ChannelBuzz.ca

Today’s headline news for Canadian IT solution providers. ChannelBuzz.ca is on site at this week’s SAS Innovate 2026 in Grapevine, Texas. Here’s some of the major news from the event. SAS announced a Viya MCP (Model Context Protocol) server at Innovate 2026, enabling external AI agents to invoke SAS capabilities – fraud detection models, statistical engines, forecasting too...

Michael Crean, senior vice president and general manager of managed security services at SonicWall SonicWall published its 2026 Cyber Protect Report in March with a deliberate reframe: rather than threat intelligence for its own sake, the report is built around actionable content for solution providers. The centrepiece is the seven deadly sins of SMB cybersecurity – seven predictable, preven...

Today’s headline news for Canadian IT solution providers: Google Cloud has launched the new Google Cloud Partner Network, formalizing a shift in how the provider interacts with the channel ecosystem. The rollout is designed to streamline partner engagement and provide clearer pathways for partners building out generative AI practices, offering Canadian solution providers a strong secondary o...

Doug Houghton , director of global channels at Alkira There’s a line from this episode that’s worth leading with: “Networking is not sexy until it doesn’t work.” That’s Doug Houghton, Director of Global Channels at Alkira , and it’s a pretty concise summary of why his company exists. Alkira was founded by the team behind Viptela – the startup that es...

Today’s headline news for Canadian IT solution providers: More than 100,000 tech jobs have been eliminated industry-wide in the first four months of 2026, with AI cited as a direct cause in nearly half of those cuts, according to tracking data reported by CNBC . Meta cut 8,000 positions – roughly 10 percent of its global workforce – with CEO Mark Zuckerberg explicitly framing 202...

Carolyn April, GTIA’s vice president of research and market intelligence When GTIA launched its inaugural Innovate Awards program earlier this year, it made a deliberate point of specifying what it was looking for: AI solutions “deployed and in production.” Not a pitch. Not a pilot. Not a Copilot rollout. That qualifier says a lot about where the IT channel actually stands with A...

Today’s headline news for Canadian IT solution providers: Canadian cyberattacks surge. Canadian enterprise cyberattacks jumped 80 percent over the past year, with the average organization hit by 342 incidents – up from 191 the previous year – and 52 percent reporting an actual breach, according to new research from CDW Canada and IDC . Cloud infection rates hit a record 53 percen...

Erin Gertner, vice president of the Partner Organization and SMB sales at Cisco Canada The Cisco 360 Partner Program launched in January after roughly eighteen months of co-development with the partner community. It represents one of the most significant overhauls to Cisco’s channel model in more than two decades – replacing the Gold/Silver tier structure with architecture-specific &#8...

Today’s headline news for Canadian IT solution providers: Acronis launches GenAI Protection for MSPs . Acronis GenAI Protection went generally available April 22nd, giving MSPs a purpose-built tool to discover shadow AI usage across client environments, prevent sensitive data from flowing into unsanctioned AI tools , block prompt injection attacks, and enforce per-client AI usage policies &#...

Eric Arcese , vice president of global partner marketing at Dell Technologies Dell Technologies vice president of global partner marketing Eric Arcese joins In The Channel ahead of Dell Technologies World , and his central message for Canadian partners is worth sitting with: the AI Factory is Dell’s story, but the seams around it belong to the channel. Arcese describes looking at the Dell AI...

Today’s headline news for Canadian IT solution providers: Hewlett Packard Enterprise expands software channel push: Hewlett Packard Enterprise is doubling its dedicated sales team to drive its Hybrid CloudOps software portfolio through the channel. According to CRN , Rocco Lavista , vice president and general manager of worldwide Hybrid CloudOps software sales at HPE, noted that rising globa...

Aharon Chernin, founder and CEO of Rewst Aharon Chernin has been building technology specifically for MSPs for more than twenty-five years – including founding Perch Security, which ConnectWise acquired in 2020. His next venture was Rewst , a workflow automation platform purpose-built for managed service providers, now serving over 1,500 MSPs. The founding insight: automation was the foundat...

Today’s headline news for Canadian IT solution providers: Salesforce launches FDE Partner Network: Salesforce is dedicating 50 million dollars to its new Forward Deployed Engineering Partner Network, providing partners with the same training and direct product team access as internal staff. According to Nick Johnston, senior vice president of partner sales, the program is designed to help pa...

Jennifer Roy, CEO of Nucleus Networks Jennifer Roy knew she was underqualified for her first job in managed services. She applied anyway — and she’d tell you that discomfort is kind of the point. Now CEO of Nucleus Networks , the Vancouver-based MSP that now operates across Victoria , Prince George, Calgary, and Toronto, Roy joined the company as COO in 2021 and stepped into the top jo...

Today’s headline news for Canadian IT solution providers: Everpure, formerly Pure Storage, has launched a new global partner program that replaces volume tiers with an outcomes-led model focused on service delivery and recurring revenue for MSPs. Copado has introduced Agentia , an AI-driven platform for Salesforce DevOps that uses context-aware agents to automate testing and compliance workf...

Benjamin Yerushalmi, senior vice president of partners and alliances at OutSystems OutSystems launched its redesigned Elevate partner program in late February – a ground-up rethink that moves away from volume-based incentives toward a point-based earned level model weighted toward AI credentials and delivery outcomes. To walk through what changed and why, I spoke with Benjamin Yerushalmi , O...

Today’s headline news for Canadian IT solution providers: Fleet launches inaugural partner program:  Open-source device management vendor  Fleet  has announced its first partner program, officially moving to a 100 percent channel sales model. According to CEO Mike McNeil, every deal will now flow through a partner. The program includes reseller and services tracks, focusing on enabling partn...

Alex Webb, CEO of F12.net and Leanne Yeatman , chief of staff at F12.net F12.net has completed more than 15 acquisitions since founder and CEO Alex Webb and Chief of Staff Leanne Yeatman made their first deal in 2006. What started as a circumstantial opportunity evolved into a deliberate growth strategy that has taken the company from its Alberta roots to a national MSP with offices across Canada...

Frank Vitagliano, CEO of the Global Technology Distribution Council Every few years, someone announces the end of distribution. Direct sales was going to kill it. Then e-commerce. Then cloud. Then hyperscaler marketplaces. And yet here we are. Frank Vitagliano  is CEO of the  Global Technology Distribution Council , the industry consortium representing 21 of the world’s leading technology di...

Rob Falzon , Head of Engineering in the Office of the CTO at Check Point Software Technologies Canada’s data sovereignty landscape is shifting faster than most organizations realize – and according to Rob Falzon, Head of Engineering in the Office of the CTO at Check Point Software Technologies, the conversation isn’t happening early enough. In this episode, Falzon breaks down the...

JoeAnne Hardy, president of WBM Technologies In this episode of In The Channel, I’m joined by JoeAnne Hardy, president of WBM Technologies . WBM is a fixture on the Canadian channel landscape, but its story is one of constant, deliberate reinvention. Founded in 1950 as Western Business Machines in Saskatoon , the company has evolved from a local typewriter and copier shop into a sophisticate...

Dan Candee, CEO of Cork Cyber When Cork Cyber first showed up on the radar a few years ago, it was easy to file under “cyber warranty” and move on. But Dan Candee , who came in as CEO in mid-2024 from AWS and Dell, has been pushing the company well beyond that starting point. What’s emerged – a risk visibility platform, a scoring system, and now active remediation tools &#8...

In Case You Missed It for the week of April 13, 2026, for Canadian IT solution providers – and the final episode of ICYMI before The Buzz launches April 20: Cisco compute prices jump April 18 – and it’s not just Cisco. WBM Technologies’ April 2026 procurement update flags list price adjustments taking effect April 18 on Cisco compute hardware, driven by ongoing memory marke...

Michael Khoury, vice president of Global Ecosystems Programs at Palo Alto Networks When Palo Alto Networks announced the first comprehensive overhaul of its NextWave partner program in more than three years this February, it raised a lot of questions for partners. What does the shift from transactional incentives to platform adoption rewards actually look like day to day? What happens to loyal, fi...

Adam Ostopowich, country manager for Tanium Canada Tanium has long been known as a platform for managing endpoints at massive scale – federal governments, Fortune 500 environments, organizations with hundreds of thousands of devices. But the company’s newly appointed Canada country manager , Adam Ostopowich, says the mid-market represents Tanium’s biggest untapped opportunity in...