Channel Mastered News

It’s so easy to miss where the real money is in AI these days. Sure, the astonishing $40 billion OpenAI raised this week is, you know, real money, as are the $6 billion xAI raised last December and the $3.5 billion Anthropic raised last month. Businesses will shell out nearly $579 billion in 2025 just…

That’s a bold statement, but probably not bold enough to impress Austin McChord. The former Datto CEO has a history of making arguably even bolder proclamations. While still an undergraduate in 2007, for example, he told peers that the backup company he’d recently founded would someday sell for $1 billion. Ten years later, he brought…

Logically, businesses these days should want one partner for all things technology, not one for communications and connectivity and another for IT services. Just as logically, the lines separating telco partners from IT partners should be fading from view as a result. And they are, only incompletely and very slowly, as a couple of conversations…

AVANT has been putting its own spin on convergence for a while. A long-time communications, contact center, and connectivity distributor that later added cloud and security solutions too, the company has built its entire channel strategy around the “trusted advisor,” a familiar term with a new meaning and added relevance, AVANT believes, in a time…

Apologies, readers. This post is a couple days late, partly because I came home from a week spent covering two events IRL and a third (CrowdStrike’s) remotely laden with more thoughts than I could sift through by Friday. My sifting’s now complete, but before we begin, allow me to list four facts that explain much…

MDR, which figured prominently in my conversation with N-able last week, figured prominently in news from security vendor ESET last week during its partner conference in Las Vegas. The company’s had an MDR solution for over a year, and MSPs have been using it too. The updated version unveiled last week, however, has been tailored…

As I wrote elsewhere recently, insurers like ESET’s devotion to left-of-boom prevention. That’s not the only thing insurers they like about the company, however. They also appreciate how much data they get from the company’s platform, which spans from endpoint protection and mobile threat defense to cloud application protection, MFA, and beyond. And as we’ve…

CrowdStrike, per coverage elsewhere, is clearly excited about SIEM replacement. Getting service providers similarly excited will probably take some work, but not as much work as Sectigo has ahead of it regarding a rapidly emerging revenue opportunity more or less hiding in plain sight: TLS certificate management. Every MSP knows what certificates are, observes Mark…

I buy a new laptop every couple of years based mostly on things like weight, battery life, and durability. If my next such device ends up being an HP, however, it probably won’t be due to any of those features. It’ll be because the laptop in question is compatible with HP’s new Go service, which…

HP isn’t just asking end users, per my reporting elsewhere this week, to deploy AI-based solutions. It’s doing so itself, a practice Dave McQuarrie, the company’s chief commercial officer, calls “drinking our own champagne” rather than “eating our own dog food.” Ingram Micro, an HP distribution partner and Amplify exhibitor, is similarly devoted to metaphorical…