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Cutting through the noise for Canadian VARs and MSPs

  1. 18 uur geleden

    Xerox IT Solutions’ Curtis Dery on HPE’s financing moves, channel-only expansion, and why AI is a ‘digital goldmine’

    Curtis Dery, executive vice president at Xerox IT Solutions Canada Curtis Dery, executive vice president at Xerox IT Solutions Canada (doing business as Powerland), has been living the HPE GreenLake story since before most Canadian partners knew what as-a-service infrastructure meant. At HPE Discover 2026, he joined In The Channel to talk about what this week’s announcements look like from the practitioner’s desk. Dery’s team won HPE’s Canada GreenLake Partner of the Year in 2022 and has kept the streak going, but he’s clear that the barrier to adoption was never the technology. “Customers are facing constraints financially,” he says, citing tariffs and geopolitical pressure. That’s why he sees the 90/9 financing offer and 150% credit line expansion as genuine deal-closing tools. “It helps open more doors and close deals even sooner.” He also sees the channel-only expansion of Private Cloud and Zerto as a deliberate strategy his team was ready for, thanks to deep ties with HPE’s advisory councils. The real differentiator, he says, is operationalizing customer processes so they can move from 20-30 projects a year to 50-70. Where Dery gets animated is AI. He calls the current moment “the most exciting time in any of our careers” and describes AI as a “digital goldmine.” His team runs internal hackathons to build reps with large language models, work that has already helped Powerland close four of the largest infrastructure deals in the world – all out of Winnipeg. But he’s also blunt about tokenomics: “The burn is real.” On sovereignty, Dery points to the Anthropic government oversight incident as validation for private AI. “If I’m a customer and I’m all in on that model, what would happen?” He sees HPE’s network optimization and Private Cloud AI stack as the hedge. Read Full Transcript Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor at ChannelBuzz.ca and your host for the show. We’ve been on a bit of an unscheduled hiatus, but we’re back. We’re going to get back into the swing of things right now, and we’re going to start that off by finishing our coverage of this year’s HPE Discover 2026. Today’s guest is Curtis Dery, executive vice president at Xerox IT Solutions Canada, which most of the channel still knows as Powerland. Curtis is based in Winnipeg. His team covers the country. He’s been living the HPE GreenLake story since before most Canadian partners knew what as-a-service infrastructure meant. His team won HPE Canada’s GreenLake Partner of the Year back in 2022 and has kept that streak alive. They were the first partner to sell a GreenLake deal in Canada, the first to sell VM Essentials, and the first to sell a cyber vault. But Curtis isn’t just a sales exec. He’s genuinely hands-on with emerging technology, running internal AI hackathons with his team, and has a perspective on the announcements from Discover that come from actually closing the deals, not just reading the press releases. He joined me on site at Discover to talk about what the new financing tools, the channel-only expansion, and the AI story mean for partners on the ground. Let’s get right into it. My chat with Curtis Dery. Robert Dutt: Curtis, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it. Curtis Dery: Absolutely. Thanks for having me. Robert Dutt: Before we get into this week, I have to acknowledge – just having been in this industry a while, you’ve got Xerox and what is formerly HP at a conference here. Slightly unexpected combination on the surface. Most people’s mental model of Xerox is still copiers, but you were running Powerland as one of the leading HPE infrastructure providers in Canada long before that. What does the Xerox relationship mean in practice for the IT business? Has it changed how you go to market with HPE, or does Powerland essentially operate in its own lane? Curtis Dery: You know what, that’s a great question. The way the market’s changing, the industry is changing, businesses are needing to change. That was the reason why Xerox looked at acquiring us – to help go through the realignment and the changes that they’re making as a business. Obviously, from a print perspective, looking at the industry challenges it was going through through COVID and post-COVID and just the market shift around that, having a focus around infrastructure and technology and driving those outcomes with our customers helped them amplify the customer base that they have across North America. Robert Dutt: You were doing GreenLake before a lot of Canadian partners knew what it was. You won the Canadian GreenLake Partner of the Year back in ’22, closing deals in the as-a-service model when it was still a pretty hard sell to customers used to buying it outright. Now HPE’s on stage talking about 90/9 financing and offering 150% expansion of credit lines. For someone who’s been engineering these deals since the beginning, what do these tools mean specifically? Do they change what’s possible for you, or are you already doing – you already have your system set up and ready to go? Curtis Dery: Yeah, I mean, being fortunate to be a little bit on the front edge of GreenLake, we’re fortunate to be Partner of the Year four years in a row, and from a North American perspective, Partner of the Year to make it five. What that created was just validation that how we’re going to market and how we’re executing it is a little bit more uniquely than others, and how we’re prepared to understand the customer, the outcomes that they want, and wrap that around operationalizing it through a GreenLake model. Having flexibility in some of these announcements helps with the challenges that we’re all entering – some of it unknown, some of it shortages, all these changes, and then you wrap that around obviously the disruption of AI. So having these flexibilities of what they want to do around credit is definitely needed because customers are facing constraints financially – just with the cost of, from a geopolitical impact perspective, tariffs, all these things are real. So HP coming to the table with new offerings helps open more doors and close deals even sooner than expected sometimes. So we’re always looking at making sure, yes, we have a foundational core that we can execute on with a rinse and repeat with a proven track record, but always making sure we’re aligned with the changes that they’re making and making sure we’re enhancing our offering with them, a walk and step together. Robert Dutt: It feels like they’re acknowledging that one of the barriers to GreenLake adoption isn’t the technology, the concept, or anything like that. It’s the customer’s budget cycles. And it sounds like you’re saying that’s the right diagnosis from what you’re seeing in the Western Canada market. Curtis Dery: Yeah, and I think also people sometimes think it has to be OpEx. There’s a balance that you can still capitalize GreenLake as well too, and then do a term top-up depending on the utilization they have, but also operationalizing it from a financial [perspective]. So that flexibility is still there. I just think sometimes that message isn’t out there at the street level. So that’s where our value comes in as a partner, right? To understand where that noise and friction is and remove the friction. Robert Dutt: Three products went to channel-only at Partner Growth Summit this week: Private Cloud, PC 3000, PC 1000, and Zerto. Last year it was VM Essentials. It seems like it’s clearly a deliberate expansion of that strategy. From where you sit with that infrastructure-heavy book of business, is channel-only a meaningful strategic signal for you, or is it about filling the gaps for customers who need DR and private cloud but haven’t had a clean vehicle to buy it through you? Curtis Dery: That’s a great question. I think, fortunate to have a strategic partnership with HP, we sold the first cyber vault in the country. And so same with VME, we sold the first in the country, and same with GreenLake. So there’s a theme there, right? Being so strategically aligned with them from executive level down to technical level, I’m on their advisory council from a GreenLake perspective. My pre-sales engineer is the ambassador on the GreenLake program. Because of that exposure, we get line of sight a little bit earlier. So then we’re already preparing on how we’re going to market to augment some of these announcements that they’re doing, and then wrapping around our own little secret sauce to that to be able to expedite the sales and making sure that we’re taking down the logos together. Robert Dutt: What is that secret sauce, in whatever depth you wish to share in this forum? Curtis Dery: Well, I think sometimes getting down to the nitty-gritty of what GreenLake really does, and that’s operationalizing the customer’s process to be able to allow them to be more agile within their own business. So instead of going to a traditional market and doing a traditional way of getting quotes, going to an RFP process, all those things take time, money, and energy. And when you do that, you then don’t have time to focus on the business to drive the outcomes you can do. Now, with our customers from a GreenLake perspective, that agility of being able to streamline that process – we have our customers that are able to go from 20 to 30 projects a year to now 50 to 70 projects a year. So then they get to see the benefits of how fast we can make their business move, get the outcomes that they want so they can start to accelerate further. Robert Dutt: You heard the partner branded services announcement this week. Curious what you thought of that and how it kind of maps with what you do i

    Xerox IT Solutions’ Curtis Dery on HPE’s financing moves, channel-only expansion, and why AI is a ‘digital goldmine’

  2. 20 uur geleden

    The Buzz: Barracuda buys Evo Security, Rewst bets on MCP, and Microsoft sets the FY27 table

    Today’s headline news for Canadian IT solution providers: Barracuda acquires Evo Security: Barracuda is integrating Evo Security’s IAM and PAM tools into BarracudaONE, giving MSPs more ways to build identity security services beyond MFA. ChannelE2E reports that the move unifies email, network, and identity protection under one stack, which matters for Canadian technicians already managing multiple dashboards. The deal size was not disclosed. Rewst rebuilds its platform around MCP and AI agents: Rewst is rebuilding its automation engine around the Model Context Protocol so technicians can describe a business process and have an AI agent custom-build it, even without deep scripting skills. ChannelE2E says the update turns automation from an internal efficiency play into a billable managed service. The rollout is expected through the third quarter. Microsoft opens its July 2026 partner playbook: Microsoft released July partner announcements covering FY27 planning resources, updated Azure IP co-sell incentives, and refreshed Microsoft 365 Copilot specialization requirements. The company is positioning the Copilot specialization as a prerequisite for AI deployment referrals, raising the bar from general cloud competency to specific AI delivery capability. A new End of Sale Software pricelist is also live in Partner Center as of July 1. CompassMSP acquires Logic Group: ChannelE2E reports the acquisition adds to CompassMSP’s portfolio as the consolidator continues its North American expansion. The 20 MSP acquires Sundance Networks, reaching 49 acquisitions: The rollup hits another milestone with the Sundance Networks deal, according to ChannelE2E. ManageEngine launches marketplace for partner-built IT extensions and AI agents: ChannelE2E says Zoho’s IT management arm is opening a marketplace where partners can build and sell extensions. Dell partners remain optimistic amid supply chain concerns: ChannelE2E reports that Dell is working to keep supply chains flowing for partners as data center growth puts pressure on memory supplies. Guardz adds agentic reporting for MSP client reviews: ChannelE2E says the new feature turns blocked threats and security activity into reports that SMB customers can understand. Read Full Transcript Welcome to The Buzz from ChannelBuzz.ca, I’m Robert Dutt, today is Tuesday, July 14, and here’s what’s happening in the channel today. Barracuda is buying Evo Security to expand its identity security capabilities for MSPs. In a deal announced last week, Barracuda said it will integrate Evo Security’s IAM and PAM tools into BarracudaONE, giving partners more ways to build identity security services beyond MFA. The move comes as identity attacks continue to outpace traditional perimeter defenses and MSPs are being asked to manage privileged access for customers with limited security staff. Barracuda is positioning the acquisition as a way to unify email, network, and identity protection under one stack. Canadian partners who have already standardized on BarracudaONE will see the new tools appear as integrated modules rather than a separate console, which matters for technicians who are already managing multiple dashboards. The channel has been waiting for Barracuda to deepen its identity story after years of speculation, and this appears to be the answer. Identity and access management has become one of the fastest-growing service lines for Canadian MSPs, but many have cobbled together solutions from multiple vendors. Barracuda’s bet is that MSPs will pay for a unified platform rather than stitching together point products. The deal size was not disclosed. Rewst is rebuilding its automation platform from the ground up around MCP and AI agents, and the timing is notable. The company announced today that MSPs will be able to describe a business process they want to automate and have an AI agent custom-build the workflow, even if the technician lacks deep scripting expertise. Rewst is leaning on the Model Context Protocol to connect its automation engine to third-party tools in a standardized way, which reduces the integration maintenance that typically consumes MSP engineering hours. The rebuild is a direct response to the skills gap that has kept many mid-market providers from offering automation as a managed service. For Canadian MSPs struggling to hire and retain technicians who can write PowerShell or Python, this could lower the barrier to entry for workflow automation and make it a billable service rather than an internal efficiency play. Rewst says the new architecture will also allow partners to sell automation to their own customers as a white-label managed service, which turns a cost center into a revenue line. The platform update is expected to roll out to existing partners in phases through the third quarter. Microsoft rolled out its July partner announcements on Thursday, and the bundle includes several items that will shape Canadian partner planning for the second half of the calendar year. The company opened FY27 planning resources, updated Azure IP co-sell incentives, and refreshed Microsoft 365 Copilot specialization requirements. A new End of Sale Software pricelist is also live in Partner Center as of July 1. Microsoft is positioning the Copilot specialization as a prerequisite for partners who want to be referred for AI deployment opportunities, which means the bar for entry is moving from general cloud competency to specific AI delivery capability. The FY27 planning materials emphasize recurring revenue and attached services, a message that aligns with what Canadian distributors have been telling partners for the last two quarters. Canadian CSPs will also want to note the pricing and packaging changes for Microsoft 365 Business plans that took effect July 1, which include additional mailbox storage and enhanced Copilot Chat experiences. The net effect is that Microsoft is tightening the link between partner program tiering and AI service delivery, something that will require training investments for smaller partners. In Brief – CompassMSP acquires Logic Group. The 20 MSP acquires Sundance Networks, reaching 49 acquisitions. ManageEngine launches a marketplace for partner-built IT extensions and AI agents. Dell partners remain optimistic amid IT component supply chain concerns. Guardz adds agentic reporting to help MSPs turn security activity into client-ready reviews. Full details and links in the show notes or the blog post. And if you haven’t heard it yet, my conversation with Curtis Dery from Xerox IT Solutions on what HPE’s financing moves, the channel-only expansion of Private Cloud and Zerto, and why AI is a digital goldmine. That’s on In The Channel now. That’s how we’re seeing the headlines today. I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, thanks for listening. Have a great day.

    The Buzz: Barracuda buys Evo Security, Rewst bets on MCP, and Microsoft sets the FY27 table

  3. 25 jun

    Long View’s Dave Frederickson on HPE’s rediscovered mojo, the quote-cycle crisis, and why AI starts with data

    Dave Frederickson, executive vice president of strategic alliances and business development at Long View Systems There are not many people who can look at HPE Discover 2026 from the vantage point of someone who helped build it. Dave Frederickson spent over 24 years at HP, including leading the enterprise servers, storage, and networking business for HP Canada right around the time Discover was created as a unified event in 2011. He joined Long View Systems in June 2012 and is now executive vice president of strategic alliances and business development. That backstory matters, because Dave comes to this week with something almost no one else on the show floor has: direct memory of the HP that lost its way, the acquisition misadventures, and what it looks like when a large technology company loses focus. His verdict on the HPE of 2026? It has its mojo back – and the Juniper integration is the piece that finally makes the networking-plus-compute-plus-storage story credible in a way it could not be before. We also get into the real operational cost of the January quote-cycle crisis – the move to 7- and 14-day quote windows that Dave says created “an astronomical amount of overhead” for Long View’s operations teams – and what the return to 30-day quote validity actually signals coming out of the Partner Growth Summit. On AI, Dave pushes back – respectfully – on Antonio Neri’s keynote framing that the network is the foundation. For Long View, the conversation still starts at the data and governance layer. And he flags tokenomics as the near-term friction point that is coming for a lot of organizations faster than they may realize, with cost predictability becoming the real barrier to AI ROI conversations. For more from HPE Discover 2026, see our full coverage hub and our earlier preview episode with Jeremiah Jenson, VP of North America channel at HPE. Read Full Transcript ROBERT DUTT: Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor at ChannelBuzz.ca, and your host for the show. We’re here at HPE Discover in Las Vegas this week, and sometimes the best conversations happen by accident. Dave Frederickson is executive vice president of Strategic Alliances and Business Development at Long View Systems, one of Canada’s leading IT solution providers. But what makes Dave’s take on this week uniquely worth hearing is what he did before he got to Long View. Many in the channel know Dave for his 24 years at HP. He led the channel for a long time, and he spent some time leading the enterprise server, storage, and networking business for HP Canada right around the time Discover was created as a unified event in 2011. He’s been on the partner side now for 14 years, and that gives him an interesting lens on HPE – where it has been, where it’s struggled, and where it is today – that very few people walking the show floor this week can match. I happened to catch up with Dave at the airport in Vegas after we both arrived here, and he graciously agreed to sit down and share his thoughts on this week. Let’s get right into it. My chat with Dave Frederickson. ROBERT DUTT: Dave, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it. DAVE FREDERICKSON: My pleasure. ROBERT DUTT: I have to ask you the obvious one first. If I’m thinking back correctly to your time at HP, you were actually leading ESSN around the time that HP Discover became a thing in 2011. And here you are 15 years later at HPE’s major show Discover, representing one of the major Canadian partners. Does it feel a little bit like old home week? And also, what’s it like to make the mental switch – I know it’s been a while now, obviously – to make the mental switch from the vendor side of the table to the partner side? DAVE FREDERICKSON: Well, I have to say, 14 years ago at the end of this month is when I left HP. And I will say that every time I come to Discover, there’s a certain nostalgia. But also, I definitely miss it. There’s certain parts of it. I miss the big show. I miss the IP. I don’t necessarily miss having to go to 8,000 meetings over the course of however many [X] days, although I still do quite a few. But yeah, no, there’s definitely – look, and I’m pretty excited about how things are right now. So yeah, it’s definitely – I miss the show a little bit, even on the partner side. ROBERT DUTT: As I say, coming up on 14 years, how is your understanding of what HP is and what the relationship between HP and partners looks like evolved from what you knew when you were on the other side of the house? What did you not really fully appreciate about the HPE relationship until you were on the side of the table you’re on now? DAVE FREDERICKSON: Yeah, I think there’s a few things that kind of unpack that. One was just the ability on the partner side and the necessity for you to represent the client in a way that isn’t necessarily tied to a particular brand. And also the trust that, once earned, a client will put in you once you kind of make that shift over. And so I remember having a senior executive at one of the banks kind of say to me that, you know, “I never knew, you only had one flavor of Kool-Aid that you were drinking, so I know you were serving up to me every time.” Now, I appreciated the fact that I was coming in with maybe an unbiased, more of an unbiased view. So that’s probably the biggest one. The other one would be profitability and understanding the impact and the requirements. I mean, it was always there, right? I always said if you wanted loyalty from a channel partner, buy a dog. But really, profitability is the key to be able to continue sustainable relationships and partnerships. ROBERT DUTT: The Juniper acquisition closed less than a year ago. Clearly, it’s the structural story underneath everything we’re talking about here. The network is the foundation of AI, the Power of One, the unification of Aruba, Juniper, and the HPE compute and storage side of things. From Long View’s perspective, what has the acquisition changed in the conversation that you’re having with customers and the conversation that you’re having internally about the HPE relationship with Long View? DAVE FREDERICKSON: Yeah. So I mean, first off, it’s an interesting challenge it poses because we also have to have a very big, strong relationship with another strong networking organization. And I think that this has really opened, at least my eyes, and I get a whole new sense of kind of energy that’s also coming forward with it. And I think that HPE and Antonio has put together a set of pieces in this puzzle, if you want to call it, that he’s executing on. And with Juniper now, it’s a pretty powerful message. So I think there’s still a lot that we need to unpack and to understand a little bit more, but it’s an exciting time. And I think this positions them in a way that they couldn’t do it before. So yeah, it’s really, really interesting to see how the next number of months pan out. ROBERT DUTT: You were at the Partner Growth Summit yesterday. Real package of operational changes. That keynote, between 30-day quote validity finally, expanded credit lines, different financing options, new channel-only products in Private Cloud and Zerto. Is there anything in what was announced at Growth Summit that kind of really hit hard or made you say, finally, or this changes something for us specifically? What, among what was announced at Growth Summit, kind of hit most meaningful from where you are at Long View? DAVE FREDERICKSON: Yeah. So first off, I think the quote cycle that happened in January-ish timeframe, I’ve never seen anything like it in our industry. And I’ve told many clients this, like going to 7 or 14 days quote cycle, I mean, it’s unheard of. So to get back to a 30-day is pretty substantial. And by the way, the amount of rework that is required internally on us – so to me, that was probably a pain point to our operations teams because the amount of extra work that was required, the amount of times they had to do multiple quotes for the same piece of business or the same request for a client. I mean, it adds an astronomical amount of overhead. So to me, that was the one that said, OK, good. I don’t know if that’s signaling that there’s a correction that’s coming relative to the problems that we had. I suspect they’re still going to see escalating costs because I don’t think the work for data centres anywhere is anywhere near finished, by any stretch of the imagination. But yeah, I’d say that that was the big one. And look, the other financing options, we were exploring and educating customers because it did actually provide an ease, at least for those that could take advantage of it. Those that could do that. There was another angle – if they didn’t have the budget, they got a different shock all of a sudden, something escalated. Because it was an unheard of increase in prices. And it was across the industry. Hopefully, as you say, we don’t know for sure. But it seems like with HPE being willing to make that move, there’s at least some sense that, yes, things are probably going to rise, but in a more manageable, more predictable kind of fashion, so at least they can stand behind their pricing for a month. ROBERT DUTT: Yeah, I mean, annual budget cycles is really the reality of almost every IT organization. DAVE FREDERICKSON: So how do you deal with that? I hope so. ROBERT DUTT: On the partner branded services, it sounds like it’s basically HPE infrastructure support that you can deliver under your own brand. Seems like a big one for partners moving towards a services-led model. Something that you guys are thinking about. Is it something that you’re already planning? Is it something that meshes with h

    Long View’s Dave Frederickson on HPE’s rediscovered mojo, the quote-cycle crisis, and why AI starts with data

  4. 24 jun

    Compugen’s Stéphan Wener on winning HPE Canada Solution Provider of the Year – and why ‘HPE is a different company’

    Stéphan Wener, chief customer officer at Compugen Recorded on-site at HPE Discover in Las Vegas, this episode of In The Channel features Stéphan Wener, chief customer officer at Compugen, one of Canada’s most established HPE partners. It was a big week for Compugen at Discover. The company achieved Triple Platinum Plus status under HPE’s Partner Ready Vantage program — the highest tier available, reflecting deep investment across compute, networking, storage, and security — and was named HPE Canada Solution Provider of the Year at the Partner Growth Summit on Monday. Wener credits the recognition to consistent, long-term investment in the full HPE portfolio and what he describes as genuine “exec-to-field” engagement with the HPE Canada team. But the conversation moves quickly from celebrating to analyzing — and that’s where it gets useful for Canadian partners. His take on HPE’s evolution is direct: “It’s not anymore a compute-led company. I think it’s an AI technology-led company, but with a big focus on networking.” He sees the Aruba acquisition as having already delivered strong returns for both sides, and the Juniper integration as filling the data centre gap to create what he calls a genuine “powerhouse” networking portfolio — a view that aligns with what Antonio Neri laid out in Tuesday’s keynote but carries different weight coming from the partner side. On the Canadian market, Wener flags two converging trends: data sovereignty concerns continuing to push customers — especially in the public sector and regulated industries — toward on-premises and edge deployments, and the economics of cloud-based AI creating a second wave of on-prem investment as the cost of tokens at scale starts to sting. The “Power of One” program consolidation? Compugen has been asking for it for a couple of years and welcomes it — with the candid observation that the compute and networking sales motions are still distinct, and that closing that gap in practice will take ongoing work. And on self-driving networks and the automation question: Wener is a believer — but as an Air Canada Super Elite, he has some pointed thoughts about where the human layer still matters. Read Full Transcript ROBERT DUTT: This episode of In The Channel is brought to you by HPE Discover 2026. Check out our full coverage of the event on ChannelBuzz.ca. You’ll find our HPE Discover 2026 news hub in the menu bar at the top of the page. Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca, and your host for the show. We’re recording this one on-site at HPE Discover in Las Vegas, and if you’ve been following our coverage from the event, you know it’s been a full one. Big keynote from Antonio Neri on Tuesday, a lot of networking announcements from Rami Rahim and the HPE networking team, the Partner Growth Summit on Monday, where HPE laid out some significant program changes, most notably the coming unification of the Juniper Partner Program under Partner Ready Vantage by November 1. My guest for this episode is Stéphan Wener, chief customer officer at Compugen. Compugen is one of Canada’s largest and most prominent HPE partners. They just achieved Triple Platinum Plus status under the Partner Ready Vantage program, which is the highest tier available under HPE’s partner program, reflecting deep investment across compute, networking, storage and security. And at the Partner Growth Summit earlier this week, they were named HPE Canada Solution Provider of the Year. So yeah, it’s been a pretty good week to be Compugen in Las Vegas. I sat down with Stéphan to talk about the story behind that recognition, how Compugen sees the evolution of the HPE portfolio, especially now that it includes both Aruba and Juniper, and what’s actually resonating in the Canadian market right now around AI infrastructure, data sovereignty, and the economics of running AI workloads in the cloud versus at the edge. There’s also a moment in here about self-driving networks that any Air Canada Super Elite will relate to. Let’s get right into it. My chat with Stéphan Wener. ROBERT DUTT: Stéphan, thank you for taking the time. STÉPHAN WENER: [It’s my] pleasure. ROBERT DUTT: Big week for Compugen here at Discover. You were named HPE Canada Solution Provider of the Year. Separately, just announced Triple Platinum Plus status under Partner Ready Vantage. That’s the highest tier, as if the name didn’t give that away, right? Tell me the Compugen-HPE story that led here. When you think about why you’ve ended up at this point, what do you credit it to? STÉPHAN WENER: I would say it’s a long-term engagement. We’ve been really connected. It’s important, if you want to succeed with the OEM, it’s all about connection from the execs to the field. I think our sales resources are really well-engaged with HPE’s sales resources. It’s really a teamwork. The results are all around this collaboration. It’s all about also bringing common value to the customer. We’re working very closely, making sure that we are doing the right thing and growing the business. Being Partner of the Year was actually a surprise, but one element is we’re really engaged in the entire portfolio of HPE. HPE is a different company right now. We were dealing with Aruba in the past and HPE and all this, now being one portfolio. The fact that we are engaged with all lines of business really helps us out, taking it to another level. Having this recognition is great. It’s great for us. It’s great for our teams because there’s a lot of people trained on the technology. There’s a lot of investment we’re making internally, both on the technical side but also on the sales side. We have BDR motions. We have a lot of engagement commonly with HPE. I think it’s really the combination of all these actions that made us successful. We have to thank the HPE team in Canada as well because we don’t win this award by ourselves. It’s really by working very closely with them. The Triple Platinum is a commitment to HPE. We believe that Compugen with HPE can provide great solutions to the market and we want to bring this engagement to another level. We’re also very proud. It was a lot of work on the technical side to be able to ramp up to this level, both on the compute, same thing on the networking side, security. So it’s the entire portfolio. ROBERT DUTT: To that point, the entire portfolio — some listeners may still think of HPE primarily as a server company, a server and storage company with networking kind of on the side. Can you walk me through what the HPE relationship actually looks like at Compugen today in terms of how you work with each part of that business, and how’s that picture changed over the last couple of years? STÉPHAN WENER: I would say HPE is a different company because they kept for a very long time Aruba and the compute side and the networking side separately. You can really feel now that it’s more one company. I actually feel, and Antonio said it today, the networking piece with AI is a big, big part of the strategy right now. So the fact that now networking and compute and storage, all the technology is really evolving in one big channel. It’s really changing what HPE is. It’s not anymore a compute-led company. I think it’s an AI technology-led [company], but a big focus on networking, especially in an AI world. Networking is key for all organizations. And I think specifically, Aruba was already a great company. That was a great acquisition. For all of us — I’m a shareholder of HPE — I can say that for the shareholders, the acquisition of Aruba was amazing, very profitable. But adding Juniper to the mix, it fills the gap. Data centre, DC — it was more campus and branch with Aruba. Now it’s really, really a powerhouse. So networking is definitely… you don’t make these type of investments as a company if you don’t believe that networking is a big part of your future. And already the Aruba part was one of the most profitable pieces of the business. In the years where compute was struggling a little bit more on the profit side, now, okay, HPE is having a great year with all AI and the shortage and all this. It’s great. But I think now HPE [has] a complete portfolio of technology, and that’s what makes it very appealing to the market right now, in my opinion. ROBERT DUTT: On that profitability point, what is having that unified networking story doing for you guys in terms of margin opportunity and that sort of thing? STÉPHAN WENER: I would say HPE would love us to leverage both sides of the portfolio. It’s still two different sales motion[s], let’s call it out. The compute and storage is one element, the network is on the other [end]. I think profit comes with investment. Compugen is a service-led company. So a lot of our sales motion is based on leading with our services, our managed services, our professional services. So we can have great margin when we are leading with our services. So technology with services, it’s the best. We even deliver — we do partner-branded support on the behalf of HPE, so really engage as one company. This is where we maximize our profitability. Again, I know because I’ve been hearing it and hearing it from the leaders, that we would like to lead more with the entire portfolio now. I think it makes a lot of sense as a strategy. Let’s see how we can accomplish and deliver on this because I still see that it’s two different business needs. The networking and security is one element and the compute and storage and all the tools around it are another motion technology-wise. ROBERT DUTT: Well, a big step towards that I suppose was announced yesterday at the Partner Growth Summit. The

    Compugen’s Stéphan Wener on winning HPE Canada Solution Provider of the Year – and why ‘HPE is a different company’

  5. 19 jun

    HPE Financial Services’ Brad Shapiro on new partner financing offers and the ITAD opportunity in AI refreshes

    Brad Shapiro, senior vice president and chief sales officer of HPE Financial Services HPE Financial Services is making a concerted push to be less of a “best-kept secret” and more of a deal-closing engine for partners. At HPE Discover 2026, Brad Shapiro, senior vice president and chief sales officer of HPE Financial Services, walked In the Channel through several new partner-facing offers unveiled at Monday’s Partner Growth Summit. The standout is the 90/9 Advantage structure: 90 days with no payments, followed by nine months at 1 per cent of the original equipment cost, before shifting to level payments. Shapiro said the program is designed to blunt the sting of recent price hikes by pushing costs into future budget cycles without requiring customers to find new money mid-year. On the networking side, HPFS is stacking three offers to help HPE take share from competitors: 0 per cent financing on Mist or Aruba Central software, a “10 per cent better than cash” hardware financing rate, and a competitive takeout program that monetizes displaced gear. The used equipment angle is particularly timely. Shapiro noted that memory shortages have driven up resale values for retiring gear, creating an offset against new hardware costs. “It’s the equivalent of the car market in the early COVID days,” he said. HPFS also expanded its approved credit capacity by 150 per cent, a move Shapiro said was driven by partner frustration with re-approval cycles as component prices fluctuated. The interview also touched on HPFS’s partner pledge – Shapiro said his team does not receive quota retirement until the partner gets paid – and the growing importance of IT asset disposition and chain of custody as Canadian customers navigate AI-driven infrastructure refreshes. Read Full Transcript Robert Dutt: This episode of In The Channel is brought to you by HPE Discover 2026. Check out our full coverage of the event on ChannelBuzz.ca. You’ll find our HPE Discover 2026 news hub on the menu bar at the top of the page. Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca, and your host for the show. Today, my guest is Brad Shapiro, Senior Vice President and Chief Sales Officer of HPE Financial Services, the captive financing arm of HPE. Brad is responsible for the global partner-facing financing strategy and programs that help resellers and MSPs close bigger deals and get paid faster. We sat down at HPE Discover last week to talk about the new partner portal enhancements HPEFS rolled out at Partner Growth Summit, the thinking behind the company’s aggressive credit expansion, and how IT asset disposition fits into the overall AI infrastructure refresh wave that’s starting to hit customer budgets. Let’s get right into it. My chat with Brad Shapiro. Brad, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it. Brad Shapiro: Sure. Glad to be here, Rob. Robert Dutt: You guys rolled out some meaningful enhancements to the HPEFS partner side on Monday: payment structures, promotional pricing, and competitive pricing tiered to the partner’s relationship level. Canada is on the first wave of that for July 1. I understand a bunch of Canadian partners are having a party for that. For a Canadian reseller or MSP who wasn’t here this week, what does it actually change in how they can put a deal together for their customers? Brad Shapiro: Yeah, sure. So as you said, lots of exciting announcements here for Discover. And I think first and foremost, what HPEFS has put together is really focused on helping the HPE partners sell more in a couple of key areas. So we’ve all seen, you know, with commodity prices going up and the price increases around products, we’ve got some really interesting offers that have gained a lot of traction in the market. The 90/9 Advantage is one of the key ones. And that offering partners can offer to their customers is 90 days of no payments, nine months at 1% of the original equipment cost, and then it goes to level payments after. So while we can’t address that the product prices are increasing, what we are doing is providing help for customers who didn’t plan for this in the budget cycle, right? CFOs didn’t say, “Oh, here’s more money because prices are going up.” So it allows the end-user customer to kind of plan for this into the next budget cycle and beyond so they can get the compute power they need. So that’s a key one. The other area, when we look at the networking space, right, we’re very excited about, you know, Aruba and Juniper coming together in the new HPE networking, and they’ve got some tremendous offerings out there. But to really help them and help customers avoid kind of a double payment, like we want to go take market share, we want to be aggressive. So the first offer is 0% financing on the networking software, whether that’s Mist or Aruba Central. Then we have on the hardware side 10% better than cash as a financing offer. So that’s a really cool offer. And then we’ve added a really aggressive focus on IT asset disposition. So we want to go in, help customers by monetizing the competitor’s assets, taking those out, and then putting HPE networking assets in. So when you combine those three offers—0% on software, 10% better than cash on hardware, and a competitive takeout on the competitor’s products—we think we’re really helping partners go and address and partner up with HPE networking and be aggressive in the market to help HPE take share. Robert Dutt: Going back to the 90/9 program, what areas is that covering? Brad Shapiro: That covers all products. So it’s really a financial structure that can address the whole portfolio. And again, it’s a very attractive offer. We’ve seen it compared to any other financing offers we put out there. We’ve seen the pipeline ramp tremendously. It’s really addressing a need that’s out there in the marketplace. Robert Dutt: Before getting into the details of some other programs, you touched on the supply chain situation that is on every partner’s mind right now. I’m curious over the last five months or so that this has been such a big factor. What have you been hearing from partners in terms of what they’re asking for from you, and where they’re looking for help here beyond obviously some clarity and whatever break they can get? Brad Shapiro: I’ll talk from a financial services perspective. It’s really about how can we help the partner address some of the customer concerns. One of the big ones is budgeting. It’s always been the case that there’s more to do than you have budget for. This just puts another wrinkle in it that is unprecedented. I’ve been doing this quite a long time. I’ve really not seen the market dynamic as we have it today. But that’s where financial engineering and financial structuring comes into play. Also, a lot of customers, while the new prices have gone up, when customers are retiring assets, what many don’t realize is the used equipment that’s coming off—the used equipment market has also increased in value. We’re able to give customers a lot more money for their used gear than they’re used to. That’s been helping offset some of the increases on the new product side. Robert Dutt: It’s the equivalent of the car market in the early COVID days. Brad Shapiro: Absolutely. Same type of scenario. Robert Dutt: The announcement around a 150% increase on approved credit capacity—that’s a pretty striking number. Is that part of the response to that? What’s driving you guys to go aggressively there right now? A response to that uncertainty, a response to tariffs, a response to all the things we see going on? Brad Shapiro: It’s a response to a few things. Yes, the price increases. For a while, the component pricing was so uncertain that there was a shorter validity period for quoting. The idea of increasing the credit line created enough room so that our partners didn’t have to keep going through the cycle. What we were hearing as feedback was, “Hey, we would go get a request from HPEFS, we get it approved, then if pricing went up, then we had to go through that process again.” We wanted to give plenty of headroom and be aggressive to allow partners to quickly get their deals done and not have to go through a process twice. It was ease of doing business, speed, and really helping them close their deals. Robert Dutt: Not a peculiar problem for HPE and HPEFS either. That’s something that we’re hearing across the industry front as a major partner issue—the idea of customer sales cycles and “validity” not matching up in any real way. Brad Shapiro: Yeah, absolutely. We’re trying to do our part to help partners get deals done. The good news is HPE on the BU side, on the compute side, announced a longer price validity. I know that they announced that here at Discover and there was really good feedback at the Partner Growth Summit. I think overall HPE, we’re all trying to address and help partners get their deals done with customers. Robert Dutt: The 0% software financing tied to VM migration is interesting when it feels like you’re trying to smooth that painful transition for folks who are on a platform and looking to move somewhere new. Is that the right way to think about it, or what else are you applying to that model? Brad Shapiro: Yeah, so I think just in general, we’re trying to provide customers a way to engage and look at our CloudOps suite—Morpheus and Zerto and OpsRamp and the whole suite—and really focus on how can we make it easy for the customer to say, “Yeah, let me try this.” So at the end of the day, it doesn’t have to be something where they’re coming in and wiping out one versus the other. The cost differential is so great and we belie

    HPE Financial Services’ Brad Shapiro on new partner financing offers and the ITAD opportunity in AI refreshes

  6. 19 jun

    The Buzz: an end-of-week look at the HPE Discover 2026 details that matter for partners

    Today’s headline news for Canadian IT solution providers: HPE Discover 2026 wraps up in Las Vegas today, and if you’ve been following our coverage, you know we’ve had plenty to unpack this week. For the Friday edition of The Buzz, we doing something slightly different – a reporter’s notebook on what HPE’s channel leadership said when they were off the keynote stage. The quote validity extension was the headline that drew the most relief, but the backstory is more interesting than the policy change itself. HPE extended standard quotes from 14 days to 30 days for compute, storage, and GreenLake, effective Monday. Simon Ewington, who leads HPE’s worldwide partner organisation, told press and partners Wednesday that the change was ‘pretty well kept secret’ – his own staff didn’t know about it either. The commodity volatility that had forced the two-week window had moderated enough that HPE could stand behind a 30-day price with confidence. Behind the ‘Power of One’ marketing, there are mechanical changes that determine whether partners can actually make money. Juniper’s Elite Plus, Elite, and Select tiers will map to HPE Platinum, Gold, and Silver starting November 1. HPE introduced a 3x multiplier on software sales for Zerto, Morpheus, and OpsRamp, plus a 1.5x GreenLake multiplier, to help partners climb tiers faster. Smart Choice SKUs – pre-configured servers missing only drives – are a speed play for distributors. The competitive storage take-out targets 14,000 customers under the VH Rail framing, with Alletra MP already outpacing market growth by 2x and 0% financing for three years. Then there was candour. Ewington noted HPE is the vendor who ‘typically moves first… and then others polish.’ The distributor overlap between HPE and Juniper is only about 10%, so they’re ‘refining the landscape’ rather than forcing universal carry. Service provider growth is running 23% to 30% CAGR. And HPE’s sustainability insight dashboard gives partners a concrete tool to analyse customer environments and open carbon footprint conversations. You can find every episode of The Buzz and In The Channel from HPE Discover on our HPE Discover news hub. Read Full Transcript This epsisode of The Buzz is brought to you by HPE Discover 2026. Check out our full coverage of the event on ChannelBuzz.ca — you’ll find out HPE Discover 2026 News Hub in the menu bar at the top of the page. Welcome to The Buzz from ChannelBuzz.ca, I’m Robert Dutt, today is Friday, June 19th, and here’s what’s happening in the channel today. I’m recording this a bit earl in Las Vegas, because I’m on a plane all day heading home from Discover.  If you’ve been following our coverage this week, you know we’ve had a lot to unpack – the Partner Growth Summit on Monday, the networking and AI infrastructure keynote on Tuesday, and a steady drumbeat of announcements through Wednesday. For this episode, I want to do something slightly different. Think of it as a reporter’s notebook – the details, the mechanics, and the candour that came out when HPE’s channel leadership sat down with press and partners on Wednesday morning, off the keynote stage. Let’s start with the quote validity extension, because the backstory here is as interesting than the policy change itself. HPE extended standard quote validity from 14 days to 30 days for compute, storage, and GreenLake, effective Monday. You’ve heard that already. What you probably haven’t heard is how closely they guarded it. Simon Ewington, who runs HPE’s worldwide partner organisation, told us Wednesday that the change was a ‘pretty well kept secret.’  His own staff didn’t know about it either. They wanted zero leaks because the commodity and supply chain volatility that had forced the two-week window in the first place had finally moderated enough that HPE could stand behind a 30-day price with confidence. Keeping it quiet meant announcing it without hedging. For partners who’ve been managing customer decision cycles that simply don’t fit a 14-day window, the relief was audible. The Partner Growth Summit was dense enough that Ewington admitted partners told him it was ‘almost too much’ and they ‘needed an AI summary to recap everything.’ So let me pull out the operational details that actually affect how you navigate the program. First, Juniper integration. We now have firm tier mapping: Juniper Elite Plus goes to HPE Platinum, Elite to Gold, Select to Silver, effective November 1. HPE is also launching a Routing competency – number 15 in the framework – to support that transition. Second, multipliers. HPE introduced a 3x multiplier on software sales for Zerto, Morpheus, and OpsRamp, plus a 1.5x multiplier for GreenLake, to help partners hit higher membership tiers faster by weighting software more heavily than hardware. Third, Smart Choice SKUs – pre-configured servers that ship missing only hard drives. It’s a speed and velocity play for distributors. Fourth, the competitive storage take-out. HPE has identified 14,000 target customers for what they’re calling the VH Rail opportunity. Alletra MP is outpacing market growth by 2x, and they’re backing the migration with 0% financing for three years. These aren’t marketing headlines. These are the details that determine whether you can actually make money on the portfolio. Then there were the moments of genuine candour. Ewington’s line that HPE is the vendor who ‘typically moves first… and then others polish’ is either confidence or arrogance depending on your perspective, but it’s not ambiguous. You may have seen recently that HP formally announced its two main global distributors as Ingram Micro and TD SYNNEX. The distributor overlap reality is worth noting: only about 10% overlap between HPE and Juniper distributors. HPE is actively ‘refining the landscape’ rather than forcing every distributor to carry everything. That’s a concession that operational integration takes time and care. On services, HPE is expanding partner-branded services so partners own the Level 1 and 2 support relationship while HPE stays in the background for Level 3 and 4. Ewington said this largely came about because there have been some large partners who have declined to get closer to HPE because of the company’s previous retisense to allow partners to lead on services around its gear.  For service providers specifically, leadership cited 23% to 30% CAGR growth rates, and they’re opening CloudOps software to CSPs to build new services around. And on sustainability, which came up in the context of AI’s energy demands, HPE has built an insight dashboard that lets partners analyse customer environments and open conversations about carbon footprint and efficiency. It’s a practical tool rather than a vague pledge. If there’s a through-line to the week, it’s that HPE is trying to make ‘Power of One’ mean something operationally, not just rhetorically. The quote validity change was a trust repair. The multiplier and tier mapping are structural incentives. The distributor and services refinements are admissions that integration is hard and takes time. Whether it all lands as promised is what we’ll be watching through the second half of this year. That’s it for this edition of The Buzz. You can find our full HPE Discover 2026 coverage on ChannelBuzz.ca – there’s a news hub in the menu bar at the top of the page. And we’ll also have more epsidoes of In The Channel from Discover next week here on the site, including more HPE executives, and more reactions from Canadian HPE partners. That’s how we’re seeing the headlines from HPE Discover. I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, thanks for listening. Have a great day.

    The Buzz: an end-of-week look at the HPE Discover 2026 details that matter for partners

  7. 18 jun

    HPE compute software VP Justin McGarry on why Compute Ops Management is a business growth platform for MSPs

    Justin McGarry, vice president of product management for compute software at HPE At HPE Discover 2026 in Las Vegas this week, In The Channel sat down with Justin McGarry, vice president of product management for compute software at HPE, to talk about where HPE’s server management story is headed – and what it means for MSPs in the Canadian channel. The centrepiece of that story is Compute Ops Management (COM) – HPE’s cloud-native, subscription-based platform built on iLO telemetry embedded in every ProLiant server. McGarry’s pitch is direct: COM is not just a management tool, it’s a business growth platform for MSPs who lean into it. His primary proof point is Nitec, an MSP that helped co-develop COM’s multi-tenant capability and now manages distributed customer environments at higher margins with fewer resources than previously required. Across a broader study of roughly 300 ProLiant customers, HPE found up to 75% less downtime and approximately $150,000 in travel and resource cost savings per customer. For MSPs serving customers with ESG or sustainability reporting obligations – increasingly common in Canadian public sector and regulated industries – COM’s AI insights module adds a forecasting layer that projects future carbon emissions and energy costs using an open-source forecasting engine. That projection can anchor a practical business case for a server refresh, as illustrated by Booking.com, which is using COM on its path to net zero by 2030. Two capabilities worth flagging for mixed-environment MSPs: third-party server monitoring (visibility into non-HPE OEM hardware from the same console) and Secure Gateway, a virtual appliance that aggregates iLO traffic into a single cloud egress point – solving the cloud-connectivity objection for customers in financial services, healthcare, and other regulated sectors. On the agentic AI front, McGarry is candid that Compute Copilot is early. This week’s Discover announcement extends its reach into security advisories – surfacing recommendations and moving toward automated remediation. The fuller agentic vision is still taking shape. McGarry’s takeaway for partners: there’s still significant runway to understand what COM can do for their businesses, and the MSPs who’ve made it a core capability are seeing it pay off. Read Full Transcript ROBERT DUTT: This episode of In The Channel is brought to you by HPE Discover 2026. Check out our full coverage of the event at ChannelBuzz.ca. You’ll find our HPE Discover 2026 news hub in the menu bar right at the top of the page. Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca and your host for the show. This week I’m at HPE Discover 2026 in Las Vegas, and over the course of the show I’ve been sitting down with HPE executives and partners for a series of conversations that I’ll be releasing over the next few days. Today’s guest is Justin McGarry, vice president of product management for compute software at HPE. Now, when HPE says compute, they mean their server business anchored by the ProLiant line, but Justin’s specific domain is the software that wraps around that hardware. The centerpiece of that is Compute Ops Management, which is HPE’s cloud-native platform for securing, automating and managing ProLiant estates. It’s built on top of iLO, HPE’s embedded server intelligence technology, and over the past few years it’s evolved into something that Justin argues is less a management tool and more a business growth engine for MSPs. Justin came to HPE a couple years ago from VMware, where he ran global services portfolio and the go-to-market strategy, so he brings an interesting outside perspective to where HPE’s story fits in the broader enterprise infrastructure picture. We talked about the MSP opportunity, sustainability forecasting, where Compute Copilot, the conversational AI layer for server management, actually stands today, and where HPE thinks agentic capabilities take all of this. Let’s get right into it. My chat with Justin McGarry. Justin, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it. JUSTIN MCGARRY: Yeah, happy to be here, Rob. Thanks for giving me the opportunity to chat with you today. I’m sure it’s a busy week, this kind of show almost always is. ROBERT DUTT: Absolutely. To start with, you guys have been calling the business unit Compute rather than servers for a while now. When you’re talking to partners, how do you describe what Compute is today versus maybe what it was five years ago, what it all kind of entails? JUSTIN MCGARRY: Yeah, I mean, I’ll give you my perspective. So I joined the company about two and a half years ago now. And when I think about what we do in Compute, the foundation of that is ProLiant. So from a hardware perspective, the servers that we ship day in and day out to our customers. The other piece, from my perspective, and maybe I’m being a little selfish here, is all the software and solutions that wrap around that. So from a software perspective, I own what we call Compute Ops Management. So that is our cloud-native management platform for securing and automating those ProLiant estates. We actually do third-party monitoring as well. So other server OEMs that you have in the environment, we’ll monitor that as well. And then we have our on-premise solution for air-gapped and sovereign environments. That’s OneView. We’ve had OneView out in the market for many years now. And then, of course, the foundation of everything we do from a software perspective is with iLO, integrated lights-out. That has been out in the market now for a few decades. We continue to innovate and evolve on that. And so all of that intelligence, the data, the telemetry, that’s all foundation to what we do in our management platforms with our subscription-based cloud-native Compute Ops Management, and our sovereign air-gapped solution with OneView. ROBERT DUTT: Okay. A couple questions around things that you guys have announced recently. You guys just highlighted a 20% energy efficiency gain with the Gen 12 platform on Xeon. So for a reseller or MSP helping a mid-market customer justify the server refresh right now, how do you see energy efficiency playing in actually closing deals? Or is it still just sort of a nice-to-have thing on the spec sheet? JUSTIN MCGARRY: Yeah, I think customers are still really focused on sustainability. Again, if I think back to what we do from a software perspective with Compute Ops Management, one of the key assets or capabilities that we have there is what we call AI insights. And with those AI insights, we can actually help customers from a sustainability perspective be able to predict and forecast future carbon emissions. So I was at Discover in Barcelona late last year. We had a customer Booking.com on stage and Booking.com has a massive distributed environment all ProLiant-based. How are they managing, securing, automating that? They’re using Compute Ops Management. One of their key goals at a company level is they want to be net-zero by 2030. How are they going to get there? They got to make sure that they’re running an efficient, sustainable operation, certainly from a data center perspective. ProLiant is in that picture. And then how they’re managing, monitoring that, predicting their future forecasts or their carbon emissions to help them derive when they’re going to go do their refreshes. They’re using Compute Ops Management for that. So sustainability is still very much top of mind. Globally, I would say even more important in EMEA with some of those board-level sustainability targets that customers have with their ESG board-level goals that they’ve got to go and achieve. ROBERT DUTT: Do you see that catching up at all in the North American market? JUSTIN MCGARRY: You know, I do. I mean, I’m hearing it more in customer conversations. If I think about when I was in Discover Barcelona, a lot of the discussion there was around sovereign and sustainability. Early into the week here at Discover, I haven’t had a lot of customer meetings yet, but I’m going to kind of predict that I think some of the sustainability pieces are going to come into play, especially when you think about AI, you think about inferencing in particular out at the edge. You think about all the energy required to go in and not just do the training, but now thinking about the inferencing and workloads and use cases around GenAI. I think that’s just going to continue to become more important. And so that’s why we prioritized it in our roadmap to continue to evolve on what we’re doing from a sustainability perspective. ROBERT DUTT: Let’s get a little bit more into Compute Ops Management. You came from VMware, which has its own management tooling story. What does COM do that’s genuinely different and what does it mean for an MSP managing, say, 100 ProLiant servers across 20 customers or whatever that profile looks like? JUSTIN MCGARRY: Yeah, yeah. So I think what really differentiates HPE, I think, generally in the market is that we have the Compute Ops Management capability. So this was a build from the ground up, cloud-native subscription-based management tool that we brought to market a few years ago now. I think it has been very transformational in the customer conversations that we’ve been having because at the end of the day, it’s not just the hardware. It’s how you secure that, how you automate it. I think the unique differentiation that we have with Compute Ops Management is specifically with all the telemetry data and intelligence that we have at the iLO level. That is in every single ProLiant that we ship out the door. And because we have that chip in each of those ProLiants that goes out, it gives us a lot of capability t

    HPE compute software VP Justin McGarry on why Compute Ops Management is a business growth platform for MSPs

  8. 18 jun

    The Buzz: Fidelma Russo makes the economic case for on-prem AI as HPE unveils Morpheus 9 and Vultr buys big

    Today’s headline news for Canadian IT solution providers: HPE chief technology officer for cloud and AI Fidelma Russo used her Discover general session to introduce “tokenomics” – the argument that agentic AI economics are fundamentally infrastructure economics. She told the Las Vegas audience that continuous AI agents can cost $13,000 per agent per month in the public cloud, and revealed that HPE’s own MindStone AI support platform achieved a 30x cost reduction by moving from the public cloud to HPE Private Cloud AI on-prem – a saving of roughly $100,000 per month. Vultr announced it is buying HPE and NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra rack-scale systems – the GB300 NVL72 – with 800GbE Spectrum-X networking to build out next-generation global AI data centres. Vultr CEO J.J. Kardwell called out “decentralized, latency-sensitive workloads” as a driver. The announcement contained no channel component. HPE unveiled Morpheus 9, the latest version of its GreenLake virtualization platform, with a built-in MCP server for agent-driven operations. HPE claims up to 90 percent cost reduction versus traditional virtualization, and says more than 2,000 customers and one million cores are already on VM Essentials. A platform migration program offers the first year of Morpheus and VM Essentials at no cost. Zerto’s recovery tools are positioned as an “undo” button for when autonomous AI agents make unintended infrastructure changes. Read Full Transcript This epsisode of The Buzz is brought to you by HPE Discover 2026. Check out our full coverage of the event on ChannelBuzz.ca — you’ll find out HPE Discover 2026 News Hub in the menu bar at the top of the page. Welcome to The Buzz from ChannelBuzz.ca, I’m Robert Dutt, today is Thursday, June 18th, and here’s what’s happening in the channel today. Today, day three of HPE Discover 2026 in Las Vegas, and the story is the economics of the agentic enterprise. Let’s get to it. HPE’s chief technology officer for cloud and AI, Fidelma Russo, took the main stage yesterday morning with a message that will resonate with anyone who has watched a client’s cloud AI bill spiral: continuous agentic AI is wildly expensive in the public cloud. Russo cited a figure of $13,000 per month, per agent, for continuous reasoning operations in the public cloud. That is not a pilot. That is production infrastructure. Her answer is HPE’s take on “tokenomics” – the idea that AI economics are fundamentally infrastructure economics. It comes down to utilization, efficiency, and scale. And HPE has proof. Russo revealed that HPE built its own AI support platform, MindStone, and moved it from the public cloud to HPE Private Cloud AI on-prem. The result: a 30-fold cost reduction, saving roughly $100,000 per month. That is the argument for why production AI is coming to the data centre. Not because it is fashionable, but because the math stops working anywhere else. The alternative hyperscaler announced it is buying HPE and NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra rack-scale systems – specifically the GB300 NVL72 – along with 800-gigabit Ethernet Spectrum-X networking, to build out its next generation of global AI data centres. This is a procurement deal, not a partnership, but it is serious hardware at serious scale. Vultr CEO J.J. Kardwell framed it around “decentralized, latency-sensitive workloads across Vultr’s extensive global network.” Now clearly, this isn’t a channel story unto itself at this moment. This is pure enterprise infrastructure. But it does signal that someone is actually buying the big AI factory gear HPE has been talking about all week. The GreenLake platform now has a built-in MCP server for agent-driven operations, and HPE says Morpheus 9 delivers up to 90 percent cost reduction compared to traditional virtualization. There are more than 2,000 customers and a million cores already running on VM Essentials. To ease the migration pain, HPE is offering the first year of Morpheus and VM Essentials at no cost through a platform migration program. There is a caveat: Zerto’s instant recovery and migration support is Morpheus-only for now. No KVM, no Kubernetes natively. But Zerto gets an interesting new job in this agentic world. Russo positioned it as the undo button for when autonomous AI agents make unintended changes to infrastructure – roll back to a known good state instantly. I’ll be back tomorrow with a reporter’s notebook from the channel leadership breakfast panel at Discover, as we wrap up our coverage of the event this week. That’s how we’re seeing the headlines from HPE Discover. I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, thanks for listening. Have a great day.

    The Buzz: Fidelma Russo makes the economic case for on-prem AI as HPE unveils Morpheus 9 and Vultr buys big
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