Channel Mastered News

Look back at my AI coverage last year and you’ll see lots of writing about the server, storage, power, and networking infrastructure businesses were going to need to turn their AI visions into reality. Review my more recent coverage and you’ll see much more discussion of agents and applications. That’s not so unusual, actually. Like…

It’s a lame joke that I used elsewhere just a few weeks ago, but in my book three instances of anything is all you need to declare a trend in effect. And by that standard, partner loyalty programs are now officially a trend. Instance one in this case was the loyalty program announced by Pax8…

Strictly speaking, the MSP Elevate program announced by Sophos last week isn’t a loyalty program. But from the cheap seats I occupy it sure looks like one. Sophos “is committed to enabling our MSP partners to further grow their business and reward their success,” says Chris Bell (pictured), the SVP of global channels, alliances, and…

I flew from the Kaseya Connect conference I covered in my last two posts to this year’s RSAC Conference in San Francisco late on a Tuesday, which meant I had yet to visit the sprawling expo hall first thing Wednesday morning when I met with Vikram Ramesh, N-able’s chief strategy officer, at a hotel outside…

We wrote a few weeks ago about why TLS certificate management, a seemingly sleepy little market, is fast becoming a big and growing opportunity for MSPs thanks to changes imposed by Google and Apple. An RSAC conversation with Mike Anderson, global channel manager at EasyDMARC, introduced me to a second, similarly overlooked opportunity. This one,…

SonicWall CEO Bob VanKirk had way more than MDR TAM in mind when he engineered the vendor’s acquisition of Solutions Granted, or its separate purchase of Banyan Security and Trapmine, within the same four-month window. Like so many other top executives in security, he was thinking platform, and we got our first and most complete…

As I said in my last post, one of anything is a fluke, two is a coincidence, and three is a trend. I’m going to bend those rules just a bit and call the fact that both Kaseya and Huntress launched fully managed SIEM solutions for MSPs on the same day last week a coincidence…

Because one conference is never enough for a true channelholic, I attended two last week, Kaseya Connect in Las Vegas and the RSAC Conference in San Francisco. Predictably, I returned home with way more material than I could fit in a single post. So consider this one a down payment. I’ll have more from the…

Travel! I love it, and there’s still no better way to track the SMB channel than experiencing it live from everywhere. All that movement can mess with my publishing schedule, though, which is why I’m a day late with this post. Given that I’ll be at Kaseya Connect in Las Vegas and then the RSA…

TD SYNNEX, as we wrote previously, is a big enough believer in the reinforcing interplay of communities and trust to have named Kristi Kirby its first-ever senior vice president of North American communities last year. “If you look truly at the rate and pace that technology is evolving and how the landscape is changing, we…