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Alan Ashby, senior director of Americas data center presales and specialty sales at Dell. Today’s episode of In The Channel comes to you from the floor of Dell Technologies World 2026, where the expansion of the Dell AI Factory has been dominating the headlines. But what does that mean for partners who aren’t selling multi-million dollar deployments to the Fortune 500? To find out, we...

Today’s headline news for Canadian IT solution providers: The AI supply chain squeeze: Yesterday, we brought you a special mid-day look at the new partner platform and AI Factory announcements from Dell Technologies World . But if you look past the glitz of the main stage, there was a sobering reality check delivered during the partner-specific keynote. Pete Trizzino, president of global sal...

Today’s headline news for Canadian IT solution providers: Dell’s ‘ Modern Partner Platform ‘ brings AI directly to deal registration : Launching in the second half of the year, this unified portal introduces an “agentic partner experience.” Powered by a family of AI assistants, the platform connects demand signals, sales collaboration, deal registration, and pri...

Jeff Taylor, executive director of global partner ecosystem and operations for Lenovo There are not many conversations where you get both the global architect of a vendor’s partner program and the Canadian channel chief in the same room. In this episode of In The Channel, recorded the week after Lenovo 360 Accelerate wrapped up in Austin, we had both: Jeff Taylor, executive director of globa...

Today’s headline news for Canadian IT solution providers: HPE unifies distribution model: Hewlett Packard Enterprise announced a major shift in its distribution strategy, naming Ingram Micro and TD SYNNEX as its two global distributors. The move transitions HPE to a unified distribution model designed to deliver greater consistency and operational support for partners worldwide, accelerating...

Cameron Tousley , director of MSP channels for ESET North America For most MSPs, the quarterly client conversation looks something like this: here are the alerts we handled, here is your uptime number, here is a dashboard of things we blocked. Useful, certainly – but not exactly the stuff of trusted advisor relationships. Cameron Tousley, director of MSP channels for ESET North America, has...

Today’s headline news for Canadian IT solution providers: Acronis has launched Cyber Frame , a new hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platform built specifically for managed service providers. The platform allows MSPs to build and deliver infrastructure services with native integration into Acronis’ cyber protection and remote monitoring and mana...

Steve Petryschuk, vice president of product and market strategy at Auvik Every year brings a new wave of IT industry reports , but Auvik’s 2026 IT Trends Report – titled “Beyond the Hype: The Real State of IT in 2026” – lands as something of a reality check. The headline finding is striking: while 67% of IT professionals say they are optimistic about AI ‘s poten...

Today’s headline news for Canadian IT solution providers: SonicWall is making its Gen 8 security platform available in virtualized environments for the first time with the launch of the NSv XS , a subscription-based virtual firewall purpose-built for MSPs and MSSPs delivering managed security to small and distributed environments. The NSv XS supports VMware ESXi, Hyper-V, KVM, AWS, Azure, an...

Joel Abramson, managing partner at Top Down Ventures Today’s In The Channel episode lands on the same morning that Vancouver-based Top Down Ventures announces the close of Founders Fund I at C$38 million – oversubscribed against an original target of US$25 million, and positioned as the first institutional venture fund focused exclusively on early-stage software and AI for the managed...

Today’s headline news for Canadian IT solution providers: Top Down Ventures closes C$38M Founders Fund I : Top Down Ventures has announced the final close of its Founders Fund I at $38 million Canadian, oversubscribed against its original target. According to the firm, this is the first institutional fund focused exclusively on early-stage software and AI for the MSP ecosystem, backed by mor...

Steven Kiss, partner and national ServiceNow practice leader at EY Canada This is the final episode in our Knowledge 2026 coverage series, recorded live in Las Vegas. If you haven’t caught the earlier episodes, we’d suggest starting with our conversations with ServiceNow SVP of global partnerships and channels Michael Park and ServiceNow AVP of Canada Cristin Gooderham – both pub...

Cristin Gooderham, area vice president of Canada enterprise sales at ServiceNow This week’s In The Channel episodes have been coming live from ServiceNow’s Knowledge 2026 conference in Las Vegas , where the company made its most aggressive platform repositioning in years – moving from workflow automation into what it’s calling the Agentic Business: autonomous AI agents doin...

Today’s headline news for Canadian IT solution providers: inforcer launches Copilot Manager: inforcer has released its new Copilot Manager feature, giving MSPs in-depth visibility into Microsoft 365 Copilot adoption and shadow AI usage across customer tenants. According to the company, as many as 80% of SMB employees are using unauthorized AI tools at work, and IBM research cited by inforcer...

Michael Park, senior vice president of global partnerships and channels at ServiceNow Recorded live at ServiceNow ‘s Knowledge 2026 conference in Las Vegas , this episode features Michael Park , ServiceNow’s senior vice president of global partnerships and channels – a channel chief who came not from sales or alliances, but from leading AI go-to-market strategy for ServiceNow its...

Today’s headline news for Canadian IT solution providers: WatchGuard acquires Perimeters.io: WatchGuard Technologies announced Wednesday it has acquired identity threat management startup Perimeters.io . According to the company, the deal introduces WatchGuard Cloud Detection and Response (CloudDR), an AI-first solution built for MSPs to handle identity threats and shadow AI across more than...

Bill McDermott , CEO of ServiceNow This is a Reporter’s Notebook episode – no guest, just some thoughts from the ground at ServiceNow ‘s Knowledge 2026 conference in Las Vegas. Earlier on Tuesday I spent about 40 minutes in a press fireside chat with ServiceNow chairman and CEO Bill McDermott. He’s one of the most practiced executives in enterprise technology, and he came w...

Tim Coach, chief evangelist at Cynomi For most managed service providers, the security services story has followed a familiar arc: endpoint protection, email security, security awareness training. Each category added value, then became table stakes. Third-party risk management – TPRM – is what comes next, and according to Cynomi Chief Evangelist Tim Coach, it may be the stickiest reven...

Reporting live from ServiceNow’s Knowledge 2026 conference in Las Vegas, the message from CEO Bill McDermott and NVIDIA ‘s Jensen Huang was clear: the era of AI pilots is over. ServiceNow is repositioning itself as the AI Control Tower — the governance layer that sits above every AI agent an organization is running, regardless of where those agents were built. McDermott’s framing...

Frances Edmonds , head of sustainable impact at HP Canada For Canadian IT solution providers, sustainability has always been something to think about – eventually. Frances Edmonds says the clock is running out on “eventually.” Edmonds is the Head of Sustainable Impact at HP Canada , a two-time Clean50 award winner, and one of the most recognized voices in the country at the inter...

Today’s headline news for Canadian IT solution providers: ServiceNow’s partner momentum is real – and the model is changing.  Opening the Partner Day Keynote at Knowledge 2026 in Las Vegas Monday, SVP of Global Partnerships and Channels  Michael Park  led with a pointed Q1 headline: partner-sourced net new ACV doubled year-over-year, and partners delivered more than 50 per cent o...

Nat D’Ercole , data transformation leader for AI and data at Deloitte Canada In the final episode of In The Channel’s three-part series from SAS Innovate 2026 in Grapevine, Texas, we sit down with Nat D’Ercole of Deloitte Canada for the practitioner perspective on enterprise AI transformation – what it looks like from inside the organizations actually doing the migration an...

John Carey, senior vice president of global channels at SAS Institute Recorded on site at SAS Innovate 2026 in Grapevine, Texas, this week’s In The Channel features John Carey, senior vice president of global channels at SAS Institute, in a conversation that covers the full arc of his four years building SAS’s channel program from the ground up. When Carey joined in 2022, SAS had a his...

Today’s headline news for Canadian IT solution providers: Integris , a managed AI and IT services firm backed by OMERS Private Equity , has announced its intent to acquire First Focus , the largest managed service provider serving small and midsize businesses across Australia, New Zealand, and the Philippines. The deal, subject to regulatory approval, is designed to extend Integris’ ge...

Ryan MacDonald, country leader for SAS Canada Recorded on site at SAS Innovate 2026 in Grapevine, Texas, today’s In The Channel features Ryan MacDonald, country leader at SAS Canada, in a wide-ranging conversation about what the week’s major announcements mean for Canadian organizations – and where SAS sees its channel and partner opportunity growing. The conversation opens on th...