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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...

A 277% spike in RMM abuse. MFA bypasses through inherited VPN configurations. Attackers targeting backup infrastructure before they even start encrypting. In this second conversation with ESET Chief Security Evangelist Tony Anscombe, we dig into how the tools MSPs rely on every day have become the primary attack surface - and what the practical path forward looks like.

As the industry shifts from search to chat, earned media has become one of the primary ways LLMs surface information about companies - which means partners who aren't thinking about communications are increasingly invisible. Gareth Pettigrew, who spent years in communications at Cisco and Okta, including leading Cisco's partner communications efforts, breaks down why PR matters more now than it ev...

Okta is running over 80 percent of Canadian revenue through partners and betting big on regulated verticals with a new Montreal-based data cell. Country manager Ryan Sydor talks about what that investment looks like and where it's headed.

This week's In Case You Missed It: SonicWall reframes SMB security around seven predictable, preventable failures. Cisco eliminates compute deal registration amid rising memory costs. Lenovo evolves its partner framework toward services as hardware headwinds build. And CDW Canada delivers sobering Canadian-specific data on the state of enterprise cybersecurity.

Faraz Siraj, vice president of global channels and alliances at Fortra, joins the podcast to talk about what it looks like to build a channel program around a cybersecurity platform assembled through more than 20

1Password's Larissa Crandall joins the podcast to discuss why identity security has become the front door of the security conversation and what that shift means for MSPs. From the company's evolution beyond password management to the staggering 82-to-1 ratio of non-human to human identities, Crandall makes the case that the identity opportunity is bigger - and more urgent - than most partners real...

WatchGuard's new CEO sits down for a wide-ranging conversation about why 2026 may be the year MSPs stop being commodity IT providers - and what the company's 30-year track record, Kaseya-honed economics playbook, and new Bell Cyber partnership mean for Canadian partners.

ESET Canada country manager Bob Bonneau joins In The Channel to talk about the company's Women in Cybersecurity Scholarship -- now in its eleventh year and fifth year in Canada -- and why the talent it produces isn't ending up where you might expect.

This week's In Case You Missed It: Sherweb secures its first outside investment in 28 years and expands into the UK. Broadcom faces an EU antitrust complaint as the VCSP deadline hits. Intel and AMD both signal price hikes squeezing the commercial PC refresh. And converging data from Auvik and OpenText reveals how far AI adoption has outrun AI governance.

In the first episode of our "Life after the channel" series, former Gurus Solutions founder Martin McNicoll talks about trading SaaS targets for organic farming, why owning the whole supply chain matters more to him now than it did then, and what it's like to plant oak trees for barrels you'll never use.

Cisco Canada's VP of Partner Organization and SMB Sales talks about what's driving the biggest refresh cycle in years, where partners are finding traction, and why a consultative approach is turning single-product refreshes into deals that are three and four times the size.

A special midweek edition of In Case You Missed It, cutting through the RSA Conference 2026 noise to highlight what actually matters for Canadian IT channel partners. From the dominant agentic AI security theme to new partner revenue opportunities from Barracuda and Sectigo, here's what you need to know.

Attorney Rob Scott, who has worked with more than a thousand MSPs across North America, breaks down where most MSP agreements fall short, how AI is rewriting the rules on both sides of the table, and why Canadian providers may be further behind than they think.

Canada's MSPs are handing out the smallest raises in the industry, but the data suggests it's less about financial pressure and more about a labor market that's finally giving owners some breathing room. In this episode, Service Leadership's Peter Kujawa breaks down what separates the most profitable firms from the rest - and why the answer has more to do with organizational structure than salary...

Bell Canada's $12-billion, 300-megawatt AI data center in Saskatchewan is the biggest Canadian tech infrastructure story in a while. WBM Technologies' March procurement update has one message for partners: buy now. AWS brings AI sales agents to Partner Central. And Exabeam launches a new MSSP commercial framework.

I could have been writing that distribution was about to be disintermediated since the late 1990s. Direct sales, e-commerce, the cloud, marketplaces -- the argument has always been there. And yet distribution didn't disappear. It evolved, repeatedly. In this solo episode, I work through why the "this finally kills distribution" prediction keeps failing, what distribution actually does that's harde...

Jeff Collins, CEO of WanAware, digs into why MSPs are increasingly accountable for outcomes they can't fully see. As AI workloads and ephemeral infrastructure reshape customer environments without formal network redesigns, the gap between what IT monitors and what the business actually runs on is becoming a real problem - and a real opportunity.

Barracuda's latest threat report draws on more than two trillion IT events to reveal how attackers are exploiting firewalls, rogue devices, and legitimate MSP tools to move through networks. Merium Khalid, director of SOC offensive security at Barracuda, joins the podcast to break down what the data means for MSPs -- and what they can do about it.