Channel Mastered News

Editor’s note: I came home from this year’s RSA Conference in San Francisco with way more news and observations than I can write up in a single post, so I’m covering the observations here and will have a bonus post about the news on Monday. Some people obsess over the song of the summer. Channelholics…

It would be a mistake to call Kaseya unpopular. You don’t get to be as big as the company is or achieve the roughly 94 percent renewal rates it claims to have by being unpopular. On the other hand, though all its major competitors have critics too, Kaseya sure appears to have more—and more vocal—haters…

Editor’s note: Channelholic usually appears in your inbox on Fridays, and will again this week. But given the extraordinary interest in the mystery announcement Kaseya has long been promising to make today at its Kaseya Connect Global event and Channelholic’s early opportunity to discuss that news under embargo with Kaseya CEO Fred Voccola yesterday, we’re…

It’s kind of a glass half full or half empty question. Which has more of your attention these days, AI’s risks or its rewards? We hardly need to belabor the scale of the potential rewards by now, and I’ve written repeatedly in recent months that IT providers needn’t wait years to begin cashing in on…

Not good: researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have found that if you feed OpenAI’s GPT-4 a CVE advisory, it can exploit the associated vulnerability all by itself with an 87% success rate. That’s up from 0% on GPT-3.5, by the way. Progress! But really, why bother sneaking into a target environment via CVEs?…

If attendance equals success for tech conferences, then last week’s Google Cloud Next show in Las Vegas was a triumph. The event drew 30,000 people (roughly double last year’s attendance), including 6,000 there to attend the event-within-an-event Google Partner Summit. “We’re seeing a 2-3x number of partners at this event than we’ve ever experienced at…

This turned out to be a pretty good week for PCs. Canalys reported a 3.2% increase in shipments during Q1 just a day after IDC put the number at a more modest 1.5%. That second figure doesn’t sound like much, but after eight straight quarters of declines (and compared to the 28.7% plunge IDC recorded…

Looks like private equity may be gearing up to start buying again. Following a miserable 2023 in which high interest rates and low exit rates sent deal volumes into reverse hockey stick territory, a little over half of U.S. PE firms see strength in the M&A market, up from 38% last year, according to January…

Devoted Channelholic readers might recall something I wrote last November about the difference between Kaseya’s Oracle-like wish to sell MSPs everything they use and ConnectWise’s Microsoft-esque ecosystem strategy. Mike Adler, N-Able’s chief technology and product officer remembers the piece well enough to have referenced it briefly during our conversation this week at the vendor’s Empower…

I trust few will disagree when I observe that opinions in IT about private equity are…mixed. I know plenty of MSPs who groan in anticipation of reduced support and increased prices whenever a favorite vendor gets acquired by PE. It’s not hard to find even less subtle perspectives in gathering spots online either. Thanks for…