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  1. 10h ago

    Cisco’s Alex Pujols on how AI is changing what partners can build

    Alex Pujols, vice president of solutions engineering for Cisco’s Global Partner Organization Artificial intelligence isn’t just changing the technologies Cisco partners deliver. It’s changing the kinds of businesses they can build. That’s a central theme of this episode of In The Channel, recorded at Cisco Partner Summit 2026 in Vancouver, where Alex Pujols, Cisco’s vice president of sales solutions engineering, joins us to discuss the opportunities emerging as AI becomes increasingly embedded in enterprise infrastructure and operations. Pujols identifies security as perhaps the most immediate opportunity. He discusses Cisco’s five-stage Vulnerability Operations Maturity Model, designed to help partners assess their capabilities and develop the increasingly sophisticated services customers require. He also offers his assessment of how quickly partners are progressing through those stages. The conversation turns to infrastructure, including emerging edge AI use cases, before exploring how Cisco Cloud Control could simplify managed services delivery. Pujols confirms that Canada is among the next markets targeted for Cloud Control availability, although no specific date has been announced. Another major theme is partner-developed intellectual property. Cisco’s AI Studio and Model Foundry aim to make it easier for partners to build AI agents and specialized solutions, potentially creating new opportunities for recurring revenue. But if AI agents become easy to create, how do partners differentiate their offerings and protect their intellectual property? Pujols discusses the importance of customer trust, creativity and the commercial protections Cisco is developing for its marketplace. Finally, Pujols reflects on how AI is transforming Cisco’s Partner Innovation Challenge, with AI-related submissions rising from fewer than 20 percent just a few years ago to more than 95 percent today. It’s a look at how Cisco sees the channel evolving from selling technology to building solutions around it. Read Full Transcript Robert Dutt: Hello, and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel for the last sixteen years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca and your host for the show. We’re coming to you today from Cisco Partner Summit 2026 in Vancouver, where Cisco is laying out its vision for how partners can capitalize on the next wave of artificial intelligence. And while there’s no shortage of technology announcements this week, one of the more interesting themes is how those technologies are changing the kinds of businesses Cisco partners can build. We’re talking about partners moving into increasingly sophisticated security services, building and managing AI-powered infrastructure, and developing their own AI agents and applications. Cisco is also making a significant push to lower the barriers to creating those solutions, potentially opening up opportunities that were previously limited to partners with substantial development resources. But making technology easier doesn’t necessarily make it easier to build a differentiated business around it. That’s one of the questions I put to Alex Pujols, Cisco’s senior vice president of sales solutions engineering in its global partner sales organization, when we sat down here Monday at Partner Summit. We also discussed Cisco’s new Vulnerability Operations Maturity Model, which is helping partners assess their capabilities and develop more sophisticated security practices; the implications of Cisco Cloud Control for managed services providers; and the opportunities emerging around specialized AI models and edge computing. And Alex shared some interesting observations about how quickly Cisco’s partner community is evolving, including a dramatic increase in the proportion of Partner Innovation Challenge submissions involving AI. It’s a conversation about where Cisco sees the channel heading and what partners need to do to take advantage of the opportunities ahead. Let’s get right into it, my chat with Alex Pujols. Robert Dutt: Alex, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it. I’m sure this is a busy week for you. Alex Pujols: Happy to be here, of course. Robert Dutt: You talked this morning about the three major shifts you’re seeing in the market: securing agentic AI, scaling infrastructure for AI, and bringing agentic AI into business operations. From a partner’s perspective, which of those shifts do you see creating the most immediate opportunity today? Like, the right-now opportunity? Alex Pujols: I think there’s an opportunity for all of them right now. It’d be really hard to ignore the role that security is playing within AI, not even just for agentic operations, but just more broadly. We also talked about this whole post-Mythos era that we’re in, and defending at machine speed, at machine scale. And so I think, 100 percent, the agentic opportunity. If I’m a partner right now, and I’m looking at these shifts, and I have to invest in a single area, I would certainly look there because the demand that we’re seeing from customers is overwhelming. The activity from a compliance and legislative perspective means there’s probably going to be even more opportunity around this moving forward. And then, selfishly, I feel that we have an amazing portfolio to address the opportunity. And so I certainly would say the security side of it. Robert Dutt: I have to imagine that’s accelerating, too. AI has been the priority for a while now, but over the last six months or so, drip, drip, drip — Mythos, [unclear], OpenAI — all of that is just adding to the awareness, the appetite, all of it. Alex Pujols: A hundred percent. And it’s interesting. It’s to the point where family members who know nothing about technology are asking me, “Is it over? Is the end near?” And so, in between therapy, I also just do a little bit of education and kind of help them understand where things are. But the point is, it’s mainstream. It’s mainstream. And so Mythos did that. The news reports of AI autonomously attacking other AI and stealing secrets have people spooked. But while I think, in my opinion, a lot of that is inflated, what’s not inflated is the opportunity more broadly around security. And so I think it certainly is real, and it’s going to continue to grow. Robert Dutt: You talked a bit today about the Vulnerability Operations Maturity Model, helping partners understand where they are today and what capabilities they need to develop. Can you give me that kind of elevator pitch on that? Just the real quick walkthrough of it: how it works, and what it tells a partner about how and where they should be investing right now? Alex Pujols: Yeah. So how the maturity model came about was initially a little bit before Mythos, but certainly as the news dropped, we really accelerated the conversations we were having with partners. And in my conversations, I was just noticing that everyone was on a different journey, or they were at different stages of that journey. And so a lot of partners, we’d say, “Hey, how can we help?” They’d say, “Get out of the way. We’re rocking and rolling. We’re cooking. We’re good.” Then we had a lot of partners that said, “I have no earthly idea how to have a conversation with my customer about this. I have no idea what capabilities I need to build out. I’m not sure how to build them out.” And so, “I’m struggling with just understanding the gravity of the situation and how I should respond.” As we saw so many different levels, we said, “Look, let’s put this into a model, and as part of that, we can help partners get from one stage to the next.” And so the model has five stages. You could say Level 1 is probably partners with the least amount of sophistication around their practice. And then Level 5, which is our most advanced partners, have full-fledged, what we’re calling Vulnerability Operations practices. And so they can manage customer vulnerabilities really at machine speed, instantly. They have super-advanced capabilities, like being able to go out and proactively scan customer networks, almost leverage AI to create automated patching on the fly, even when the vendor hasn’t supplied patching on their end. So, super-advanced capabilities. But ultimately, that’s not needed for every customer. And so the idea isn’t that every partner has to develop that capability. They need to find out where on that maturity model their customers need them to be, and then build to that. So if your customers need you to be at a three, and you’re at one, then you can move to Stage 2 and Stage 3. From a vendor perspective, what we want to do is equip them with the skills and the capabilities and the tools, and ultimately the guidance, so that they understand clearly how to get from one level to the next and build out the practices their customers need. Robert Dutt: Especially for those partners who are finding they’re at the Level 1, perhaps, and their customers are saying, “Maybe two or three would be more representative of what we need, what we want from a partner.” Are there any common threads or common first steps that you find work best for helping them move up that? Alex Pujols: Yeah, I think there’s a couple of things. Number one, of course, even though we’re talking about this more in the context of agentic AI and post-Mythos and things like that, what is just the fundamental understanding of AI at the organization? Generally, for our Level 1 partners, AI means that a few people have ChatGPT subscriptions or something. And so it’s kind of tapping into, where are you? What are the specific skills and capabilities that you need to build? And then also, how do you apply them? Because a lot of partners maybe work with a specific subse

    Cisco’s Alex Pujols on how AI is changing what partners can build

  2. 12h ago

    The Buzz Special: Cisco wants partners to make more money from AI, and it’s changing the rules to help

    VANCOUVER — Cisco’s message to partners at Partner Summit 2026 is about more than the opportunities created by artificial intelligence. It’s about how partners can turn those opportunities into profitable businesses. In this special edition of The Buzz, we’re reporting from Vancouver with a closer look at the announcements and strategy emerging from the opening day of Cisco’s annual partner gathering. A central piece is the continued evolution of Cisco 360, including new incentives intended to reward partners for more of the value they contribute throughout a customer relationship. That includes Ecosystem Deal Registration, designed to recognize partners that influence customer decisions even when they aren’t the ones completing the transaction. Cisco is also expanding incentives tied to adoption, customer growth and recurring revenue. The changes reflect a broader reality: As customer technology environments become more complex, the partner creating the opportunity, the partner delivering the solution and the partner providing ongoing services may not be the same company. Cisco is also expanding its AI infrastructure opportunity, including making rack-scale infrastructure developed with Supermicro available through its global price list. But the more significant profitability opportunity may lie beyond the initial infrastructure sale—in networking, security, observability and services. That theme extends to Cisco IQ, Cisco’s evolving customer experience platform, and new Cisco Powered managed services built around Splunk and Duo. For MSPs, those developments could create new ways to build recurring revenue. They also raise questions about how Cisco’s increasingly integrated platform strategy fits with partners’ existing technology stacks. Distribution is another important part of the picture. Cisco plans to bring distributors into the Cisco 360 Partner Value Index in February 2027, while continuing to invest in AI-assisted partner workflows intended to reduce administrative complexity. The bigger question is whether these changes can deliver meaningful improvements in profitability across Cisco’s diverse partner ecosystem—not just for large global integrators, but for smaller partners serving Canadian businesses. That’s the focus of today’s special edition of The Buzz from Cisco Partner Summit 2026 Read Full Transcript Hello, and welcome to The Buzz from ChannelBuzz.ca. I’m Robert Dutt.  Today is Tuesday, October 27, 2026. And here’s what’s happening in the channel today. We’re coming to you from Vancouver, where Cisco Partner Summit 2026 is underway. We’re doing something a little different for this edition of The Buzz. Rather than our usual roundup of industry news, we’re dedicating the entire episode to the announcements, conversations and bigger themes emerging from the opening day of Cisco’s annual partner event. And while there’s certainly plenty of AI technology to talk about, I think the more interesting story here is about how Cisco wants its partners to make money. Because the company is making a fairly ambitious argument: That the AI era isn’t simply going to create more opportunities to sell infrastructure, networking and security products. It’s going to change the kinds of services partners deliver, the ways they participate in customer relationships, and ultimately, how they’re compensated. And Cisco is trying to adjust its partner program, its technology portfolio and its own processes to support that transition. The question, of course, is how much of that ambition translates into real business opportunities for partners. Let’s get into it. First, Cisco 360. Cisco’s new partner program has been a major focus of the company’s channel strategy, and Partner Summit brought another round of changes intended to address how partners actually create value. One of the more interesting is something called Ecosystem Deal Registration. Traditionally, deal registration has been built around the partner that identifies an opportunity and ultimately transacts the sale. But that’s not always how technology projects work anymore. A consultant might help a customer develop its AI strategy. Another partner might design the architecture. A systems integrator might build the solution. And a different partner could ultimately handle the transaction or provide ongoing services. Cisco wants to recognize more of those contributions, including from partners that influence a deal without necessarily selling the products themselves. That’s a meaningful change in philosophy. And it reflects something Tim Coogan, who leads Cisco’s global partner sales organization, has been emphasizing: The partner ecosystem increasingly includes companies that don’t fit the traditional reseller model. Cisco is also expanding incentives around customer adoption, growth and recurring revenue. The company says adoption incentives are nearly doubling, and it’s introducing additional opportunities tied to Enterprise Agreement activation and the use of Cisco IQ. There are also new incentives intended to reward partners for growing customer relationships over time, rather than simply closing the initial transaction. Now, there’s an important distinction between creating more incentive categories and creating more profitable partner businesses. Partners will ultimately judge these changes by whether they can understand the rules, qualify for the incentives, and receive predictable payments. Cisco says it’s working on those issues, including better visibility into potential earnings and more predictable program administration. But the real test will come when partners start using these programs in the field. And there’s another question worth watching with Ecosystem Deal Registration: Does recognizing more participants create additional revenue opportunities, or does it sometimes mean dividing the economics of an existing opportunity among more companies? That’s something we’ll be watching as the program develops. Next, the AI infrastructure opportunity. Cisco’s technology announcements this week reinforce its ambition to play a larger role in the infrastructure supporting enterprise AI. Among the developments is the availability of rack-scale AI infrastructure developed with Supermicro through Cisco’s global price list. That gives Cisco partners another route into AI infrastructure projects, with associated deal protection and opportunities to attach networking, security and services. But there’s a useful distinction here between selling AI infrastructure and building a profitable AI business. During the opening-day presentations, Cisco’s leadership repeatedly returned to the idea that the strongest economics aren’t necessarily in the compute hardware itself. They’re in everything surrounding it. The networking required to move data. The security required to protect increasingly complex environments. The observability tools needed to understand what’s happening. And the services required to design, deploy, operate and optimize the whole thing. Cisco’s leadership made the point that margins follow the platform. That’s an important way to understand what the company is trying to accomplish. Cisco doesn’t simply want its partners to participate in the next wave of infrastructure spending. It wants them to capture a larger share of the work surrounding those investments. And Cisco has some numbers suggesting customers are going to need help. In a survey of seventeen hundred partners, ninety-one percent reported customer concerns about the operating costs of AI. And forty-one percent identified on-premises AI as a growth opportunity. Those findings point to a market that’s still working through some fundamental questions about where AI workloads should run, how much they cost, and how to manage them securely. For partners, those questions create opportunities for assessment, consulting, integration and ongoing management. But they also mean AI infrastructure isn’t necessarily an easy sale. Customers are going to want a credible business case, not just a collection of expensive new hardware. And partners that can help customers answer those questions may be better positioned than those focused primarily on moving products. That brings us to security and managed services. One of the most consistent themes across the opening day was that AI is changing the security conversation. It’s not just about protecting employees using AI applications. It’s increasingly about protecting the infrastructure supporting AI, understanding what AI agents are doing, and managing the identities and permissions those agents need. That creates opportunities for partners to develop more sophisticated security practices. And Cisco is trying to make some of those opportunities easier to package and deliver. The company announced two additional Cisco Powered managed services: One built around Splunk for security operations, and another using Duo for identity and access management. For MSPs, that’s particularly interesting. Managed security is already an established business opportunity, but the complexity of delivering advanced security services can be a significant barrier. If Cisco can make it easier for partners to build repeatable offerings around these platforms, that could open opportunities for partners that haven‘t traditionally operated at that level. Cisco IQ is another part of the strategy. Cisco is positioning the platform as a way to give customers and partners better visibility into their environments, while supporting more proactive management and customer experience services. And it’s backing that strategy with additional partner incentives. There’s a twenty-five-hundred-dollar Cisco IQ adoption incentive, along with opportunities associated with higher support tiers. Cisco h

    The Buzz Special: Cisco wants partners to make more money from AI, and it’s changing the rules to help

  3. 1d ago

    The Buzz: Oracle commits $1 billion to partners, Kiteworks names channel chief, Portal26 targets managed AI

    Today’s headline news for Canadian IT solution providers: Oracle commits $1 billion to partner growth Oracle has announced a $1 billion commitment to its partner ecosystem over four years, including technical training, skills development, migration resources, demonstration environments and go-to-market support. The investment is intended to help partners build capabilities and deliver more Oracle-based cloud and AI solutions. It’s a substantial commitment, but not a billion-dollar pool of unrestricted partner payments. Individual benefits depend on eligibility, and Oracle hasn’t disclosed a Canadian allocation. For Canadian solution providers, the important questions are how accessible those resources will be, which partners can benefit, and whether they translate into profitable customer engagements. Read Oracle’s announcement. Kiteworks names Matt Marlier global channel chief Kiteworks has appointed Matt Marlier vice president of global channels and alliances, bringing in a veteran of Red Hat, NGINX, HashiCorp and Software AG to expand its partner ecosystem. The company is targeting distributors, resellers, MSPs, MSSPs and technology alliances, with an emphasis on partner recruitment, enablement and sales support. The appointment raises interesting questions about how Kiteworks intends to expand its secure data exchange and compliance business through different types of partners, particularly those looking to develop ongoing managed services. Read Kiteworks’ announcement. Portal26 looks to turn AI governance into managed services Portal26 has introduced its Managed Intelligence Platform and Point2 Academy, combining technology for discovering and managing customer AI usage with training intended to help MSPs develop service offerings. The company sees opportunities in AI governance, advisory services, cost management and licence optimization. But the distinction between having a platform and operating a profitable managed service remains important. Partners will need to establish how those services are priced, delivered and measured. Read Portal26’s announcement. In Brief Canadian cloud distributor Sherweb has added DNSFilter to its marketplace, giving MSPs DNS-layer threat protection and visibility into shadow IT and AI usage. Sherweb announcement. Cork Cyber has expanded automated vulnerability remediation for MSPs, reporting more than 50,000 remediation runs and an estimated 5,100 technician hours saved, according to original reporting by Channel Insider. Channel Insider report. Mailprotector has launched Shield Blueprints, allowing MSPs to apply standardized email security configurations across multiple customer environments. Mailprotector announcement. Read Full Transcript Robert Dutt: Welcome to The Buzz from ChannelBuzz.ca. I’m Robert Dutt, and today is Monday, October 26, 2026. Let’s start with Oracle, and a pretty substantial number. The company announced Friday that it’s committing one billion dollars over the next four years to supporting its partner ecosystem. Now, whenever a vendor puts a number that large into a partner announcement, it’s worth asking exactly what the money represents, and how much of it is actually going to be available to partners. In Oracle’s case, we’re talking about a broad investment in partner development and enablement, rather than a billion dollars in direct grants or payments to solution providers. The commitment includes technical training, skills development, resources for building and demonstrating solutions, support for customer migrations, and assistance with joint go-to-market activities. In other words, Oracle is investing in the infrastructure around its partners, with the aim of helping them develop more capabilities and pursue more customer opportunities. And there are a couple of reasons that’s interesting right now. First, Oracle has been investing heavily in its cloud and AI businesses, and it’s going to need partners that can help customers make use of those capabilities. It’s one thing to provide the underlying infrastructure or software. It’s another to help a customer migrate existing workloads, integrate new services, build applications and manage the environment over time. That’s where the channel comes in. And second, as the industry shifts toward more complex AI and cloud projects, the cost of developing the necessary skills can become a significant barrier for partners. Training people, maintaining certifications, building demonstration environments and developing repeatable service offerings all require investment, often before a partner has a customer ready to pay for the work. If Oracle can help reduce some of those upfront costs, that could make it easier for partners to pursue opportunities they might otherwise leave alone. But there’s an important distinction between announcing a billion-dollar commitment and demonstrating that the investment is making a difference to partners. Eligibility matters. So do the terms of individual programs, the resources available in a particular market, and how difficult it is for partners to actually access them. Oracle hasn’t specified how much of the commitment will be directed toward Canada. And for Canadian solution providers, that’s going to be one of the questions worth asking. Are these resources readily available to Canadian partners? Are they aimed primarily at large integrators with substantial Oracle practices, or is there a meaningful opportunity for smaller and mid-sized firms? And perhaps most importantly, can a partner turn the available support into a profitable customer engagement? Because the goal isn’t simply to get more people certified or add another logo to a partner’s website. The real measure of success is whether that investment helps partners win business, deliver projects successfully, and develop ongoing customer relationships. We’ll be watching for more detail on how Oracle intends to put that commitment to work, particularly in Canada. Our second story is about a new face at the top of a security vendor’s channel organization. Kiteworks has appointed Matt Marlier vice president of global channels and alliances. The appointment was announced last Wednesday, and it’s an interesting one because Kiteworks operates in a part of the cybersecurity market where the channel opportunity isn’t necessarily as obvious as it is in endpoint protection or firewalls. Kiteworks focuses on securing the exchange and handling of sensitive information. That includes situations where organizations need to move confidential files, collaborate with external parties, or demonstrate that sensitive data is being handled in accordance with security and regulatory requirements. For customers in regulated industries, or organizations dealing with particularly sensitive information, those can be substantial business problems. And for solution providers, they can create opportunities that go beyond the initial sale of a security product. There may be consulting work around information governance, integration with existing systems, compliance requirements, deployment and ongoing management. But those opportunities don’t necessarily look the same for every type of partner. A large security integrator serving enterprise customers may approach Kiteworks very differently from an MSP serving smaller businesses. And that brings us back to the new channel chief. Marlier has held channel leadership roles at Red Hat, NGINX, HashiCorp and Software AG, giving him experience across enterprise software, infrastructure and developer-oriented technologies. His new responsibilities include expanding Kiteworks’ relationships with distributors, resellers, managed service providers, managed security service providers and technology alliance partners. He’s also expected to focus on the mechanics of the partner experience, including recruitment, training and sales support. Those may sound like fairly routine channel priorities, but they’re particularly important when a vendor is trying to expand into different types of partners. It’s one thing to recruit a partner. It’s another to give that partner a practical way to identify customer opportunities, build the necessary expertise and make money delivering the solution. And there’s an interesting question here about where Kiteworks sees its greatest opportunity. Is the growth primarily going to come from specialist security firms working with large and highly regulated organizations? Or does Kiteworks see a broader opportunity among MSPs and other solution providers that want to add secure data exchange and governance capabilities to their managed services portfolios? Those are different channel strategies, and they require different approaches to enablement, sales support and service delivery. It’s also worth watching how much emphasis Kiteworks puts on partners providing ongoing services, rather than simply reselling its technology. We’ve covered Kiteworks before, particularly around compliance and sensitive information. But a conversation with the company’s new channel leader would provide an opportunity to look more closely at its go-to-market strategy and where it sees the partner opportunity developing. And that’s something we’re hoping to explore on In The Channel in the coming weeks. Our third story takes us into another area where vendors are trying to help managed service providers build new practices. Portal26 has introduced what it calls its Managed Intelligence Platform, alongside a training initiative called Point2 Academy. The announcement came last week, and the basic proposition is that MSPs have an opportunity to help customers manage the growing use of artificial intelligence across their businesses. Now, that’s a broad statement, and we’re hearing versions of it from a lot of vendors r

    The Buzz: Oracle commits $1 billion to partners, Kiteworks names channel chief, Portal26 targets managed AI

  4. 4d ago

    Why an OpenText partner came back — and what still needs to change

    Shanel Salomon, president of Optima Csonulting For years, Optima Consulting built a successful business implementing OpenText technology for enterprise customers without maintaining a formal partnership with the vendor. Now, under new leadership and with a renewed emphasis on its partner ecosystem, OpenText has brought Optima back into the fold. In this episode of In The Channel, recorded at OpenText World 2026 in Orlando, Optima CEO and founding partner Shaney Salomon discusses what brought the company back, and why OpenText’s partner transformation remains a work in progress. Salomon, a former OpenText executive who built Optima around the intersection of SAP and OpenText technologies, says previous OpenText leadership sometimes viewed implementation partners as competitors for professional services revenue rather than as organizations that could expand the vendor’s reach. That attitude is changing, she says, although aligning field sales teams with the company’s partner-first ambitions remains an important challenge. The conversation also explores the changing economics of enterprise modernization as customers weigh cloud migrations against rapidly evolving AI capabilities. Salomon argues that vendors need to deliver practical AI value even to customers that haven’t completed their modernization journeys, or risk seeing those customers turn to alternative technologies. And she shares lessons from building Optima, including why solution providers must continually evolve their expertise, why change management can make or break technology projects, and how helping customers realize more value from existing investments creates opportunities for deeper, longer-lasting relationships. It’s a candid look at OpenText’s evolving partner strategy from a solution provider that’s both enthusiastic about the opportunity and realistic about the challenges ahead. Read Full Transcript Robert Dutt: Hello, and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel for the last sixteen years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor at ChannelBuzz.ca, and your host for the show. We’re wrapping up our coverage from OpenText World 2026 in Orlando with a look at what the company’s changing partner strategy looks like for a solution provider that’s built a business around OpenText technology. My guest today is Shaney Salomon from Optima Consulting, a company that operates at the intersection of the OpenText and SAP ecosystems, helping enterprise customers implement, modernize, and get more value from their technology investments. Shaney has an interesting perspective on OpenText’s partner evolution. She started her career with the company, left to build Optima, and after years of working with OpenText technology without being an official partner, has recently brought the company back into the OpenText partner program. And she’s quite clear about why. We talk about how OpenText’s previous approach to professional services sometimes put the company at odds with its partners, what’s changed under new leadership, and why there’s still work to do to make that partner-first approach a reality throughout the organization. We also get into how AI is changing the enterprise modernization conversation, why customers can’t necessarily wait until they’ve completed their cloud migrations to start seeing AI value, and the lessons Optima has learned about building a successful solution provider business around major technology platforms. It’s a useful look at OpenText’s strategy from the perspective of a partner that’s actually putting it into practice. Let’s get right into it, my chat with Shaney Salomon. Robert Dutt: Shaney, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it. I’m sure it’s a busy week for you. Shaney Salomon: It is. It’s been a busy week so far, but super happy to be here with you and looking forward to the questions. Robert Dutt: And just starting, too. Let’s start with your story. You started within OpenText and then went out and built out Optima Consulting. What led you to make that leap? What was the opportunity that made you decide that building a partner organization around OpenText was the right move to make back when you made that decision? Shaney Salomon: I came to OpenText through an acquisition, actually, of one of the solutions that SAP considers a solution extension today, Vendor Invoice Management. That was back in the 2004 timeframe. Once I joined OpenText, I worked my way up into leadership, into the SAP Global Services lead, and had a really good run there. But when SAP and OpenText really went to market together around their archiving solutions, and then eventually Vendor Invoice Management, the partner community, the big guys, the Big Four, started coming into the space. And those were the partners that OpenText, I think, thought would be the right level of partners to really work with SAP and OpenText on bringing these solutions to market. I saw that a little bit differently. I saw that as an opportunity to go out into the ecosystem, partner with both SAP and OpenText, and create a company that really focused in that space. Robert Dutt: In that kind of intersection. That’s interesting, because I’ve heard the story of folks who are within a vendor and decide to go out and build a partner organization around that vendor. But it’s an interesting twist to have that be at the intersection of two vendors’ businesses there. Shaney Salomon: I had been in the SAP space for several years and really saw that as the catalyst. OpenText has very, very strong technologies, but SAP had the breadth of reach with enterprise customers. It was really interesting to me. Being able to marry the two, where my understanding of the OpenText products married up with the SAP ecosystem and that enterprise customer breadth, that was really interesting. And the thesis has proved correct. Robert Dutt: I guess an interesting level of insight, especially going into it, into customer needs and customer requests across both OpenText and SAP. Shaney Salomon: Absolutely. Things have changed a lot. I think originally the idea was we were out really just selling and implementing OpenText at the time. We started out with just a product or two, and now we cover everything where SAP and OpenText meet. But our team has expanded, our opportunities have expanded, and we’ve really moved also into the spend management space around SAP and the OpenText Vendor Invoice Management space, accounts payable, that whole procure-to-pay space that we really got good at. Leveraging the OpenText solutions afforded us the opportunity to move deeper into the spend management space with SAP. And now, with SAP really moving all of their customers to cloud, that big S/4 transformation that’s happening in the market today, we see customers really needing to modernize their stacks. And that’s our bias today, helping them modernize so that they can get prepared for AI in a way that makes sense. Robert Dutt: Is that something that you find you’re driving to them, or is it something that they’re coming to you and asking for, looking for? Shaney Salomon: It’s certainly both, but it’s top of mind for everyone. It’s board level, CEO level, CIO level. But bringing it to life is a whole different story, right? And OpenText has a great perspective around that, I think, because without structured content, the context around that, making AI work for a company is really challenging. Both OpenText and SAP are bringing their own technological versions of AI to the table. But customers are really, really trying to figure out which stack makes sense, which AI is the best, how do they combine them, where do we orchestrate all of that kind of thing. So it feels like the Wild West right now, but it is certainly the mandate for all of our customers today. Robert Dutt: It feels like the Wild West, but I think I’m hearing over the course, especially over the course of this year, that we’re getting past the point of customers coming to an organization like you and saying, “CEO says we have to do AI. Don’t really know what that means, but we need to do it.” Sounds like there’s an increased level of sophistication, understanding, and wanting to get to outcomes as quickly as possible in doing that. Shaney Salomon: Absolutely. And that’s where I think we start, and we do really well, is focusing on what is the outcome. Then you can think about what are the inputs and who’s it going to impact and all of that. But if there isn’t a really good reason to do it in the first place, where it’s going to provide ROI, allow a company to do things better, faster, make better use of their resources, all of that, then what’s the point? And that’s our perspective. It has to come with a clean core, good data, good context, a business process that’s going to help them move their business forward. But it also needs to be a trusted place as well. We see our customers finding use cases in spaces where there are outcomes that will make a big difference, but also aren’t too risky right up front. And so the starting point is places where you can really make a business outcome and a big difference. Robert Dutt: Going back to the spin-up and the buildup of Optima over the years, you built a business around a couple of major technology vendors’ ecosystems. What were the biggest lessons along the way? What did you get right about your thesis coming into it, and what did you kind of have to go, “Okay, in reality, this needs to look a little different”? Shaney Salomon: I think the number one lesson is you can’t rest on your laurels, right? You might be knocking it out of the park in one business area, but being able to always be looking forward, seeing where the market is heading, getting ahead of your clients so that you’re there b

    Why an OpenText partner came back — and what still needs to change

  5. 4d ago

    The Buzz: Huntress expands Ingram Micro relationship to Canada, Fortinet urges urgent updates, Cycode grows Canadian business

    Today’s headline news for Canadian IT solution providers: Huntress expands Ingram Micro distribution relationship into Canada Huntress is extending its existing distribution relationship with Ingram Micro into Canada, creating another route for Canadian managed service providers and solution providers to access the cybersecurity vendor’s portfolio. The expansion also includes Latin America and builds on the companies’ existing US go-to-market relationship. The development is particularly relevant as Huntress continues expanding beyond its original endpoint security focus into a broader set of managed cybersecurity capabilities for MSPs. For Canadian partners, the relationship could provide additional purchasing and procurement options through an established distributor. The companies have not yet provided ChannelBuzz.ca with detailed information about Canadian pricing, product availability or the commercial structure of the expanded relationship. ChannelBuzz.ca is also pursuing a joint conversation with Huntress and Ingram Micro about the Canadian opportunity and the evolution of their partnership. Fortinet urges immediate security updates across major products Fortinet is calling on customers and partners to prioritize a coordinated set of security-hardening updates released Thursday for FortiOS, FortiManager and FortiAnalyzer. The updates follow recent releases for FortiMail and FortiAuthenticator. Fortinet says the releases address critical and high-severity vulnerabilities, including issues identified through its frontier AI-assisted security testing program. The company is urging organizations to prioritize internet-facing systems and treat the updates as an urgent security change rather than routine maintenance. Recommended steps include inventorying affected systems, scheduling maintenance windows, backing up configurations and restricting administrative access where immediate upgrades aren’t possible. Detailed public vulnerability advisories are expected November 10. Read Fortinet’s security-hardening announcement. Cycode reports 500% Canadian customer growth Application security vendor Cycode is expanding its Canadian operations following what it describes as 500% growth in its Canadian customer base over approximately 18 months. The company has established dedicated presales, postsales and customer-success resources serving Canada. Canadian customers named in the announcement include Jane Software, Clio, Tenstorrent, Benevity, BDO Canada and theScore. Cycode is also repositioning its portfolio around agentic development security, reflecting the growing role of AI coding assistants and autonomous agents in software development. Its platform is intended to provide visibility, governance and security controls across the development lifecycle, from initial prompts through production. The announcement doesn’t specify the size of Cycode’s Canadian partner network or whether the expansion includes new channel resources. Read Cycode’s Canadian expansion announcement. Also in today’s briefing Huntress documents Microsoft 365 token-replay attacks. New research describes a ten-week campaign affecting 79 organizations, involving more than 200,000 login attempts and 497 confirmed successful sign-ins. Attackers used stolen authentication tokens rather than guessing passwords, sometimes registering their own devices and MFA methods to maintain access. The campaign is distinct from the recent ConnectWise incident. Read Huntress’s research. Climb Global Solutions acquires French distributor NeoVAD. Climb has completed an approximately €16 million acquisition of NeoVAD, a value-added distributor serving about 300 active French reseller partners. The transaction expands Climb’s European presence and strengthens relationships with vendors including Cato Networks, DataCore and Netwrix. Wagepoint finds Canadian small businesses growing and retaining workers. Payroll data from approximately 6,800 Canadian businesses shows average headcount increasing 44% between 2019 and 2025, while annual employee separations fell from 38% to 27%. Gen Z now represents 38% of employees in the dataset, compared with 18% in 2019. Read Wagepoint’s Canadian workforce research. Read Full Transcript Robert Dutt: Welcome to The Buzz from ChannelBuzz.ca. I’m Robert Dutt. Today is Friday, October 23, 2026, and here’s what’s happening in the channel today. We begin with a development that’s particularly relevant to Canadian managed service providers. Huntress is expanding its distribution relationship with Ingram Micro into Canada. The two companies already have an established go-to-market relationship in the United States, and the expansion will also include Latin America. For Canadian MSPs and solution providers, the announcement means another route to market for Huntress’s cybersecurity portfolio through one of the country’s largest technology distributors. Huntress has become an increasingly significant name in the managed cybersecurity market. The company built much of its reputation around managed endpoint detection and response, but has been steadily broadening its portfolio and the range of security problems it helps MSPs address. And that makes the distribution expansion interesting from both sides. For Huntress, Ingram Micro offers access to an established Canadian reseller and MSP community, including partners that may not already have a direct relationship with the security vendor. For Ingram, the relationship adds another security offering to a portfolio serving partners that are increasingly being asked to provide managed protection rather than simply sell cybersecurity products. And for MSPs, an additional distribution route can potentially simplify purchasing and vendor management, particularly when they’re already doing significant business with Ingram. There are still some details we’d like to understand. The companies haven’t yet provided specifics about Canadian pricing, product availability or how the commercial relationship will operate. And there’s a broader question about where Huntress sees its next phase of growth in Canada, particularly as more MSPs expand their managed security practices. We’re hoping to explore those questions with representatives from both Huntress and Ingram Micro on a future episode of In The Channel. For now, the important development is that Huntress is extending an existing distribution relationship into the Canadian market. Our second story concerns an unusually urgent security update from Fortinet. The company is strongly encouraging customers and partners to prioritize a coordinated set of security-hardening releases across several of its major products. Updates for FortiOS, FortiManager and FortiAnalyzer were scheduled for release yesterday, following recent updates for FortiMail and FortiAuthenticator. And Fortinet is making it clear that these shouldn’t be treated as ordinary maintenance releases. The company says the updates include fixes for critical and high-severity vulnerabilities. Some of those issues were identified through Fortinet’s use of frontier AI models to examine product code, protocol handling and configuration logic. Fortinet says that approach has helped it identify weaknesses more efficiently than traditional testing methods. But there’s another side to that development. The same advances in AI-assisted code analysis could help attackers examine software updates, identify vulnerabilities and develop exploits more quickly. And that means the time between a security fix becoming available and attackers attempting to exploit the underlying weakness could become considerably shorter. Fortinet is recommending that organizations prioritize internet-facing devices, inventory affected systems and schedule updates as quickly as practical. It also recommends backing up configurations and reviewing logs for suspicious administrative activity. For organizations that can’t update immediately, temporary measures include restricting administrative interfaces to trusted IP addresses and ensuring management systems aren’t directly exposed to the internet. Those mitigations can reduce risk, but Fortinet stresses that they aren’t substitutes for applying the updates. Detailed public vulnerability advisories are expected on November 10. For MSPs, this is an operational story as much as a security story. Partners managing Fortinet equipment across multiple customer environments need to understand which versions are affected, coordinate maintenance windows and ensure that systems don’t remain exposed simply because an update hasn’t yet been scheduled. And the broader implication is worth watching. If AI is accelerating both vulnerability discovery and the development of exploits, the economics and logistics of patch management may become increasingly challenging for service providers. Our third main story comes from application security vendor Cycode, which is reporting substantial growth in Canada. In an announcement earlier this week, Cycode said its Canadian customer base has grown by 500 percent over approximately eighteen months. That’s a company-reported growth figure, and Cycode hasn’t disclosed the starting customer count. But the company has also made a more tangible investment in the market, establishing dedicated presales, postsales and customer-success resources serving Canadian organizations. Cycode names several Canadian customers, including Jane Software, Clio, Tenstorrent, Benevity, BDO Canada and theScore. The expansion comes as the company shifts its positioning from traditional software supply chain security toward what it calls agentic development security. The underlying problem is straightforward. AI coding assistants and autonomous development agents are changing how software gets written, tested and deployed. That can increase t

    The Buzz: Huntress expands Ingram Micro relationship to Canada, Fortinet urges urgent updates, Cycode grows Canadian business

  6. 5d ago

    Why OpenText’s AI chief says the human element is the biggest lesson in agentic AI

    Shannon Bell, executive vice president and chief product and technology officer at OpenText Even the companies building the technology are discovering that the road to autonomous AI isn’t quite as straightforward as expected. At OpenText World 2026, Shannon Bell, executive vice president and chief product and technology officer at OpenText, acknowledged that the company had expected to move toward fully autonomous AI workflows much faster than it has. The biggest surprise? The importance of the human element. In this episode of In The Channel, Bell discusses what OpenText has learned from deploying agentic AI internally, including its global command centre, where human operators and AI agents work together. Those lessons have prompted a more deliberate approach to adoption, with greater emphasis on change management, employee readiness and incremental deployments. For channel partners, the implications extend beyond the technology itself. Bell argues that getting enterprise data ready for AI is an ongoing discipline, not a project with a defined finish line. As customers improve data quality and governance, deploy agents and identify new business processes to automate, partners have opportunities to deliver continuing value rather than one-time implementations. We also discuss OpenText’s evolving AI portfolio, including Aviator and Aviator Studio, and the potential for partners to build repeatable, industry-specific solutions using the company’s technology. Bell acknowledges that partner adoption remains in its early stages, but sees considerable opportunity as customers mature in their AI journeys. And looking ahead, Bell shares her enthusiasm for hybrid agentic AI, which would allow organizations to deploy AI workflows across cloud and on-premises environments while keeping sensitive data where it belongs. It’s a candid look at the practical challenges behind the agentic AI vision — and what those challenges mean for the partners tasked with making it work.

    Why OpenText’s AI chief says the human element is the biggest lesson in agentic AI

  7. 5d ago

    The Buzz: Zoom readies MSP specialization, SentinelOne builds AI security services, Dell expands AI Factory

    Today’s headline news for Canadian IT solution providers: Zoom outlines new MSP specialization and partner incentives At its Zoomtopia Partner Connect event, Zoom announced updates to its Zoom Up Partner Program, including a new Managed Service Provider specialization expected in December. The specialization is intended to recognize partners delivering managed services, with anticipated benefits including advanced delegated account access, direct Tier 2 support and enhanced service levels. Zoom is also simplifying its performance metrics around monthly recurring revenue growth, introducing new incentives for longer customer commitments in 2027, and expanding self-service capabilities for partners. The company says partners are now its largest source of new enterprise business. In an interview with Channel Dive, global channel GTM leader Nick Tidd said more than 300 partners had signed up to deliver professional services over the previous two quarters. Read Zoom’s full partner-program announcement. SentinelOne expands PartnerOne to support AI security services At OneCon 2026 in Las Vegas, SentinelOne announced a significant expansion of its PartnerOne program, introducing new certifications, assessments and delivery resources intended to help VARs, MSPs and MSSPs build AI security practices. The additions include Implementation Engineer certifications for Prompt Security, endpoint and identity protection, and AI SIEM. Partners can also access an AI Recon Assessment Service, early access to Singularity Agentic Detection and Response, and deployment packages containing scoping guides, statements of work and implementation runbooks. LevelBlue, GuidePoint Security and World Wide Technology are initial launch partners, with broader availability planned over the coming months. SentinelOne separately expanded its Lenovo relationship, bringing Prompt Security capabilities into Lenovo’s ThinkShield portfolio. Read SentinelOne’s PartnerOne announcement. Dell expands AI Factory with NVIDIA At NVIDIA GTC Berlin, Dell Technologies announced new capabilities across its AI Factory with NVIDIA portfolio, including validated AI software solutions, deskside agentic AI deployment templates and modular data-centre infrastructure. New ecosystem additions include solutions involving Mistral, Dynatrace, Fogsphere and Reflection. Dell is also expanding its deskside AI portfolio with reference designs intended to help organizations scale from individual developers to deployments of more than 1,000 systems. On the infrastructure side, Dell introduced plans for modular AI data centres based on NVIDIA’s DSX POD reference design, alongside new PowerEdge platforms. Dell says more than 6,500 organizations have adopted the AI Factory with NVIDIA. Read Dell’s announcement. Also in today’s briefing Ricoh finds a Canadian AI adoption disconnect. New research finds that while 85 percent of Canadian business decision-makers believe their workplace technology is connected, 76 percent of employees say their jobs would be easier if those systems worked better together. Another 43 percent report using non-approved tools at least monthly. Read Ricoh’s research announcement. Barracuda identifies cybersecurity expertise gaps. A new international survey finds 94 percent of organizations report cybersecurity skills gaps, particularly around AI risks and advanced identity and phishing threats. Read Barracuda’s analysis. Tanium brings endpoint management to NVIDIA AI systems. A new collaboration extends Tanium’s management capabilities to local AI infrastructure, including NVIDIA DGX Spark and RTX Spark, with visibility into system configuration, compliance and AI-agent activity. Read the announcement. Read Full Transcript Robert Dutt: Welcome to The Buzz from ChannelBuzz.ca. I’m Robert Dutt. Today is Thursday, October 22, 2026, and here’s what’s happening in the channel today. We begin with Zoom, which is preparing a new specialization for managed service providers as part of a broader overhaul of its partner program. The changes were announced Tuesday at Zoomtopia Partner Connect, and they reflect Zoom’s continuing effort to make the channel a larger part of how it sells, implements and manages its expanding portfolio. The headline for MSPs is a new specialization expected to launch in December. Zoom says the specialization will recognize partners that deliver managed services, with anticipated benefits including advanced delegated account access, direct Tier 2 support, enhanced service levels and additional incentives. Those are potentially important changes for partners looking to manage Zoom environments on an ongoing basis, rather than simply selling licenses and moving on. The company is also simplifying how partners earn points within its program. Under the new structure, partners will receive one point for every thousand dollars in monthly recurring revenue growth during the applicable assessment period, while new-customer revenue will continue to be measured separately. Zoom is also planning new incentives for longer customer commitments next year. Other changes include expanded self-service access to not-for-resale licenses and a new business process outsourcing program for Zoom Contact Center. And Zoom says the channel is now its largest source of new enterprise business, accounting for 90 percent of its ten largest customer experience deals in its second fiscal quarter. There’s an interesting services story underneath all of this. Speaking with Channel Dive, Zoom’s global channel GTM leader Nick Tidd said more than 300 partners had signed up to deliver professional services over the previous two quarters. But Tidd also suggested that implementation is only the beginning. The next challenge is helping customers actually adopt and use more of the platform. For MSPs, that potentially means a larger role in ongoing administration, integration, optimization and customer adoption. And as Zoom moves further into AI-powered services and consumption-based pricing, how partners participate in that recurring business will become an increasingly important question. Our second story comes from SentinelOne, which is giving partners a more structured path into AI security services. At its OneCon conference in Las Vegas yesterday, SentinelOne announced a major expansion of its PartnerOne program. The goal is to help VARs, MSPs and managed security providers build services businesses around AI security and autonomous security operations. There are several components. First, SentinelOne is introducing new implementation certifications covering its Prompt Security offering, endpoint and identity protection, and AI SIEM. Second, partners will have access to an AI Recon Assessment Service, designed to help them identify customer risks and create consulting and implementation opportunities. There’s also early access to Singularity Agentic Detection and Response, which focuses on discovering AI agents, monitoring their behaviour, enforcing policies and responding to potentially malicious activity. On the security operations side, SentinelOne is introducing additional certifications and assessment services covering data pipelines, AI-assisted investigation and automated response. And perhaps most practically, certified partners will receive delivery packages containing scoping guides, statements of work, project plans and deployment runbooks. Those resources are intended to make it easier for partners to turn technical capabilities into repeatable services. The initial launch partners are LevelBlue, GuidePoint Security and World Wide Technology, with a broader rollout planned over the coming months. That’s an impressive group, but it also raises an interesting question. How accessible will these opportunities be to smaller MSPs that don’t already have sophisticated security practices? SentinelOne clearly wants partners to own more of the services layer. The question is how broadly that opportunity will extend across its partner ecosystem. The company also announced an expanded relationship with Lenovo, bringing SentinelOne Prompt Security into Lenovo’s ThinkShield portfolio. That extends their existing endpoint security relationship into visibility and governance of enterprise AI use. Our third main story takes us to NVIDIA GTC Berlin, where Dell Technologies has announced another substantial expansion of its AI Factory with NVIDIA. Dell says more than 6,500 organizations have now adopted the platform, up from 5,000 last quarter. The latest announcement is focused on helping enterprises move agentic AI beyond experimentation and into production. That includes new validated software solutions and deployment blueprints involving companies such as Mistral, Dynatrace, Fogsphere and Reflection. Dell is also expanding its deskside agentic AI offerings. New reference templates are intended to help organizations move from an individual developer running AI locally to deployments involving more than a thousand systems. The hardware additions include new Dell Pro Precision configurations built around NVIDIA processors. And at the larger end of the market, Dell is introducing modular data-centre infrastructure based on NVIDIA’s DSX POD reference design. These containerized systems are designed to combine compute, storage, networking, power and liquid cooling in factory-integrated deployments. Dell also announced new PowerEdge systems designed for agentic workloads and high-throughput inference. There are services implications here as well. Dell Managed Services for AI, expected in the first quarter of next year, is intended to help organizations manage AI resources, access, consumption and costs. For channel partners, the broader opportunity is in helping customers choose, deploy, integrate and manage increasingly complex AI infrastructure. But it’s also wort

    The Buzz: Zoom readies MSP specialization, SentinelOne builds AI security services, Dell expands AI Factory

  8. 6d ago

    OpenText’s Todd Cione on its radical pivot to partner-led mid-market growth

    Todd Cione, chief sales officer at OpenText OpenText is rethinking how it reaches and serves mid-market customers, putting partners at the centre of a significant transformation in its commercial strategy. Speaking with In The Channel at OpenText World 2026 in Orlando, Todd Cione, executive vice president and chief sales officer at OpenText, described a “radical pivot” away from a direct sales approach that has struggled to provide sufficient coverage of the mid-market. Instead, the company is increasingly turning to regional solution providers, systems integrators and other channel partners to extend its reach and deliver customer value. The shift is part of a broader transformation under OpenText’s new One OpenText operating model, which brings together the company’s extensive technology portfolio and partner ecosystem around customer needs. For its largest 2,400 customers, OpenText has introduced client executives responsible for coordinating internal specialists and external partners. Cione also sees a substantial opportunity to drive organic growth by expanding adoption of OpenText technologies across its existing base of more than 120,000 customers. But realizing that opportunity requires more than encouraging partners to cross-sell. Cione points to financial incentives, technical and commercial enablement, and simpler programs and systems as essential investments. That includes reconsidering the historically significant costs associated with some partner training. The conversation also explores the role of OpenText’s MSP-focused cybersecurity business, opportunities to extend the company’s portfolio into smaller customers, and the challenge of creating a more consistent partner experience without losing the specialization different types of partners require. OpenText’s existing Accelerate Partner Program illustrates some of the distinct requirements of its cybersecurity channel. Cione says roughly half of OpenText’s revenue is currently influenced by partners, a proportion the company hopes to increase over time. In this episode of In The Channel, Cione discusses what these changes mean for OpenText partners and where the company’s channel strategy goes next. Read Full Transcript Robert Dutt: Hello, and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel for the past 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor at ChannelBuzz.ca, and your host for the show. We’re coming to you from OpenText World 2026 in Orlando, where the company is laying out an ambitious vision for its future, positioning itself as a critical provider of trusted information and connected data for the emerging world of enterprise AI. But delivering on that vision is going to take more than technology. It’s going to require some significant changes to how OpenText goes to market, particularly how it works with its partners. That’s where today’s guest comes in. Todd Cione is OpenText’s president of Worldwide Sales, and I had the opportunity to sit down with him shortly after CEO Ayman Antoun laid out the company’s strategy in his opening keynote. Todd describes what he calls a radical pivot in OpenText’s approach to the mid-market, moving away from a predominantly direct sales approach towards one that depends much more heavily on partners to reach and serve customers. We also get into the company’s new One OpenText commercial model, the opportunities for partners to build businesses around more of OpenText’s extensive portfolio, and what it will take to make that cross-selling opportunity a reality. And we discuss where the company’s substantial MSP-focused cybersecurity business fits into the broader strategy, as well as efforts to simplify the experience of working with OpenText across its many businesses. It’s a conversation about some significant changes in how OpenText thinks about its channel, and what partners can expect as those changes take shape. Let’s get right into it, my chat with Todd Cione. Robert Dutt: Well, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it. I imagine this has got to be a busy, active week for you and the whole team here. Todd Cione: Thanks for having me, Robert. It’s a fantastic week, and very excited to have colleagues, partners, and clients here at OpenText World. Robert Dutt: So we just sat in on a session where Ayman laid out a pretty ambitious vision for where OpenText goes from here. When you look at that strategy, when you were formulating that strategy, where do your partners fit into making that all a reality over time? Todd Cione: Yeah, I think they play a critical role in the AI stack. I mean, put simply, no one vendor partner can deliver value across the entirety of the AI stack to a client. Shannon’s metaphor of a team sport, I think, is directly applicable. It takes an entire ecosystem working together to deliver the value that clients expect today. Robert Dutt: Let’s talk about that ecosystem. Moving down the stack into the long tail of the channel, when you get beyond the GSIs, the technology partners, and start looking at the regional solution providers, the consultants, the implementation partners who are working directly with customers, large and small, but especially once you get into that mid-market and below size. Todd Cione: Yeah, look, clients expect, whether they’re a large enterprise or they’re in the mid-market, they’re dealing with the same problems. They just have different amounts of resources available to them to solve problems. They need technology, they need expertise, but it’s that combination of technology and expertise where business value comes that they all expect. Partners of all categories play a critical role. As you’re referencing, regional system integrators, resellers that are localized in markets, bring either local expertise on the marketplace or the country where they are serving and operating, or they bring some type of vertical expertise, whether it’s public sector or private sector. In that combination of their expertise and our technology is where I think the value lies for a client. Robert Dutt: How do you see the transition that this whole industry, this whole world is in right now changing the definition of who is, or will be six months, a year, two years from now, an OpenText partner? I’m curious if the kind of things you’re looking for in the partner base are evolving as both the market itself and OpenText’s place within it evolves. Todd Cione: Yeah, that’s a good question. I think if you look back on the last decade, just for context before we look forward, it’s important to recognize that we certainly have invested in a partner ecosystem and a partner channel. However, the expectation of value and scale was different previously than it is now, and it is going forward. Partners unequivocally are core to our entire company, including our commercial model that I’m responsible for. That means large global system integrators and regional system integrators to extend the delivery of professional services expertise. That means cloud service providers to provide the infrastructure layer on that modern AI stack. That means technology providers like SAP, Salesforce, that we integrate into their systems of record. That also means technology providers that build applications, agents on top of our platform as well, and then resellers and distributors that provide scale. Moving forward, this ecosystem is not only critical for clients because no one technology provider can provide the entire stack, but it’s core to OpenText. It is core to what we do. It’s going to be core to our product roadmap. You’re going to see more and more and more tomorrow. It’s core to how we bring value to our shared clients. It’s like an integrated part of our sales force that I’m responsible for. Robert Dutt: How does that go-to-market continue to evolve, especially as that whole ecosystem that you describe gets more complex? We get into situations where it’s you plus an OpenText partner plus any number of those technology partners who may have their own channels, and sometimes there’s going to be overlap between their partners and your partners, but not always. It can create a complex ecosystem, and managing that is a little bit of a different beast. Todd Cione: Yeah, certainly with more providers working together to provide a common solution for a client, there can be complexity. But put simply, our job is to simplify it. Our job is to integrate and work super closely with a partner ecosystem early in a sales cycle, in a value cycle with a client, so that we all have clarity on our roles and responsibilities. What part of the overall solution for a client are we going to provide? And that way there’s kind of a seamless experience, most importantly, for the client. And so we work really, really, really hard on it. We’re not perfect. We’re learning a lot. Our teams are learning, but we’re making big investments, human investments in resources, to be able to bring that simplicity to clients, and then enablement investments for the teams that we do have. Robert Dutt: Is it changing kind of the nature of the sales call, the sales motion, when you’ve got all those different folks potentially in the room to make something that hopefully will reach some of those outcomes that we’re all striving for on behalf of customers? Todd Cione: Simple answer is yes. And the longer answer is, gone are the days where OpenText would show up just with a product specialist to our client by themselves. And here are the days where we’ve launched an initiative, an organizational structure, a program, a model called One OpenText that puts the client at the center of everything that we do and is partner-centric. And with that, for our largest 2,400 clients globally, we have a client executive that we’ve deployed. And this is a new

    OpenText’s Todd Cione on its radical pivot to partner-led mid-market growth
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Cutting through the noise for Canadian VARs and MSPs

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  • Creator
    ChannelBuzz.ca
  • Years Active
    2011 - 2026
  • Episodes
    150
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    Explicit
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    Copyright © ChannelBuzz.ca 2026
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