Channel Mastered News

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…

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…

Note: I could have attended the Cisco Partner Summit in Miami this week and called it good. Because I’m an unrepentant channelholic, however, I started the week at the Cisco Partner Summit and ended it at the ConnectWise IT Nation Connect event in Orlando. I’ll have much to say about the latter conference, but given…

The Federal Reserve left short-term interest rates, which it’s raised 11 times in roughly as many months, unchanged this week. Unfortunately for anyone with a business model dependent on borrowed funds—like, say, private equity firms—“unchanged” in this case means the highest levels seen in over 20 years. The predictable consequence has been a massive slowdown…

The notion that backup and security are closely related elements of a complete cyber protection strategy isn’t a new one. Indeed, next month will mark 15 years since Barracuda first added backup to a product lineup previously focused on email and web security. It took the explosive proliferation of ransomware in the 2010s, however, to…

The tech industry unemployment rate here in the U.S. rose from 1.8% in July to 2.2% in September, according to CompTIA. That’s still a very low number, though, and well below the overall economy’s 3.8% rate last month. Kam Kaila, president of IT By Design, which among other things provides recruiting and outsourcing services to…

Let me make clear upfront that I wholeheartedly endorsed environmental sustainability even before this year’s record-breaking tally of extremely expensive climate-related disasters, not to mention the difficult time many Americans had, you know, breathing recently thanks to massive wildfires at least partly fueled by rising temperatures. Combatting climate change is an end in itself. It…

Spend enough time reading comments about Kaseya on social media or talking to its partners, and you’ll quickly run into complaints about how aggressively the company prods its partners toward long-term contracts. That criticism usually overlooks the lower prices associated with those longer terms, however. Listen to CEO Fred Voccola (pictured) speak during a conference…

Fear not, Channelholic readers. If the two stories I’ve already written about this week’s Kaseya DattoCon event for my buddies at ChannelPro aren’t enough for you, I’ve got lots more thoughts inspired by my interviews with top Kaseya execs coming tomorrow. Until then, here’s a collection of updates on some of the conference’s many sponsors…

Supply chain issues have impacted everything in IT in recent years except chatter about artificial intelligence. That’s been available in seemingly unlimited quantities since the release of ChatGPT last November, and I haven’t exactly been an innocent bystander. What most interests me about AI at the moment is how channel partners can make money on…