Rich Freeman
January 12, 2024

Just a few months ago, I shared an analyst’s prediction that it would be a good five to 10 years before managed service providers with SMB clients were making recurring revenue on artificial intelligence. Just last week, a startup named Hatz AI bet $2.5 million of seed funding that some MSPs could be earning MRR…

January 5, 2024

Happy New Year! Your network’s obsolete. Or it probably is, anyway, if you’re an SMB. Barring a major recent overhaul, you’re most likely using network gear designed principally to keep traffic flowing among devices and applications inside an office. Yet as we’ve discussed before, networks spend most of their time these days moving traffic between…

December 22, 2023

Note: Even channelholics need time off. This particular one will be on vacation next week, but back with a fresh post on the first Friday of the new year. Until then, here’s a supersized post to tide you over. I recently pointed out how quickly Asio, ConnectWise’s next-gen development platform, allowed the company to add…

December 15, 2023

With apologies to Dickens, these appear to be the best of times and worst of times for vendors and their partners. I base that on two of many interesting data points in the recently published 2023 edition of IDC’s North America Partner Landscape study. When asked to identify their top opportunities, 28.4% of the 503…

December 8, 2023

Channelholic is far from the only outlet to report on the all-new partner program that Barracuda Networks introduced this week. But I’m pretty sure it’s the first. We told you this was coming all the way back in April, in fact, and then spilled more details in June. By now, you’re probably familiar with the…

December 1, 2023

In cybersecurity, a market dripping with acronyms, “MDR” just may be the hottest one there is right now. In the last few weeks alone, WatchGuard has rolled out a managed detection and response solution as has SonicWall via its acquisition of Solutions Granted. Go back a bit further and you have ThreatDown (better known until…

November 24, 2023

It’s starting to look like the worst is over for the PC market. True, sales were down 9% year over year in Q3, per Gartner, but the analyst expects global device shipments to enter positive territory after eight straight quarters of decline in Q4 and then grow 4.8% in 2024. That’s good news for resellers,…

November 17, 2023

No doubt about it, there are some big MSPs out there these days. I wrote about two of them, Logicalis and Presidio, in my coverage of the Cisco Partner Summit last week. The former collects about $1.7 billion of revenue annually. The latter pulls in over $5.8 billion. There are plenty of private equity-backed rollups…

November 16, 2023

The giant expo hall at last week’s ConnectWise IT Nation Connect conference housed dozens of vendors, many of which shared news, notes, and insights with Channelholic. Here, somewhat belatedly, are some highlights of what they told me. Mailprotector’s newest product does a lot more than protect mail I suspect the biggest problem Mailprotector will have…

November 14, 2023

Note: This blog pretty much only appears in your inbox on Fridays. But I was at two events (Cisco Partner Summit and ConnectWise IT Nation Connect) last week, there was much to write about at both, and the ConnectWise event didn’t wrap up until after my last post went out. So here’s a rare bonus…