Channel Mastered News
The latest updates and news for Channel Mastered
Recent News
August 8, 2023
Man oh man was there a lot going on at CompTIA’s ChannelCon event in Las Vegas last week. I’d tell you all about it but, you know, what happens in Vegas… That said, I’ve finally gotten around to writing up my take on several stories that broke during the show. And since two other interesting…
August 4, 2023
Seems like just yesterday we learned that the Microsoft Partner Network, along with its 19 competencies and coveted Gold and Silver designations, would soon be replaced by a new Microsoft Cloud Partner Program offering most members a single designation to pursue (“Solutions Partner”) in six cloud-oriented areas like Azure infrastructure, business applications, and security. Actually,…
July 28, 2023
Tech unemployment in the U.S. stood at 2.3% in June, according to the latest data from CompTIA. That’s a touch higher than May, but still well below the nation’s 3.6% overall unemployment rate. If you’re an MSP, data like that probably just reinforces what you already know: as our screwy, pandemic-warped economy enters its fourth…
July 21, 2023
Much ink has been spilled in the months since ChatGPT’s debut last November on both the promise and peril of artificial intelligence. The promise is obvious. Though still in its infancy, AI has already performed once unimaginable feats likely to save millions of lives. The peril is fairly clear too: No one really understands how…
Rich Freeman
July 14, 2023
During a recent appearance on the All Things MSP Live! podcast, I said something that polite people would call controversial and others might call nuts: It’s possible, I suggested, that the worst of the managed services world’s cyberinsurance nightmare is behind us. If you deal regularly with steep premiums, book-length application forms, and infuriating claims…
Rich Freeman
July 7, 2023
How rough is it out there for anyone in search of venture capital right now? Well, thanks in large measure to persistently high interest rates, U.S. deal values declined 13% quarter over quarter in Q2 this year and that’s an encouraging development, per data from PitchBook yesterday. Year over year, the drop is more like…
Rich Freeman
June 30, 2023
I’m thinking of an artificial intelligence innovator. See if you can name it. The company I have in mind invested years of effort quietly developing a generative AI solution powerful enough to let ordinary people produce reams of informative, grammatically flawless prose in seconds using nothing more than natural language prompts. Know who it is?…
Rich Freeman
June 23, 2023
Indulge me. I started last week’s post with a story from a year ago, and I’m going to do it again here. This one comes from a conversation last May with Chris Ploessel, of Aliso Viejo, Calif.-based MSP RedNight Consulting, about a surprisingly effective sales motion he’d recently stumbled across. Chris (who popped up in…
Rich Freeman
June 16, 2023
Listening to Pax8 lay out the sprawling, ambitious vision behind the next-generation marketplace it unveiled this week at its inaugural partner conference in Denver, I couldn’t help but think back to an Ingram Micro conference a year ago at which cloud exec Victor Baez devoted part of his keynote to a looming danger: SaaS vendors…
Rich Freeman
June 15, 2023
There were 86 vendors in the expo hall at Pax8 Beyond 2023, the cloud distributor’s inaugural partner conference in Denver this week. When they weren’t talking to the 1,100 MSPs at the show, they were generously making time to tell Channelholic what they have in store soon for their partners and SMB end users. But…