefs, and things like that. So the Dell rep just types in a query into Dell Sales Chat, and an answer comes out while referencing all Dell documentation. What I really want to see is Dell enabling that for the channel. And so I’ve talked to Dell leadership – specifically people that own this product – and that is the plan. And so I’m really, really excited for that, because especially when we respond to RFPs in public sector, it’s a very time-consuming endeavor. And so for us to be able to type in queries on very specific questions that public sector has about technology would be really valuable.
And I do know that there are compliance and governance issues as well. The labeling of documentation has to be accurate – otherwise, the channel would get access to potentially confidential data from Dell Sales Chat. But that’s the biggest thing that I’m waiting for Dell to offer the channel.
Robert Dutt: Cool. I wanted to talk a little bit about security and data resilience, because that was another theme here at the event – an area where you guys have a fair bit going on with vCISO and MDR, cyber recovery, all that kind of stuff. Basically, how does the Dell cyber resilience narrative from this week connect with what you’re already doing? Does it strengthen the story you’re telling clients? Does it give you new opportunities? How are you viewing the message here?
Josh Singh: Yeah. So I actually come from the security and resilience team at Dell – that’s my most recent role there. So it’s near and dear to me and my heart, and I am seeing a lot of product updates when it comes to security. That’s really exciting for me to see, actually.
So Dell has a security and data platform in Data Domain, and there are other partners in the ecosystem like Druva and others. There are some partnerships with CrowdStrike and other MDR companies. And that’s what I really appreciate about Dell – they did have Secureworks for a period of time, which got spun off, but I do appreciate Dell constantly looking at where their gaps are from a technology perspective and then partnering up with other vendors to complete the end-to-end strategy.
As I mentioned, each individual product in the technology portfolio – they are releasing a lot of security updates and functionality embedded in PowerStore, more in Data Domain when it comes to immutability and things like that, and PowerScale anomaly detection in each of the different products, end-to-end encryption with secure [HPAs – unclear; possibly “HBAs” or “APIs” – verify]. So there’s a lot of attention right now when it comes to security.
And to come back to AI – AI is really cool and it can create a lot of really cool outcomes. That’s if you’re wearing a white hat. If you’re wearing a black hat, it can be equally exciting for them as well. And so Dell has to keep up now with not just asking what are the positive outcomes that can drive more efficiency and unlock human progress, but what are the black hats going to be doing with AI, and how do we respond?
Robert Dutt: I was sharing a detail this week that backup infrastructure is kind of a primary target for attacks. Curious – does that kind of match with what you’re seeing? And how do you, especially with customers who are newer to you or just going through the process, help them reconcile what they think they’re protecting with their backup versus what they actually have in terms of protection?
Josh Singh: Yeah, this is – I mean, every backup vendor says the same thing. This becomes really difficult, actually, to undo a lot of the conditioning from a lot of the backup vendors. I joined DPS – which is now the SRP, the Security and Resiliency Platform, at Dell – for a very specific reason. I actually used to also work for Secureworks. And I realized that talking to people about managed security services was resonating at the time. But the answer was always, “Hey, we just go back to our backup target and we restore, we recover, we’re up and running within a couple of hours.” So I thought, I could spend the same amount of time with a different team and a different product and achieve much more success, because that’s what most organizations are relying on. So they really rely on backup.
Now, backup should not be confused with business continuity. Backup is the last line of defense – and it really is the last line of defense. So when you have a last line of defense, you need to make sure that that is locked down. If you don’t trust your last line of defense, it doesn’t really matter what you do on top of that. You can spend millions of dollars per year operationally on subscriptions and monitoring and things like that. But if you don’t trust your last line of defense, you are hooked.
And so Dell’s backup product, Data Domain, is the most secure, purpose-built backup appliance out there in the market – hands down. It’s not even a comparison, from my perspective – and it could be a biased perspective – against other competition and other vendors that also play in the same area. There are just so many features in Data Domain when it comes to immutability and governance and compliance and DDBoost, which is a proprietary protocol – it’s not CIFS, it’s not NFS. A bad actor can scan a CIFS or NFS directory so easily and then just encrypt it.
So while we do work very well with PPDM – which is Dell’s backup software – we also use Veeam as well. And so the Veeam-to-Data Domain story is very powerful, and it’s really good for the SMB market as well. So we’re constantly looking at the market and seeing what’s compatible, what plays well with Dell products, and we’re introducing that into our ecosystem as well.
Robert Dutt: All right. To wrap it up – sitting where you sit as a partner who’s made a pretty significant single-vendor bet on Dell, what’s the one thing from this week that you sit back and go, “Yeah, that validates the decision”? And also, was there anything that gives you pause – that makes you go, “Okay, I need to learn more about that before I’m sure that we’re aligned”?
Josh Singh: Yeah. I mean, I can’t deny that we haven’t been forced to think about more vendor adoption. And as every company needs to iterate and evolve and stay on top of industry trends, we need to constantly be surveying other technologies. And we do. We look at NetApp all the time. We look at Pure. We look at HPE constantly. And what we’ve noticed is we don’t need to take on a different vendor.
And especially – one thing I will say about Dell, and I’m not sure if this is an answer to your question, but I do have to mention this – Dell’s supply chain is second to none. So we’re in this world right now which is shifting aggressively to shortages and components and things like that. And that’s where Dell’s really shining right now – in their ability to go to different geographic areas and fast-track product from other areas. So that’s just one thing that I have to plug Dell for: very impressive about what they’re doing there.
But from a Dell perspective, they’re constantly innovating. All the thought leaders of the world – in different companies and different partners and vendors – they’re all here. And so if we have that big bet on Dell and they’re constantly innovating and adding new partnerships and are at the forefront of innovation, then that means we are too. And if we are, then we don’t need to look anywhere else – and we’re going to double down on the bet.
Robert Dutt: To go back to what you were saying about the supply chain situation – it’s no doubt wild times trying to get infrastructure for everyone on the planet right now. And we hear pretty clearly from Jeff Clarke the idea, the message to customers: put your hand up early – really early, if you can – because that’ll give you the best chances of getting what you want when you want it. If you’re thinking two years out or something, how are you approaching timelines and guidance to customers on – okay, so you want to be here at some point – speccing that out in light of the uncertainty of availability, the uncertainty of price, all the fun stuff that’s going on right now?
Josh Singh: We’re living in that world right now and it’s changing the way customers have to respond to their stakeholders in their organizations. Back in the day – and by back in the day, I mean six months ago – a customer needed compute and they would buy compute and they would get it within three weeks, likely two. Now we’re looking at two months, three months, sometimes six-month delays, depending on if they need very specific components. So it is a little bit like the COVID days, where there was a big push to remote connectivity. Now customers are looking at public cloud again in a bigger way because they need immediate resources.
So what we’re trying to do as an organization is say, “Yes, you could go to the cloud – that is an option. It always has been an option and always will be an option. But is that the right thing for your organization economically, from a security perspective, from a latency perspective?” There are so many more considerations, especially in the Canadian market with data sovereignty.
And so the shift of parts shortages – and this wouldn’t be a current interview unless we talked about Broadcom and the changes they’ve made in the market as well. These two very big changes in our market are now affecting the way that organizations have to respond to their stakeholders and the immediacy of resources. So planning now is critically important.
The way that customers are now trying to secure budget within their organizations is changing, because they need to be a bit more adaptable and flexible to what’s externally offered. Previously, it was internal operational methodologies on how they adopted technologies. Now they’re being affected by the external. So they have to be a bit more flexible and adaptable as to how they need to support their growing environment – by way of data, by way of compute resources, and especially AI. Now that I need GPUs and memory and CPUs, which are now in shortage, it is a very big challenge. But it’s not a Dell challenge, it’s a customer challenge. It’s happening across the entire industry. So that’s a good thing for us. If it was a Dell challenge, then we’d have a challenge ourselves and be in a bit of a corner.
But it’s a global challenge right now that we are constantly seeing changes to. And I suspect we’ll continue to see changes for the rest of the year.
Robert Dutt: It’s wild times when you hear folks who are very intelligent on these things saying this is going to be a multi-year kind of cycle. I guess AI giveth, AI taketh away.
Josh Singh: Yes, yes. And geopolitics – we’ve got some leaders in the world right now that are making decisions that are affecting our geopolitical climate as well, which is then downstream affecting IT. So it’s interesting times. Exciting times. And I think we’ll look back on today just like we looked back on COVID – we’ll get through it. We’re all in it together.
Robert Dutt: Here’s hoping the war stories end up good at the end of the day.
Josh Singh: That’s right.
Robert Dutt: Thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it.
Josh Singh: Thanks very much, Rob. I appreciate it. Thank you.
Robert Dutt: There you have it, Josh Singh from Turning Point Technology Services. I’d like to thank Josh for his time in Las Vegas.
The full-circle element of his story – spending years inside Dell, working alongside Turning Point as a channel partner, and then joining the company he was selling through – comes through clearly in how he talks about the business. And I think that perspective showed throughout the conversation.
A few things I’d like to take away from this one.
First, the single-vendor bet argument. A lot of partners hedge on vendor relationships as a form of risk management, but Turning Point went the other way. And the case Josh makes is essentially that depth beats breadth – that knowing how to navigate a large vendor’s internal matrix quickly is itself a competitive advantage for customers. When someone needs an answer today, knowing exactly who to call inside Dell and getting it done in hours instead of days is a real differentiator. Doesn’t show up in a product spec, but it does show up in the relationship.
Second, the AI adoption ladder. The AI Factory is the right concept, but maybe too large a bite for most of the Canadian market. What’s changing now – and what you heard Josh describe with the solution center and the GB10 pilots – is AI becoming consumable at the entry level. Small win, prove the model, scale it up. That’s how it actually gets adopted in the mid-market and SMB space, and the partners who figured out how to structure that journey are the ones who are going to win those accounts.
And third, backup is the last line of defense, not the first. Josh put it plainly: if you don’t trust your last line of defense, it doesn’t really matter what you spend on top of it. And if your backup infrastructure gets hit with a ransomware attack – which is increasingly the whole point of the attack – and you’ve filed an insurance claim on top of that, you can’t touch it until the insurance company is done with their analysis. You’re building from scratch. That air gap, clean recovery point is the whole game. Not a nice-to-have.
If you’re enjoying the show, please follow or subscribe wherever you listen. We’re on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, the usual suspects. And if you have a moment to leave a rating or review, please do. Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.
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Today’s headline news for Canadian IT solution providers:
Pax8 Beyond26 – managed intelligence: Pax8 wrapped its annual Beyond conference in Salt Lake City on Tuesday with over 3,500 attendees including 200+ from Canada, centering the show on the transition from managed services to the Managed Intelligence Provider model. The headline announcement was Microsoft Agent 365 for Managed Intelligence – multi-tenant governance of agentic AI across MSP client environments through the Pax8 Agent Store, arriving in July – alongside the launch of the Managed Intelligence Provider Program, Voyager Alliance Rewards, and the Managed Intelligence Alliance. CEO Scott Chasin argued that as AI models commoditize, the trust MSPs have already built with clients is their primary competitive advantage going forward.Arrow Electronics global experience centers: Arrow introduced a network of global experience centers on Tuesday, built in close collaboration with channel partners in North America and Europe to reflect how partners actually go to market today. Facilities in the US and Sweden are fully networked to deliver a consistent design and testing experience regardless of location, and are designed specifically to help partners accelerate the move from AI and cloud evaluation into deployment and monetization.Mitel names new channel chief: Mitel has appointed Ben Macdonald as vice president of global channel go-to-market, bringing experience from Owl Labs, Poly, Juniper Networks, and Ekahau. The hire comes as Mitel’s own research shows 68 percent of businesses are running communications infrastructure more than seven years old, with 92 percent of modernizing organizations choosing an integrated-hybrid strategy – a dynamic the company says positions its 6,000-plus channel partners at the center of one of the largest communications refresh cycles in a decade.Cork Cyber wins Pax8 Startup Vendor of the Year: Pax8 recognized Cork Cyber at Beyond26 for its AI-native remediation platform built for MSPs, which remediates threats automatically, reduces ticket volume, and provides financial payback when risks slip through. The award was presented on the Beyond mainstage by Pax8 president Nick Heddy.Canada’s cloud market: A new report from the Canadian Anti-Monopoly Project, covered by CBC News, calls the Canadian cloud computing market “broken,” warning that Amazon, Microsoft, and Google control approximately 85 percent of the market. The report argues that even adding domestic sovereign alternatives will not fix the problem without interoperability standards, coining the term “maplewashed dependency” for the risk of trading one lock-in for another.Pentesting research: New research from Cobalt and Omdia finds that 53 percent of security leaders believe traditional penetration testing is now outdated, with demand growing for continuous, AI-assisted approaches.iCOUNTER leadership: iCOUNTER has appointed Joel Molinoff, formerly of BlueVoyant and CBS Corporation, as chief operating officer.DataStrike expansion: DataStrike has expanded its Linux managed services practice by hiring Jon Cain as senior Linux infrastructure engineer to meet growing client demand.Read Full TranscriptWelcome to The Buzz from ChannelBuzz.ca, I’m Robert Dutt, today is Thursday, June 11, 2026, and here’s what’s happening in the channel today.
Pax8 wrapped its annual Beyond conference in Salt Lake City on Tuesday, and the event made a clear statement about where the distributor sees the managed services business heading. With more than 3,500 attendees – including over 200 from Canada – the show centered on what Pax8 is calling the Managed Intelligence Provider model, or MIP. The idea is that MSPs are no longer primarily managing infrastructure. The next phase of the business is orchestrating agentic AI and delivering outcomes that SMB customers cannot build on their own. The headline product announcement from the show was Microsoft Agent 365 for Managed Intelligence, which will give MSPs multi-tenant governance of agentic AI across their client base through the Pax8 Agent Store, arriving in July. Alongside that, Pax8 announced the Managed Intelligence Provider Program, the Voyager Alliance Rewards program, and the Managed Intelligence Alliance, all aimed at helping partners navigate that business model transition. CEO Scott Chasin’s central argument was that as AI models commoditize rapidly, the trust that MSPs have already built with their clients becomes the primary competitive differentiator. It’s a different kind of pitch than many vendors have been making this year, and the Canadian partner contingent at the show was among the largest regional groups in attendance.
Distribution giant Arrow Electronics introduced a new set of networked global experience centers on Tuesday, and the design philosophy behind them is worth paying attention to. According to Arrow, the facilities in the US and Sweden were built in close collaboration with channel partners across North America and Europe, specifically around how partners actually go to market today, where they face constraints, and what slows them down. The two locations are fully networked, meaning the design and testing experience is consistent regardless of where the customer or partner is located. Arrow has operated various lab facilities over the years, but this iteration is explicitly oriented around solving the commercial and operational friction partners face in moving customers from AI and cloud evaluation into deployment. For solution providers working to differentiate on deep technical expertise and pre-sales capability, the ability to leverage distribution infrastructure at this level is increasingly part of the value equation.
Mitel announced Tuesday that Ben Macdonald has joined the company as vice president of global channel go-to-market, making him the company’s new channel chief. Macdonald comes from Owl Labs, where he led the shift to a scalable B2B and enterprise channel model including strategic alliances with Microsoft and Lenovo. He has also held senior channel roles at Poly, Juniper Networks, and Ekahau. The appointment arrives at a moment Mitel describes as one of the largest communications refresh cycles in a decade. According to Mitel’s own research, 68 percent of businesses are currently running communications systems that are more than seven years old, and 92 percent of organizations actively modernizing are choosing an integrated-hybrid strategy. Macdonald’s specific background – building recurring revenue models out of historically transactional, hardware-centric businesses – aligns directly with what Mitel says it needs. For the more than 6,000 channel partners in Mitel’s ecosystem, including a significant number of Canadian resellers and MSPs with established UC practices, the appointment signals an intent to activate that market opportunity through the partner community.
In Brief – Pax8 named Cork Cyber its Startup Vendor of the Year at Beyond, recognizing the MSP-focused AI remediation platform that remediates threats automatically and pays out financially when risks slip through. A report from the Canadian Anti-Monopoly Project calls Canada’s cloud computing market “broken,” warning that Amazon, Microsoft and Google control 85 percent of the market and domestic providers risk creating what the report calls “maplewashed dependencies.” Cobalt and Omdia research finds that 53 percent of security leaders believe traditional penetration testing is now outdated. iCOUNTER appoints Joel Molinoff, formerly of BlueVoyant and CBS Corporation, as chief operating officer. DataStrike expands its Linux managed services practice by hiring Jon Cain as senior Linux infrastructure engineer. Full details and links in the show notes or the blog post.
Later today on In The Channel, we’re hearing from Josh Singh at Turning Point Technologies in Vancouver – it’s a conversation about running a single-vendor Dell practice, AI for SMB, and why backup is the last line of defense against ransomware.
And if you haven’t heard it yet, yesterday on In The Channel I sat down with ESTI’s Earl Gosick on AI infrastructure, cyber resilience, and why Saskatchewan may be Canada’s next data center hub.
That’s how we’re seeing the headlines today. I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, thanks for listening. Have a great day.
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Earl Gosick, CTO at ESTI Consulting Services
Earl Gosick has been attending Dell’s annual event since the EMC World days, and the ESTI Consulting Services co-founder brought to this year’s Dell Technologies World a perspective grounded in 35 years of building deep technical expertise on the Prairies.
ESTI, the Saskatoon-based solution provider that won Dell’s Data Centre Solutions Excellence Award for Canada last year, runs a pure-play Dell infrastructure practice with particular depth in storage and data center design. Earl also sits in Dell’s CTO Connect program – a small, invitation-only group of partner technologists with early visibility into Dell’s product roadmap and a real voice in shaping it.
His framing for the week: AI is fundamentally a data story, and data stories are storage stories. The push toward on-premises AI infrastructure – from deskside devices up through the newly announced Exascale and Rackscale solutions – is being driven as much by data governance requirements and token economics as by raw performance. Organizations that don’t control their data, Earl argues, can’t truly control their AI outcomes.
On cyber resilience, he made a point worth underlining for anyone running managed services: ransomware insurance changes the recovery equation in ways clients don’t always anticipate. When a claim is filed, infrastructure gets frozen for forensic analysis. Recovery speed from a clean, air-gapped golden image – built with technology partners like Index Engines – isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the whole game.
And to close: Saskatchewan and Alberta may be poised to become Canada’s next significant data center hubs. With regulated power, guaranteed energy supply, and a provincial government that has now seen a CoreWeave-scale facility successfully built in the province and is actively pursuing more, Earl sees a real and growing opportunity – and ESTI is already working to support it.
Read Full TranscriptRobert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In the Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor at ChannelBuzz.ca, and your host for the show.
We’re continuing our series of conversations from Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas. This week, we’re shifting from the Dell executive perspective to the partner perspective, and today’s guest has been making the trip to this event since the EMC World days.
Earl Gosick is co-founder and senior consultant at ESTI Consulting Services, a Saskatoon-based solution provider that just celebrated 35 years in business and took home Dell’s Data Centre Solutions Excellence Award for Canada last year. Earl also sits inside Dell’s CTO Connect program, a small, invitation-only group of partner technologists who get an early look at where Dell’s roadmap is actually heading – and, importantly, a real opportunity to push back on it.
Earl’s a storage specialist at his core, and that turned out to be a useful lens at a conference that was fundamentally about AI infrastructure. Because if you pull on that AI thread long enough, it leads you back to data, and data always leads you back to storage. We talked about what the Exascale and Rackscale announcements mean for real customer deployments, why the cyber resilience conversation is as much about recovery speed as backup integrity, and a genuinely interesting thread about why Saskatchewan and the broader Canadian Prairies may be sitting on one of the most underappreciated data centre opportunities in North America right now.
Let’s get right into it. My chat with Earl Gosick.
Earl, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it.
Earl Gosick: I appreciate you having me here. It’s always nice to talk about what we’re doing with Dell.
Robert Dutt: No doubt, and you guys are doing a lot. I understand this is by no means your first DTW rodeo.
Earl Gosick: No, I’ve been coming since the EMC World days, and I’ve never – I missed a year through COVID, that was about it.
Robert Dutt: Well, I guess we’ll allow you that. So you’ve got this background here, you do the CTO Connect with Dell. What’s different about this year, if anything? What’s the tone or the energy that tells you something about where the industry is at right now, and not necessarily just where Dell would like it to be going?
Earl Gosick: I think the driving factor of today is really the supply constraints. You can see what AI is doing and the effect that’s having across the board on every product that has memory or CPU or flash drives in it – which is everything in technology. So that’s really setting the tone. But it also shows how effective AI is as a market driver, and what people think is going to come out of that technology – which is, I think, very important for people to understand. It’s ubiquitous technology that’s going to drive a lot of change in our industry. And we’re seeing a leading edge of that. And if this is the leading edge, there’s some pretty exciting things coming, I suspect, and it’s going to do some pretty important and probably quite wonderful things for our clients.
Robert Dutt: We heard from the main stage the idea of encouraging customers to get their hand up early – to get those orders, or even an inkling of where things are going for orders, in as early as possible – and that that will, in effect, Jeff Clarke was suggesting, get folks the best possible results. What’s the guidance you guys are providing your customers around that whole issue, and thinking about availability and pricing of hardware in this current super-fun environment?
Earl Gosick: Our position does align with what we’re hearing from Dell when we’re dealing with Dell Technologies, so we try and pass on the messages as transparently as we can, understanding there are supply constraints coming. And we have to deal with those in the only way we have, and that is to figure out what we need. Let’s plan early. Let’s plan the budgets we have for the year, and we can make some estimates about what’s going to be happening six months from now – but they’re estimates, and they’re going to be higher. So it’s probably going to be cheaper for you to have technology that’s sitting on the floor unused for a few months and waste through some support potentially, as opposed to delaying the purchase for three months. So if we know what we’re going to buy, we should operate in a manner that allows us to order those technologies as soon as possible and make sure you’re not waiting for something that delays your business initiatives.
Robert Dutt: You guys won the Data Centre Solutions Excellence Award last year for Canada. Take your victory lap. Tell me – what is it you guys are doing in the data centre space that earned that, and what does winning the award tell you about where your practice is focused?
Earl Gosick: I hope it helps demonstrate our success. So what ESTI likes to do as a business – our business model is really to build highly competent experts all the way from solution architecture to implementation of those technologies at the customer site. That takes a lot of effort on our behalf, and so it’s nice to get a reward that says we’re doing the right things. Because if you can build a strong rapport with a client who trusts your experts in their field, that creates long-term relationships – which is what both ESTI and Dell are after, and what our clients want.
Robert Dutt: You’re a storage specialist at a conference that has been at its core all about AI infrastructure. But at the same time, you go back to when it was – you said – EMC World, all about storage. The more I heard this week, the more it feels like the AI story is really a data story, and data stories are storage stories to at least some degree. How are you seeing that translate in terms of what your customers are actually asking about, or what they’re going to be asking you about?
Earl Gosick: It’s significant. You’re right. In order for any type of artificial intelligence to derive a useful data product out the end, it’s built on the data that you have. So customers are coming to the realization that they have to store everything. So it is driving a lot of demand for storage. It’s driving storage in different ways and they just keep everything. Then there’s another product that comes after that, which is cleaning that data – building the data pipelines. When I talk about storage, it’s really about data, and AI is a data-driven product. So it’s doing great things for the storage industry. But the clients understand that they do have to have the data – it has to be there, it has to be available. And then when they build these data products, they have to protect those data products. They’ve got to make sure they’re secure. So it’s driving a lot of initiatives on both sides of the fence that are good for all of us.
Robert Dutt: Especially with new or newer customers, or customers who are looking to expand what they’re doing with AI – and acknowledging there’s going to be a range from folks who have had the religion since day one and folks who’ve just been randomly shoving stuff digitally wherever they can. Where do you find those newer customers are at, generally speaking, in terms of sophistication of data management and data governance and all that kind of fun?
Earl Gosick: Unfortunately, I’d like to say there’s a median in there. There is not. Everybody is at a different stage in that cycle for them. So you really have to be a little bit cognizant and ask the questions to find out where they’re at before you can really sort of hold their hands and walk them down the road. Many people who started that journey early – you can learn from them. And so they’re going to tell us to start and do something, and you may fail, there may be some things, but you’re going to learn something from that. The second time will be more successful. Then you take that information, you pass it on to the newer people who are trying to get quick value from those investments they’re making on the AI front. So it could be things about how to connect those various data sources because they’re spread everywhere, to how do they build, or select which ones they put their money and their efforts behind. And so you take from the ones that have been doing this for a while, you pass that information on to the ones that are starting on this journey, and you connect the dots. You provide value and make pain go away wherever you can. And customers appreciate that.
Robert Dutt: And that sounds like that’s where you’re kind of bridging that gap that exists and trying to bring customers to the level they need to be at to get something out of this.
Earl Gosick: Absolutely. Like I said, everybody’s on a journey at a different stage of that journey. And so you have to communicate well to understand where they’re at and what they’re trying to achieve. Once you know that – we don’t always have the answers, but we leverage great partners like Dell who do have somebody that knows the answer. And so building this sort of ecosystem of potential partners to bridge that gap is great. And Dell does that not just from us and the partner community, but their partner community as well, to support all the component pieces that go together to build these pretty highly complex solutions in some cases.
Robert Dutt: Of all the announcements, all the stuff that we heard on the main stage and elsewhere this week, what kind of caught your attention – your major aha moment – the thing that’s going to be interesting going back to your business or going back to your customers with new opportunities or the ability to do something better, faster, more?
Earl Gosick: So as we talked about, I am a storage guy. So I look at something like Exascale. They’ve been talking about this for a couple of years now in the CTO cycles that I’ve been to. To see that product sort of come to fruition, where you have something and you can just put a personality on that module and build something out – I think that could be very game-changing, especially for AI. They might want to do a lot of things with file storage today, object storage tomorrow. Being able to build up a cluster and put a personality on it that meets the needs of the day – I think that could be quite interesting. That Rackscale solution you saw on the stage with Michael Dell and Jensen the other day – for the larger clients, something like that could be quite interesting. I mean, we’re building these large data centers right now and trying to fill them. Rackscale infrastructure that helps with power and energy and doing a lot of powerful things is going to probably be a game changer for a lot of people.
Robert Dutt: One of the things that struck me here is what I want to call the AI agnosticism, as long as you’re doing it on Dell infrastructure – that Dell is talking about here, ranging from, if you’ve got really basic needs, run it locally on your AI PC, moving up a bit there’s the GB10, which is more of a deskside machine, up to the big old box that Jensen signed on stage. How does that map with what you see in terms of customer needs for AI, and what do you think of that kind of approach to structuring both the data center and broader AI processing across the enterprise?
Earl Gosick: I think as we touched on earlier, everybody’s on a different stage in that journey. So if you’ve got a guy that’s working at his desk and he’s trying to do some cool things, but he doesn’t have access to a million tokens – that little GB10 you put on the desk beside him and he’s going to do some development, he’s going to learn some wonderful things. Then as you move up the stack in your journey, you’ve got some big clients who are going to do small proof-of-concept type scenarios where they might want a smaller box and then move up that stack. I think it’s important to have a product that covers a diverse range of those people because nobody’s in that one sweet spot – they’re all over the map. Having that full technology set supports wherever they happen to be in their life cycle.
Robert Dutt: You touch on tokens, and Jeff Clarke’s presentation was really deep into tokenomics and the kind of the trap there. I’m curious how that maps with what you’ve seen in customers as they’ve started to explore AI. Are they seeing these same challenges, and how are they thinking about it?
Earl Gosick: Tokens are the buzzword of the day, but they’re out there for a reason. Everybody has finite resources to put towards the solution they’re trying to build. They may or may not know what that solution is – they’re working towards something, they need tokens to achieve that. What I find interesting is the people who are very early into the game of AI and building solutions around that – it doesn’t take them long before they’re like, “I’m out of tokens. I need to do some stuff.” So it just comes back to the fact that there are only so many resources to solve the needs you have, and you only have so many tokens, and you’ve got to learn to live within what you can get your hands on. And that’s driving the economy, whether it’s at a data center level or at an internal level for any business.
Robert Dutt: And does that in turn drive – which I believe is Dell’s thesis here – does that in turn drive the interest in building out infrastructure in-house, so that the relative incremental cost of those additional tokens goes way down because it’s bought and built versus rented?
Earl Gosick: Yeah. I think there’s a step along that AI journey where people have potentially outgrown what they can do in the cloud in an economic fashion. We see the supply constraints are driven by CPU and memory usage. If you look at what the cloud hyperscalers offer, when you get into highly intensive memory and CPU, it starts to get very expensive. A lot of storage, a lot of bits and bytes moving back and forth – very expensive. All those things are prevalent in AI. You’re moving a lot of data back and forth, you’re touching a lot of things, you need a lot of memory at times. So once you get to a point where you’re doing useful things with your AI and building generative models, no matter what you do with inferencing, it starts to get really expensive. Then it becomes a time where you can move those things into a data center you control. You can get some economics from it and you can get some sovereignty out of it. A hyperscaler outside of your control can turn things off – they can’t do that when it’s your data center. So you’ve got a lot of control as well as the economics behind how you’re achieving the outcomes you’re looking to achieve.
Robert Dutt: I used a word which is actually where I wanted to go next, which is sovereignty. When we’re talking about data center infrastructure and moving bits around and enterprise storage, how is data sovereignty trending among your customers, especially folks who have regulatory concerns and that sort of thing?
Earl Gosick: Being a Canadian company, predominantly, we have a larger focus on sovereignty and data sovereignty and sovereign solutions than maybe you’ll see south of the border here. And we find our friends in the European Union are a little bit different – they’re ahead of us even. But it’s a really big concern, especially when you have any type of government agency that you’re dealing with, or anybody that really has intellectual property that they’re looking to protect. They’ve learned that open AI models may expose things – even if it’s just from how they’re creating their algorithms. But if the data gets out there, it’s a concern. They’re protecting their assets as well. These AIs are delivering very useful outcomes for them. They need to make sure they own those outcomes and that they can actually reach them when they need them. So part of data sovereignty is not just the sovereign part of your data, but it’s the actual access to your data. We’re learning things from not just the AI piece but from ransomware – all of a sudden your data goes away. The same thing could happen with a hyperscaler for some people. Sovereign IT solutions are going to be, I think, increasingly important moving forward.
Robert Dutt: On that note, you mentioned ransomware, and data resilience and protection is another area I wanted to touch on. We heard the figure that 97% of cyber attacks are now specifically targeting backup infrastructure – because of the old line about, I forget the particular bank robber’s name, but why do you rob the banks? Because that’s where the money is. Why do you go after the backup? Because that’s where all the data is. Does that match with what you’re seeing, and if so, how does that change how you’re designing and recommending data protection for your customers?
Earl Gosick: It is absolutely changing people’s realization of how they need to protect their data. This one doesn’t matter if it’s AI or your regular business practices – your data has value, whether it’s to support applications that are running your critical business or you’re building AI products that you need to protect. That has value and you need to access it. What we’re seeing more and more – and we’ve built a really strong practice around this – is building things like cyber vaults and using Dell’s technology partners like Index Engines, where they come in and they can quickly identify threats inside your environment and act on those. Because these guys loiter around for potentially months at a time. They know how to get to your backups. They know they’re not getting paid if you can recover. So they’re going to do everything they can to try and disrupt that. They have AI engines just like ours, but they have a lot of money and they don’t have the constraints about how they use their AI. I mean, these people are criminals, so they act in a method that makes them money. We’re going to be facing even more potential threats in the future, and some of those are going to be AI-driven. We’re going to have to react at AI speeds. There are changes coming, but certainly people are learning to build protection mechanisms that are air-gapped and can respond very quickly to threats.
Robert Dutt: When you’re sitting in front of a client who thinks they’re covered – they’ve got a backup solution, they’ve got someone who’s responsible for it – what are the most common gaps that you find between what they think they have and what they actually have?
Earl Gosick: I think for many clients, they don’t really understand how disruptive it’s going to be if they run into a ransomware attack. If you’re a client that may have ransomware insurance, for example, and they get hit – you have to tell them, “Do you understand you’re not going to be able to touch any of that infrastructure? Because your insurance company is going to want to do some analysis on that to see how the threat came in.” That infrastructure is dead and gone. You’re starting from scratch. You need a golden image – you need something you know nobody has touched. Protecting the data is only the first piece. Rebuilding from that data, and how fast you can do that – that’s the very critical component. That’s where an air-gapped cyber recovery solution like Dell Cyber Recovery is critical, because you can understand what data to recover and you can recover quickly. Having the data there – that’s the great first step and that’s where you should start. But following that, that is only the first step.
Robert Dutt: Your client base is different from a lot of partners I talk to. Given where you sit and who you’re focused on – not necessarily organizations that are under the same kind of pressure or have the same kind of resources to pursue AI – how do you translate and filter what you hear at a conference like this, where a lot is focused towards big enterprise, to a message that makes sense for your customers and scales to their needs and appetites?
Earl Gosick: That’s one I think isn’t really that difficult – it’s not as difficult as you would think. Because everybody has the same problems. They run into the same problems. How they build solutions to those problems might change on the scale, but you just have to understand and recognize that everybody’s having the same problems. You can articulate and communicate to them that you’re not the only one that has this. We can resolve this problem at a large scale, but we don’t have to. You came back to it earlier when we talked about the product sets, from small to large – you just pick the right one to meet the solution that these guys have. How you solve that problem of the day doesn’t necessarily change for a really, really large client versus a very, very small client. It’s really just the scale of the end solution and the architecture that’s put together to solve the need.
Robert Dutt: From a Titanium partner’s seat, what did the program changes that we saw rolled out – the agentification of the program, some of the incentive shifts – tell you about where Dell sees growth opportunity, and how does it align with where you’re already going or where it might take you?
Earl Gosick: I think you can see very easily that Dell is putting a large focus around AI and what it can do for them to streamline their business and be successful. We, like any other company we deal with, are doing the same thing. What they’re doing with their Dell One program, and having a single operation from lead generation down to quoting and pricing and follow-up – it matches what we’re doing on the back end and trying to automate that. Because as long as we can automate that process and reduce the friction in those programs and dealing with Dell, we can spend that time focusing on our clients’ needs. You see Dell, I think, leveraging the same technologies to do that. And if we’re smart business people today, we’re looking to the people around us who are being successful and trying to do what they’re doing in a sense. That’s true for us and our clients. Leveraging AI and seeing how that’s being successful for our partners is driving what we’re all doing – to drive automation and simplification through the processes that are just painful every day that we have to do better at, to support our clients.
Robert Dutt: I’m guessing you guys are pretty far down this road already because you’re pretty much a pure-play Dell on the infrastructure side, as far as I understand. But when a company like Dell rolls out these incentives focused on expanding customer footprints – getting a Dell storage customer into Dell PCs or any of the other solution lines – just curious if that moves the needle for you in terms of the incentive, or is it already baked into what you’re doing?
Earl Gosick: It’s baked into what we’re doing. In the end of the day, you are trying to build a rapport with a customer based on being a trusted expert. You’re not going to flip your technologies around based on what’s going to get somebody a little bit more money. You’ve got to do the right thing for the customer today and every time you deal with them. The advantage of dealing with Dell is they typically tie their incentives to the product that they are investing in today – that they see the future growing into. So they usually coincide. They understand the pain points of the year, and the incentives usually match the requirements of the day as well. So they’re really good at that. And then they usually have a lot of tools to support that initiative of IT transformation, whatever it is for that time and place in our industry.
Robert Dutt: You mentioned earlier you’re on the CTO Connect program – pretty small room, an exclusive group. Tell me about what that relationship looks like on the inside of the room, and the value that an organization like ESTI gets from sitting in there.
Earl Gosick: I guess I’ll put it this way. We deal with some technology providers – predominantly Dell. Dell puts us in a room, they tell us what they’re doing for the next year or two, and they ask us if they’re on the right track. That’s telling to me – they care and they listen. They talk about the technologies that we’re going to see upcoming, so it’s helpful for us to talk to our clients about where the industry is headed. But they do sometimes say, “We’re going to do this,” and the room says, “Oh, no, you can’t do that. Our customers love this,” or, “We like this for this reason.” And they say, “Oh, okay.” And we have a dialogue about those things. So I think that’s one of the most important things that comes out of CTO Connect – we hear about industry trends, but they also ask us our opinion on whether they’re on the right track, and then they listen to that opinion. I think that’s telling for any company you deal with – one that engages not only with their clients, but with their technology partners. It’s one of the things I really like about CTO Connect.
Robert Dutt: You guys just turned 35 or so, as I understand, as an organization. That’s a long time to be running a consultancy in any market – and markets move, vendors come and go. What’s the philosophy behind building something that durable in a market that changes so fast, and especially in an area of the country that doesn’t necessarily get as much headline attention from vendors as a Toronto or a Vancouver or a Montreal?
Earl Gosick: I think it comes back to what I stated earlier around building strong and capable expertise across the board – and that’s building relationships with the clients, building relationships with partners like Dell to solve the solutions of the day. Our clients respect that because they know they can come back to us again and again and we’ll do the right thing together. So that’s really the crux of it. Our business model is a little different in that we support a little bit more of an entrepreneurial aspect to our business. When young, capable people come on board and they build differentiating products, they get a seat at the table – and that’s critical for ESTI and the way we operate. But it’s really about looking at modern technology solutions and being agile to support those ever-changing technologies. It makes our industry exciting. You’re never doing the same thing every day. And as long as you can recognize the fact that you won’t be doing the same thing tomorrow and you just have to find a way to deal with it – that’s how we thrive in our company, and in working with Dell as well.
Robert Dutt: All right, so let’s close with asking you to do a little bit of the impossible, given that pace of change. What’s one thing that you’re thinking about today, but maybe not totally all-in on at this point, that you think is going to be shaping the business for ESTI and your customers when we’re sitting here at DTW 2027?
Earl Gosick: Well, that’s a really hard question. On the investment side, we do look at some of the technologies today – and as we talked about, AI is big for us. We need to build services that our clients don’t have. So we spend a lot of focus on where they have skills and where they don’t. We’re going to build a lot of expertise around cleaning data, building data pipelines and that kind of stuff, to focus on the needs our clients are asking us to help them solve. So that’s kind of an easy one because everybody sees that going forward. Beyond that – we’re making a strong effort in Saskatchewan and Alberta to build a sort of data center economy to support a lot of these data centers that need to be built. We already have access to power infrastructure to support those things. That’s going to drive a little bit of a change in our operating model just to support our local governments as they try and take advantage of the differentiators we have. That’ll drive some change for ESTI. And then as we expand across the rest of Canada, different geographies have different requirements as well. So lots of change, lots of new people coming on board all the time – interesting but dynamic.
Robert Dutt: That will be an interesting thread to pull on. I remember going to an event – God, it must have been 15 years ago now – talking about how Canada really should be a data center powerhouse. When you consider we have power, clean power in relative abundance, we have cold, which turns out to be important – it sounds like maybe there’s an opportunity to realize some of that with what you guys are doing and what governments are starting to look at more seriously.
Earl Gosick: They are. Also, right outside my hometown, they just announced a very large data center which is going to house some infrastructure from CoreWeave – and we’re going to see more of that, I think, because that process went very well. I sat in on a conference a couple of weeks ago where it was government and industry getting together to talk about why they were successful, what they bring to the table. Saskatchewan is unique because they have regulated power, energy, and land. They can guarantee, “We will give you power, we can guarantee you’ll get LNG.” Those types of things are very important for anybody trying to build a data center – it’s the critical piece. And with the government having control over all of those, they can guarantee them. That’s where I think Saskatchewan is going to have a real differentiator to support that technology, and the government is well aware of that fact now. They’re going to want to do more of these things. And then our neighbors in both Alberta and Manitoba are sort of on board as well. Certainly Alberta has done a few key data centers to support AI and those are going to continue to happen. We’re sometimes slow to move because it’s government. But once they realize the differentiators they have and what it can do for the market, I think there’ll be some traction there.
Robert Dutt: Should be interesting times, and sitting where you’re sitting sounds like a big opportunity.
Earl Gosick: Absolutely. I think it’s a big opportunity for all of us – supporting your community around you as well as building a thriving business.
Robert Dutt: Earl, I appreciate you taking the time once again. I hope this has been a good DTW for you.
Earl Gosick: It’s been a great discussion and a good DTW, so thanks a lot for having me.
Robert Dutt: There you have it – Earl Gosick from ESTI Consulting Services.
I’d like to thank Earl for his time last week in Las Vegas. Thirty-five years building deep technical expertise from Saskatoon, in a vendor relationship game that tends to reward proximity to the bigger centres – that’s not an accident, and it came through in the conversation.
A few things I’ll take away from this one.
First, the AI-is-a-storage-story framing. Every AI product ultimately requires data to be collected, governed, moved, and protected. That’s not news to Earl, but it’s a useful reframe for anyone still trying to connect their existing practice to the AI conversation. The hardware gets the headlines. The data work actually gets the contracts.
Second, on cyber resilience – the ransomware insurance point Earl raised is worth sitting with. The moment a client files a claim, that infrastructure gets frozen while the insurance company figures out how the breach happened. Your ability to recover doesn’t just depend on whether the backup is intact – it depends on whether you built a clean, air-gapped golden image that nobody has touched. That’s the conversation. And if you’re not having it with your clients, maybe someone else is.
And third, keep an eye on Saskatchewan. Regulated power, guaranteed energy supply, and a provincial government that has now seen a CoreWeave-scale data center get successfully built in the province and wants more of them. Earl thinks that’s just the start of something, and I’m inclined to agree.
If you’re enjoying the show, please follow or subscribe wherever you listen. We’re on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and most of the usual podcast directories. And if you have a moment to leave a rating or a review, that really does help folks in the channel find the show.
Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.
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Today’s headline news for Canadian IT solution providers:
Kaseya MSP Success ecosystem: Kaseya has launched MSP Success, a unified growth initiative led by EVP of Channel Dan Tomaszewski and backed by a 140-person global team. The ecosystem consolidates three programs: MSP Success Digital Marketing (AI-powered lead generation, website, and SEO/AEO tools in Express and Pro tiers), MSP Success Peer (combining TruMethods Peer and Technology Marketing Toolkit into a single accountability network), and the Kaseya Community hub at MSPsuccess.com. The launch is framed around a finding from Kaseya’s own 2026 State of the MSP Report: 71% of MSPs say acquiring new customers is their single biggest challenge.Zscaler agentic AI security: Zscaler has announced major innovations to its Zero Trust Exchange platform at Zenith Live 2026, including three new capabilities for securing agentic AI: Zscaler AI Broker (securing MCP and A2A agent communications via an integrated Agent Registry), Zscaler Endpoint AI Security (detecting AI-related threats in browsers, plugins, and local tools), and Zscaler AI Access Graph (mapping identities, apps, and data sources in real time, powered by the Symmetry Systems acquisition). The company is positioning this as the industry’s first complete Zero Trust platform for Agentic AI.FlexPoint AI agents for MSPs: FlexPoint launched what it describes as the first AI-powered agents purpose-built for the MSP back-office, built into its AI-native accounts receivable platform. According to FlexPoint, the agents automate billing, collections, payment reconciliation, and client follow-up workflows, and are designed to integrate into existing MSP toolstacks without requiring additional administrative headcount.Kaseya State of the MSP Report context: The 2026 Kaseya State of the MSP Report finds 48% of MSPs rank AI as their top client need, while difficulty hiring skilled technicians has risen from 9% to 16% year over year, compounding the business development challenges MSP Success is designed to address.DTEX behavior intelligence: DTEX Systems has announced a new behavior intelligence tool built specifically for its partner ecosystem, using behavioral science and machine learning to flag anomalies that indicate potential insider risk or accidental data loss events.ConnectSecure Patch 360: ConnectSecure launched Patch 360, a centralized patch management platform purpose-built for MSPs, offering consolidated visibility across endpoints and third-party applications to streamline remediation workflows.Tumeryk and CSA AI Trust Score: Tumeryk has announced a collaboration with the Cloud Security Alliance on the RiskRubric v2 AI risk framework, now covering agentic AI and MCP servers, and has launched its AI Trust Score assessment service in beta.Read Full TranscriptWelcome to The Buzz from ChannelBuzz.ca, I’m Robert Dutt, today is Wednesday, June 10, and here’s what’s happening in the channel today.
Kaseya yesterday launched MSP Success, a unified growth ecosystem designed to tackle what its own research identifies as the managed service provider community’s single biggest problem. According to Kaseya’s 2026 State of the MSP Report, 71% of MSPs say acquiring new customers is their primary challenge. MSP Success is Kaseya’s answer – a three-pillar initiative that consolidates the company’s existing growth programs under one roof. The first pillar, MSP Success Digital Marketing, is a new platform offering conversion-focused websites, AI-powered search and answer engine optimization, local search visibility, automated lead generation, and access to a dedicated marketing specialist. The platform comes in Express and Pro tiers depending on scale. The second pillar, MSP Success Peer, unifies two programs Kaseya has operated separately until now – TruMethods Peer and Technology Marketing Toolkit – into a single global accountability network with quarterly in-person meetings across North America, EMEA, and APAC. The third pillar is the Kaseya Community hub at MSPsuccess.com, a centralized resource and learning portal. The initiative is led by Dan Tomaszewski, EVP of Channel, supported by a 140-person global team. In a sector where technical excellence is table stakes, this is a signal that Kaseya is investing meaningfully in the business side of running an MSP, not just the tooling.
Zscaler yesterday used its Zenith Live 2026 conference in Las Vegas to announce what it describes as the industry’s first complete Zero Trust platform for Agentic AI. The announcement extends Zscaler’s Zero Trust Exchange to address a challenge traditional security tools were not designed to handle: autonomous AI agents that operate at machine speed, create ephemeral identities, and access sensitive data in ways that conventional perimeter and identity-based tools cannot fully see or control. The centerpiece of the announcement is Zscaler AI Broker, which secures agent-to-agent and MCP-based communications through an integrated Agent Registry that governs what each AI agent is permitted to access. Alongside that, Zscaler introduced Endpoint AI Security, targeting threats hidden in browsers, plugins, extensions, and local AI tools that many legacy endpoint products miss. A third new capability, AI Access Graph, powered by Zscaler’s earlier acquisition of Symmetry Systems, maps how identities, applications, and data sources connect across an enterprise to enable real-time policy enforcement and data lineage tracking. For MSSPs building managed AI security practices, this is a significant platform update from one of the key SASE and zero trust providers in the market.
FlexPoint yesterday launched what it is positioning as the first AI-powered agents purpose-built for the MSP back-office. The company, which operates an AI-native accounts receivable platform for service providers, says the new agents are designed to automate the financial workflows that consume significant administrative time inside MSP operations – billing, collections, payment reconciliation, and client follow-up. According to FlexPoint, the agents integrate directly into existing MSP toolstacks and are designed to work without requiring dedicated back-office headcount. The core argument from FlexPoint is that MSP revenue growth often stalls not because of a shortage of clients, but because back-office operations don’t scale proportionally. That framing aligns with the theme emerging from Kaseya’s research and this morning’s news – that the constraint on MSP growth is increasingly on the business operations side, not the technical side.
In Brief – Kaseya’s announcement follows its own 2026 State of the MSP Report, which also finds that 48% of MSPs rank AI as their top client need and that difficulty hiring skilled technicians has nearly doubled year-over-year. DTEX Systems announces a new behavior intelligence tool built for its partner ecosystem, designed to detect insider risk through behavioral analytics and machine learning anomaly detection. ConnectSecure launches Patch 360, a new patch management platform purpose-built for MSPs, offering a centralized view across endpoints and third-party applications. Tumeryk and the Cloud Security Alliance announce a collaboration on RiskRubric v2, an AI risk assessment framework that now covers agentic AI and MCP servers, with Tumeryk launching its AI Trust Score assessment service as part of the ecosystem.
Later today on In The Channel, ESTI Consulting Services‘ Earl Gosick brings a Prairie data center perspective to a conversation about AI infrastructure, cyber resilience, and why the storage conversation is the one Canadian partners should be having right now.
And if you haven‘t heard it yet, yesterday’s episode features AWS Canada’s Martin Brazonet and CGI’s Dinesh Bhavsar on the launch of the AWS Partner Innovation Hub in Toronto – and why the gap between AI prototype and production is where the real partner opportunity sits.
That’s how we’re seeing the headlines today. I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, thanks for listening. Have a great day.
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Martin Brazinet, head of Technology at AWS Canada
AWS Canada has opened its first Canadian Partner Innovation Hub in Toronto, a purpose-built facility designed to help Canadian businesses move from AI experimentation to production-ready implementation – with their partners in the lead.
The center, publicly announced June 2 at the AWS Summit Canada, is the Canadian evolution of AWS’s GenAI Innovation Center (GenAIIC) model. Globally, 65 percent of solutions that went through the GenAIIC program have made it to production, some in as few as 45 days. The key distinction for the Toronto hub: it is explicitly built around partner delivery and scale.
“Seventy percent of our customers are hoping to get their GenAI implementation done using a partner,” said Martin Brazinet, head of technology at AWS Canada. “Having an environment where we can bring our launch partners and show cross-industry specificity is how this came about.”
The facility opens with four launch partners: CGI, Dedicatted, Elevata, and OpsGuru.
Each visit is tailored rather than templated – partners customize the demos and talk track for a specific customer, then move into a structured workshop designed to get C-suite, architects, and line-of-business stakeholders aligned on a shared action plan before they leave.
Dinesh Bhavsar, director of AI, emerging technologies and innovation at CGI, said the space addresses a gap he sees regularly in how customers approach AI adoption. “If you’re starting with AI as the solution, you’ve already failed,” he told In The Channel. “You haven’t thought about what problem you’re actually trying to solve.”
AWS says it intends to expand access beyond the four launch partners, with industry specificity and differentiated offerings being the primary selection criteria for future participants.
Read Full TranscriptHello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca, your host for the show.
So here’s a number worth thinking about. 650,000 Canadian businesses are already on the AI adoption path, but only a third of them have actually mastered it. The other two-thirds are still at a very basic level of implementation, and the challenge isn’t getting started, it’s getting serious. Moving from a proof of concept that generates excitement in the boardroom to a production solution that actually changes how the business runs. That gap between prototype and production is the problem AWS Canada is trying to help its partners solve, and on June 2nd, the company formally launched its answer, the Partner Innovation Hub in Toronto.
I was on site the day before the launch for a couple of conversations. First, I sat down with Martin Brazinet, head of technology at AWS Canada, who walked me through the vision behind the centre, why it’s built around partners and what success actually looks like. Then I spoke with Dinesh Bhavsar, director of AI, emerging technologies and innovation at CGI, one of the four launch partners, about what the space means for his clients and how he thinks about sparking curiosity with customers who may not yet know what questions to ask.
Let’s get right into it, starting with my chat with Martin Brazinet.
Thanks for taking the time, really appreciate it, especially on the eve of the centre going public and getting it launched out there.Martin Brazinet: Oh, thank you very much. It’s my pleasure to be here with you, Rob.
Rob: For folks who aren’t familiar with the concept or haven’t heard it yet, can you kind of give us the elevator pitch, I guess, for the Partner Innovation Centre – what it is and why Toronto is the place for it?
Martin Brazinet: Yeah, no, for sure, Rob. Every day my team is working with customers and helping customers adopt AI on a continuous basis. We see a lot of excitement from customers who wanted to get deeper into AI. I believe in terms of Canadian customers, there are 650,000 customers already in Canada that have adopted AI. But surprisingly, only about a third of them have really mastered AI – two-thirds of them are still at a very basic level of AI adoption. And we see that, and customers want to get some support on having a better understanding of how they can adopt AI at a more transformative level that touches their industry and touches their requirement. And the AWS Partner Innovation Hub is really there for that – to provide that space where we can see solutions in action, having an immersive environment where we can, with our partners, show some solutions that are transformative, and then talk about an action plan on how to put that in effect within their environment.
Rob: You guys have had other innovation spaces, innovation hubs, innovation centres, that kind of thing globally. Can you kind of tell me a bit about how you’ve built on those ideas? And especially, I’m interested because you chose to put “Partner” right on the tin in terms of the name of this centre – why was the partner focus so important for this one?
Martin Brazinet: Yeah, of course. So I guess two-fold here. From a GenAI Innovation Centre perspective – and this is called GenAIIC – GenAIIC is something that we started in 2023 with a lot of demand from our customers. And this is based on our own experience of bringing customers into an immersive environment, thinking about their scenario, showing them solutions and prototypes. And that has been super successful – that was an AWS practice. We’ve brought thousands of customers globally to adopt the solutions that we were presenting. I think it’s 65% of the solutions that went through our GenAIIC that went to production, and some of them just within 45 days. Over time, we’ve adopted a lot of partner motion as part of the GenAIIC in order to scale it and bring way more industry knowledge, industry specificity. And so we took the best of the GenAIIC in terms of the demos and the industry specifics, and we made it more scalable. And this is how the hub here that we’re implementing in Toronto came about. Toronto is the first Canadian hub that we’re launching, and it’s really because we see that Canadian customers really want to have that partner support to launch their GenAI journeys. In fact, 70% of our customers are really thinking about using partners to be deploying their GenAI environment, and having an environment where we can bring our launch partners – that we’ll talk about in a minute – to bring that cross-industry specificity.
Rob: Let’s talk a little bit about one of the problems that you’re designing to solve here – the dynamic that you see where AI projects stall out between proof of concept and actually getting out there and earning their keep in the business. How widespread a problem is that for Canadian partners talking to their customers today?
Martin Brazinet: Well, I think that’s one of the problems, right? Our customers have started to adopt AI, and they had that first stage of adoption of having pretty basic implementation. And when it comes to having more complex use cases to address in terms of really trying to transform their industry, they lack some of the knowledge that is required to move this to production. And this is where working with partners such as the launch partners that we have here – which are CGI, Dedicated, Elevata, and OpsGuru – they’ve been going to those types of projects dozens of times. They know how to move from proof of concept to production, building the right runbook, upscaling the customer environment, and they are that proof of success that can really reassure customers in that journey to moving to production.
Rob: We talked a little bit before this about a shift that you’re seeing in how purchasing decisions are being made – kind of away from IT and towards line of business, the people who actually own the ultimate solution. How do you find that’s changing what a partner actually does to spec, to architect, to close a deal?
Martin Brazinet: Well, it comes back to the fact that right now, the solutions that were initially planned were very generic. When you’re buying an AI solution off the shelf, it’s relatively non-complex to bring to production, but then you don’t transform your business as much. And it’s really where you see the partner with different depth of expertise – whether it’s consulting expertise that really understands how you need to shift your production environment if you’re in a manufacturing environment, or if you’re a global organization – having the partners that understand those different dynamics and can bring their expertise to help them launch and transform your business.
Rob: Is this a Canada-specific challenge, or something you’re seeing around the world? And if it is sort of a universal challenge – which I suspect at least to some degree it is – is there anything that’s specifically unique about the Canadian market and its peculiarities?
Martin Brazinet: Yeah. I think overall Canadian businesses are, in some aspect, maybe less risk-taking than some other countries.
Rob: You would not be the first who said that.
Martin Brazinet: Yeah. So being supported by a partner that has the experience to move this into your environment is certainly reassuring to customers in terms of the chances of success and avoiding costly mistakes that some may have made. So I think this is kind of maybe more unique to Canada, and this is why the number that I shared earlier – of 70%, 70% of customers are hoping to get their GenAI implementation using a partner – there’s certainly a connection between those two data points there.
Rob: Yeah. I sometimes use the term, “Canadian businesses like to have someone walk through the minefield first and see where it is.” In the case of the right partner who’s done this a bunch of times, they hopefully know where all those mines are beforehand, and specific to your industry.
Rob: So let’s talk about the centre itself and the experience. Walk me through – if I’m a partner and I’m bringing a customer in here, what does that look like in practice? How does the experience unfold?
Martin Brazinet: Yeah. So I think the first thing is every visit to the hub is expected to be a tailored visit. It’s not a demo centre where everybody gets the same experience. A partner is going to take the time to really tailor it with demos and a talk track that are certainly pertinent to the customer that is going to come. So with that in mind, the visit has two dimensions. The first dimension is to work through that immersive demo centre where they’re going to see curated demos that speak to their industry. And it’s going to give some form of reference in terms of the art of the possible – what is the most innovative organization in my specific industry thinking about, and solving problems in different ways? So I think that’s a very intuitive moment where the lights are turning on and you see the art of the possible. And then we’re going to shift to the second aspect of the visit, which is the workshop. And the workshop is where you build that alignment. We have the leadership of our customers present there, and it’s often a diverse set of personas that are going to come – it’s going to be the C-suite and the architects and the line of business, not just the CIO. And we’re bringing the partners’ architects and our architects as well from AWS. And altogether we’re going to try to align the value map of the use cases that they’re trying to solve from a customer perspective, and define what the workstreams are – whether it’s to do a better understanding of the KPI for that use case that we’re thinking about, or whether it’s to go directly to a proof of concept or proof of value, or just to bring it to production. We’re going to get that customized experience. So by the end of the session, the customer walks out of here not only having seen really impressive technology, but they’re going to walk out of here with a plan in hand and documented next steps that we can go and pursue together.
Rob: And I think that last bit may inform this, but I’m curious what you think is the most powerful thing about this space – the thing that you think is really going to get things moving, get things unstuck and create some momentum toward getting AI solutions that are meaningful, that are delivering business outcomes.
Martin Brazinet: You know, that’s a good question. There’s certainly the inspiration moment that is quite powerful – really understanding how technology can now solve a problem in a completely different way. And we try to say that to our customers: if you are going to implement a generative AI solution, don’t try to just automate the steps that are already part of your process, but try to look at it through a completely different lens so that you get a disproportionately better outcome. But to answer your question directly, I think some of the most powerful things that come out of here is the alignment – getting the leadership alignment of our customers, all being in the room, realizing the same capabilities together, and then brainstorming with subject matter experts on what the next steps are. You walk out of here with a consensus on what the best next steps are. And I think that alignment from the leadership perspective is really, really powerful.
Rob: Is it a best practice to lock the door and not let anyone have pizza until everyone’s got on the same page?
Martin Brazinet: Where did you learn about that? I cannot reveal my sources.
Rob: So if I’m a partner who’s participating here and I want to bring a customer in – what does that look like in terms of lead time, in terms of setup, in terms of thinking through what I want to be showing and talking about?
Martin Brazinet: I mean, I guess it depends on where you are in terms of your journey. There’s not a one-size-fits-all. If you’re pretty advanced in terms of defining the outcomes that you’re trying to drive and it’s really about understanding what technology we can align, it’s probably something that we can get ready to do in a couple of days. But if you’re still at the ideation level and you don’t really have a clear understanding of what you’re trying to do, there’s probably more work to do in terms of gathering the requirements and understanding what “good” looks like in terms of the outcome of that session. So I’d say anywhere between a couple of days to a week or two of prep work.
Rob: And I guess lead time will depend on how popular the place is and how many customers are lining up outside the door.
Martin Brazinet: Absolutely. And that’s why we have a few launch partners – so that we start with scale and each of them bring their own set of capabilities. And we also have the scaling factor behind having a few large launch partners with us.
Rob: What’s the vision for the broader partner community going forward? You’re starting with four – what’s the message in terms of a roadmap for more partners having access, and how are you looking at what the qualifying metrics will be to get on the list to bring customers in?
Martin Brazinet: Yeah. Well, I think to your point, this is a starting point. We’re starting with four and it’s not an ultra-gated approach – we want to scale. We want to bring partners that have differentiative offerings. I think that’s the main selection criteria. We’re looking to bring differentiative offerings from the perspective of either industry or type of use case. But this is expected to be a transformation session – not to talk about “oh, I just need to migrate from A to Z.” So if a partner has a specificity in terms of the industry or the way that they tackle problems, we’re certainly willing to hear it and scale our capabilities here.
Rob: What are some of the things that you think will make for the best customers to bring in here, in terms of where they’re at in their journey – what the partners have identified as being beneficial for them versus maybe what the customer themselves has already figured out is beneficial for them?
Martin Brazinet: I think it’s about rotating on the personas. We often pivot when we think about technology and AWS and cloud and AI to the tech owners of the businesses – we go to the CIOs and the architects. But a lot of the expectation from AI and generative AI is a revenue growth imperative that our customers are looking at, and that’s really a board-level priority. So we’re hoping to get more than just the usual technical leaders. Let’s go to the line of business – the people that are really interfacing with the industry problem they’re trying to solve – and see how AI and generative capabilities are now able to accelerate the innovation within that space.
Rob: You mentioned the art of the possible on the customer side. I’m curious on the partner side – as I imagine we’re close enough to having customers going through here regularly that some of the partners have started to identify who they want to bring in – any surprises, without naming names or with naming names if you wish, in terms of what you’ve seen partners bringing to the table in terms of the types of customers or the types of things they want to be showing off?
Martin Brazinet: Yeah, well, it’s a little bit early because we’re really launching this today – it’s going to be announced at the summit the day after tomorrow. So I think we’ll see that and make those discoveries as we go. We’re super excited and our partner ecosystem is really excited about that. But I can’t wait to get some of those learnings.
Rob: So if this works out the way that you’re hoping, what does success look like a year from now? What are you measuring – is it deal velocity, customer outcomes that are actually out there, something else?
Martin Brazinet: That’s a good one. I think the real measure of success is moving to production. Because that’s where the rubber meets the road and we are able to measure the outcome that we’re trying to drive. If it just turns out that we’re visiting the innovation hub and having great discussions and we walk out with a roadmap, but none of this goes into production – I think that’s the exact problem that we’re solving for. I’d say moving to production, and deepening the expertise into different industries, and really thinking about solving the problem in a different way – so that when we solve a problem in a different way, we can scale those learnings to other customers and help the Canadian industry evolve in that matter.
Rob: Big picture – how significant do you think this place, and places like this, will ultimately play in moving the needle on AI adoption in the Canadian market, especially for partners and for customers?
Martin Brazinet: Well, I think the opportunity is immense. If I just go back to my initial statement – there are 650,000 Canadian customers and two-thirds of which are at that very basic implementation of AI. We need to unblock those customers. We need to accelerate them. And I think places like this one are a way to get there. So I expect it’s going to be really impactful, providing this format is what customers need. They need to see things through a different lens and they definitely need the support of the partner community to move to implementation and get them to production. So I’m hoping it’s going to be really impactful for Canadian customers to accelerate their transformation. I think the number that I saw is that we expect 85% of the Canadian industry needs to change within the next five years, driven by AI adoption. So if we want our Canadian customers to stay innovative, to stay relevant, to be as productive and innovative as the rest of the industry, I think doing those experiments that we’re doing here with the hub is how we can help them. That’s a lot of folks through the centre.
Rob: Good luck with the launch and getting partners in here and getting some of those AI projects moving forward. Thanks for taking the time.
Martin Brazinet: No, thank you very much. It was great speaking with you today.
That was Martin Brazinet from AWS Canada on the vision behind the Partner Innovation Hub and what it’s designed to unlock for Canadian businesses on their AI journeys. Now let’s hear the partner side of the story. Dinesh Bhavsar is director of AI, emerging technologies and innovation at CGI – one of the four companies tapped as launch partners for the facility. His take on what customers actually need, and the honest conversations partners sometimes need to have, is a nice complement to what we just heard from AWS itself.
Rob: Dinesh, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it.
Dinesh Bhavsar: Thanks for having me. I appreciate it as well.
Rob: Tell me a little bit about where your customers at CGI are at with AI. Obviously one of the precepts here – and this is something I’ve heard from partners for at least the last year – the idea that we start out strong, we have lots of ambition to do AI, but we don’t necessarily know what we want to do, we don’t necessarily know how we want to do it. We don’t know what that outcome looks like. What are you seeing from customers today in terms of where their AI journey falls off, for want of a better phrase?
Dinesh Bhavsar: Yeah, I think there’s a broad spectrum of maturity when it comes to understanding what AI is, what it’s not, and what it can do for the organization. So we’ve had great clients who have a really good, clear understanding of what AI can do for their business and their business processes. And then we’ve had clients who are just, “Hey, I need to implement AI – Dinesh, help me implement AI.” And it’s those clients where we really have to have the honest conversation about the fact that if you’re starting with AI or any technology as the solution, you’ve already failed. Because you haven’t thought about what problem you’re actually trying to solve, and yet you’ve jumped to AI being the solution for all things in life. I don’t think that’s the case in many instances, but you do have to have those honest conversations with clients about that.
Rob: Tell me about how you guys got involved here with the centre. At what point did AWS pull you in, and what was the initial reaction to the idea of doing this kind of an innovation hub?
Dinesh Bhavsar: Yeah, I think at CGI – and especially within our team in the emerging technologies, AI and innovation team – we really try to drive a culture of innovation, a culture of customer-first mindset. And through our partnership with AWS, we were able to bring clients in to work through that concept and that practice. So that really allowed our clients to understand what it really means to put customer-first in every opportunity, in every challenge that they’re trying to solve. And I think through that partnership, through that collaboration, this hub really allows us to bring that to life and really bring clients into that journey. And we’re hoping to bring more of those experiences to our clients, as well as our CGI partners. I think CGI as a whole is looking to innovate and drive more customer-centric, or client-centric delivery. And I think this practice, this centre, will allow us to showcase some of that as well with our partners.
Rob: What do you think will be the most impactful, especially when it comes to the demos and the things that they can show off here? I know it’s hard to predict because every customer is going to be different, but just in terms of things that you think might really get into a customer’s mind.
Dinesh Bhavsar: Yeah, I think it’s the application of AI. Real-world scenarios, real-world application – I think that’s going to stand out. It’s very easy to think about the theoretical aspects of everything that’s happening in the AI space. Like I said, clients can get very lost. All of us can get really lost in everything that’s happening. But when you try to bring it down to real, tangible examples where people can see it in action, that relates to their role or relates to their business process – I think that’s when AI really becomes real. And I think this allows us to showcase that.
Rob: What do you think it’s going to do in terms of speed to value, speed to outcomes – whatever you want to call it – in terms of the sales and architecting cycle that you guys go through with customers?
Dinesh Bhavsar: Yeah, I think it’ll accelerate that quite a bit. Again, I’m a big advocate of solutions – real screens, real models, real-world solutions – and less of theoretical slides. I think the days of current state assessments and advisory alone are of the past. I think clients expect us to show real working solutions. And once you actually have that – what I always say is 70%, 80% there – you only really have the balance to customize for the client. And that allows you to move a lot faster than how we do today.
Rob: You guys, I have to presume, are very familiar with the idea of working with the C-suite and working across the business. But I’m curious how much more of a shift you’ve seen towards line of business and C-suite as we’re looking at this AI technology stack.
Dinesh Bhavsar: Yeah, I think we’ve gone from the world of being curious and wanting to understand more about AI at that level – and a bit of FOMO, I think – we’ve had executives that are in the race for the sake of being in the race to deploy AI – to more of, “Okay, I understand the technology now. I really need to understand the ROI or the value that it’s going to help drive in our business. What impact does it have on our employees?” So technology alone is great, but really you need to surround yourself with the human-centered, customer-centric practices – like design thinking, systems thinking, for example – which are great practices to surround yourself with AI or any technology. And I think C-suites are now understanding what that human impact is going to be. Efficiencies, sure, but it’s really around empowering their employees with more decision-making power at a pace that hasn’t been there in the past. So I think that’s evolved. Like I said, there are some notions out there of being in the AI space because it’s the thing to do right now. But I think executives, I think middle managers are all taking a step back to really understand what value it can bring, and really understand the cost of maintaining and creating these models. So I think the maturity has evolved quite a bit.
Rob: How important is it that it’s a physical location? You guys are obviously global in scale with customers both local and international. And the whole concept of the cloud, of AI, of all this – is that it’s out there, it’s everywhere, all at the same time. And yet it does come down to getting everyone in the same room and hashing it out, working it out, and getting everyone aligned on the same value.
Dinesh Bhavsar: Yeah, I mean, I’m a big advocate of in-person experiences. So I think having a physical space does allow you to bring a different mindset when you walk into it – whether that’s how it’s laid out and how people can navigate the space, complemented by the technology there to help you think differently, and then of course the collaborative spaces that surround it. Whether it’s workshops, groupthink, communal seating – I think all of that makes a big difference in a space like the Innovation Hub here. I think it does help that people get away from their day-to-day routine and come through an experience like this, because I think it does help you think differently, think more boldly. And it allows you to, again like I said before, be vulnerable, ask all the questions, and know that you’re surrounded in a safe environment that allows you to do that and fosters it. So physical space, to me, is great. I’m a big advocate of whiteboarding. I love whiteboarding. I’m such a visual person that I just draw it all out and see how it all works. And you’d be surprised to see how quickly decisions can get made when everyone’s in a room together, focused on one thing and not distracted by the emails and the phone calls – but really allowing themselves for focused work, group work.
Rob: It sounds like almost the benefits of an off-site type of meeting, just where the site involved happens to be purpose-driven for what you’re trying to do with it.
Dinesh Bhavsar: Exactly. And you want to be intentional. You want to come in here for a purpose. You want to come here with intention. And you do need facilitation of that. And I think the space helps facilitate that thinking. I think the people in the room can help facilitate that as well. But I think it is much more important to have a space like this than to not.
Rob: How are you thinking about the customers who come in here, especially in terms of prioritization? Is it the biggest opportunities first, or is it you want to look at those who have big hairy audacious goals, or those who maybe don’t quite realize yet what could be the goal?
Dinesh Bhavsar: Yeah, it’s probably the last part. In my world in emerging technologies and innovation, our role is really to help clients think about things they haven’t thought about yet, help CGI partners think about things they haven’t thought about yet, and really the art of the possible. So I think having clients come through here and really seeing what it could be is very beneficial. I’m hoping that seeing real-world solutions really helps to say, “Okay, well, what is AI and how does it help me and my business process? And what does that mean for my employees? Or what does it mean for my customers? Or what does it mean for my partners?” And so I think those questions can all be sort of answered in a space like this, in an experience like this, with real solutions. So yeah, I think it’ll be great. I don’t necessarily prioritize in terms of the size of the pie. My job is more about sparking curiosity with all our clients. And so we focus a lot more on strategic pursuits than tactical delivery.
Rob: In terms of the kinds of demos you want to be delivering, I’m curious how customized, how granular do you want to go on setting those up? Is it a matter of the more customized the better, or do you want to keep it at an industry level? What does best case look like for you?
Dinesh Bhavsar: Yeah, I think for me, one thing is keeping it as simple as possible – that will get the most adoption and understanding of what we’re trying to showcase. I think industry-wide definitely helps, because then you can see what others are doing, or where the industry is headed, and how that can apply to your specific scenario. And then you have to flex, right? So I think there are certain demos that are very business-friendly – where you do have executives come in and want to understand those solutions at a high level – and then you can have it so that you can go technically deep as well for the right audience and have those conversations. So you do need to be able to flex the demo, but I would say industry-wide, what’s truly emerging – and again, focus on what clients perhaps are not thinking of or considering yet – and really show them the art of the possible.
Rob: Last one for me – a year from now, once getting folks in here is a frequent experience and you’ve got lots of reps on it, what are you thinking about in terms of one specific type of AI success story that you hope will have come out of bringing a customer into this facility?
Dinesh Bhavsar: Yeah, I think I hope to bring a lot more clients through this experience, as I call it. I’m hoping we can bring real-world AI solutions that have impacted not only the client themselves, but I think it’d be great to see AI supporting social good, and us being able to dive into responsible innovation as well. So an AI solution that’s helping Canadians collectively across the country would be a great AI use case. And we’re doing a lot of work at CGI in terms of responsible innovation and how do we drive AI for good, for Canadians, with Canadians. And I’m hoping that use case or something gets sprung from this space.
Rob: Big goals. I wish you well on that.
Dinesh Bhavsar: Yeah, appreciate it. Thanks for having me.
Rob: Thank you.
There you have it – Martin Brazinet from AWS Canada and Dinesh Bhavsar from CGI.
I’d like to thank both Martin and Dinesh for their time, and for carving out space for these conversations in the middle of what was a busy launch week.
A couple things that stuck with me from these two interviews. Martin’s numbers are worth sitting with: of 650,000 Canadian businesses already on the AI journey, only about a third have gone deep. Two-thirds are still at the basics – not for lack of ambition. It’s just that moving from proof of concept to production is genuinely hard. It takes industry expertise, stakeholder alignment, and someone who’s been through the minefield enough times to know where the mines are.
What I appreciate about Dinesh’s perspective is how direct he is with customers about the starting point. If someone comes to CGI and says, “I need to implement AI – help me,” he’ll be the first to tell them that they’ve already made a mistake, because they jumped to the solution before identifying the problem. That’s a conversation a lot of partners are navigating right now, and it’s a healthy one to hear out loud.
The hub itself is an interesting bet on the idea that getting the C-suite, the architects, and the line-of-business people in the same room, seeing the same demos, and walking out with a shared plan is what actually gets these projects unstuck. The model has a good track record globally – 65% of solutions through AWS’s GenAIIC program have made it to production – so there’s something to build on here.
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Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.
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Today’s headline news for Canadian IT solution providers:
ConnectWise Platform: ConnectWise yesterday unveiled what it calls the industry’s first purpose-built platform for Predictive IT, unifying PSA, RMM, cybersecurity, automation, workflow orchestration, and native agentic AI into a single execution layer for managed services. CEO Manny Rivelo described it as a fundamental shift from reactive IT management to an AI-native operating model. The company also released new operational benchmark modeling based on a representative MSP with approximately $3M in annual managed services revenue, showing the productivity and economic impact it says AI-driven automation can deliver.Cavelo Cora AI Security Analyst: Kitchener, Ontario-based Cavelo has introduced Cora, an AI Security Analyst integrated into its data security posture management platform and positioned specifically for MSPs and MSSPs. Cavelo says Cora analyzes security telemetry and translates it into a guided remediation action plan in seconds, tailored by role. The tool targets the operational gap between risk visibility and actual remediation – without requiring additional headcount.Radiant Logic and Zscaler Partnership: Radiant Logic and Zscaler have announced a technology partnership aimed at solving the Day 1 access problem in mergers and acquisitions. By integrating RadiantOne’s identity data fabric with the Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange, the companies say acquiring organizations can securely connect newly onboarded employees to applications from the moment a deal closes, regardless of disparate identity systems.ConnectSecure Patch 360: ConnectSecure is launching Patch 360, a patch management platform built for MSPs that introduces pilot-first validation, risk-based prioritization using CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities and EPSS scoring, controlled rollouts with approval workflows, and integrated rollback – replacing what the company describes as a “deploy-and-hope” model with a “test-and-trust” framework.NTT DATA and Google Cloud: NTT DATA is expanding its AI partnership with Google Cloud, launching a dedicated Gemini Enterprise practice to help enterprise clients move AI deployments from pilot to production at scale.Descope Agentic Identity Hub: Identity platform Descope is announcing enhancements to its Agentic Identity Hub today, extending its tools for managing authentication and access for autonomous AI agents.Checkmarx CISO Research: Checkmarx has released research surveying more than 2,000 developers and CISOs, finding that 95 percent of CISOs report facing internal pressure to suppress software compliance findings.Read Full TranscriptWelcome to The Buzz from ChannelBuzz.ca, I’m Robert Dutt, today is Tuesday, June 9, 2026, and here’s what’s happening in the channel today.
ConnectWise yesterday unveiled what it is calling the industry’s first purpose-built platform for the era of Predictive IT. The ConnectWise Platform brings together PSA, RMM, cybersecurity, automation, workflow orchestration, and native agentic AI into what the company describes as a single intelligent execution layer for managed services. CEO Manny Rivelo positioned it as a fundamental shift away from the labor-intensive, disconnected systems that have defined MSP operations for decades, toward what ConnectWise calls an AI-native operating model. To support the launch, the company released new operational benchmark modeling showing the productivity and economic impact it says AI-driven automation can have on MSP operations. In their model, a representative managed services firm with approximately three million dollars in annual revenue could see measurable transformation across their first stages of the Predictive Intelligence journey. This is a significant platform bet from one of the largest players in the MSP tooling market, and the framing around “Predictive IT” is clearly a narrative ConnectWise intends to own.
In the security space, Kitchener, Ontario-based Cavelo has introduced Cora, an AI Security Analyst integrated directly into its data security posture management platform. Positioned specifically for MSPs and MSSPs, Cora functions as an AI agent that analyzes security telemetry to identify, prioritize, and recommend remediation steps for cyber risks across client environments. Rather than adding more alerts to the dashboard, Cavelo says the tool translates security data into a guided action plan in seconds, tailored to the specific roles of frontline technicians and senior security leaders. The development targets a well-documented operational gap between risk visibility and remediation – allowing service providers to reduce manual investigation time and offer clients clear, actionable intelligence without increasing headcount.
Radiant Logic and Zscaler have formed a strategic partnership designed to address the Day 1 access challenges commonly found in mergers and acquisitions. By integrating RadiantOne’s identity data fabric with the Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange, the companies are aiming to eliminate the complex network and identity merge projects that typically stall productivity following a deal close. The joint solution allows acquiring organizations to securely connect newly onboarded employees to necessary applications from day one, regardless of disparate Active Directory or HR systems. In a market where M&A activity among IT service providers shows no sign of slowing, this integration offers a repeatable framework for reducing the downtime and cyber risk associated with bringing acquired entities onto a managed environment – which is a practical and recurring service challenge for many MSPs in the field.
In Brief – ConnectSecure launches Patch 360, a patch management platform for MSPs built on pilot-first testing, risk-based vulnerability prioritization, and integrated rollback controls. NTT DATA expands its AI partnership with Google Cloud, launching a dedicated Gemini Enterprise practice to help organizations move deployments from pilot to production scale. Descope is announcing enhancements today to its Agentic Identity Hub, aimed at helping organizations manage access for autonomous AI agents. Checkmarx research of more than 2,000 developers and CISOs finds 95 percent of CISOs report facing pressure to suppress software compliance findings. Full details and links in the show notes or the blog post.
Later today on In The Channel, we have a conversation about the launch of the AWS Partner Innovation Hub in Toronto, with AWS Canada‘s Martin Brazonet and CGI’s Dinesh Bhavsar on the challenge of moving AI from proof-of-concept to production. And if you haven’t heard it yet, check out our conversation with Earl Gosick from ESTI Consulting Services, recorded at Dell Technologies World, on why the AI story is really a storage story – that one is on the feed now.
That’s how we’re seeing the headlines today. I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, thanks for listening. Have a great day.
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Nigel Brown, CTO of Microserve
Not every voice at Dell Technologies World last week belonged to a vendor. For a partner perspective on the week’s biggest themes, In The Channel sat down with Nigel Brown, CTO of Microserve – a Burnaby, BC-based solution provider, Dell Titanium partner, and Dell’s Client Solutions Partner of the Year in Canada in consecutive years.
Brown walked away from DTW with deskside agentic AI as his headline takeaway, particularly after hands-on time in a Dell lab showcasing NemoClaw – NVIDIA’s enterprise-governance take on the OpenClaw open-source agent framework. “They’ve set it up closed by default – it can’t leave the box,” Brown says. “That’s a safety net that really opens the conversation.” That said, he’s clear-eyed about where most of his public sector and enterprise clients actually are. “Broad scope, it’s ahead. The hardware is going to follow it.”
The tokenomics reality landed hard too. Brown shared a personal story about spending a hundred dollars testing Claude on a single flight – a relatable example he’s started using to frame the real cost implications of unmanaged AI usage, well before any on-premises or local inference conversation begins.
On cyber resilience, Brown says he’s had to evolve his approach: “I got to be more of a jerk. I was being too nice.” His firm’s managed backup practice has seen firsthand the damage when clients – and even other MSPs – treat backup as a checkbox. When you show up after a ransomware event to find the backup server was on the same domain and hit just as hard, the conversation changes.
And on Canadian data sovereignty, Brown goes beyond the standard data-residency talking points. FISA Section 702 and the CLOUD Act, he argues, represent far more serious legal exposure than most clients realize – even those who believe a Canadian cloud region is sufficient protection.
The conversation also covers the AI PC refresh cycle colliding with supply chain pressure, the end-user adoption gap that’s undermining Copilot investments, and what Dell’s revised partner incentive structure signals about where the growth opportunities are.
Read Full TranscriptRobert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In the Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca and your host for the show.
Last week, I was at Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas, Dell’s big annual customer and partner event. Over the course of the week, I had a number of conversations that I’ll be bringing here on In the Channel. Last week, we featured three Dell executives. This week, we’re bringing you some partners.
Today, we start on that partner perspective, specifically from one of Canada’s top Dell partners. Nigel Brown is CTO of Microserve, a Burnaby, BC-based solution provider that has earned Titanium status with Dell and taken home Dell’s Client Solutions Partner of the Year in Canada in consecutive years. Microserve serves an enterprise and public sector-heavy client base, which means Nigel’s job is regularly about taking what gets announced on a stage in Las Vegas and translating it into something that makes sense for organizations that don’t necessarily move at conference speed.
I caught up with Nigel on site at DTW last week. We covered a lot of ground – deskside agentic AI and what it’s actually going to take to make that real for customers, the very real cost of token economics, why he’s had to be, as he put it, more of a jerk about cyber resilience, and why the Canadian data sovereignty conversation is more urgent than most people realize.
Let’s get right to it. My chat with Nigel Brown.
Nigel, thanks for taking the time. Appreciate it.
Nigel Brown: Happy to be here. Thanks for having me.
Robert Dutt: So you guys are here, obviously, as a Titanium-level Dell partner, consecutive years as the Client Solutions Partner of the Year in Canada. What’s your overall read on this week? What made your ears stand up? What caught your attention? What are you taking back to both your team and to your customers when you go back to Burnaby?
Nigel Brown: That’s a really good question. It’s also a big one. There’s been a lot of announcements, a lot of dialogue over the last couple of days. I’m trying to process that a little bit, assuming you were going to ask me that. I think the biggest takeaway I had – everybody’s heard of OpenClaw, everybody’s heard all the IT people are terrified of it, so it’s more, how do we get rid of it in our environments? Seeing this whole push around deskside agentic AI, especially given our market where we play a lot with clients – I actually had the opportunity, I did the lab today because I couldn’t resist seeing what it’s like. The governance and security wrapper on it totally makes sense and it’s opened my eyes. I think that’s probably the biggest. Beyond that, I would say the Dell hardware being able to run frontier models, seeing Gemini running local for sovereignty conversations – I think that’s a really good thing to see as well.
Robert Dutt: Along those lines, obviously you touched on one of the big stories this week, which is deskside AI – the idea of physical infrastructure that’s at or near the customer’s desk, either in the data center or right there in the PC, that’s processing the models locally. It sounds like something that you’re interested in. I’m curious where it lands for your customers. Is it something that’s a conversation point, or is it ahead of where they are in the AI discussion at this point?
Nigel Brown: I would say broad scope – I don’t want to lump all my customers into one bucket – but broad scope, it’s ahead. I don’t think you’re seeing a lot of organizations ready for it. We also deal heavily with public sector enterprise accounts, for example. We’re doing more and more in the commercial market where you’re going to see a little bit more playing and adoption within tech teams. But in ours, yeah, I’d say we’re definitely ahead right now. So it gives you a chance to get in there and pitch the idea as something new and plant those seeds. Once I get it past my IT and security folks, then that’s where it’s all going to start. If I can’t get it through mine in a good conversation, then I’m never going to be able to with our clients.
Robert Dutt: But it sounds like there’s at least that – from your comments on OpenClaw, it sounds like there’s that door, that area of interest.
Nigel Brown: Seeing it today under the NemoClaw and Viya umbrella – yeah, I think there’s definitely something there. They’ve set it up closed by default. It can’t leave the box. That’s what I saw in the lab today. So until you set up essentially like a firewall rule to allow it to do something, it’s a safety net that I think really opens the conversation and allows the idea of end users actually playing. Those are really early adopters anyway. And how could I integrate agentic AI into organizations?
Robert Dutt: Man, how often does it come back down to governance with AI?
Nigel Brown: Oh, absolutely. That’s pretty much the name of the game everywhere. And so we’re doing it well, and many are still scrambling.
Robert Dutt: You touch on you guys having a lot of public sector, healthcare, education, all those kinds of verticals – not always the fastest to move on new tech. Along the lines of the previous questions, but sort of taken out a notch – how much of what the AI announcements we’ve heard this week translate directly to where your customers are at, versus how much needs to be, shall we say, adapted for the reality of your accounts?
Nigel Brown: Well, you go to any of these events and it’s, “We’re behind if we’re not doing agentic AI everywhere.” Reality is, it’s just not true. I think it’s very forward-thinking – or very optimistic – to think we’re all moving that fast. It’s headed in that direction quicker and quicker. Executive tables are always the ones sitting there going, “We want it, we need it in our organizations, we’re going to get left behind.” So it’s very top of mind. But some organizations have very niche deployments – they’re figuring out the right solutions. Healthcare – I’ve seen it, they’ve done some phenomenal things in radiology and other areas. So it’s picking up. We’re dealing with one client right now that’s looking at online pharmacy and they’re looking at a huge Dell compute cluster to run AI on. So you see it, but it’s not commonplace. It’s not every organization. Certainly as you get into municipalities and things like that, it’s Copilot at best – that’s really where they’re trying to play – and their user base just isn’t adopting, not even close.
Robert Dutt: So it sounds like there are at least a couple of steps that need to happen to get to the point of, A, using what’s already in place and, B, potentially looking at building out something internally – and the stuff that’s been talked about here a lot, the idea of running those AI workloads internally on the data center side.
Nigel Brown: Yeah. I think it’s going to get there for sure. Right now the conversation has to be outcomes – not “I want AI.” And right now it’s so heavily, “Well, I know I need it, I don’t know what for yet.” I’ve seen it even in some peer groups – the dialogue is, “Well, we’re going to do AI, we’re going to build agents.” So, what for? And then there’s a long pause. Driving outcomes conversations is where it’s going to start, in my opinion. The hardware is going to follow it. And that really ties into, well, where are you going to run it? Do you understand token economics – or tokenomics, whatever the buzzword is right now – and that’s a really big deal. For me, getting that message out really loud and clear around the cost of tokens – I’ve done it, I’ve gotten burned. I spent a hundred bucks on a plane because I wanted to see Claude do something cool. And you’re going, wow, if I can do that in 10 minutes, think of what larger organizations will spend if they don’t find a smarter way to run it.
Robert Dutt: That’s a good point – it’s not something you necessarily understand, but it’s something you can sure feel if you start to have adventures with the stuff.
Nigel Brown: Well, exactly. And all it’s going to take – like I said, a lot of organizations started with Copilot under the Microsoft umbrella, because it was like an easy button. It was there for them, it was already set up. I am worried about some of those days changing, where that subscription turns into usage-based models. And we’ll see where that goes. You’re seeing it with Anthropic, you’re seeing it with Perplexity. I bounce off my limits all the time. Most of what I’m doing I can wait till tomorrow – but it’s easy to get out of control.
Robert Dutt: And user computing is pretty core to what you guys do. There are a few things going on there – Windows 11 end-of-life support coming in October, the AI PC push coming from every direction at the same time. I’m curious if those two things are coming together in customer conversations as one refresh decision, or are they still separate tracks – the need to modernize for the Windows upgrade versus the need to modernize to get the most out of AI workloads?
Nigel Brown: I think the end-of-support conversation and hardware refresh, honestly, is the biggest driver of the conversation that I’ve seen. And then that leads into, well, do I need an AI PC, and why, and what’s going to run on it? Everybody’s exploring and curious about it. There’s more skepticism about whether you need it now.
Robert Dutt: How is that hitting along with the current fun situation with hardware constraints and prices spiking? And we’re hearing pretty directly from Jeff Clarke that, you know, telling customers, let us know what you want as early in the process as you can. I think the natural addendum to that is, make decisions knowing you might have this machine for a little bit longer than you previously expected.
Nigel Brown: Totally right. So it’s very much my dialogue with our clients – it’s future-proofing. You better do it now. You don’t want to be stuck with a machine that can’t run an NPU for the next five years. So even if right now there’s skepticism about how much is going to run on it today, I think it is an important conversation to have and make sure that we’re ready for the moments where we’re really seeing workloads and inferencing running on device. You have to have that conversation now and pre-plan for it. But yeah, it’s been – especially in public sector – a hard conversation to have right now. Supply chain – we’re like a broken record. It still surprises me how many clients we talk to that haven’t seen this coming, that don’t know it’s real, or you get the ones going, “Well, I think it’s going to clear up in September, I’ll just wait till then.” Oh man. Brace for it. We’ve got to be ready. It just feels like a conversation on repeat these days – and it’s more than worth it, making sure we’re doing model selection with the future in mind.
Robert Dutt: I find it’s a fun time to be a partner in that particular space.
Nigel Brown: Well, you know, quote volume has quadrupled, because that same customer deal might take four different passes before they’ve made it through, especially in government. Pricing validity is a real challenge. It’s a moving target – no decision ever gets made fast.
Robert Dutt: I want to talk a little about cyber resilience – another big topic here at the event. You guys run a managed backup practice, I understand, and you’re doing a lot of what vendors are asking MSPs to evolve towards. When you get into a customer environment today, what’s the most common gap between what they think their backup situation looks like and the reality of the situation?
Nigel Brown: That’s an interesting question. It’s a real mixed bag. I always start with, “How confident are you in your ability to recover?” And most leaders – business leaders, outside of IT – there’s like a long pause. “Well, I don’t know.” Okay. Have you ever tested your recovery capability? No. Well, that’s where we’re going to start. And in other dialogues, they think they’ve got the backups running, but nobody’s been looking at them – they’re coming from doing it themselves, or maybe a mom-and-pop IT person taking care of it. They’re not watching, they’re not looking at tools, they’re not getting alert notifications on whether it’s keeping up and whether they’re protected. So that’s very foundational. Warning new clients – it’s just, let’s take them on that journey, do an assessment of the whole environment, make sure we’re protected. And a lot of conversations are, “Do you know that you’re not protected? Like, if you got ransomware tomorrow, there’s nothing I could do to help you, even though I’m your MSP.” That’s a scary reality. I’ve seen that have to go back to boards and make some tough decisions, find budget and solve it. They usually do – they react fast – but you’ve got to make the risk abundantly clear.
Robert Dutt: That makes sense. In talking to Rob Emsley, who’s on the marketing team for the cyber resilience side at Dell, he was saying that 97% of cyber attacks now are specifically targeting backup infrastructure – because it turns out that’s where all the stuff is. Does that match what you’re seeing, and has that shift changed what you’re recommending to customers about what being protected really means for them?
Nigel Brown: I wouldn’t say it’s really changed our messaging. I’d like to think we were maybe ahead of the curve in talking about storage and immutability – some of these key elements of, well, you just need it. That’s how we run our hosted service for clients that use it. And if we’re building out an architecture for another client, it’s just fundamental these days. You can’t even consider a solution that doesn’t include immutability protection, being able to spot bad things happening. But I’ve seen it – we’ve come into a disaster client where, “Hey, we got ransomware, can you help us recover?” And you go to the backup server to find out it was ransomwared too. “Do you have any tapes floating around?” It’s a tough chat to have. You see that less these days, but you definitely see the attempts – people trying to do it. And even other MSPs – I hate to say it – they’re not mature enough in how they’re protecting. They took the backup server, joined it to the domain – it’s just another device on the network. And sure enough, that’s exactly what gets hit because they didn’t plan it out. So it’s all planning and doing it right in the first place.
Robert Dutt: It’s a checkbox as opposed to something that’s more firmly thought through. Given that, how do you approach it with customers? Do you come at it as, “This is something you should do, these are the reasons why, this is the potential downside” – or is it a thou-shalt kind of conversation?
Nigel Brown: You know, a pile of years ago, after seeing an incident hit a new customer, I kind of resolved – I’ve got to be more of a jerk. I hate to say it. I got to be a lot tougher in my stance. I was being too nice. So yeah, in all things on this, my position is to generally take a pretty firm line. It’s all about risk, though. And to business leaders especially, that’s a term they understand. I’m not telling them, “Okay, you need this type of backup solution and it’s going to do these things.” It’s all about, how do we address the risk that you have right now? Leave it to us to figure out the details as we design the solution. Rarely do we get into the weeds of it unless it’s a larger client where we’re dealing with a large IT team that has opinions. But usually in those larger environments, there are groups that are already aligned – they know what they should be doing, maybe just haven’t done it themselves yet. The new architecture is absolutely going to include all those steps. So it’s an easier conversation to have. In some ways, it’s giving them permission if you’re coming in as a new supplier – it’s the stuff they’ve wanted to do, but haven’t really had the air cover to make the case.
Robert Dutt: Yeah, you come in as that outside opinion to say, this is how it needs to be.
Nigel Brown: And our job is often more of just a translator for those IT teams to their leadership – to help support the business case.
Robert Dutt: I want to talk about the Modern Partner Platform and some of the partner program changes that have rolled out this week. One of the big things is obviously the revised incentive structure, with cyber resilience particularly called out as a premium rebate area. From your seat as a Titanium partner, what does the new structure tell you about where Dell sees the biggest growth opportunities for partners?
Nigel Brown: Well, I think it does exactly that – it says where the growth opportunities are. And largely there was no surprise. In my opinion, when you look at it, it aligns to how we want to lead deals, it aligns with the conversations we’re already going to have. Now it’s just helping incentivize that dialogue. Nothing surprising there – I just see better alignment.
Robert Dutt: Let’s play a little bit of “anything can happen here.” Vendors like Dell are starting to build agentic AI into their programs, their portals, their tools – all the stuff you guys work with every day. Where do you see the most genuine value for an organization like your own in vendors – agentifying, for want of a better word – their partner programs and tools? And the flip side: are there any potholes you’re watching out for as that rolls out?
Nigel Brown: You know, the more the merrier – more tools you can bring in is great. We’re always excited to see what they come up with. But to me, the bottom line is back to outcomes. It’s about reducing friction in the sales process. What do we want our sellers to do? We want them out selling. Living in a partner portal trying to find what they need, deal registration, all of those things that can be painful – sometimes it’s just admin work taking you away from conversations with clients. Reduce friction – that’s the name of the game. Do I want to see more AI-generated marketing content? No. We can do that ourselves – one prompt, feed something in, done. To me, the more you can expose what matters to us and reduce friction, the better. It keeps us doing what we should be doing and not sitting there doing admin work.
Robert Dutt: It sounds like based on that comment, what Dell and a lot of its peers are doing is already on track – because I’m sure they’re asking these exact same questions of partners around the world right now.
Nigel Brown: Oh, they’ve got way smarter people than me working in these massive organizations. They know the outcomes we want to achieve. And I’m excited that we’re at a point in time where we can see some of this come to fruition. Ten years ago, this was never a reality.
Robert Dutt: What’s the biggest misconception you think your customers have about what it means to be AI ready right now?
Nigel Brown: I think it depends on who the conversation is centered around. If it’s C-suite leadership, it’s back to, “We want AI, I don’t know what for, I don’t know what it is, but I know I need it.” There are tough conversations to be had. AI readiness is really, is your data ready? We heard that on stage this morning. Most organizations we walk into – it turns out they’ve got no data governance. So, let’s define some of this, let’s build some process, look at the right tools. In the Microsoft lens, we do a lot around Microsoft 365 and modern workplace. Well, then it’s a Purview conversation. And they get confused – “Why are you talking about DLP and Purview? I thought we were talking about AI readiness.” That’s exactly what it’s all about. The other big one I think they’re not taking seriously enough is the end-user adoption side. I’ve seen organizations – you go into their portals and have a look with them – their adoption of Copilot, where they’ve spent a whole pile of money, is abysmal. So then the dialogue is, “What you actually need to do is get your users excited. Train them, show them the cool things.” I think we’ve been really successful doing that inside our own organization, and now that’s something we deliver to our clients as well – we need to get your teams ready and thinking differently. At a C-suite level, they’re usually surprised at the path it takes, or in some cases how long it might take to get there. “Your data is in such rough shape – you’re two years away. You need to build a foundation before you can really consume it.” Now, some of the announcements this morning – okay, that starts changing the equation. We could get there faster if we have the right infrastructure in place.
Robert Dutt: For a variety of reasons, the Canadian data sovereignty question feels like it’s getting louder. And I have to imagine, especially in your public sector footprint, how are you helping customers think through AI infrastructure decisions when data residency and compliance are an increasing part of the equation?
Nigel Brown: It’s a non-negotiable for most of our enterprise and public sector clients. It’s going to run on-prem. They cannot afford to run on cloud. Yes, they want the latest models, the frontier models, the cool bells and whistles as we all do. But really – I presented at a conference last year on exactly this topic, why it’s important to bring it back on-prem. Never mind the tokenomics conversation – now there’s just more ammunition. I chatted with one IT leader, a commercial client, not public sector, who was all proud of how he’d migrated everything to cloud. We were in a session where they talked through the tokenomics challenge and another reason why sovereignty matters. And you watch the look on his face go, “Wow, I’m going to have to start building a data center again. I thought I got out of that.” And he was sitting there with his CEO in the room for that conversation. Kind of a wake-up call. So my dialogue is, let’s talk through what does the Patriot Act mean? What does FISA Section 702 mean? It’s a little bit scary, and people are shocked – “I thought running in Google Cloud or AWS, running it in a Canadian location was good enough.” No. That provider has access to your data. Have you heard of the CLOUD Act? That’s nothing compared to FISA 702 – they don’t even need to ask. They can just go and get it. And that’s pretty scary. So yeah, a lot of our job now is just sharing and communicating the right things to our clients and making sure they’re aware.
Robert Dutt: Aside from your efforts to bring that education – do you find that the level of general awareness is on the rise? Are we getting to more of a discussion about how to solve for this, rather than still defining the scope of the problem?
Nigel Brown: I would love to say it’s more mature. The reality is no – it’s still early-stage conversations. You get anomalies. We were with some clients who are way ahead and have just deployed Azure Local on Dell infrastructure. They’re doing amazing things, moving fast. So now it’s more, “How can I partner with you to go share this message? Why you went there, why you built it this way, what are you doing about it?” But no, it’s going to be a continued push – much like the supply chain story here – these dialogues just repeat as you walk into client after client.
Robert Dutt: Last one for me – along the same lines as the first question, but a slightly different lens. What’s one thing from this week that you think will genuinely change what Microserve brings to customers in the next 12 months?
Nigel Brown: I come back to where we started – the whole side of agentic AI. That was not on my radar, not in a serious way. “Let’s play around with this, let’s lab it out, see where it’s getting explored.” When you see a name like Dell behind what we’re doing, that got me more excited than I would have thought. I want to pilot inside our org. And if we can start building something that works here, then absolutely – taking that to clients and saying, “Okay, look at the GB10s, look at the GB300s, let’s move up the ladder.” There’s a tangible path that gives them more value than trying to build massive solutions right out of the gate. There are quick wins there, and that’s what excites me – showing a customer how there could be a quick win if we did this right. And it ties into the last thread we were pulling on – “Okay, you’re telling me I shouldn’t have all this stuff running on public cloud, so where’s it going to run?” And you’re not talking megawatts and massive data centers here. All I want to do is automate tasks and do some of this lower-level stuff. I think that’s going to be an interesting entry point for a lot of clients – making it more accessible. Everybody’s used ChatGPT, Claude, whatever their tool of choice is, so they’re into prompting. Nobody’s really understanding Copilot or understanding agentic – it’s a big buzzword. That’s our job. We can show them a slice of the possible, mock up these use cases, and those are quick wins. Then it is something deployable at scale – you just move it from the little box to a bigger box. The more people take advantage of it and keep moving up the scale, you don’t need to go spend millions upfront to play around with something like that. It’s going to open more doors.
Robert Dutt: No shortage of interesting opportunities. Good luck getting out there and chasing those, and thanks again for making the time this week.
Nigel Brown: You bet. Thanks for having me.
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Today’s headline news for Canadian IT solution providers:
ASUS Canada Country Manager: ASUS Canada has announced the appointment of Vernon Coutinho as Country Manager for its System Business Group. Made ahead of the ASUS Business Summit 2026 in Toronto, the move underscores the company’s long-term growth ambitions in the commercial market as it accelerates its focus on AI-ready devices.7AI PLAID ELITE Launch: Security vendor 7AI has launched PLAID ELITE, a fully managed, AI-native security operations solution. The platform uses agentic AI to autonomously complete the majority of investigations end-to-end, offering partners a way to scale security operations without increasing headcount.Guardz Appoints Channel Leader: SMB cybersecurity platform Guardz has appointed former Pax8 executive Danni Munro as its new Director of Channel Sales for the ANZ region. The hire reflects a broader global channel push by the vendor to help MSPs meet the accelerating demand for consolidated security services.ChannelNEXT Toronto: TechnoPlanet’s ChannelNEXT conference kicks off tomorrow in Toronto, gathering Canadian VARs and MSPs to tackle pressing channel challenges. The event will feature extensive discussions on the future of the channel ecosystem.ManageEngine Autonomous AI: ManageEngine is rolling out an autonomous AI push designed to streamline IT operations. The initiative aims to help MSPs handle increasingly complex environments with automated workflows.Tech Builders 2026: Global Startups will host the Tech Builders 2026 conference in Toronto on June 16, focusing on the new digital economy. The event will explore AI, venture capital, and Canada’s role as a global innovation hub.Tech Financing Adoption: Mitsubishi HC Capital Canada is urging the channel to embed financing into partnerships. Director of Technology Finance Jim Moschos believes this approach will help clients overcome the high upfront costs of complex technology implementations.CRTC Streaming Demands: The CRTC has officially ordered streaming giants like Netflix and Apple TV to boost their spending on Canadian content. The regulatory move is designed to support the domestic production industry.Read Full TranscriptWelcome to The Buzz from ChannelBuzz.ca, I’m Robert Dutt, today is Wednesday, May 27th, and here’s what’s happening in the channel today.
Yesterday, ASUS Canada announced the appointment of Vernon Coutinho as Country Manager for its System Business Group. The announcement, which came just ahead of the ASUS Business Summit in Toronto, reflects the company’s long-term growth ambitions in the Canadian commercial market. Coutinho, who brings nearly 30 years of industry experience, will oversee strategy and performance across consumer, gaming, and commercial segments. For Canadian MSPs, this signals a deepening of the ASUS partner ecosystem locally. The company is actively accelerating its focus on AI-ready commercial devices, bringing its consumer DNA into the workplace. According to ASUS, the goal is to elevate the business laptop experience by delivering devices that are secure, manageable, and enjoyable to use.
Also on Tuesday, 7AI announced the availability of PLAID ELITE, a fully managed, AI-native security operations solution. The platform combines autonomous investigation by AI agents with expert oversight from 7AI security engineers, delivering a continuous, follow-the-sun security outcome. The company is positioning the tool as a way for organizations to protect their environments without needing to build or scale an internal operations team. What makes this relevant for the channel is the service model. Rather than relying entirely on human analyst shifts, PLAID ELITE’s coverage scales with investigation volume through agentic AI. 7AI noted that agents are now autonomously completing the majority of investigations end-to-end, allowing partners to drive security outcomes through technology rather than headcount.
Cybersecurity platform Guardz has appointed former Pax8 executive Danni Munro as its new Director of Channel Sales for the Australia and New Zealand region. While this is an international appointment, Munro’s background in scaling Pax8’s operations underscores a broader channel push by Guardz. The company is actively deepening its partner relationships to meet accelerating demand from small and medium-sized businesses facing rising ransomware threats. This move highlights a continuing global trend where cybersecurity vendors are relying on seasoned channel veterans to help MSPs deliver consolidated security services to clients who lack the internal expertise to manage threats independently.
In Brief – TechnoPlanet’s ChannelNEXT conference kicks off tomorrow in Toronto to address pressing partner challenges. ManageEngine says its new autonomous AI push will streamline IT operations for managed service providers. Global Startups is set to host the Tech Builders 2026 conference in Toronto on June 16. Mitsubishi HC Capital Canada is urging the channel to embed financing into partnerships to offset complex technology costs. The CRTC has ordered streaming platforms like Netflix and Apple TV to boost their spending on Canadian content. Full details and links in the show notes or the blog post.
Later today on In The Channel, we will be airing our conversation with Coro CEO Joe Sykora to discuss security stacks and the 2026 threat landscape.
And if you haven’t heard it yet, be sure to check out yesterday’s episode featuring Nigel Brown, CTO of Microserve, for a practitioner’s take on AI readiness and tokenomics from Dell Technologies World.
That’s how we’re seeing the headlines today. I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, thanks for listening. Have a great day.
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Anthony Tanoury, senior director of distribution at Dell Technologies
Distribution doesn’t get a lot of editorial love. It’s easy to treat it as the background infrastructure of the channel – the warehousing, the credit lines, the logistics layer that keeps product moving. But as anyone who’s been paying attention knows, that picture is well out of date.
At Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas this week, In the Channel sat down with Anthony Tanoury, Dell’s senior director of distribution, to talk about what distribution actually looks like in 2026 – and the conversation ranged from supply chain strategy to AI-assisted deal registration to the shifting economics of the partner ecosystem.
The headline number: Dell moved approximately ten thousand partners to a distribution-led buying model last year. Partners who previously purchased direct from Dell now route exclusively through distribution. The more interesting data point is what happened next – those partners are growing faster than the ones who remained on a direct model. Tanoury attributes it to the enablement depth that distributors can offer at a scale that Dell simply can’t replicate directly.
On the Modern Partner Platform rollout – one of the bigger announcements at DTW this week – the conversation came down to speed. Deal registration that today takes two to three days is being redesigned, with AI-assisted automation in the pipeline to bring that down to two to three hours. The plumbing involves integrating Dell’s systems tightly with distributor platforms, streamlining the multi-system, multi-email-thread process that currently slows everything down.
And when asked for the single most underutilized resource available to partners through distribution, Tanoury didn’t hesitate: the AI accelerator programs that distributors have built to help partners get started in the AI practice space. With every partner asking “where do I begin,” the answer may already be sitting in the distributor’s enablement catalogue.
Read Full TranscriptRobert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor at ChannelBuzz.ca and your host for the show.
We’re continuing our coverage from Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas this week, and I wanted to close the series of Dell execs with a conversation that I think will resonate with pretty much anyone who moves Dell product – which, let’s be honest, is a lot of you. Distribution is one of the topics that often gets taken for granted. It’s the plumbing, it’s the logistics, it’s the credit line. Except that’s not really what distribution is anymore, and Anthony Tanoury has about as good a vantage point as anyone to explain why.
He spent 30 years in the industry on both the vendor and distributor side of the table, and he’s now Dell’s senior director of distribution, which means he’s the person responsible for making the relationship between Dell and its distributor partners actually work at scale. This week at DTW, Dell announced some significant changes to how it’s thinking about its partner ecosystem, and distribution’s right at the center of that.
We talked about the evolution of distribution from warehouse and financing shop to AI enablement engine, what it actually means for partners that Dell moved 10,000 of them to distribution-led buying last year, and what the promise of deal registration in hours rather than days actually requires to make real.
Let’s get right into it. My chat with Anthony Tanoury.
Anthony, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it.Anthony Tanoury: Thanks for having me.
Robert Dutt: To kick things off – the definition of distribution, and the definition from distributors themselves of what they do, has changed so dramatically over the last few years, as you’ve been party to on both sides of the fence, vendor and distributor, with your background. Sitting where you are now as senior director of distribution, how do you define the core value proposition for your distribution partners today compared to the way it may have looked a few years ago if you were in the seat, or in a previous seat managing distribution?
Anthony Tanoury: Yeah, I think 30 years in distribution – dating myself here. The idea of a distributor was warehousing, finance, so on. Really, the way that that’s evolved – and still evolving, because not everyone fully understands distribution and the value of distribution – but it’s really become the engine for all of us OEMs to really dive deep into the mid-market, and as lead generation for all of us. So SMB, mid-market, and then really leveraging their enablement platforms for our partners. So as an example, this week here at Dell Technologies World, we’ve launched our full AI portfolio. And really at the end of the day, it’s a platform to build off of. And our distributors, through our partners, are really enabling those partners – especially in the mid-market. The enterprise partners have hired data scientists and so on. And those mid-market and SMB partners, they need our help. And we really rely on our distributors, who have AI accelerator programs and can really take a partner through the journey of how to look at AI, how to start, and then how to implement and really get started in this space. We’ve met with multiple partners at this show and we’ve had our partner advisory boards. And that’s the number one takeaway when we’re talking to our partners: “How do I get started?” And I think Jeff Clarke and Michael Dell talked about that on stage – it’s really, we’ve got the platform to build off of, and then really rely on our distributors to go enable all of our partners out there to have those conversations, and then to build the proof, the POCs for us with their customers and take it to the next step.
Robert Dutt: Let’s talk about this moment in time and managing distribution right now. Whenever I think of running a hardware vendor, running distribution, or being on the purchasing side of the solution provider right now – boy, that’s an interesting challenge – with the supply chain issue, with the pricing issue, with all of that. I guess it boils down to, from your perspective: how are you leaning on distribution differently to help you guys and your partners ultimately, especially the smaller ones, handle this issue of availability, of supply chain, of capacity, as we’ve seen the component price challenges across the industry?
Anthony Tanoury: Yeah, so that’s not unique to Dell. We’re all challenged with the supply chain challenges, and it’s really about having a consistent message to our partner community, to our customers, on how – or why – to partner with Dell in these times. And our distributors have really leaned in with us right now and are getting that message out to our partners that “Dell’s got a plan. Here’s the plan.” And this is how we want you to message that and relay that to your partner community. So as an example, I did a keynote speech at one of our large partner events recently, and my talk track was based on how to navigate those supply challenges with us. I spent a lot of time on that, and had multiple partners come up afterwards, catching me outside. And the comment was, “That’s what we need to hear. That’s our challenge today, and you’re tackling that head on.” So to get back to your question from a distribution perspective – they enabled me to take that message to them, and then they’re expanding on that to their 20,000 partners in their ecosystem.
Robert Dutt: As you bring up an interesting thread there – I don’t have time obviously to go through the whole keynote, but the elevator pitch, boiled-down version of it – what’s the advice to partners on tackling it from where you sit and from where Dell sits?
Anthony Tanoury: Yeah, really leaning in with us and going deeper with your customers. And so that’s where you’re going to work with Dell and get priority allocation – looking long-term versus short-term, “I just need this product in the next week to get through this phase.” Now, let’s look at a long-term solution together and let’s plan two years out. Let’s plan longer in some cases, and then we’ll take it from there.
Robert Dutt: And that’s something we heard also from Jeff Clarke in Q&A – that idea of build out those long-term plans, put your hand up as early as you can. Because it sounds like if you’ve got your hand up early, you’ve obviously got the best chance of getting that list fulfilled.
Anthony Tanoury: Yeah, whether it’s a customer or a partner – I mean, that’s a true partnership and we’ll lean in when customers want to lean in with Dell.
Robert Dutt: I wanted to touch on the changes that are coming to the partner program, specifically as it involves your interactions with distribution. The Dell portal is getting redone and the Dell program is getting redone with the modern partner platform rolling out this year. You guys are baking agentic AI into your partner platform. Meanwhile, your distributors are doing the same thing with their partner platforms. I’m curious – obviously very early in the game – but how are you and your distribution partners thinking long-term about how those various platforms interact with each other, in terms of delineating who covers what base, when it comes to serving the partner and what you may be able to do down the road as a result of having those platforms?
Anthony Tanoury: Yeah, so the key is cutting down on SLAs. How do we take getting pricing out to a partner, out to a customer, from two to three days down to a matter of hours, right? And we’ve worked closely with all of our distributors over the last year or two, because our partners rely on our distributors’ platforms. And how does that integrate with ours? But the key is speed. How do we do things faster? And that is, as you stated, embedding AI into that. And so again, can’t get too far ahead, because we’re still going down this path and things sometimes get pushed out. But we’ve been working on this for a long time with them. We’ve had a lot of meetings with them here. We’ve gone deep into their platforms. They’re all rolling out new platforms as well. So making sure we’re doing it all at the same time, and together, has been key.
Robert Dutt: One area I did want to double-click on there. One of the big promises of the new platform is deal-reg approval in minutes, AI-generated demand signals, those kinds of things. As Dell is accelerating its own systems, how does distribution plug into that? How does the distributor help manage and act on those AI-driven demand signals and facilitate a faster quote-to-deal-reg?
Anthony Tanoury: Without getting too deep into deal-reg, there are a lot of nuances there. But yes, today where you’ve got multiple partners of record and you’ve got multiple partner IDs – simplifying that down to one or two partner IDs versus 20 today that we have – and then with deal registration, having partner of record is key in that mix, and we do have that today. But the distributors are really where it starts. So a partner comes to the distributor, says, “Hey, I need pricing on this and I want deal registration.” Today it might take the full SLA – the two to three days we just talked about – to get deal registration approved, with multiple systems flowing back and forth. In the future – and when I say future, we’re close, we’ll get there – is having that one stream go, starting from the distributor, through AI, plays into that, where it’ll do the work of looking in and making sure: here’s the partner of record. Is there a partner on record? Does the end user qualify? And without multiple people, multiple email streams going back and forth, it locks it in. And so now you’ve got an answer back in two to three hours versus two to three days.
Robert Dutt: A lot of MSPs prefer to consume technology as a service, because it’s kind of in what they do – the name’s kind of on the tin – and bundle that with vendors like Microsoft or security or what have you. How are you working with distributors to make APEX and infrastructure solutions seamlessly consumable within distribution, and particularly on their marketplace?
Anthony Tanoury: Yeah, so that’s a good question. So there’s APEX, right? We have Dell APEX, and our competitors have their own, but we have Dell APEX. But our distributors also have their own versions of APEX, or as-a-service models. And at the end of the day, we leverage theirs just as well as we do our own. And it depends on the customer, depends on the contract situation, but there are multiple vehicles to get an as-a-service deal done today that didn’t exist a year ago, didn’t exist two years ago, right? And then there’s – moving to another topic, and really the same topic – device as a service, right? And that was something we’ve been talking about for a few years now and hasn’t really taken off, but that’s all part of this now. Because the device at the edge is co-mingled now – especially in the new AI world – with your server infrastructure. So it could all become part of a recurring revenue stream for MSPs.
Robert Dutt: And I think it makes potentially hardware more compelling to the MSP. When you’ve gotten that tie-in – I know it’s early days and it’s a way off from being fully operationalized – but what you’re talking about, and what Jeff Clarke was talking about today about basically acting as the arbiter, sort of an open orchestration layer, saying “all right, this particular bit is best handled in the infrastructure and the data center, this particular bit is best handled right here on the machine sitting by the desk side.”
Anthony Tanoury: Absolutely.
Robert Dutt: We’ve heard a lot this week about the focused accounts incentive, rewarding partners for selling across lines of business. And it’s kind of a cliche almost, in that vendors such as yourselves who have multiple lines of business are always looking for great ways to get partners to sell across those businesses. And certainly incentives are a classic way of doing that. How are you using distribution to train, enable, and facilitate partners making that leap across the portfolio – especially as this seems to be something that Denise Millard and the team are putting a lot of the wood behind?
Anthony Tanoury: Yeah, so you mentioned the partner program – and that’s really what we leverage with the push coming from distribution. You typically focus where you can earn the most dollars. And so we’re putting the dollars on driving all lines of business for us. So today you may have a lot of infrastructure-focused partners – like MSPs, they don’t want to sell the client the edge device. But again, with AI driving from both ends now, it’s become an imperative that they don’t ignore the edge devices anymore. So really leveraging distribution both ways. We’ve got CSG partners that don’t sell storage and infrastructure, and then we’ve got partners that are trying to move in that direction. And then we’ve got other partners saying, “Hey, I’ve got to get on board too,” that are in the infrastructure space and have got to move in the other direction. And that’s where we leverage distribution – they have multiple enablement engines, all of our distributors, to enable those partners to do that. So for us – and again, to the partner program – we’ve announced some changes here at this event, with our partner advisory board meeting coming up. Partner programs, you want to keep them simple, predictable for partners, with tweaks along the way. And AI is one of those tweaks where we’ve got to pull the levers in different directions to get partners and distributors moving in that motion. So yeah, it’s an exciting time to be at Dell with this opportunity in front of us.
Robert Dutt: That’s a big tweak – or more accurately, a big series, whole family, whole universe of tweaks to be made. But you don’t want to pull a whole program apart. You’ve got partners that have invested and distributors that have invested in that program. So you’ve got to make sure you do those incremental tweaks when you need them, but not blow up the whole program.
Anthony Tanoury: Absolutely.
Robert Dutt: You mentioned off the top the classic framing of distribution as the warehouse and the bank kind of structure. Let’s touch on the bank side of things a little bit there. In light of everything that’s going on today, in light of the infrastructure refresh opportunity that’s out there, the constraints in the marketplace – financial engineering is probably more critical than ever. Dell Financial Services is doing a lot of heavy lifting, but how do you view the role of the distributor when it comes to PO financing, terms, bridging the financing gap for complex projects, and helping partners manage this whole multiple-balls-in-the-air situation?
Anthony Tanoury: You can’t look at a partner just through the lens of what they do with Dell. The business they have with Dell – partners procure from many places. We love them to only sell Dell for us, but they have other options, other solutions, other areas of the business that we’re not focused on. They procure through distribution. Distributors have huge businesses with a lot of these partners. They have financial terms through the distributors that maybe we can’t offer them through Dell – and leveraging our partner programs to deliver extended terms in this environment. With the supply shortages and lead times getting pushed out, really leveraging distribution with terms that we can’t give them today. There are multiple levels, and they have much higher credit lines with the distributors than maybe we have with them. And then going back to the as-a-service model – really leveraging distributors who have all those options in place for them today, that maybe they don’t have with us.
Robert Dutt: When you’re looking at distribution, what’s the one metric you look at first to judge whether a distributor is meeting the bar – is delivering net new value to Dell?
Anthony Tanoury: New partner recruitment, right? Multiple lines of business – not just focused in one area of our business, but selling across all lines of business. Then we rely on distribution. We just moved 10,000 partners last year over to distribution-led. Where those partners could procure direct from Dell in the past, now they can’t, and they buy strictly through distribution. Those are our authorized partner community – and potentially in the future, expanding that to other levels of our business and offloading them to distribution. Dell is a more channel- and distribution-friendly company than we get credit for. I think that doesn’t always get seen, and we’re moving that way.
Robert Dutt: How did that process go, and any learnings from moving those 10,000 partners that may inform what you do in moving the next group, if there is a next group to be moved?
Anthony Tanoury: Exactly, a lot. A lot of that is in data transfer and making sure that the distributors have the right data to target those partners and give those partners the service they need. The distributors all had to ramp up their infrastructure to support those partners – credit line facilities with those partners – because they didn’t do business with those partners before. Onboarding some of those partners as net new to distribution, who had never bought from distribution before. And then again, really letting those partners know the value of distribution. Since we’ve moved those partners over, those partners that have embraced distribution are growing faster than the partners that haven’t. It’s sometimes a lot easier to get that additional support, that additional attention from a disti, than it is to try to navigate that directly. In some cases, they can support them better than we can, and it’s proven out in the last year.
Robert Dutt: What’s the single most underutilized resource that you guys have through distribution, in terms of what partners are using?
Anthony Tanoury: I would say the AI accelerator programs I spoke about earlier. That’s key. Going back to the enablement piece – I just don’t think a lot of partners understand the value. They come to these events, they make the statements, “Hey, we need help here. We need to leverage distribution for that help.” Especially when you come to a Dell Technologies World, or you go to one of our competitors’ or peers’ events. Our distributors have that enablement piece for you to get started, that you need to leverage, because it’s not just a point-solution type of conversation, it’s broad. Really leveraging them to help.
Robert Dutt: Along the same lines, but a little bit different – obviously we’ve touched on the idea of cross-selling, and the idea that, surprise surprise, Dell would like partners to sell more of the portfolio, better together, all that kind of stuff. For an MSP or VAR whose primary look at Dell to date has been selling end devices – laptops, desktops, et cetera – sourced through distribution, what do you see as the most likely next logical step to expand that relationship? To get thinking across lines? What are some of the common threads for the best ways to approach that?
Anthony Tanoury: Yeah, that’s a tough question. Common ways to approach how to sell across lines of business – take it back to the customer level. Your customer is buying these products, and they may be buying them from somebody else or they may be buying them online, depending on the size of the organization, so on. Again, the service model – going back to it, it’s another service revenue stream that they can leverage. But I think when you look at the distributors, they have a lot of talk tracks with the partners on how to do that, and frankly do it better than we do. So that’s why we really leverage them. When we say, “Hey, we want to sell more of our client and peripheral devices,” we start with distribution. We start with the partner community, and it’s paid off. I think it’s just – really, don’t leave revenue on the table. We’ve been saying it for years and I think it’s starting to resonate, and leveraging distribution to push that message forward. And I think partners are starting to catch on.
Robert Dutt: All right, great insights. Anthony, I thank you for taking the time. I’m sure it’s been a busy week for you here. Thanks for joining us.
Anthony Tanoury: Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
Robert Dutt: There you have it, Anthony Tanoury from Dell Technologies.
I’d like to thank Anthony for carving out some time in what I’m sure was a very busy week on the show floor here at DTW.
Few things from the conversation that I thought were worth pulling out.
First, the 10,000 partners that Dell moved to distribution-led buying last year – that’s not a small number, and the fact that those partners are outgrowing the ones who haven’t yet made that transition should be a data point for anyone still on the fence about how they structure their Dell relationship.
Second, when Anthony named net new partner recruitment as his primary metric for judging distributor performance – not revenue, not attach rate, net new – that tells you something about where Dell thinks its distribution channel still has room to grow.
And third, if you haven’t looked at the AI accelerator programs your distributor is running, that came up twice as the single most underutilized resource available to partners right now. Probably worth a phone call. I’d like to thank you as always for listening to the show.
Please follow or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts – Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, most directories. Ratings and reviews are always appreciated as well.
Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.
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