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Cutting through the noise for Canadian VARs and MSPs

  1. 3 ngày trước

    Is technology expense management the MSP practice you haven’t considered?

    Jason Wieser, senior vice president of mid-market and channel sales at Calero If technology expense management isn’t on your radar as a practice area, Jason Wieser thinks that’s about to change. Wieser, senior vice president of mid-market and channel sales at Calero and a 2026 CRN Channel Chief, joins In The Channel to talk about why MSPs and VARs are leaving real recurring revenue on the table by not offering technology spend management services to their customers. The conversation covers a lot of practical ground. Wieser explains why SaaS visibility has become the entry point for most partner conversations – delivering value in hours rather than the months that traditional telecom expense management historically required. He walks through how successful partners use TEM as a pipeline creation tool, turning full visibility into a customer’s contract and renewal landscape into a 3-4 year forward roadmap. And he offers a simple three-question framework – visibility, control, or optimization – that partners can use to qualify where a customer actually needs help. Wieser also touches on the recently launched Calero ConnectIQ, an orchestration layer designed to automate the flow of intelligence across technology expense data, and on the shadow SaaS problem – Gartner estimates the average enterprise runs 145 applications, and Calero’s data suggests the real number is significantly higher. For partners curious about what getting started actually looks like, Calero’s partner program has no joining fees or revenue commitments at entry level. 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 sixteen years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca and your host for the show. When we talk about practice areas for MSPs and VARs, we usually start with the big ones: cybersecurity, cloud migration, and managed infrastructure. One area that rarely makes the list, but probably should, is technology expense management, or TEM. It is an area that has historically been seen as a back-office auditing function. But in an era of massive SaaS sprawl and complex mobility footprints, it is becoming an advisory service for the new C-suite. My guest today is Jason Wieser, senior vice president of mid-market and channel sales at Calero. Jason was named a 2026 CRN Channel Chief, and he has spent the last few years building a partner program around the idea that TEM is actually a pipeline-creation engine for the channel. Let’s get right into it – my chat with Jason Wieser. Robert Dutt: Jason, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it. Jason Wieser: Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it. Robert Dutt: You’ve been in tech sales for about twenty years. I’m curious: how did you land in technology expense management, and what made you want to stay and build a channel around it? Jason Wieser: I’ll be honest: when the TEM opportunity was first presented to me, I ran for the hills. I wasn’t willing to entertain the conversation. I’m sure my reasons were similar to those of many people when they think about TEM – that it is a legacy product set and not really on the cutting edge of technology. But from my perspective, as I heard the pitch, particularly around the SaaS expense management component, that was what got me excited. I felt there was a tremendous amount of opportunity. It was a wildly untapped market, and coming out of the COVID environment, I thought there was a good opportunity for channel partners to capitalize on the SaaS sprawl that we all experienced. That is what brought me into the TEM side of the business. When we were building out the channel, there weren’t many players in the TEM space with a channel focus. During the discussions we had as we were courting each other, one thing that came up was that Calero had no desire to be an agent. That was a big differentiator for me, and it was pivotal to my willingness to jump in and build out a channel, because none of the other TEM players could say that. It was a significant differentiator when you think about the value delivered back to the channel. When you combine those two things – the SaaS opportunity and Calero’s channel-first approach – it became a great opportunity. I’m really happy with the success we’ve had over the last four years building the channel at Calero. Robert Dutt: Most of my listeners are IT resellers and MSPs who probably haven’t thought much about TEM as a line of business they would offer. But you describe it as an untapped opportunity – words that always make my ears perk up. Can you make the case for that partner? Why should this be on their radar right now? Jason Wieser: I think the difference is in where TEM was and where it has gone. Historically, TEM stood for telecom expense management. Now, we think of it as technology expense management. I see this as a pipeline-creation tool for MSPs and resellers. Partners that lean in and work with a TEM provider that supports the channel can build a three-year pipeline roadmap. A reseller might ask, “How is that the case?” The way we go to market is that when we work with partners – whether they are resellers, referral partners, or MSPs – we make them part of the solution. They get full access to the Calero platform with their respective customer. That creates a building block. They can identify which contracts are coming up and position themselves as a trusted advisor to their customer. For example, if the customer’s Zoom licenses are coming up for renewal, the partner can see the usage rate. Or perhaps the customer’s Microsoft enterprise agreement is coming up for renewal. The partner can look at how the organization is using its E5 licenses and determine whether it really needs E5, or whether some users should be moved to E3 or F3 licenses. The partner gets to change the trajectory of the conversation and add a new source of value to the organization. At the end of the day, I see that as the biggest opportunity for a partner organization. From there, the partner can build on that process. They can look at circuits that are coming up for renewal, mobility, and other technology expenses. All of that helps them build out a pipeline over the next three, four, or five years. Robert Dutt: Is this something that a smaller reseller or MSP can realistically build, or does it require a certain level of scale to be a real opportunity? Jason Wieser: The good news is that we built this for MSPs and resellers. Historically, with technology expense management – or telecom expense management – you needed to have a large customer base. You might need a customer with a million dollars in annual telecom spend, otherwise it did not make sense. Now that we’ve moved into SaaS, particularly with a mid-market focus, you can go much further down-market. Our smallest customer has 250 employees. That gives a partner the opportunity to change the conversation and use this in a much smaller-capacity environment. On the telecom side, it used to take four, five, or six months to build out the infrastructure and gather all the data. On the SaaS side, it takes four, five, or six hours to bring information in. That is a significant differentiator. Partners can scale the opportunity, realize savings much more quickly, and begin addressing the control and optimization issues associated with technology spending. Robert Dutt: Legacy TEM is rooted in telecom, but given the speed at which you can prove value with SaaS, what is typically the entry point into the conversation with a customer? Does the conversation still begin with telecom bills that have gotten out of control? Do partners lead with SaaS sprawl? Is it mobile device management? What typically opens the door? Jason Wieser: From an MSP standpoint, what we are seeing work right now is starting with SaaS. It is the gateway because you have the opportunity to show immediate results. On the telecom and mobility sides, it is a longer process. You need letters of authorization, or LOAs. You need access to the data, and you need to bring all of that information into the system. That process can take four, five, or six months if the LOAs are not completed in a timely manner. With SaaS, you can get access to an endpoint and conduct a proof of value immediately with the partner. You can start showcasing the data sets, and the decision practically writes itself for the customer. For an MSP, I would focus on SaaS because of that speed. The ability to white-label the platform and make it look like your own – with your logo in the upper-left corner and “powered by Calero” underneath – helps cement you as a true partner to the business. Robert Dutt: The thesis seems to be about the merger of telecom, mobility, and SaaS into one management problem. But for many businesses, those are still three different budget lines, with three different people responsible for them. What makes managing them together increasingly important, and who on the customer side is feeling the pain most or leading the charge? Jason Wieser: That’s the million-dollar question, because they are very different business units. We view our platform as providing a single pane of glass to accommodate all of those expense categories. But the person making SaaS decisions is usually not the same person making mobility decisions, and neither is necessarily the person responsible for telecom. The way we frame it is to start on the SaaS side. We leverage the resources and data sets that we are able to uncover with the partner, and then we ask to go wider into the organization. SaaS provides the gateway. Once we have shown results – whether that is savings, improved security, better control, or the ability to bring in data that the customer did not previously have – we can ask w

    Is technology expense management the MSP practice you haven’t considered?

  2. 4 ngày trước

    Red Hat’s Kennedy on why the swim lanes are gone – and what the partner program looks like now

    Kevin Kennedy, vice president of global partner ecosystem at Red Hat The channel has fundamentally changed – and for a long time, Red Hat‘s partner program hadn’t caught up. That’s the candid starting point for Kevin Kennedy, who joins In The Channel this week fresh off his appointment as Red Hat’s vice president of global partner ecosystem. Kennedy’s career spans just about every layer of the channel – direct sales at IBM and Xerox, close to a decade at Arrow Electronics, and leadership roles at VCE, Dell EMC, and TD SYNNEX before joining Red Hat in 2022. That perspective shapes how he talks about the shift from a model built on clear “swim lanes” – where resellers, services partners, and software sellers all stayed in their own lanes – to the multi-partner, collaborative engagements that define how business gets done today. “It’s really hard to even define a partner today,” Kennedy says. “We can’t go to market by ourselves any longer.” Red Hat’s program refresh responds to that reality with a bifurcated incentive structure: front-end rewards for individual sellers at the deal level, and back-end incentives for firms making deeper investments in Red Hat competencies. Kennedy is direct about what drove the change: “We were putting all of our rewards around the resell of our products. And that ship had sailed.” The conversation also covers the Broadcom/VMware disruption as a modernization opportunity rather than a rip-and-replace play, where AI realistically fits in the partner revenue picture right now, the evolving role of distribution as an ecosystem aggregator, and – for Canadian partners specifically – the growing urgency of data sovereignty as a go-to-market factor. And Kennedy offers a memorable frame for Red Hat’s long-term platform ambition: “Red Hat inside” – the idea that Red Hat increasingly underpins solutions partners build and customers buy, whether or not the name is on the box. 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 of ChannelBuzz.ca and your host for the show. My guest today is Kevin Kennedy, vice president of the global partner ecosystem at Red Hat. Kevin’s career spans just about every seat in the channel: direct sales at IBM and Xerox; the better part of a decade, on and off, at Arrow Electronics; leadership roles at VCE and Dell EMC; and then about five years running advanced solutions at Tech Data and TD SYNNEX before coming to Red Hat in 2022. That’s a resume that takes you from carrying a bag, through distribution leadership, to vendor-side ecosystem strategy. That full-channel perspective shapes how he thinks about the partner business in ways that are pretty evident in this conversation. Red Hat recently named him the permanent head of its global partner ecosystem, and the word “ecosystem” in that title is deliberate, as you’ll hear. We get into how the partner business has fundamentally shifted from the old swim-lane model to something much more collaborative and complex; what Red Hat is changing in its partner program and why; the VMware modernization opportunity; where AI realistically fits in the partner revenue story right now; and what data sovereignty means for Canadian partners specifically. Let’s get right into it, my chat with Kevin Kennedy. Robert Dutt: Kevin, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it. Kevin Kennedy: Thanks for having me, Rob. I appreciate being here. Robert Dutt: You’ve been in so many different seats facing the channel, from starting in direct sales at IBM and Xerox, to distribution, and now, of course, the vendor side. I’m curious: when you look back at the arc of the channel, as it were, over that time, what’s the biggest way the partner business has changed since you started looking at it and watching it closely? Kevin Kennedy: That’s a great question, because there has been a significant evolution, that’s for sure. I think it starts with the definition of what a partner is. It used to be that you had very clear swim lanes. You had resellers, you had services partners, and you had people who always sold software or people who always sold hardware. Everybody had their individual lanes, and that was predominantly the way the channel made money: through the resale of all those things. If you fast-forward to today, it’s completely different. It’s really hard to even define a partner today. You can’t put them in one camp. Take a larger partner like WWT, for example. It used to be the preeminent reseller for a myriad of OEM lines. Today, that may be just a portion of its business. If you look at its total bottom-line profitability, I would say the vast majority of that comes from the services it offers and the contracts it manages for very large customers. Partners have evolved. We used to be able to go sell something individually. With the complexity that now exists in technology and the solutions that customers are demanding, we can’t go to market by ourselves any longer. We’re forced to collaborate and build relationships outside of our historical domains in order to present a customer with a holistic solution that’s going to drive the outcomes or efficiencies they demand. I think all of that dynamic is great. We talked about multi-partner engagement for decades and couldn’t get it to work because, realistically, we were all competing for the same nickel. If I went into a customer with you, likely one of us would get cut out of that deal or eventually be eased out. Today, that’s not true. We’re really dependent on each other. You bring your strengths to the table, I bring mine to the table, and those combined strengths are what the customer is going to realize. I think that’s the exciting component that’s really changed dramatically, especially over the last 10 years, and even more so over the last five. Robert Dutt: That speaks to the fact that you’re coming in as vice president of the global partner ecosystem, rather than vice president of channel sales or vice president of partner programs. I’m guessing, especially from that latter point about the co-sell and multi-partner arrangement becoming much more accepted and more of a default, that it’s a meaningful and purposeful distinction. What changes day to day when you call it an ecosystem, or when you think of it as an ecosystem, rather than a channel? Kevin Kennedy: I think your point is well made. The title and our nomenclature – ecosystem versus channel, or ecosystem versus partner – are intentional. Again, it goes back to illustrating the necessity of multiple people with varying levels of expertise in a variety of domains. All of them are required to bring a customer a solution and drive an outcome. It actually makes things more complex in some regards. From my lens, at the end of the day, what do we want to sell? We want to sell Red Hat products and our platforms into a customer. In years gone by, that might have been a much more simplistic arrangement. Our sales teams would call on a customer, represent only what we’re good at, and get that deal done. That no longer remains the case. I have to make sure we’re selling the value of Red Hat’s portfolio not just to the customer. I’ve also got to make sure the systems integrator sees how we can bring value to the solutions they’re going to represent to their customer base. I’ve got to represent the value of Red Hat to the hyperscalers – why they should care about us and how we may drive consumption in their marketplaces. I’ve got to bring value to the distributors and explain why they want to put resources around our product portfolio. I need to show them how our portfolio is going to help accelerate some of the more profitable lines they represent. On one hand, the ecosystem model illustrates the necessity for all of us to come together. On the other hand, it invites complexity from a go-to-market standpoint because everybody’s my customer. That’s traditionally been true in distribution, where a lot of my heritage comes from. We used to have the adage that we’re nobody’s customer and everybody’s customer, because I have to constantly sell the value of why we exist and why we should matter to you, and how we can help you be successful. Robert Dutt: That must make it an interesting challenge to structure programs when it’s no longer as simple as, “You are a reseller, therefore you fit in box A.” Now you’ve got to get creative with your programs and incentives in order to keep partners excited about what you’re doing, engaged with your platforms, and recognizing where you’re headed and why that might be valuable to them. Kevin Kennedy: I’ve got to construct a program with incentives that look at presales and the whole customer-management lifecycle. It’s no longer just, “We’ve got a product and a contract for that product that’s going to be sold.” Now I’ve got to think about adoption. I’ve got to think about how we make that product more pervasive through an organization. I’ve got to ensure that everything we said was going to be done when we presented the solution is actually coming to fruition, so the customer sees a return on that investment. If they don’t, I’m going to be a one-and-done. If they do, it’s going to give me an opportunity to have conversations around other things we can bring to bear that might provide similar or even better outcomes than what they did initially with us. Robert Dutt: When you did the program refresh, you said it was built around simplicity, predictability and profitability – three words that come up a lot in channel chief conversations, for obvious reasons. I don’t think those are unique to Red Hat, but along with what you’ve alr

    Red Hat’s Kennedy on why the swim lanes are gone – and what the partner program looks like now

  3. 4 ngày trước

    The Buzz: ePlus buys Daymark, Cohesity expands Aspire partner program, and Exclaimer builds an MSP lane

    Today’s headline news for Canadian IT solution providers: ePlus acquires Daymark Solutions: The solution provider bought the Boston-area Microsoft cloud partner for roughly $36 million, adding Azure, Microsoft 365, and security capabilities. Daymark ranked No. 41 on CRN’s 2026 Solution Provider 500. ePlus says the deal is the latest in a string of about 30 acquisitions and significantly expands its Northeast footprint. Cohesity expands Aspire Global Partner Program: The data security vendor has added new partner specializations in AI data security, cloud services, and backup and recovery, along with broader rebates and simplified training. Cohesity says the updated program, which took effect Aug. 1, 2026, rewards partner teaming and services expertise. Exclaimer launches MSP Connect for managed service providers: The new global program offers consumption-based billing, self-service provisioning, NFR licensing, and PSA integrations with ConnectWise, HaloPSA, and Kaseya BMS. Exclaimer says the program is designed to remove billing and management friction for MSPs selling email signature management as a compliance and brand-consistency layer. In Brief: IBM Consulting deploys thousands of AI agents: IBM says it has rolled out thousands of AI agents across enterprise security projects, productizing agentic AI for cybersecurity use cases. CrowdStrike warns frontier AI demands “greatest mobilization” ever: Chief business officer Daniel Bernard told CRN that AI-accelerated threats require what he calls cybersecurity’s greatest mobilization, outlining how the company is positioning partners to defend against frontier AI risks. CRN publishes 2026 Fast Growth 150: The annual list ranks solution providers by two-year growth rate. Caylent, EchoStor, and Park Place Technologies are among the top 25 fastest-growing companies. ChannelPro names Top 20 MSPs for 2026: The annual list highlights what the publication calls “bold, relentlessly innovative leaders” in the managed services space. Kaseya embeds agentic AI into MSP service delivery: The IT management platform vendor is bringing autonomous AI agents into its core MSP tools, according to an Aug. 24 report. Read Full Transcript Welcome to The Buzz from ChannelBuzz.ca, I’m Robert Dutt, today is Wednesday, August 26, and here’s what’s happening in the channel today. Solution provider ePlus has acquired the assets of fellow solution provider Daymark Solutions. According to CRN, ePlus announced the deal on Monday, paying roughly $36 million for the Boston-area Microsoft cloud partner. Daymark ranked No. 41 on CRN’s 2026 Solution Provider 500 and brings advanced Microsoft Azure, Microsoft 365, and security capabilities to ePlus. The acquisition is the latest in a string of about 30 deals ePlus has done, and it significantly expands the company’s footprint in the Northeast while deepening its Microsoft cloud services portfolio. For Canadian solution providers watching the M&A market, this deal is worth noting because it shows how midmarket Microsoft cloud practices are becoming acquisition targets as larger VARs look to build density in specific geographies. ePlus said in a statement that Daymark’s team and customer base will be integrated into its existing operations. Data security and management vendor Cohesity has expanded its Aspire Global Partner Program with new specializations, broader rebates, and simplified training requirements. The Aug. 25 announcement adds partner specializations around AI data security, cloud services, and backup and recovery, along with expanded profitability through increased rebates and deal registration protection. Cohesity says the updated program took effect on Aug. 1, 2026, and is designed to reward partner teaming, services expertise, and what the company calls “customer obsession.” The program is global, so Canadian partners are eligible for the new specializations immediately. The rebate expansion is the piece to watch here: Cohesity is moving toward outcome-based incentives that favor partners who wrap services around the platform rather than pure transactional resellers, which mirrors a broader trend across infrastructure vendors. Email signature management vendor Exclaimer has launched a dedicated partner program for MSPs called MSP Connect. The Aug. 19 announcement includes consumption-based billing, self-service provisioning, and direct integrations with ConnectWise, HaloPSA, and Kaseya BMS. Exclaimer is also offering NFR licensing so MSPs can run the platform internally before pitching it to clients. The program is global, so Canadian MSPs are eligible from day one. The pitch here is that email signatures have become a bigger compliance and brand-consistency issue as phishing attacks get more sophisticated, and MSPs can fold Exclaimer into their security and productivity stacks without adding billing complexity. According to Exclaimer, the PSA integrations mean invoice line items and tenant management should live inside tools MSPs are already using. IBM Consulting says it has deployed thousands of AI agents across security projects for enterprise clients. CRN reported the initiative on Aug. 25 as part of Big Blue’s broader push to productize agentic AI for cybersecurity use cases. CrowdStrike chief business officer Daniel Bernard says frontier AI demands what he calls cybersecurity’s “greatest mobilization” ever. In an Aug. 25 interview with CRN, Bernard outlined how the company is positioning partners to defend against AI-accelerated threats. CRN has published its 2026 Fast Growth 150 list, with the top 25 solution providers ranked by two-year growth rate. Caylent, EchoStor, and Park Place Technologies are among the fastest-growing companies. The ChannelPro Network has unveiled its Top 20 MSPs for 2026, an annual recognition of providers the publication calls “bold, relentlessly innovative leaders.” Kaseya is bringing agentic AI deeper into MSP service delivery. ChannelE2E reported on Aug. 24 that the IT management platform vendor is embedding autonomous AI agents into its core MSP tools. Full details and links in the show notes or the blog post. Later today on In The Channel, Red Hat vice president of the global partner ecosystem Kevin Kennedy sits down with me to talk about how the partner business has shifted away from swim lanes, where the VMware modernization opportunity stands for Canadian partners, and what data sovereignty actually means in practice. And if you haven’t heard it yet, yesterday on In The Channel, Cisco Canada president Raj Juneja walked me through the company’s new Sovereign Critical Infrastructure portfolio and what trust-based licensing looks like for partners selling air-gapped infrastructure to Canadian public sector clients. 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: ePlus buys Daymark, Cohesity expands Aspire partner program, and Exclaimer builds an MSP lane

  4. 5 ngày trước

    Cisco brings sovereign infrastructure to Canada with air-gapped portfolio

    Raj Juneja, president of Cisco Canada In this episode of In The Channel, we speak with Raj Juneja, president of Cisco Canada, about the launch of Cisco’s Sovereign Critical Infrastructure portfolio in Canada – the second market worldwide after EMEA, where it debuted last September. The portfolio spans Cisco’s networking, security, compute, collaboration, and Splunk offerings, configured for air-gapped, on-premises deployment. The differentiator is trust-based licensing: Cisco can’t remotely access, control, or disable the products – control sits entirely with the customer. It’s certified to FIPS 140-2/3 and Common Criteria standards, and aligned with Canada’s ITSG-33 framework. Juneja confirmed the offering is open to the full partner ecosystem, not restricted to any one partner, with certifications consistent with existing Cisco portfolio requirements. Distribution plays its usual role. Target customers are government, financial services, healthcare, and AI providers – organizations that need to run sensitive systems without cloud connectivity or foreign vendor access. IDC research shows more than half of Canadian organizations are increasing scrutiny of their critical system providers, but intent is running well ahead of deployment. Partner economics details are expected in the coming weeks. The launch comes as HPE has been active in sovereign infrastructure in Canada, and the federal government funds sovereign AI compute through ISED’s AI Sovereign Compute Infrastructure Program. 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 sixteen years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor at ChannelBuzz.ca and your host for the show. This morning on The Buzz, we covered the news: Cisco launched its Sovereign Critical Infrastructure portfolio in Canada. Here’s what that actually means and why it matters for the channel. Cisco has taken its core networking, security, compute, collaboration and Splunk portfolio and configured it for air-gapped, on-premises deployment – systems that sit in facilities customers own and run, with no connection to the outside internet. The key differentiator is what Cisco calls trust-based licensing. Cisco can’t remotely access, control or disable the products. That control sits entirely with the customer. This is aimed at government, financial institutions, healthcare and other critical infrastructure providers – organizations that need to run sensitive systems without depending on constant cloud connectivity or foreign vendor access. The portfolio is certified to FIPS 140-2/3 and Common Criteria standards, and is aligned with Canada’s ITSG-33 framework for achieving Authority to Operate on mission-critical government systems. Canada is the second market for this portfolio after EMEA, where it launched last September. This comes at a time when data sovereignty has become a board-level priority. IDC says that more than half of Canadian organizations are increasing scrutiny of their critical systems providers, but intent is running well ahead of deployment. That gap between wanting sovereignty and actually having it is where the channel plays. For partners, the big questions are about access, economics and the services opportunity. To help answer those, I spoke with Raj Juneja, president of Cisco Canada. Let’s get right into it – my chat with Raj Juneja. Robert Dutt: Raj, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it. Raj Juneja: More than happy to take the time, Robert. I’m looking forward to the conversation. Robert Dutt: The announcement talks about the infrastructure being available through Cisco and its partners, and Bell is front and centre in the announcement. Is this an opportunity that’s open to the broader partner ecosystem, or is it limited to a set of partners? Regardless of which way that goes, what does a partner need? What are the “you must be this tall to ride the ride” specifications in terms of specializations, certifications and clearances to sell and deploy the portfolio? Raj Juneja: This is not, in any way, shape or form, limited or restricted to any one particular partner. This announcement is really about addressing the demand we’ve been receiving from our customers to have more control and autonomy over their digital infrastructure and their data. We’re happy to bring this to our partner community, but there is nothing that limits or restricts it to any one specific partner. The certifications that partners hold – if you’re speaking specifically to partner-oriented certifications – are no different from what we currently have for the rest of our portfolio. Robert Dutt: So it’s broadly available. Basically, if you’ve got customers who are interested in this, you have access to it, by the sounds of it. Raj Juneja: That is absolutely our intention. We’re not looking to restrict this in any way. It’s an offering – the portfolio that we have today – that’s being offered in a different form to address the needs of our customers for control and the ability to manage their infrastructure on their own. Robert Dutt: Especially for smaller partners, are distributors at play here? If so, what role do you see them playing both at launch and further out, as this has a chance to develop an ecosystem around it? Raj Juneja: Distribution serves an incredible purpose in our channel community. As I said before, I don’t see this being any different in terms of the way we go to market and leverage our existing, broad set of distribution partners today. This is intended to address the needs of customers who are looking for control and choice over their own digital infrastructure and data. Ultimately, the path they take to acquire the technology will be no different from how they currently buy today. Robert Dutt: Let’s talk a little bit about the commercial model here. Can you elaborate on what trust-based licensing means and how it differs from the usual Cisco model? Raj Juneja: Trust-based licensing effectively means that, when you don’t have any connection to the cloud, there is no capability for us to remotely disable the products. Nor is there any requirement for license governance or administration. This goes back to the choice and control that we talked about. The onus is primarily on customers to ensure that they are adhering to the licensing they’ve acquired from Cisco. Effectively, the only way we can offer the air-gapped licensing that we have is through trust-based licensing. Robert Dutt: In terms of partner economics, is this pretty much the same as any Cisco engagement? What can you tell me about revenues in terms of subscription, perpetual licensing or something new? Basically, how do partners earn on this? Is it the same as ever, or is it a combination of one-time and recurring revenue? Raj Juneja: I can tell you that there will be more clarity on the specifics around partner profitability as the announcement comes out. The main thing to take note of is that, typically, when we offer new solutions and bring them to market, our partner ecosystem has a clear path to get the technology into the hands of the customer base. Profitability is always top of mind for Cisco. I think there will be greater clarity in the coming weeks, but we’re very excited about being the first country after EMEA to launch this. Robert Dutt: Air-gapped, on-premises infrastructure is a pretty complex thing to deploy and manage. What do you see as the split for partners between product and services? In terms of the services side, is Cisco seeing this as a “deploy and hand it over” kind of engagement, or is it also going to be a “deploy and manage” managed services opportunity for partners? Raj Juneja: Because it’s in the hands of our customers, it’s going to depend very much on how they want to configure the choice and control they have. That goes back to working very closely with the partner ecosystem to determine the role partners will play. Our partners have been coming to us and seeking the ability to solve these demands for our customer base. They are ready and willing to help customers configure and adapt, as they’ve done in the past with other on-premises deployments. I see this following similar lines and being very similar to the way our partner ecosystem has helped customers deploy other on-premises solutions. Robert Dutt: So there’s nothing precluding this from being delivered as a managed service. It comes down to what customers are comfortable with and what they want – and, in some cases, what is legally available to them, given the type of infrastructure issues we’re talking about. Raj Juneja: Correct. Robert Dutt: Splunk is central to the security and observability story, and I know it’s a subject near and dear to your heart in particular. My understanding is that Splunk has traditionally been a data platform that benefits from connectivity to the cloud. How much of that capability exists in an air-gapped environment, and what do partners need to deliver to support that? How do they help customers get to the cloud when appropriate? Raj Juneja: Just to correct you, Splunk is offered both on-premises and in a cloud version, and has been for quite some time. I don’t think this will be any different in terms of requirements. Splunk is already configurable to be handled in an on-premises manner. In fact, we have a number of customers that leverage that choice and control in an on-premises fashion. That’s why the on-premises version of Splunk exists today: for customers that are heavily regulated. For customers and verticals that are looking for choice and control and want to take a hybrid approach, it will be in their hands to determine what data they want ingested and how they want Splunk configured on-premises to control that data, vers

    Cisco brings sovereign infrastructure to Canada with air-gapped portfolio

  5. 5 ngày trước

    The Buzz: Cisco Canada launches sovereign critical infrastructure, ScanSource buys MicroAge for $220.5 million, and ESET Canada names cybersecurity scholarship winners

    Today’s headline news for Canadian IT solution providers: [Cisco Canada]: The company this morning launched its Sovereign Critical Infrastructure portfolio, making Canada the first market outside EMEA to receive the offering. The company says the configurable portfolio spans core networking, security, compute, collaboration, and Splunk analytics, with air-gapped deployment options where required. According to Cisco Canada, the offering is aligned with ITSG-33 and most of the on-premises portfolio is IPv6-ready, FIPS 140-2/3 certified, and Common Criteria certified. Bell is the lead quoted partner. Read more on Cisco [ScanSource]: The distributor announced last week it will acquire value-added reseller and managed service provider MicroAge in a $220.5 million all-cash transaction expected to close on Sept. 30. The deal adds more than 2,400 U.S. customers and over 200 employees, and brings MicroAge’s hardware, professional services, and consulting expertise to ScanSource’s partners. Read more on Channel Dive [ESET Canada]: The company yesterday announced the winners of its 2026 Women in Cybersecurity Scholarship, naming Arthure Gélinas, Tsidkenu Tomori, and Sulaksa Jeevakumar as the three Canadian recipients. The program has awarded more than $50,000 to 14 women in Canada since expanding north in 2021. Read more on Business Insider [CrowdStrike]: The company is expanding Project QuiltWorks to midmarket companies through partners including Arrow Electronics, Pax8, and TD Synnex. CrowdStrike says the initiative integrates its AI-driven vulnerability discovery with partner services to deliver enterprise-grade protection to SMBs. Read more on Channel Dive [Palo Alto Networks]: The company and NTT Data say they have signed a three-year strategic pact targeting $1 billion in joint cybersecurity revenue, with NTT Data bringing more than 2,000 certified professionals and 20 cyber defense centers to the alliance. Read more on Channel Dive [Auvik]: The Canadian IT management platform provider says it promoted channel veteran Daniel Ochoa to chief revenue officer, with a mandate to expand the partner network and focus on AI-powered capabilities across North America, Latin America, and EMEA. Read more on Channel Dive [ChannelPro]: The publication unveiled its Top 20 MSPs for 2026, recognizing providers driving innovation, leadership, and impact in the channel. Read more on ChannelE2E Read Full Transcript Welcome to The Buzz from ChannelBuzz.ca, I’m Robert Dutt, today is Tuesday, August 25, 2026, and here’s what’s happening in the channel today. Cisco Canada this morning launched its Sovereign Critical Infrastructure portfolio, making Canada the first market outside EMEA to receive the offering. The company says the configurable portfolio spans core networking, security, compute, collaboration, and Splunk analytics, with air-gapped deployment options where required and control over access to systems and data sitting with the customer. According to Cisco Canada, the offering is aligned with ITSG-33, the foundation for Authority to Operate on mission-critical services, and most of the on-premises portfolio is IPv6-ready, FIPS 140-2/3 certified, and Common Criteria certified. The launch comes as Canadian organizations in critical sectors face increasing pressure to maintain control over their data and digital infrastructure amid rising sovereignty concerns. For channel partners, the move creates opportunities around assessment, deployment, and ongoing management of sovereign environments, particularly for regulated and government customers that need to demonstrate compliance with strict data residency and control standards. IT distributor ScanSource announced last week it will acquire value-added reseller and managed service provider MicroAge in a $220.5 million all-cash transaction expected to close on Sept. 30. The deal adds more than 2,400 U.S. customers and over 200 employees to ScanSource, and brings MicroAge’s hardware resale, professional services, and consulting expertise under the distributor’s umbrella. ScanSource Chairman and CEO Mike Baur told Channel Dive the acquisition is aimed at augmenting channel partners that lack their own customer service and support organizations, with plans to effectively rent MicroAge’s resources to partners who only pay if something closes. The deal reflects ScanSource’s broader strategy to cross-pollinate its technology advisor base with the MSP and VAR capabilities needed to deliver integration, implementation, and ongoing management services. Baur also noted that MicroAge’s Octum.ai consulting business could help technology advisors fill the AI expertise gap they currently face. For Canadian partners, the convergence of distribution and managed services is a signal that the traditional boundaries between partner types are eroding faster than many expected, and that distributors are increasingly willing to touch the end customer directly. ESET Canada yesterday announced the winners of its 2026 Women in Cybersecurity Scholarship, naming Arthure Gélinas, Tsidkenu Tomori, and Sulaksa Jeevakumar as the three Canadian recipients. According to ESET, the program has awarded more than $50,000 to 14 women in Canada since expanding north in 2021, with this year’s awards totaling $15,000 across three scholarships. Bob Bonneau, country manager at ESET Canada, said the recipients demonstrated an impressive combination of skill, leadership, and a genuine desire to make a difference in the industry. The winners will be recognized at a celebration at ESET’s Markham headquarters on Thursday, continuing a commitment that ESET says is one of the earliest initiatives of its kind in the cybersecurity industry. The three recipients come from the Greater Toronto Area, Montreal, and Ottawa, reflecting a geographic spread that ESET says mirrors the growth of cybersecurity hubs across the country. For the Canadian channel, the scholarship underscores the ongoing need to build a more diverse cybersecurity talent pipeline as demand continues to outpace supply, and it highlights a concrete way vendors can contribute to that pipeline beyond short-term hiring initiatives. In Brief – CrowdStrike expands Project QuiltWorks to midmarket companies through partners including Arrow Electronics, Pax8, and TD Synnex. Palo Alto Networks and NTT Data say they have signed a three-year strategic pact targeting $1 billion in joint cybersecurity revenue. Auvik promoted channel veteran Daniel Ochoa to chief revenue officer, with a mandate to expand the partner network and AI-powered capabilities. ChannelPro unveiled its Top 20 MSPs for 2026, recognizing providers driving innovation, leadership, and impact. Full details and links in the show notes or the blog post. Later today on In The Channel, my conversation with Raj Juneja, President of Cisco Canada, on the company’s new sovereign critical infrastructure portfolio for Canada. And if you haven’t heard it yet, check out my conversation with Tony Anscombe from ESET on why breached SMBs feel more confident, and where MSPs fit in the insurance collision. 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: Cisco Canada launches sovereign critical infrastructure, ScanSource buys MicroAge for $220.5 million, and ESET Canada names cybersecurity scholarship winners

  6. 20 thg 8

    ESET’s Tony Anscombe on why breached SMBs feel more confident, and where MSPs fit in the insurance collision

    Tony Anscombe, chief security evangelist at ESET ESET’s 2026 SMB Cyber Readiness Index surveyed 700 cybersecurity decision-makers across the United States and Canada, and the findings tell a story that should matter deeply to the Canadian MSP channel: the businesses that have been breached the most feel the most confident, cyber insurers are increasingly becoming managed security providers, and the gap between AI anxiety and actual threat reality is as wide as ever. In this episode of In The Channel, ESET Chief Security Evangelist Tony Anscombe returns to unpack the datat. The conversation opens on what Anscombe calls the “confidence paradox” — 91 percent of US SMBs and 88 percent of Canadian SMBs with multiple incidents in the past year report high confidence in their cyber resilience, compared to those with fewer or no incidents. Anscombe argues this is not mere resilience theater: live incident response functions as an unplanned exercise, and organizations that survive it genuinely understand their own capabilities better. For MSPs, the takeaway is to replicate that experience through simulation — taking anonymized real-world incidents from one client and running them as tabletop exercises for another. The discussion then turns to the insurance-MSP nexus, which Anscombe describes as a collapsed fence rather than a competitive boundary. The report finds that 35 percent of US SMBs and 27 percent of Canadian SMBs now outsource security directly to their cyber insurer, yet the same report flags monoculture risk: if three or four major insurers rely on the same one or two security products, a single exploit could compromise an entire portfolio. Anscombe suggests MSPs should embrace the shift by building relationships with insurance brokers, getting their services pre-authorized to lower client premiums, and differentiating on holistic ownership of the security stack rather than ceding the MDR layer alone. On AI, the perception gap remains stubborn. AI-powered malware ranks as the top concern for roughly one-third of SMBs in both markets, yet phishing, weak passwords, and unpatched vulnerabilities remain the actual leading causes of breaches. Anscombe brings fresh research on malicious AI skills and shadow AI — unverified code that employees attach to agents inside the network — and notes that over half of organizations still lack a formal AI usage policy. For MSPs, walking into a client with a draft AI governance framework is an immediate, billable conversation starter. Finally, the episode closes on training cadence and business risk framing. While 90 percent of SMBs call awareness training critical, Anscombe argues the annual checkbox model is broken. He recommends monthly five-to-fifteen-minute micro-learning modules tied to seasonal phishing themes, and urges MSPs to reframe their pitch from “cyber risk” to “business risk” — because the clients who are buying insurance and increasing security budgets are doing so to mitigate financial loss, not to chase technical metrics. 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 of ChannelBuzz.ca, and your host for the show. Today, we’re digging into the results of ESET’s 2026 SMB Cyber Readiness Index, which surveyed hundreds of small and medium-sized businesses across the United States and Canada on their cyber resilience, insurance habits and AI readiness. With me, as usual, is Tony Anscombe, ESET’s chief security evangelist. If you’ve listened to the show before, you know Tony is a regular here. He always brings a perspective that manages to be both deeply technical and deeply practical for the MSPs and resellers in our audience. We’re going to talk about a few things that jumped out at me from the report: the strange confidence paradox that says the more breaches you’ve had, the more confident you feel; the collision course between cyber insurance and the MSP channel; why AI-powered malware dominates the headlines while phishing and weak passwords continue to do the actual damage; and why Tony thinks the smartest MSPs might soon be talking less about cyber risk and more about business risk. Let’s get right into it. My chat with Tony Anscombe. Robert Dutt: Tony, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it. Tony Anscombe: It’s always a pleasure to come and talk to you, Rob. Always a pleasure, and you’ve been on this show more than just about anyone else. Robert Dutt: The report you put out shows a really striking pattern: the more breaches an SMB has suffered, the more confident it feels in its cyber resilience. I think the figure was 91% of US SMBs and 88% of Canadian SMBs with multiple incidents in the past year saying they were confident, compared with lower numbers among those with zero or one incident. You wrote that attacks are becoming the new norm. That’s something we’ve talked about before, and it has become a common mindset in the industry. I’m curious: is that confidence among organizations that have been breached multiple times earned, or is it simply normalization? For MSPs watching this in their client base, how do you tell the difference between genuine maturity and what we might call resilience theater – self-delusion, or simply wanting to look better than you really are? Tony Anscombe: First, let’s break that down a little bit. We have people who have been attacked once, people who have been attacked twice, and then there are those who don’t know whether they’ve been attacked. That’s a bit worrying, although it may simply mean that the wrong person answered the question. As you said, if somebody has been attacked twice, they have greater confidence in their cyber resilience plan than somebody who has only been attacked once. From the end user’s perspective, they are the ones answering the question. That tells me that after they have been attacked once, they understand the game. They understand what incident response involves. They know what they need to have in place and how to assemble the team when an incident occurs. They feel more confident because, in effect, they have done a live exercise. Robert Dutt: Although it wasn’t an exercise, was it? They dealt with a live incident. Tony Anscombe: Exactly. If it had been an exercise, the organizations that had not yet been attacked, or had only been attacked once, might have had greater confidence. But I think the lower confidence is simply a result of not having the experience needed to feel confident. If you and I went out to shoot arrows at an archery target on Saturday, the second time we did it, we’d be better than the first time. The third time, we’d be better than the second. Robert Dutt: Well, I’d hope we would be better. Tony Anscombe: Or we could be axe throwing, or whatever it might be. My point is that you get better the more you do something, or you understand what you’re doing more clearly. So how does this apply to MSPs? For me, the lesson is that you need to run real-life simulations to give people that confidence. Take a real incident from one of your customers, walk across to another customer, remove anything that should not be disclosed, and put that scenario firmly on their table. Run it as an incident. Give them a real-world example of how an incident unfolds and unpack it for them. That gives them confidence in two ways. First, it shows that you, as an MSP, know how to deal with the situation. Second, it gives them a grounding in exactly what other customers have experienced when incidents unfold. They can gain from the experience of others. I think it’s about running what you might call a tabletop exercise, although for me it’s really an incident simulation. My takeaway for any MSP would be to offer an incident simulation to your customers, rather than simply presenting it as a tabletop exercise. Doing tabletop exercises is not new. But an incident simulation based on a real-world event gives it more weight. Robert Dutt: When you talk to MSPs, are you seeing many that are taking what they’ve learned from a real-world experience with one customer, abstracting it enough that they aren’t giving away anything they shouldn’t, and then using it as a repeatable training exercise with other customers? Tony Anscombe: No, I don’t think I’ve seen much of that. But I also think MSPs and people in our industry are so busy running from hello to post that they don’t have time to stop and think about putting something together in quite that way. The other thing I’d say is that cyber insurers do most incident response very well these days. If an MSP has a relationship with a specific cyber insurer, I would go to that insurer and say, “Can we borrow your incident response team’s experience to run a simulation with our customers?” It helps the insurer as well. It can reduce their costs when an incident happens if everyone already knows what they are doing. There are multiple parties that could be involved in this. Robert Dutt: The interplay between cyber insurance and the MSP channel is fascinating to me. According to the report, a little over a third of US SMBs that outsource security are getting their MDR directly from their cyber insurance provider. In Canada, the figure is closer to a quarter. The report also notes that roughly three-quarters of US businesses and two-thirds of Canadian businesses are concerned about single-vendor ecosystems – a kind of security monoculture. So insurers are both absorbing the risk and providing the services intended to prevent it. For MSPs, is this a partnership opportunity, a competitive threat, or something else entirely? Where do you see this relationship going? Tony Anscombe: It is interesting because if you talk to somebody on the cybersecurity side of the fence,

    ESET’s Tony Anscombe on why breached SMBs feel more confident, and where MSPs fit in the insurance collision

  7. 19 thg 8

    Buffering the madness: Dynabook Canada on building a channel in the age of RAMageddon

    Carmine Cinerari, president and CEO of Dynabook Canada When Carmine Cinerari took over as president and CEO of Dynabook Canada in April 2025 – adding the role to his existing responsibilities running Sharp Electronics of Canada – he inherited the same optimism most of the industry shared at the time: AI PC adoption was going to drive a significant refresh cycle, and the market was going to be on fire. Then, in his words, “we hit the wall.” The memory and component crisis that has come to define the endpoint hardware market in 2026 was not what anyone signed up for. But in this conversation with In The Channel, Cinerari makes the case that a focused, flat, Japanese-owned PC brand may actually be better positioned to navigate the chaos than conventional wisdom about market scale would suggest. A significant piece of that argument is a new nationwide distribution partnership with TD SYNNEX Canada, announced in March. For Dynabook – historically public-sector and direct-focused since its launch as the successor to the Toshiba laptop line – the move is a deliberate pivot toward the channel. Cinerari explains why the deal is about more than broadening reach: it’s about building predictable local inventory at a moment when supply chain commitments have never been shorter. “As a sales company, our job is really to buffer the madness to the customer,” he says. “We can’t shield them from the industry. This is a global phenomenon. But at least we can communicate well about what we can and can’t commit to.” He also addresses the AI PC picture candidly – Copilot+ requirements start at 16GB of RAM, at the exact moment DRAM prices have surged dramatically – and explains, unprompted, why being a Japanese-headquartered company that engineers its own products and carries a local Canadian balance sheet may be more of a competitive advantage in 2026 than it would have been in quieter times. 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 of ChannelBuzz.ca and your host for the show. If you sell endpoint hardware or if your customers buy it, you already know that this year has not been a quiet year on that front. Memory prices have surged dramatically; some analysts are projecting cumulative DRAM and SSD cost increases well north of 100% by year end. OEMs are compressing quote windows, repricing backorders, and in some cases, reserving the right to cancel compute orders before they ship. Buyers are deferring refresh cycles, and the phrase “RAMageddon” is being used without irony. Into that environment steps my guest today, who’s been navigating the Canadian IT market since 1996, most of that time at Sharp Electronics of Canada, where he now serves as president and CEO. About a year ago, he added a second hat, taking on the role of president and CEO of Dynabook Canada—the company that carries forward the legacy of Toshiba’s legendary laptop line, and which has been quietly building its Canadian channel presence ever since. We’re going to talk about what the channel build-out looks like right now, including a new nationwide distribution partnership with TD SYNNEX, and what it means to be in the endpoint hardware business when market dynamics are moving as fast as they are right now. Let’s get right into it. My chat with Carmine Cinerari. Carmine, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it. Carmine Cinerari: Nice to be here. Robert Dutt: Let’s start with the TD SYNNEX announcement from earlier this year. For folks who maybe aren’t as familiar with Dynabook, can you give us a quick picture of who Dynabook Canada is, where you’ve been going to market up until now, and what adding TD SYNNEX actually changes for your partners on the ground? Carmine Cinerari: Dynabook Canada was established back around 2018. Sharp had an interest in the company from the beginning, but it culminated in a full ownership stake. For clarity, Dynabook Canada is a Sharp company; globally, Sharp is the 100% shareholder. It currently operates as a separate company, but in Canada—being a smaller market—we have a unified go-to-market strategy. I took over as CEO of Dynabook on April 1st, 2025, following the retirement of the past executive who had been the CEO of Toshiba Canada for a long time. It just made good business sense. We haven’t legally integrated the two entities, but I concurrently run Sharp Canada and Dynabook Canada. Historically, the business was predominantly public sector and direct, with less channel focus. The TD SYNNEX initiative is really a result of aligning that strategy closer to what Sharp does in Canada. We have a very strong channel strategy, alongside a direct-to-end-user strategy predominantly in our print business. We wanted to leverage the strong professional display business we already have through TD SYNNEX for the Dynabook side. One of the benefits Dynabook has is a CTO (Configure to Order) model. We engineer and develop the product out of Tokyo, Japan, and manufacture in China. Lead times are fairly short—about three weeks, door-to-door—which has been a strength. But with all the supply chain disruption now, the upside of having local inventory for the channel through TD SYNNEX is a great decision. Robert Dutt: I’m guessing that bringing on TD SYNNEX, having that relationship from the other side of the business, provides a level of familiarity that helps ramp the relationship fairly quickly. Carmine Cinerari: That’s true. I’ve learned a lot in the last year about the differences between the PC business and the AV display business. TD SYNNEX is calling on thousands of accounts, and we’re learning that those possibilities are there for Dynabook too. One benefit of Sharp and Dynabook in Canada is that we aren’t a “one size fits all” company. We are a full-on local company; we carry our own balance sheet and don’t report into a U.S. executive. We are a consolidated subsidiary of Sharp Japan. It’s a blessing. Our employee diversity and tenure are very strong—I’ve been with Sharp for 30 years—but we’ve also welcomed about 25% of our current workforce in the last two and a half years. What’s it like being in the hardware endpoint business? You might think I’m off my rocker, but it’s a lot of fun. It’s dynamic. We’re selling print devices, commercial displays, and now PCs. It keeps you on your toes. The team and culture alignment after a year is very strong. Our job is to bring that local infrastructure—technical support, inventory, credit lines—to the channel and be the easiest partner to do business with. Robert Dutt: You touch on the moment we’re in. Partners are under real margin pressure; they’re watching quote windows shrink and configurations getting more expensive. How are you helping partners have that conversation with end customers around the realities of procurement in this environment? Carmine Cinerari: In our print or display businesses, the product life cycle is longer. The PC business is much more dynamic. Our mentality, however, is the same: we promise consistency when we can, and when we can’t, we don’t. Right now, our price commitments are record-short. I’ve never seen a time where we can’t commit to long-term pricing, even in the public sector. We’ve been managing this through disciplined communication. Our senior director, Jamie Duncan, has been here for 25 years and is a disciplined communicator; he doesn’t make promises he can’t keep. As a sales company, our job is really to buffer the madness for the customer. We can’t shield them from the industry—this is a global phenomenon—but we can communicate well about what we can and can’t commit to. We’re chasing supply on memory and chips like everyone else, but we’re doing it in a disciplined way so we don’t disappoint people. Robert Dutt: IDC has made the case that in the current environment, larger OEMs with bigger supply chains will fare better than smaller regional players. How do you see that dynamic? Is it a disadvantage, or is there an argument that a focused, nimble player navigates this differently? Carmine Cinerari: It’s a fair question, but our feedback is that it’s an opportunity for a smaller player. We are very nimble. We’re one of the few, if not only, Japanese companies doing our own design, engineering, and manufacturing in our own factory. That provides a huge upside in security, which is big in our public sector work. The big companies tend to have a lot of confusion during times like this, whereas we are very focused and very flat. To some channel partners, we’re new, and our “one size doesn’t fit all” approach is refreshing. Smaller is better for us because we can keep promises that larger companies might struggle with. Robert Dutt: If we were talking six months ago, I would have led with the AI PC refresh. But Copilot+ requirements start at 16GB of RAM as a minimum, right when RAM is incredibly expensive. How is that shaping your product lineup and the conversations you’re having with partners? Carmine Cinerari: If we talked six months ago, I would have had that same green optimism that the market was just going to be on fire—and then we hit the wall. AI is part of the conversation, but right now, the demand is so tight it’s hard to pinpoint its exact level. Right now, we are just chasing supply on memory and chips. Robert Dutt: For partners sitting in front of customers who are saying, “let’s get one more year out of what we have,” how do you make the case for “buy now”? Carmine Cinerari: That phenomenon isn’t unique to PCs, but because we are coming from a relatively smaller base, we aren’t running into the “wait and see” as much as our bigger competitors. We are still refreshing fleets

    Buffering the madness: Dynabook Canada on building a channel in the age of RAMageddon

  8. 18 thg 8

    Coro CEO Joe Sykora on the case against Frankenstein security stacks

    Joe Sykora, CEO of Coro The debate between platform consolidation and best-of-breed point solutions has been running in the MSP community for years. But with AI-driven attack volumes up three to four times year over year, and clients unwilling to absorb price increases, the operational stakes are getting harder to ignore. In this episode of In The Channel, host Robert Dutt speaks with Joe Sykora, chief executive officer of Coro, the Chicago-based cybersecurity platform built for lean IT environments and the MSPs who serve them. Coro’s platform spans 14 security modules – endpoint, email, network, cloud app security, data protection, and more – running on a single agent and a shared data engine. The company is 100% channel, past Series D, and recently recognized by Gartner as a representative vendor in the emerging Workspace Protection category. Sykora brings an unusual background to the CEO chair. He started out running solution provider businesses before moving vendor-side, holding channel leadership roles at Fortinet, Bitdefender, and Proofpoint. One of his first acts as CEO was eliminating Coro’s direct sales motion entirely. The conversation covers Coro’s core consolidation argument – and what Sykora calls the “Frankenstein stacks” that result from stitching together point solutions via API integrations – alongside the platform’s 92-93% automated alert remediation rate, with some partners pushing toward 96%. It also gets into harder territory: Sykora acknowledges on the record that not every Coro module is best in class, and addresses the vendor concentration risk that comes with consolidating that much of a client’s security posture in one place. The episode closes on Coro’s recently launched MCP server integration, which brings security operations directly into AI agent workflows, and the question Sykora took from RSA: is it cybersecurity with AI protection, or AI with cyber? 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 of ChannelBuzz.ca and your host for the show. The question of how to build a security stack for small or mid-sized businesses, or for the MSP serving one, hasn’t gotten any simpler. If anything, it’s more crowded than ever. Best-of-breed point solutions for every threat vector, each with their own agent, their own dashboard, and their own data silo. There is no such thing as a single pane of glass in security. My guest today has a different answer, though. Joe Sykora is chief executive officer at Coro, an 11-year-old cybersecurity platform purpose-built for lean IT environments and the MSPs that serve them. Coro covers 14 security functions—from endpoint to email to network, cloud app security, and data protection—under a single agent and a single data engine. The company is 100 percent channel, past Series D funding, and has made no secret of its ambition to be a platform that consolidates what Joe himself called the “Frankenstein stacks” that so many MSPs have been managing for years on the security side. What makes him an interesting person to have this conversation with is that he isn’t coming at it from the product or the engineering side. He started out running solution provider businesses in the 90s, exited two of them, and spent the better part of 15 years in channel leadership roles at Fortinet, Bitdefender, and Proofpoint before taking the CEO chair at Coro last year. Let’s get right into it. My chat with Joe Sykora. Joe, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it. Joe Sykora: Robert, great to see you. Robert Dutt: You know, most cybersecurity CEOs come up through product, through engineering, or through finance. Your background involves running a solution provider before going vendor-side. I’m curious what the industry looks like from a CEO’s seat when your formative years were on the partner side of the table. Joe Sykora: Sure. Well, it’s been an exciting ride. It started back in the 90s and I’ve been very, very fortunate. I was one of the early adopters. The first company I had was an infrastructure company; we quickly pivoted to security and became a managed security provider in the 90s. I still have a lot of friends that are still out there doing it, but I was one of the early adopters. I was very, very fortunate to be able to exit both of those companies and that got me to the manufacturer side. I started with a little-known company—at the time it was unknown, but most people now know Fortinet. I joined them in 2010 during their IPO and, man, I like to say the rest is history. My role at Fortinet was a little bit different because I did cover primarily the channel, the partner side, which was a huge, huge part of Fortinet’s success. But I also got to dabble on a few other things like operations and the marketing piece. In fact, when we made some of those acquisitions, I got to be the interim CEO as we integrated those in. I never lost my entrepreneurial spirit; if there’s a problem, I like to fix it. I don’t like to just say “that’s the way it’s always been.” I always challenge things no matter where I go. I have the attitude where if the garbage needs to be taken out, I’ll take out the garbage too, right? Because that’s the way I was brought up—very humble beginnings in Ohio. I grew up in farm country, believe it or not. I was one of the first children to get to play around with a Mac and programming in fourth grade. So at a very early age, I got a little bit addicted to computers. The seat right now as CEO is what I’ve been brewing myself for throughout my career. I’ve led go-to-market strategies and I’ve been involved very much on the backend. When this opportunity came up, it was something that I felt I was ready for. I’ve put in a lot of international experience over the last 10 years or so, meeting with partners all over the world and really listening to the different needs they have. But more importantly, I love the channel. I came from the channel. So for me to be able to run a 100 percent channel motion is very unique. One of the first things I did as CEO was kind of kill the direct motion. We had a mixed model and it didn’t make sense for us. So it’s exciting. Of course, there’s other challenges—I spend a lot of my time with boards and financial institutions now—but I still love getting in front of the partners and talking about our story and how we’re different. Sometimes it even leads to giving advice on how to exit companies and what’s important there. Robert Dutt: No doubt a topic of interest for the MSPs listening. For you guys, the platform consolidation pitch is a big one and it’s compelling on paper. One agent, one dashboard, 14 modules. But there’s always that MSP who comes up and says, “All right, the jack of all trades, master of none thing.” How do you answer an MSP who says, “I see your point, but my EDR vendor or my email security specialist is doing better in that particular lane than what Coro can do”? What’s the message to that skeptic? Joe Sykora: Yeah, well, I think things have definitely changed. Again, this is coming from a guy who’s been in cyber now for almost 30 years. For the partners out there, everyone has their tech stack. This isn’t anything new. When I was an MSP, my pitch was “you can’t afford an enterprise platform—not only the licensing, but really managing the platform.” I’m sure a lot of people out there today are doing the same thing. Coro’s different because of the advancements of using AI. I know that’s a topic—I think last week I said we should make a drinking game out of anytime anyone says “AI.” But AI is moving faster than anything we’ve seen out there. Coro is not a new company; we’re 11 years old. Coro was purpose-built for the MSP and SMB—or “Lean IT,” as I like to refer to it. We help operationalize things. Coro is not about looking at each individual module and saying “I have it, I don’t have it.” It’s about putting it all in one agent to stop agent sprawl and putting it all in one dataset. Because it is all our own IP that we spent the last 11 years developing, having clean data going into it is so important. That’s why we’re seeing, on average, about a 92 to 93 percent automation rate of correlating and then remediating automatically. That’s pretty good, and it’s getting better. A year ago we were in the high 80s; we’re now closing in on the mid-90s. I was talking to a partner the other day who was seeing about 96 percent. What that translates to is operational efficiencies. That is time back, and that is money to you as an MSP. We know that the attacks aren’t slowing down—in fact, we’re seeing about a 3X increase already this year. The bad guys are also using AI. If we want to go head-to-head versus your endpoint and EDR vendor, we can. We still test out at five nines. The difference is it’s simpler. I’ve talked to many “enterprise” MSPs who are very proud of their stack, and that’s fine. But then they look at someone like Coro—100 percent channel, guaranteed margins, a lot of support—and it makes sense. The “aha” moment is when they see the operational efficiency of an analyst being able to look at 100 or more clients instead of 20 or 30. We did introduce Coro AI within the product for MSPs who want to look at reporting across all their customers. We’re not an NDR, but we give you NDR results. If you want to do some threat hunting and see what’s going on, you just talk to our AI. The concept is the same as the old UTM or Next-Gen Firewall days, except now I have more modules and I’m in the cloud. And we can coexist. If you have a solution in place, that’s okay. We are a very lightweight client. You can get the results and then, when it comes up

    Coro CEO Joe Sykora on the case against Frankenstein security stacks
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