Cutting through the noise for Canadian VARs and MSPs
Listen to episodes
60 recent
June 17, 202614 min
Betting on HPE networking: Ben Fallon on self-driving networks, SASE security, and what partners can expect in November
en Fallon, vice president of worldwide channel and partner ecosystem networking sales
At HPE Discover Las Vegas this week, HPE pushed its networking story to the centre of the event – from autonomous AIOps capabilities to a unified SASE platform – and the channel is central to how it plans to execute on some ambitious market share targets.
ChannelBuzz.ca sat down on-site with Ben Fallon, vice president of worldwide channel and partner ecosystem networking sales, to talk about what the announcements mean in practice for Canadian partners.
On the self-driving network vision – a major theme in the general sessions this week – Fallon pointed to HPE Aruba Mist as the concrete proof point: autonomous remediation that partners can toggle on in the dashboard for known network problems, no human click required. “Autonomous networking, with that human deciding where they want that to take place, is already real,” he said.
On the Aruba and Juniper Networks platform integration – a frequent question from partners navigating two management platforms – Fallon described a “build once, deploy twice” philosophy built on microservices architecture, keeping both platforms differentiated by use case while accelerating innovation through cross-pollination rather than forced convergence.
The SASE and security opportunity produced one of the clearest channel statements of the conversation: “Pretty much 100% of our security sales go through partners. There is no other path.” With HPE publicly targeting a $1 billion security business, Fallon said the partner base is nowhere near saturated – and that competency-based incentives within the Partner Ready Vantage program are in place to bring more networking-pedigreed partners into that conversation.
A formal partner program unification is on track for November, with a stated focus on simplifying certification, deal registration, and rebates – and new incentives aimed squarely at winning net-new networking customers away from competing vendors.
Read Full Transcript
Robert Dutt: Today’s episode of In The Channel is brought to you by HPE Discover 2026. Discover runs June 15-18 at the Venetian in Las Vegas. Discover what’s next at hpe.com/discover.
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.
We’re coming to you this week from HPE Discover Las Vegas, where HPE has been rolling out a significant set of announcements across networking, cloud, and AI infrastructure. The embargoes are lifted, and the Partner Growth Summit is in the books, so we can actually get into the substance of things.
My guest is Ben Fallon, vice president of worldwide channel and partner ecosystem networking sales at HPE. Ben came to this role via the Juniper side of the house. He was running global partner and commercial sales for Juniper Networks when the acquisition closed, and moved into leading the combined networking channel earlier this year.
His session at Discover this week was called “Betting on HPE Networking,” which turned out to be a pretty useful frame for a conversation. We got into what self-driving networks actually mean for a partner having a Monday morning conversation with a customer, the Aruba and Mist integration story, the SASE and security opportunity, and what partners can expect when the unified program formally launches in November.
Let’s get right into it. My chat with Ben Fallon.
Ben, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it. I know it’s a busy week on site here, I’m sure.
Ben Fallon: It is. It’s a fun week. We’ve got thousands of partners here, but it’s great to be here with you.
Robert Dutt: For listeners who don’t know you or your role, can you give me a quick rundown on what you do here and how you came to be leading networking channels for HPE?
Ben Fallon: Yeah, so like you said, I lead the global networking channel for HPE. I’ve spent the last 25-odd years in the industry, have led channels for a number of the significant vendors in the market. I was part of the Juniper acquisition, most recently running one of the global sales segments, and in January moved over to lead the channel. We’ve got a fantastic opportunity in front of us.
Robert Dutt: I like that you frame it as you’re part of the Juniper acquisition. You’re not taking entire credit for them acquiring Juniper to get your talent.
Ben Fallon: Absolutely not, no. It was a bonus.
Robert Dutt: Absolutely. Your session this week is called “Betting on HPE Networking.” It’s a pretty confident way of looking at it, and obvious given the milieu. Walk me through what the bet looks like from where you sit. What are you asking partners to bet on, and why now?
Ben Fallon: Yeah, so for me, it’s like when you look at a bet, you’ve got to make sure it’s a good one. No one wants to be playing the lottery. That’s got the worst chance of winning. The more strategy that you actually bring into a game, along with some execution, increases your chance of winning. So for us, what increases the chance of winning with HPE Networking is cross-selling. The more you’re selling across the portfolio, the more you’re going to engage with our account teams, the more problems you’re going to solve for our customers. And also, that’s where you can earn the most amount of rebates, and where the program is really geared towards. So if you make a bet on us, we’re making a bet on you, and you’ll get that back in profitability and customer satisfaction.
Robert Dutt: Cross-selling within networking, across the HPE portfolio, or…
Ben Fallon: All of the above. So you can absolutely cross-sell within the portfolio, whether you’re selling campus and branch, or you want to move into selling more security solutions. Or if you’re selling the hybrid cloud solution portfolio from HPE, you need to start getting involved in networking, because it’s going to expand your opportunity, and we know the network is at the heart of all of these AI workloads.
Robert Dutt: One of the big presentations here is about taking the idea of self-driving networks from vision to reality. For a lot of partners, though, the question is always, “What do I take to my customer?” On Monday morning, how do partners translate that message around self-driving networks to a concrete conversation with staff at a customer, and make it map with their care-abouts?
Ben Fallon: Yeah, sure. Well, look, complexity is only increasing. We know there are talent shortages. We know that it’s almost an impossible task to keep up with all the vulnerabilities that are created through AI. And so you have to have AI as part of your defense. So what’s real? Let’s take something like HPE Mist, where that has autonomous actions now built into the dashboard. So we know for certain problems that come up on the network, we know how to remediate them. We don’t need a person to go and click a button. You can literally switch on a toggle, and off it goes. So autonomous networking, with that human deciding where they want that to take place, is already real.
Robert Dutt: You touch on Mist. One thing I do hear from partners sometimes is with the Aruba and Juniper integration, the two platforms you’ve got with Aruba Central and Mist, moving toward common capabilities, but it sounds like the vision is not to merge. What do you tell the partner who’s been selling one side of that equation or the other? And now that we’ve kind of got one HPE networking, what does it mean in practice, basically?
Ben Fallon: Yeah, well, you touched on self-driving. That’s a unified vision across the entire portfolio. And then we’ve got this strategy of cross-pollination. I think if you look at a lot of acquisitions over the years, they’ve spent so long arguing over maybe not a feature, but how do you actually get to that feature to be capable? And innovation dies when that happens. If you want innovation to actually accelerate, which is what we’re seeing, you take the best from each platform, and because they’re built with a microservices architecture, you can build once, deploy twice, and it becomes this incredible boon of innovation on the platform. So I’d say that is real, because customers are voting with their wallet. So there’s a decent amount of cross-pollination, but each kind of remains aimed towards its focus.
Robert Dutt: That’s it.
Ben Fallon: And really what I see with partners is they see this as a growth play in the same way that we do. This is about finding new opportunity. So they may have served some SMB customers with some on-prem part of the Aruba portfolio. Now they’re wanting to get into some mid-sized lower enterprise, and they’re seeing that Mist has some capability that helps get them there. So it’s a growth play for us, and it’s a growth play for the partner.
Robert Dutt: One of the things that caught my attention in the announcements this week was the unified SASE story – bringing SD-WAN and SSE under one management pane. You guys have talked about a billion-dollar security ambition. Pretty big number. What’s the channel’s role in getting to that? And for a partner who hasn’t historically led with networking security, what’s kind of the on-ramp or the easiest first step?
Ben Fallon: Yeah. So first of all, obviously, we’ve got this universal zero-trust network architecture, which we’re really leaning into. And it’s about bringing together the different parts of the security portfolios from across HPE. And obviously with the Juniper acquisition, that brought an even richer portfolio. For partners, pretty much 100% of our security sales go through partners, so there is no other path. And what we’re really looking for is – we have some very, very capable, specialized partners on security – I think there’s a bigger opportunity for more partners to be selling HPE networking and security solutions. We’re just getting started. We’re already posting some great numbers. We had some incredible growth just last quarter, and there’s still more partners can do. We are not saturated from the partner landscape selling our security portfolio, so lots of opportunity there.
Robert Dutt: Those additional partners in that space – do you see them being primarily folks who come in from other parts of the HPE network, existing specialists in security who maybe haven’t worked with you in the past, a little bit of both? What’s kind of the…
Ben Fallon: It’s a bit of a combination, but you always have to focus. You can’t go everywhere. And where we’re focusing is on partners that have a pedigree in networking with us, because we’re increasingly seeing that there’s a great attach opportunity, and the convergence of the network and security we think is only going to accelerate.
Robert Dutt: Are we at the point of having a formal program, that kind of thing, to bring those partners on board, or to enable and encourage the partners who are in the HPE sphere, but not yet?
Ben Fallon: Yeah, we do. We have, as part of our Partner Ready Vantage program, our broad certifications that are part of that, and that’s how you get to platinum, gold, silver, etc. But then we have competencies, and we have a number of security competencies that partners can build up that capability. They can pick different parts of the portfolio. They could be brand new to networking, but build up competency in security, and that will bring technical competence and capability, but also incremental profitability for them as well.
Robert Dutt: A lot of talk this week, obviously, about the disruption around VMware – customers reconsidering virtualization strategies and how that drives the refresh cycles within the data center on some of the compute and storage hardware, all that kind of good stuff. Does that also create a network refresh opportunity?
Ben Fallon: So there can be opportunities that do arise. I don’t know if that’s the biggest piece that’s driving growth in data center networking right now. I think the AI boom is doing a significant job there, and probably dwarfs anything else. But what you’ll see is announcements this week around how we’re, really from a technology perspective, bringing more parts of the portfolio together from across the hybrid cloud portfolio and networking. Because really, that’s what customers want. They want integrated technology that solves their problems, and that’s what we’re focused on.
Robert Dutt: From a Canadian channel perspective, where do you see the biggest networking opportunities today? I’m going to guess your answer to the last question strongly informs the answer to this one. But what are the biggest opportunities in the back half of the year? And what’s your ask of Canadian partners who are listening to this?
Ben Fallon: Yeah. Well, there are two things I think are the biggest opportunity. One is cross-selling. If you’re selling part of the HPE portfolio today, look at how you can integrate across the stack – whether that’s the full HPE stack, or whether it’s specific to networking. There’s a huge opportunity there, and we’re seeing that partners that have adopted that are growing faster than anyone else. Second, new logos – going after new customers. We’re here to win. We’re here to be number one, and we’ll do that first in wireless networking. And to do that, we need new customers. And you’ll see new incentives and new programs come out in November that will put even more wood behind the arrow – that’s going to make it an incredible opportunity for partners to go and solve the networking crimes of other vendors and bring them into the light of a self-driving network.
Robert Dutt: You guys are obviously deep into the process of integrating programs between legacy HPE and legacy Juniper. We have the November 1 date, I believe, as the formalized launch date for that becoming one. What can partners expect coming out of that at a programmatic level on the networking side?
Ben Fallon: Yeah. So what we’re doing is, first of all, looking at the experience partners have – everything from how they get certified, trying to simplify that and make sure that they’re not having to do multiple layers and duplicative actions. We’re working on the experience when it comes to things like registering a deal, getting rebates, keeping it simple. I think other vendors I’ve seen, you need a bit of a rocket science degree to figure out how all of these different programs and rebates come together. We’re focusing on keeping it simple, we’re focused on driving action, and most of all – which I think is often missed – we’re making sure that our sales teams know how to engage with partners really well and go and win deals together.
Robert Dutt: Good luck on a big week here at Discover, and thanks for taking the time once again.
Ben Fallon: Appreciated. And we love working with our Canadian partners, and just a big thank you to all of them that are on board already.
Robert Dutt: There you have it, Ben Fallon from HPE.
I’d like to thank Ben for his time. We were literally recording between sessions at Discover, and I appreciate him making it work.
And thank you for listening as well. A few things that stuck with me from this one.
The self-driving network story has been fairly abstract for a while, but his Mist example – autonomous remediation actions you can toggle on in the dashboard, no human in the loop for known problem types – it’s the most concrete I’ve heard it get. That’s actually something you can put in front of a customer.
The other thing worth sitting with: “pretty much 100% of our security sales go through partners. There is no other path.” That’s what Ben said. If you’re an HPE networking partner who hasn’t yet built a security practice, and HPE is out there talking about a billion-dollar security ambition, someone is going to capture that opportunity. Make sure it’s you.
And for partners who may have walked away from the Juniper side of the portfolio at acquisition time and have been watching from the sidelines, November is shaping up to be the moment to take another look. Simplified programs, new incentives, a unified experience. It’s worth paying attention to.
If you found the episode useful, we’d love to have you subscribe to the podcast. You’ll find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and most of the major podcast directories. If you have a moment to leave a rating or a review, it always helps.
Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.
June 17, 20268 min
The Buzz: HPE Discover keynote day: self-driving networks take centre stage as HPE makes its AI-era argument
HPE used keynote day at HPE Discover 2026 in Las Vegas to make a clear argument: networking is the foundation of the AI era.
In the afternoon general session, Rami Rahim, HPE’s EVP and GM of Networking, led what was arguably the most channel-actionable session of the week. Using a “Millennium Tower” analogy to frame the risk of building AI on a networking foundation that wasn’t designed for it, Rahim announced four items worth flagging for Canadian partners.
First, Marvis AI cross-pollination: Mist’s Marvis AI engine is coming to the Aruba Central platform, with explicit confirmation that neither platform is being sunset. Second, a unified SASE orchestrator combining SD-WAN and Secure Service Edge under a single console and consistent zero trust policy layer – including a new AI Firewall capability that classifies GenAI application usage as sanctioned, unsanctioned, or tolerated with guardrails like prompt filtering and upload controls. Third, the QFX 5140, a new inference switch purpose-built for distributed AI at the edge, announced this week. And fourth, the HPE Network Migration Program: zero percent financing through HPE Financial Services plus asset trade-in for legacy gear – a deal closer for stalled network refresh conversations.
In the morning keynote, HPE president and CEO Antonio Neri framed the company’s direction around the “agentic enterprise” – autonomous AI agents that act without user input – and warned of the “shadow cost” of agents deployed at scale without IT governance. His GreenLake Intelligence example made it concrete: a system that sees a major all-hands meeting on the calendar and proactively prioritizes video traffic before the strain hits, based on historical telemetry.
In the press Q&A, Neri put a five-month timeline on the Juniper integration – from deal close to fully integrated data centre switching, routing, and campus portfolios – and said HPE is “better than Cisco in many ways, whether it’s campus and branch.”
For Canadian partners, data sovereignty is adding a uniquely local dimension to the private cloud AI and self-driving networks story. More on that in an upcoming In The Channel episode from the show.
Read Full Transcript
This epsisode of In The Channel is brought to you by HPE Discover 2026. Check out our full coverage of the event on ChannelBuzz.ca — you’ll find out HPE Discover 2026 News Hub in the menu bar at the top of the page.
This episode of The Buzz is brought to you by HPE Discover 2026. HPE Discover runs June 15 to 18 at The Venetian in Las Vegas. Discover what’s next at hpe.com/discover.
Welcome to The Buzz from ChannelBuzz.ca, I’m Robert Dutt, today is Wedneday, June 17th, and here’s what’s happening in the channel today.
We covered news elsewhere in an earlier episode of the Buzz, go check that out if you haven’t already. For this one, we’re drilling down on Tuesday’s news from HPE Discover 2026.
We’re right in the middle of the week here, and I want to bring you the highlights from Tuesday – keynote day, the day HPE makes its biggest arguments. And the argument on Tuesday was pretty clear: the network – not the GPU, not the server – is the foundation of the AI era. They had product announcements to back it up. Here’s what went down.
Let’s start with the afternoon, because honestly, the networking general session led by Rami Rahim – who heads up HPE’s networking business as EVP and GM following the Juniper acquisition – was the meatiest part of the day for the channel.
The headline is what HPE is calling self-driving networks. The idea is that AI-driven networking should be able to sense, learn, optimize, and heal itself in real time, without requiring a human to manually troubleshoot every issue.
Rami opened with an analogy I thought landed pretty well. He talked about the Millennium Tower in San Francisco – the luxury condo building that started sinking after construction because the foundation wasn’t built for the environmental load it was sitting on. His point: companies that are building AI on top of networking infrastructure that wasn’t designed for it are making the same mistake. “AI innovation can only move as fast as the network allows” was the line. It’s a good one.
So what did they actually announce? Four things worth flagging.
First: Marvis AI cross-pollination. Mist’s Marvis AI engine is coming to the Aruba Central platform, and Aruba capabilities are moving the other way too. Both platforms get stronger. And the important subtext for the channel: neither platform is being sunset. HPE has been clear about that, and it’s worth saying out loud, because there’s been plenty of speculation since the Juniper deal closed.
Second: a unified SASE orchestrator. HPE is combining its SD-WAN and Secure Service Edge capabilities into a single console with a consistent zero trust policy layer across the enterprise. But the most interesting piece is what they’re calling the AI Firewall – the ability to classify your users’ GenAI applications as sanctioned, unsanctioned and blocked, or tolerated with guardrails like prompt filtering and data upload controls. They demoed it blocking a data exfiltration attempt through a GenAI app in real time. If you’re an MSP and your customers are asking you how they let people use AI tools without losing control of sensitive data, this is a concrete answer to that question.
Third: the QFX 5140. This is a new inference switch – new this week, not a prior announcement – purpose-built for distributed AI workloads at the edge. AI-optimized load balancing and congestion control, designed to connect GPUs at distributed locations. The edge inference angle is where this gets interesting for partners who are thinking about AI at branch or remote sites.
And fourth – and I want to make sure this doesn’t get buried – the HPE Network Migration Program. Zero percent financing through HPE Financial Services, plus asset trade-in for legacy non-self-driving gear. If you’ve got a customer sitting on aging campus or branch infrastructure and the refresh conversation has stalled, this is the conversation starter to go back with.
On proof points: Rami said that over 80 percent of network incidents are now either fully self-remediating or instantly identified with a resolution ready – up from around 50 percent just a few years ago. He had big customers on stage: Ohio State University, the Royal Bank of Canada, Sentara Health. The RBC quote was notable – security is now “job number one” and it has to be managed at the network layer for what they called immutable evidence. That framing works particularly well in regulated industries, which is a big part of the Canadian market.
In the press Q&A afterward, Rami was direct about where the security and networking story goes: “When we say network and security are coming together, it’s not a tagline – it’s an investment strategy.” He also acknowledged that getting customers to trust full network autonomy is an adoption curve – most start with what they call trusted actions, where the system recommends and the human approves, before moving to full automation. I actually think that’s a reassuring thing to say rather than a weakness – it matches how enterprise IT actually works.
Now let’s go back to the morning. CEO Antonio Neri’s keynote set the strategic context for everything Rami built on in the afternoon.
Neri’s frame for the whole show is what he’s calling the agentic enterprise – the shift from applications that respond to user inputs, to autonomous agents that reason across your data and take action. And his point is that infrastructure has to be built to handle that, because agents deployed at scale without IT governance become the new shadow IT problem. He used the phrase “shadow cost” – the risk of an AI-heavy workforce operating outside IT’s visibility and control. That’s a real and near-term problem for your customers, and MSPs are typically the ones who get called when it goes sideways.
The most concrete illustration he gave was GreenLake Intelligence. The example: a major internal announcement gets added to the corporate calendar. The system sees it, anticipates that a large portion of the workforce is about to jump on a video call simultaneously, and proactively prioritizes video traffic before the strain hits – based on historical telemetry, no human in the loop. It’s a small example but it makes the concept real in a way that “agentic infrastructure” as a term doesn’t always do.
In the press Q&A after the keynote, Neri was notably direct on a couple of things. On the Juniper integration, he put a specific number on it: from close of the deal on July 2nd last year, to fully integrated data centre switching, routing, and campus portfolios – five months. That’s a credible timeline, and it matters for partners who’ve been watching to see whether the deal delivers or whether it turns into the kind of slow-moving integration that disrupts customer relationships for years.
And on competitive positioning, he was unusually blunt. Asked about HPE’s networking vision going forward, he said HPE is – direct quote – “better than Cisco in many ways, whether it’s campus and branch.” That’s not something you hear a CEO say casually at a press Q&A.
Now, for the Canadian channel specifically, there’s a layer here that tends to get underplayed in the broader coverage of a show like this.
The conversation in Canada right now isn’t just “upgrade your network because AI needs faster pipes.” It’s “bring AI workloads back on-prem or to Canadian colocation, because you can’t let that data live in a US-based cloud under current conditions.” Data sovereignty is a genuine buying driver right now in a way it hasn’t been before. And HPE’s self-driving networks story, and the broader private cloud AI play, maps onto that buying driver in a way that’s worth having a direct conversation with your customers about.
I’ll have more on the Canadian channel perspective in an upcoming In The Channel episode coming later this week from HPE Discover. But the framing I’d leave you with is this: self-driving networks don’t eliminate the managed services partner – they change what that partner does. The network takes on more of the routine work, but someone still needs to watch the dashboard, make strategic decisions, and bring the human layer. That’s still your business, and if anything it’s a higher-value version of it.
One more thing before we go – and this one’s a little off the beaten path. Someone asked Antonio Neri in the press Q&A who he’s picking for the World Cup. Being Argentine, he said he’d love to see Argentina win again – but acknowledged it’s tougher with an extra game in the format this time around. His final four: England, France, Argentina, and Spain. No bias there whatsoever.
That’s how we’re seeing the headlines from HPE Discover. I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, thanks for listening. Have a great day.
June 17, 20265 min
The Buzz: OpenAI launches partner program, Canadians among GTIA Innovation Award finalists, Cisco study shows looming infrastructure cliff
Today’s headline news for Canadian IT solution providers, aside from HPE Discover:
OpenAI launches official partner program and investment fund: OpenAI has officially introduced its new partner program alongside a $150 million investment fund aimed at expanding its enterprise ecosystem. The partner program is designed to help service providers, system integrators, and consultancies build, deploy, and manage custom AI solutions leveraging OpenAI’s models. According to the company, the initiative will provide partners with dedicated technical support, go-to-market resources, and early access to new product features. The accompanying $150 million fund will focus on investing in early-stage startups that are developing applications on top of the platform.
GTIA names two Canadian Innovate Awards finalists: GTIA announced the six finalists for its inaugural Innovate Awards today, with two Canadian companies among them: GoWest.ai (Toronto, customer-facing AI category, for its CFP Service Desk and Field Technician Assistant) and Nucleus Networks (Vancouver, internal AI category). Winners receive a $20,000 USD cash prize, announced at ChannelCon 2026 on August 5 in San Diego. For more on the awards and what GTIA is looking for, check out our In The Channel conversation with Carolyn April from April 27. And to hear Jennifer Roy of Nucleus on how they’re thinking about AI, that episode is here.
Cisco research highlights Canadian AI network risks: A new study from Cisco underscores an infrastructure cliff for Canadian organizations. The research found that 71 percent of Canadian respondents expect their current network capacity to hit its limits within 36 months due to AI workloads, while 91 percent cited budget constraints as the primary barrier to the required modernization. The data provides a critical conversation point for MSPs: any serious AI strategy must now be preceded by a serious network upgrade strategy.
Okta integrates with Google Cloud AI: Okta has announced it is adding a dedicated identity security layer to Google Cloud AI, while its Auth0 platform is now directly integrating with Gemini for AI agent deployment. According to the company, these integrations are designed to bring enterprise-grade identity governance into the fast-moving AI ecosystem. For Canadian solution providers helping customers experiment with AI tools, this integration provides a mechanism to secure these environments and non-human identities without slowing down developer velocity.
CrowdStrike open AI gateway: CrowdStrike has announced an open gateway ecosystem making Falcon AI’s control plane available across AI infrastructure, with native integrations spanning Databricks, Google Cloud, Azure API Management, and others. Simultaneously, Grant Thornton Advisors announced it is standardizing its managed security service operations on Falcon Complete, replacing legacy MDR with what CrowdStrike is positioning as agentic MDR.
Acumatica channel appointment: Acumatica has appointed Roman Bukary as senior vice president of partner strategy and programs, effective immediately. Bukary brings prior experience in SaaS channel leadership and will be responsible for the strategy and ongoing evolution of Acumatica’s partner ecosystem.
Coro Global Lean IT Day: Coro has launched Global Lean IT Day as an annual observance on June 16, recognizing IT professionals who manage enterprise-level cybersecurity complexity with limited team size and resources. The announcement is tied to ISC2 data showing 59 percent of organizations report critical or significant cybersecurity skills shortages, and Coro says it will release full survey findings ahead of Black Hat USA 2026.
Leaseweb Canada leadership: Leaseweb Canada has named Estelle Azemard as its new chief executive officer. Azemard, who will be based in Montreal, brings more than 16 years of cloud industry experience and will lead the company’s continued growth and strategic expansion in Canada, where data sovereignty and hybrid cloud demand are both rising.
Read Full Transcript
Welcome to The Buzz from ChannelBuzz.ca, I’m Robert Dutt, today is Wednesday, June 17th, and here’s what’s happening in the channel today.
We’ll have a full roundup of everything going down at HPE Discover this week in your feed in about an hour from now, but in the meantime, there’s plenty going on aside from all the news at Discover. Here’s what we think is worth keeping an eye on.
OpenAI has officially introduced its new partner program alongside a $150 million investment fund aimed at expanding its enterprise ecosystem. The partner program is designed to help service providers, system integrators, and consultancies build, deploy, and manage custom AI solutions leveraging OpenAI’s models. According to the company, the initiative will provide partners with dedicated technical support, go-to-market resources, and early access to new product features. The accompanying $150 million fund will focus on investing in early-stage startups that are developing applications on top of the platform. As enterprise demand for generative AI moves from the proof-of-concept phase to production deployment, solution providers are increasingly being asked to navigate the integration complexities of building AI agents and customized models. The launch represents a significant maturation of OpenAI’s channel strategy, moving beyond direct enterprise sales to embrace the third-party ecosystem. Formalizing a channel structure gives Canadian IT providers a clearer framework to monetize AI advisory and implementation services, allowing them to capture more margin as customer demand scales up.
The Global Technology Industry Association – GTIA – has announced the six finalists for its inaugural Innovate Awards, and Canadians have a strong showing. Two of the six companies are Canadian: GoWest.ai, the Toronto-based AI consultancy founded by West McDonald, is a finalist for its CFP Service Desk and Field Technician Assistant in the customer-facing category, while Nucleus Networks, the Vancouver-based MSP that now operates across five Canadian cities, is a finalist in the internal AI solutions category. The remaining four finalists – J&M Solutions, Sentry Technology Solutions, Framework IT, and Thrive – are all US-based. Winners in each category receive a twenty-thousand-dollar cash prize, announced live at the ChannelCon 2026 final keynote on August 5th in San Diego. One-third of the inaugural finalist class being Canadian is significant for a channel community that too often looks south of the border for proof points on what real AI deployment looks like. If you want more context on what GTIA was building toward with these awards, and what “deployed and in production” actually means in practice, we covered exactly that earlier this year on In The Channel with Carolyn April, GTIA’s vice president of research and market intelligence. And to hear how Nucleus thinks about AI inside their own MSP operations, Jennifer Roy joined us on the show in late April. Links to both episodes are in the show notes.
A new study from Cisco underscores a looming infrastructure cliff for Canadian organizations chasing AI ambitions. The research found that 71 percent of Canadian respondents expect their current network capacity to hit its limits within 36 months due to the demands of AI workloads. Even more pressing, 91 percent cited budget constraints as the primary barrier to the required modernization. This data suggests an impending reckoning where artificial intelligence software aspirations simply outpace the physical network capabilities required to move massive data sets. The strain on existing infrastructure will likely manifest in latency issues and stalled proof-of-concept projects. This presents a critical conversation point for Canadian MSPs and infrastructure partners to bring to their customers: any serious AI strategy must now be preceded by a serious network upgrade strategy. It creates a massive opportunity for the channel to re-engage clients on foundational infrastructure, turning a software conversation into a broader hardware and services engagement.
In Brief:
Okta announces dedicated identity secrity layer for Google Cloud
CrowdStrike announced open AI gateway ecosystem.
Acumatica appoints Roman Bukary as its new senior vice president of partner strategy and programs.
Coro launches the first-ever Global Lean IT Day to recognize IT professionals managing enterprise-level cybersecurity with limited resources.
Leaseweb Canada names Estelle Azemard as its new chief executive officer.
Full details and links in the show notes or the blog post.
Remember that we’ll have all The Buzz from HPE Discover in your inbox in about an hour, and shortly after that, be sure to check out today’s In The Channel, where we’ll talk to HPE’s Ben Fallon about the company’s self-driving networks strategy.
And if you haven’t heard it yet, yesterday on The Buzz we took you through all the news from HPE Partner Growth Summit at Discover 2026, and then we followed that up Tuesday with HPE North American channel chief Jeremiah Jenson, going deep on The Power of One, the announcements from the show, and his big reqquest for solution providers. Be sure you check it out if you’re working with Hewlett-Packard Enterprise.
That’s how we’re seeing the headlines today. I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, thanks for listening. Have a great day.
June 16, 202629 min
HPE’s Jeremiah Jenson on the power of one: what the Partner Growth Summit announcements mean for Canadian partners
Jeremiah Jenson, vice president of North Amiercan channels at HPE
This episode is the second half of a two-part conversation with Jeremiah Jenson, vice president of North America Channel and Partner Ecosystem at HPE, recorded ahead of HPE Discover 2026.
Part one – the Discover preview and HPE’s AI infrastructure themes – is Monday’s episode. This half focuses on the announcements made at the HPE Partner Growth Summit on Monday, June 16.
The centrepiece is what HPE is calling the “power of one” – one portfolio, one partner program, one integrated experience. It’s partly organizational messaging, but there’s real substance underneath: HPE spent the past 18 months merging three separate channel organizations (HPE, Aruba, and Juniper) into a single team, and the work of translating that into a coherent partner experience is now coming due.
Concretely, that means Juniper partners integrating into Partner Ready Vantage on November 1 – with tier mapping already defined – along with Zerto, Private Cloud 3000, and Private Cloud 1000 shifting to channel-only routes to market. HPE is also extending free three-year Morpheus software licenses to approximately 600 partners for internal deployment, as much about building hands-on expertise as it is about the virtualization savings.
The piece with the most direct relevance for Canadian MSPs is the new partner-branded services model: partners lead with their own brand, own the customer relationship, and HPE backs them as the invisible infrastructure layer for on-site break-fix and parts logistics.
Jenson specifically calls out Canadian partners’ customer intimacy and regional compliance knowledge as a natural fit for that services-forward model. The “one more mile” close is worth hearing directly.
Tuesday’s episode of The Buzz has the headline news breakdown – check that first if you want the full context.
Read Full Transcript
[Robert Dutt]: This episode of In The Channel is brought to you by HPE Discover 2026, and we’ll be bringing you full event coverage all week right here on ChannelBuzz.ca. Don’t miss it!
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.
Quick note before we dive into this one – if you haven‘t already listened to Tuesday’s episode of The Buzz, I’d really encourage you to go find that in your feed first. On The Buzz, we’ve got the headline rundown on HPE’s Partner Growth Summit announcements – what was announced, what moved, what the numbers are. What we’re doing here is going a level deeper with the person who actually owns this for North America.
Jeremiah Jenson is the vice president of North America Channel and Partner Ecosystem at HPE. He returned to the company about a year ago, after a previous decade-plus that included the Aruba acquisition, a stint at AWS in between, and enough perspective on how the IT channel actually works to fill several episodes on their own. This is part two of a conversation we recorded just ahead of Discover. Part one, the Discover preview and the big AI infrastructure themes, is on the feed Monday if you want the full picture.
This half is about the Partner Growth Summit announcements – what HPE is calling the power of one. One portfolio, one program, one partner experience. And specifically, what it means if you’re a Canadian reseller or MSP trying to figure out where HPE fits into your business right now and into the second half of 2026.
Let’s get right into it. My chat with Jeremiah Jenson.
Jeremiah, good to be chatting with you again.
[Jeremiah Jenson]: Yeah, good to talk to you, Rob. Thanks.
[Robert Dutt]: Let’s get into some of the stuff that was announced at Partner Growth Summit. And I guess let’s start here. You’ve now had about 18 months since the single channel org stood up, and now you’ve got the Juniper integration happening on top of that. From your seat, what did that single organization feel like to execute on? And what’s the one thing that turned out to be harder than expected?
[Jeremiah Jenson]: One, it feels very good. So a little bit of my history – I was here when the Aruba acquisition happened some 10 years ago, and then I was with a different company for a period of time, and I’ve been back for about a year and a half now. And I will say it’s been fantastic to unify the channel in a lot of ways – making it more simple and easier and more profitable for partners to understand and to do business with, but also to take advantage of the power of the portfolio. So what’s it like? Simple answer. It’s great because we have a tremendous amount of channel history and momentum and power from that piece of the business, combined with a tremendous amount of channel history, momentum, and power on the hybrid IT side, and bringing all that together in a unified way. It’s fantastic. Now, the hardest part about that is you’re dealing with big businesses and the devil being in the details. And that’s where we just spend a lot of time working on. While the big themes are unification, ease of doing business, and simplifying things along those lines, the hard part is in the detail. Like, how do we actually want to help accomplish this? And so from that, we’ve had to get a lot of very big voices in the room and get through some very meaningful things on behalf of our customers and our partners.
[Robert Dutt]: I guess, to your point on your history and the long history of HPE in this acquisition space, at least to some degree, you’ve got the muscle memory of doing the Aruba side of things and getting that integrated into the programs. And now it’s sort of doing that at a different timeline, at a different scale with Juniper.
[Jeremiah Jenson]: It’s true. We have the muscle memory of acquisitions and some history of that. I think the one thing that is really just awesome to see is how people have come together with customer and partner being front and center, and how are we iterating and innovating on their behalf, and just a unified goal of how do we move really fast? Because the opportunity in that market is too big for us to miss. And so there’s really this motivation to move very, very fast and very quickly. And that’s why we’re ahead of our integration targets. We’re very pleased with where we are in that business, unifying the channel, unifying a bunch of business processes. You’re seeing that in the programmatic announcements we made. So it’s nice to be able to take advantage of that muscle memory. We’ve done the training, now we’re doing it for real.
[Robert Dutt]: So the November 1 date is concrete, and the tier mapping for the Juniper roll into Partner Ready Vantage is clear – Elite Plus becomes Platinum, etc. But what about the Canadian partner today who’s a Juniper partner, but has never really sold HPE server or storage? What does that reality look like in practice? Is there a runway and enablement in place to help bring those folks on board? And obviously, I assume you want as many of them transacting as far across the portfolio as possible – what does it look like as the two truly become one?
[Jeremiah Jenson]: Absolutely. So one, we want them participating across the full portfolio. One program gives partners a very clear, unified path across networking, cloud, and AI. And this move that we’ve made, it’s a major simplification that gives partners a more consistent way in which they can engage across those three – whether that’s networking, cloud, or AI. And it also paints a very clear opportunity in terms of how they can take the broader portfolio to their customers to solve those business problems. I always want to keep that customer front and center, and that they have a unique opportunity to solve a broader set of customer challenges. And so the value there is that partners can work across more of the portfolio without navigating disconnected experiences. And I also want to say, we’re not forcing anybody to become something that they’re not. This is an opportunity for them, and we’ve made it simple for them to capture that opportunity and to grow their business with HPE.
[Robert Dutt]: It’s always a balancing act, right? You want to incentivize, but you don’t want to push too hard because that potentially breaks partner business models or creates challenges. But at the same time, it’s like – we’ve got all this stuff over here too. You want to sell it? That’d be cool.
[Jeremiah Jenson]: Yeah, look, I’m not twisting anybody’s arm here. I think the opportunity speaks for itself. And I think our results in the market also speak for themselves. The opportunity is there, and that opportunity stands on its own. Whether you want to invest in an AI practice or whether you have an opportunity to help customers solve a problem with compute, we have the right enablement and want to come alongside that partner and take advantage of that opportunity and help that customer. But that opportunity is real and right there for them now. The value of the opportunity, the capability of our products, how that’s meeting the market with customers – that speaks for itself. So the opportunity is there, and I want to harness it. I want to take advantage of it with our mutual partners.
[Robert Dutt]: We seem to be getting a little bit of a drumbeat going in terms of HPE products being declared channel-only in terms of go-to-market. Last year with VME Essentials, this year it’s Zerto, PC 3000, PC 1000. There’s clearly a strategic logic here beyond just adding product to the list. What’s the underlying principle on what makes a product the right candidate to be channel-only? And what does it mean for a partner that these products will only come through them and their peers?
[Jeremiah Jenson]: Well, I mean, there’s a couple of things there. Certainly we’re expanding areas where partners can lead, and that creates additional room for growth, both for them and for us. And it’s a clear signal that HPE is expanding in areas where – like I said – where partners can lead, but especially in areas that are core to the market, whether that’s private cloud or virtualization with this great VM reset that we’ve got going on, or whether that’s data protection with some of our Zerto solutions and ransomware protection, things along those lines. So this gives partners more ownership and opportunity while also creating more room for them to differentiate. I don’t want a homogeneous channel. Each partner has not made the same investments. And so each partner has a level of capability, a market that they serve, and has made investments to serve their customers in the right way. And so this partner-led opportunity with these products gives them not only ownership of the opportunity, but clear ways in which they can differentiate by investing in these product sets. So it’s an area of channel leadership. And then finally, it also speaks to our channel heritage. We trust the channel. We partner with them very closely, and we see an opportunity for us to grow our collective business by allowing them to lead.
[Robert Dutt]: To your point on the non-homogeneous nature of the channel, I think that’s represented well throughout the program and what you guys are talking about in terms of being open to embracing and facilitating multi-partner engagements when the customer needs support from different specialists in different areas to drive those outcomes.
[Jeremiah Jenson]: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think this helps partners build higher-value practices. I don’t need them just to sell another product. We have lots of products that are available for sale, but this helps them see and build a higher-value practice, whether that’s the services capability that they can bring in – because we all know customers need help transforming to new and more efficient ways of doing business in a hybrid IT environment. So it creates more ways for partners to move up that value chain, whether that’s through their services or deeper expertise that they want to build. And it matters because that creates long-term growth. As they become more valuable to the customer through their differentiated capabilities, differentiated services, or the distinct and unique value that they bring to their customers, it creates long-term growth. It helps build something that outlasts not only them, but us.
[Robert Dutt]: Part of the announcements is you’re giving up to 600 partners free Morpheus licenses to run their own environments. It’s interesting – it really sounds like it’s saying, sort of an opportunity to become your own reference customer, to drink your own champagne, to eat your own dog food, whatever your preferred analogy is there. What are the expectations around how partners use those capabilities? Is it about demos? Is it about building their own expertise? Is it about getting a chance to do some of that transformation and reinvention of their own infrastructure and tech stack so they can speak more clearly to customers about what’s possible?
[Jeremiah Jenson]: Yeah, I mean, what is going on in the virtualization market is impacting everybody – the entire channel. And I don’t mean just how various companies are going to market. It’s impacting everybody, and that includes our partners who are customers of a lot of different companies. And there’s real power in our portfolio. We see a clear opportunity not only to invest in the channel with those partners who have invested in us, those partners who have invested in the virtualization competency – we want to invest back in them with the capability that our portfolio brings to them. So these VME licenses offer them an opportunity to reset their virtualization environment and set themselves up for continued modernization. And what better story to take to their customers than, “We know this works for you because we did it ourselves.” So drinking their own champagne is a very good analogy there. And that is our expectation – not only to help partners realize the true value of the portfolio, but also enable them to modernize and take that story to their customers. And there’s no better way than to say, “I’ve done it myself and here were the outcomes that we saw.”
[Robert Dutt]: Given the scale of the HPE channel, I’m guessing there are going to be a lot of hands going up for those 600 slots.
[Jeremiah Jenson]: Well, look, what we see in VME, the Morpheus software suite, is nothing short of impressive. I’ve got a history of working with and working for companies that move very fast, that make decisions fast and execute very quickly. What I have seen in this Morpheus VME space is impressive – it’s like nothing I’ve ever seen. The roadmap, our ability to execute against that roadmap, to produce enterprise-quality and just phenomenal products at pace and at scale is incredibly impressive. And so partners that are working with VME and Morpheus today are continuing to be blown away by the capability and the roadmap. And for those partners that haven’t taken advantage of that, please take a moment for yourself and look at what we’re doing here. It’s a fantastic product and a fantastic solution to help customers with what they need most – cost savings while setting the on-ramp to modernization.
[Robert Dutt]: Especially in a moment where perhaps acquiring new tech is not going to be as easy as it has been from a hardware point of view.
[Jeremiah Jenson]: Exactly. In a moment where everybody is looking for ways to save dollars, you can cut virtualization costs by up to 90% with this product. It has very simple per-socket pricing. And so what better opportunity not only to help our partners, but to get that message out to their customers.
[Robert Dutt]: In terms of channel penetration, is this a fairly mature, realized market, or is there still a lot of greenfield out there on the channel side?
[Jeremiah Jenson]: I mean, there’s a massive opportunity. You think about the size of that virtualization market – the size of the VM reset, the virtual machine market – it’s huge. So there is a tremendous amount of headroom in this market. There is a tremendous amount of opportunity for all of us. And we have to turn that opportunity into reality. And that’s happening now.
[Robert Dutt]: Moving on to partner-branded services – this is one that really caught my interest, and I think is going to catch the interest of a lot of folks, especially those who are in the MSP mode. Can you walk me through what it actually looks like for a Canadian MSP? They’re putting their name on a support offering, HPE is the invisible backbone. What does it look like in terms of the customer call, billing, and what does HPE get out of participating in this model where it’s the partner and not HPE that’s the primary brand?
[Jeremiah Jenson]: First of all, a clear thing with partners is they have a level of customer understanding – or I often say they have a level of customer intimacy that I could never replace and don’t intend to. So partner-branded services really helps us service the customer faster with a very valuable piece of that equation, and that’s the partner. So allowing a partner to take first-call support, first-call services, and to be able to capitalize on that customer knowledge and that depth of history and customer intimacy that they have – what we have found is that just produces a better customer outcome. So E+ in North America is one of those first partners that has taken advantage of this, and we’re really just enthused and excited about what’s coming through at the customer level. That’s the piece that I want to put front and center – customers have a need for a faster answer, a faster path to resolution, and partners are part of that. And so this acceleration of this program is really helping.
From a Canadian standpoint, look, who knows more about the Canadian market than a Canadian partner serving a Canadian customer and understanding their requirements? I often say Canadians have forgotten more about Canada than I’ll ever know, and I have a tremendous amount of respect for that. So the opportunity to deploy that knowledge front and center with a customer – no better opportunity. And it plays especially important, I think, in a market like Canada where there are so many differences regionally. In any large market there are regional differences, but there are real and meaningful differences here.
[Robert Dutt]: Yeah, I mean, let’s not pretend that the United States and Canada are identical, because they’re not. There are nuances, there are real and meaningful differences.
[Jeremiah Jenson]: And whether that’s compliance or any other kind of nuance, those differences are real at the customer level. And so the opportunity for partners to service customers with that level of knowledge – whether that’s compliance or regional nuance – that speaks to the power of the channel. And it’s phenomenal to see this announcement come to life and see partners taking advantage of it.
[Robert Dutt]: So how quickly do you anticipate it expanding to a broader number of potential service provider partners who are in that partner-branded services mode with you?
[Jeremiah Jenson]: I think it really is incumbent upon us to be very deliberate about what we build with our partners. I think in the past, sometimes partners get very focused on what can I sell today. And I think the opportunity with partner-branded services is how can we build something that outlasts all of us? How can we build a foundation of services? Because once you have that services capability and once you are effectively taking that first call and you are not only the provider but you are the solution – you are the solution for when things need to be fixed – that stickiness becomes very real. So we have to really think about what do we want to build? What is the services capability that we’re building together? And from that, that will create the pace at which we grow. But there are very large partners, very sizable MSPs, as well as what I would call MSPs who have very specialized capability that want to take advantage of this.
[Robert Dutt]: Moving on to storage – you’ve got the 15% front-end takeout rebate on top of existing rebates for competitive storage displacement. That’s a notable number. How should a Canadian reseller read that? I’ve heard that it runs at least through calendar year, but is this a period-based incentive or is it a signal that HPE is ready to play offense on storage for the long haul?
[Jeremiah Jenson]: It’s the latter. We are very much on the front foot when it comes to our storage portfolio. The product is fantastic. The storage portfolio specifically is in a place that I’ve never seen it before in decades of history. And that’s phenomenal. And the results we have seen over the past several quarters – it has been several quarters of really good growth and great success here in North America. And now is the time to pour gasoline on that fire. So this is a signal of not only our existing success, but how can we be even more on the front foot and take that to our partners who want to lean in with us. Now is the time to lean in with storage and our hybrid cloud offerings and really accelerate – how we go and acquire new customers and grow that base for the future. There’s a phenomenal opportunity with our product, but there’s a bigger opportunity in what customers are demanding, and we have the right product to meet it.
[Robert Dutt]: So November 1, one experience. That’s a big promise. We’ve got one portal, one deal registration system, one development fund. There’s a lot in there. For a partner who’s been managing different login credentials and different MDF processes, what’s actually noticeably different on November 2 in terms of their relationship and running their business with HPE?
[Jeremiah Jenson]: Yeah. I mean, I say this a lot because it’s real – I spend an inordinate amount of my time thinking about how do we simplify? How do we make ourselves easier to do business with? And so one experience is really about making it easier for partners to engage, to move faster, and to grow at an accelerated rate. And it matters because partners want speed, but speed comes from consistency and getting rid of some of the administrative overhead that is in place. So this is all about reducing friction in the places where partners feel it the most. Having to log out of one website and into another – common tools, common onboarding processes, contracting, deal flow, deal registration, things along those lines. This is really all about making it easier for partners to engage and easier for us to do business together. It pains me and keeps me awake at night if they’ve got to log into multiple websites – it’s just time. It’s impacting the time in which we can get to customers and service customers. So that’s what they should expect: a common set of tools, common contracting, common deal flow, easier to engage, and moving faster with HPE.
[Robert Dutt]: We’ve heard that this is going to be AI-enabled in terms of the partner portal and partner tools and experiences. Can you tell me a little bit about what that means today, as well as – without giving away too much of the secret sauce – what you’re thinking about in terms of what AI-enabling the partner experience is going to look like for your partners in the long run?
[Jeremiah Jenson]: Yeah, I mean, we’re a leader in the AI market and we have a long history of drinking our own champagne, as we talked about earlier. And so there’s an opportunity to deploy some of our AI tools in customer- and partner-facing experiences – whether that’s websites and things along those lines. As an example – and I don’t have a very explicit example in terms of this specific process – but one of the mental models that we have is: sometimes you’ve got to send an email to an email alias when it’s a repetitive process, things along those lines. Agentic AI and the AI tools and infrastructure that we produce for customers every day can help solve those questions immediately. So how do we put some of our AI tools into that workflow and solve at pace and do things much, much faster – so we’re not waiting on someone to type up a response from some anonymous alias. And while that’s a very basic example, you begin to think about other opportunities in terms of repetitive processes that drive partners crazy. How can we simplify and make things move faster?
[Robert Dutt]: Yeah, I was going to say – it may be a basic example, but you can imagine how that multiplies over time and over opportunities and over deals when it’s repeated again and again.
[Jeremiah Jenson]: It’s really about solving real problems. We can talk high and mighty and pie in the sky and AI this and AI that, but it’s really about what, at the end of the day, some human sitting in front of a desk is experiencing. It’s solving real-world problems with technology and capability. And it’s that real-world approach to the business that we’re taking.
[Robert Dutt]: On the distribution landscape – we heard recently you’ve named TD SYNNEX and Ingram Micro as the two globals with local augmentation. Obviously those two are very strong players in the Canadian market. But how does distribution look now in Canada, and how do you see it looking in terms of additional niche or boutique players to round out the strategy?
[Jeremiah Jenson]: So distribution is a core part of how we go to market and a core part of our overall channel strategy. The global announcement of Ingram Micro and TD SYNNEX – of course they’re both headquartered here in North America and we do a lot of business with them, and we’re excited about the plans that we have together. Stay tuned. You’ll see additional announcements in terms of how we think about that landscape and how we’re accelerating with our other distribution partners. So more to come there in the very near term.
[Robert Dutt]: All right. A teaser. I love that. Last one for me. There’s a lot in these announcements and partners are going to be reading a lot of headlines, listening to a lot of stuff – probably have already, as they’re listening to this. But what’s the one big thing you would most want a Canadian partner – reseller, MSP, wherever they fit in the equation – to actually understand and act on from what HPE is announcing at Partner Growth Summit?
[Jeremiah Jenson]: I’ll answer it this way – just who I am as a person, just my personal hobby. I love long-distance trail running. I’m an ultramarathoner. And I always think about: can I run one more mile? And I’m not saying that everybody should go out there and sign up for a 50-mile or 100-mile race, but I do think about, can I run one more mile? And so to bring that back to what is my ask of whether you’re an MSP or partner or something along those lines – with a portfolio of our size, what’s one more thing that you can take to your customer? Is that data center networking? Is that moving from Juniper into the wireless space with some of our Aruba products? Is that compute? Is it that I’ve sold storage, but now I want to talk about data protection with Zerto – can I do one more? And so as we think about Discover and the announcements we’ve made this week and the momentum we have with our portfolio, that’s what I want to ask. Can you do one more? What is that one more thing that we might be able to do together that will help you grow your business, help your customer solve another business problem, and help us accomplish our mutual goals?
[Robert Dutt]: All right. I think that’s a reasonable ask. I appreciate you taking the time. Once again, thanks for walking us through some of the details of what was announced at Partner Growth Summit, and have a great rest of the week.
[Jeremiah Jenson]: Always good to talk to you, Rob. Thanks.
[Robert Dutt]: There you have it – Jeremiah Jenson, vice president of North America Channel and Partner Ecosystem at HPE. I’d like to thank Jeremiah for his time and for a pretty candid look at how HPE is thinking about the partner community as these organizations – HPE and Juniper – settle into one.
Thank you for listening. There’s a lot to process in these announcements, but the thing I keep coming back to is the frame that Jeremiah closed with – the “one more mile” idea. He’s an ultramarathoner, and the ask he’s making of the Canadian channel isn’t to boil the ocean. It’s to ask yourself if there’s one more HPE product that belongs in front of your customers. Data center networking if you’re already doing compute. Zerto if you’re already doing virtualization. Partner-branded services if you’re an MSP looking to own more of the customer relationship. One more mile, compounded across a partner base, is how the power of one actually becomes real.
We’re going to have a lot more from HPE Discover through the rest of the week, including an on-site recap coming later. So keep an eye on your feed. You’ll find the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and most of the major podcast directories. And if you’re finding the show useful, a rating or a review genuinely helps other people in the Canadian channel find us.
Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.
June 16, 20267 min
The Buzz: HPE resets partner economics and expands channel-only territory at Partner Growth Summit
Today’s headline news for Canadian IT solution providers:
HPE’s Partner Growth Summit served as the channel keynote kickoff for HPE Discover 2026 in Las Vegas on Monday, organized around the company’s “Power of One” theme – the ongoing effort to unify its HPE, Aruba, and Juniper channel organizations under a single program, experience, and portfolio. The deeper programmatic story is covered in this week’s In The Channel with Jeremiah Jenson. But Monday’s keynote also delivered a package of near-term operational and commercial changes that matter to Canadian solution providers right now.
Quote validity extends to 30 days, effective June 16th. HPE is moving its standard quote validity from 14 to 30 days for compute, storage, and GreenLake. Partner operations lead Mark Bakker explained it plainly: extreme commodity cost volatility in the first half of fiscal 2026 forced the two-week window. That’s moderating enough now for HPE to stand behind pricing for a full month. HPE also introduced Smart Choice SKUs – competitively priced configurations aligned to best available supply – and Smart Models in OCA, workload-specific templates updated continuously against current inventory.
Two new financing tools. HPE Financial Services announced a 150% increase in approved partner credit lines to support larger deal proposals. The company also highlighted its 90/9 offer – no payments for 90 days, then 1% monthly payments for nine months – which has been in market since earlier this year and is particularly relevant now for customers whose budget cycle doesn’t align with their deployment timeline.
Channel-only territory expands significantly. Building on last year’s VM Essentials channel-only move – which HPE says generated 700+ new partners and 1,300+ certifications in twelve months – HPE is adding HPE Private Cloud PC 3000, HPE Private Cloud PC 1000, and HPE Zerto software to the channel-only list. Partners earning the private cloud virtualization competency can also apply for free three-year VME licenses to deploy internally, and a new migration assistance program defers VME license costs until customer workloads are actually running on HPE virtual machines, eliminating the “double bullet” cost of mid-migration transition.
Partner Branded Services: the managed services bridge. Simon Ewington, HPE’s senior vice president of worldwide channel and partner ecosystem, used the keynote to formally highlight Partner Branded Services – a model enabling eligible partners to sell and deliver HPE infrastructure support under their own brand, with HPE providing break-fix, parts logistics, and engineering support invisibly in the background. Ewington called it “the bridge that many of you have been waiting for to managed services.” The program launched in April and is actively onboarding its first large partner.
Competitive storage incentives start July 1st. A new competitive storage takeout program offers 15% front-end margin on top of existing rebates for deals that displace a competitor’s storage product.
Partner Day One lands November 1st. HPE is branding its unified experience rollout “Partner Day One” – a single portal, digitized onboarding under three days, unified deal registration, and one MDF program, all effective November 1st. Mark Bakker’s operations team has already consolidated four quoting tools into one, cut support response times from 40 to 8 seconds, and improved payment accuracy from 84% to 98% – operational gains that will translate into the partner-facing portal experience later this year.
For the full conversation on Juniper integration, channel-only strategy, and what the unified program means for Canadian partners, listen to this week’s In The Channel with HPE’s Jeremiah Jenson.
Read Full Transcript
This episode of The Buzz is brought to you by HPE Discover 2026. HPE Discover runs June 15 to 18 at The Venetian in Las Vegas. Discover what’s next at hpe.com/discover.
Welcome to The Buzz from ChannelBuzz.ca, I’m Robert Dutt, today is Tuesday, June 16th, and here’s what’s happening in the channel today.
HPE’s Partner Growth Summit in Las Vegas wrapped yesterday as the channel kickoff for HPE Discover 2026, and there was enough ground covered in the keynote that I’m going to take a bit more time than usual today. If you work with HPE at all – compute, storage, networking, virtualization – there are several things in here that affect how you do business with them, and some of them take effect today.
HPE is extending its standard quote validity from 14 days to 30 days for compute, storage, and GreenLake, effective today.
The backstory matters here. HPE’s partner operations lead Mark Bakker was direct on stage about why quotes were shortened in the first place. Commodity costs went through a period of extreme volatility in the first half of this year – HPE literally couldn’t hold pricing for more than two weeks. That volatility has moderated enough now that HPE is willing to stand behind a full 30-day quote. For partners who’ve been managing customer decision timelines that rarely fit a two-week window – which is most of them – this means fewer expired quotes, less rework, and more actual selling time.
HPE also introduced two supply chain tools aimed at reducing the gap between what you quote and what actually ships: Smart Choice SKUs, which are competitively priced configurations built around best available inventory; and Smart Models in OCA, which are preconfigured workload-specific templates that update continuously against current supply.
On the financing side, HPE Financial Services had two items. The first is new: a 150% increase in approved credit lines for partners, giving you more headroom to propose and win larger configurations. The second is a tool that’s been available since earlier this year but is worth highlighting in this context: the 90/9 offer. No payments for 90 days, then 1% monthly payments for nine months after that. The pitch is straightforward – customers who are committed to buying but whose budget cycle doesn’t match their deployment timeline now have a bridge.
HPE continues to expand what it routes exclusively through the partner channel, and the additions this year are significant.
Some quick context: last year at Discover, HPE moved VM Essentials – its virtualization platform – to channel-only. The results they reported Monday: more than 700 additional partners are now selling VME software compared to twelve months ago, and over 1,300 partners have taken the associated certifications since November. HPE is treating those numbers as validation and doubling down.
This year’s channel-only additions: HPE Private Cloud PC 3000, HPE Private Cloud PC 1000, and HPE Zerto software. That’s a meaningful slice of HPE’s private cloud and disaster recovery portfolio now locked to the channel. If you’re in the business of helping customers modernize workloads and protect data – the territory most MSPs already play in – HPE is putting margin and exclusivity behind you in those conversations.
Two more items in this space. For partners who want to actually deploy VME inside their own IT environment before taking it to customers, HPE is offering free three-year software licenses – nominal support charge only – to approximately 600 partners who earn the private cloud virtualization competency this year. That’s HPE backing partners to practice what they preach. And for customers who are hesitating on VME because they’re still mid-migration from another hypervisor, there’s now a migration assistance program that defers VME software license costs until workloads are actually running on HPE virtual machines. It eliminates what one speaker described as the “double bullet” – paying for two platforms at the same time during a transition. That’s a real barrier removed.
This one will resonate most with MSPs – and with partners thinking seriously about becoming one.
HPE has launched Partner Branded Services. Eligible partners can now sell and deliver HPE infrastructure support entirely under their own brand. HPE stays invisible, providing on-site break-fix, parts logistics, and deeper engineering support through a channel-only backing arrangement. The partner is the customer’s first call. The partner manages the relationship. The partner books the recurring revenue.
Simon Ewington, HPE’s senior vice president of worldwide channel and partner ecosystem, was explicit about the intent. He called it “the bridge that many of you have been waiting for to managed services.” That’s not spin – it’s HPE publicly acknowledging that its partners’ business models are shifting toward services-led, and building commercial infrastructure around that shift rather than working against it. The program launched quietly in April. HPE is onboarding its first large partner this week.
Starting July 1st, HPE is launching a competitive storage takeout program. Partners who displace a competitor’s storage product will receive 15% front-end margin on top of existing rebates. It’s targeted, it’s aggressive, and it’s designed specifically to push partners into competitive accounts rather than just protect existing HPE business.
Last item, a bit more forward-looking. HPE is calling its unified experience rollout “Partner Day One,” landing November 1st.
What that means in practice: a single partner portal covering the full HPE, Aruba, and Juniper portfolio. A fully digitized onboarding and contracting process, with enrollment time dropping from weeks to under three days. Unified deal registration. A single MDF program spanning the full portfolio.
Mark Bakker, who leads the operations team building all of this, shared some numbers that give you a concrete sense of where the backend is already heading. His team has consolidated four separate quoting and pricing tools into one. AI-assisted support response times have dropped from 40 seconds to 8 seconds. Partner compensation payment accuracy has improved from 84% to 98%. Those are internal numbers today – but they’re the foundation for what partners will start experiencing directly through the portal starting November 1st.
For the full picture on what HPE’s “Power of One” strategy actually means for your business – and there’s considerably more to it than what I’ve covered here – check out today’s In The Channel. It’s part two of my conversation with Jeremiah Jenson, vice president of North America channel and partner ecosystem at HPE, recorded this week at Discover.
Jenson walks through the Juniper integration in detail: how partner tiers are mapping across programs when everything merges November 1st, what the unified compensation structure looks like, and which Juniper specializations convert to HPE competencies. He also gets into the philosophy behind the channel-only decisions and what HPE sees as the biggest cross-portfolio opportunity for partners heading into fiscal 2027. If you’re evaluating your HPE relationship heading into the second half of the year – whether you’re deep in compute, just starting to look at networking, or somewhere in between – that episode is worth your time.
That’s how we’re seeing the headlines from HPE Discover. I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, thanks for listening. Have a great day.
June 15, 202618 min
AI starts with the network: an HPE Discover 2026 preview with Jeremiah Jenson
Jeremiah Jenson, vice president of North Amiercan channels at HPE
HPE Discover 2026 is underway in Las Vegas this week – June 15-18 at the Venetian Convention and Expo Center – and by Jeremiah Jenson’s account, it’s the biggest Discover yet. The event is oversubscribed, with partner demand he describes as unlike anything HPE has seen before.
Jenson is HPE’s vice president of North America channel, overseeing partner strategy across the United States and Canada. We sat down with him ahead of the show opening to preview the event for Canadian partners – whether they’re on the ground in Vegas or following along from home.
The headline theme of Discover 2026 is “architecting AI, starting with the network.” CEO Antonio Neri’s keynote frames that out on Tuesday morning, and it’s a deliberate positioning: the network isn’t the last thing you figure out when deploying AI, it’s the foundation that determines whether AI delivers real outcomes or stays a proof of concept. For channel partners, Jenson says that framing opens up more strategic conversations with customers around readiness, performance, and security.
On the partner side, the week kicks off with the Partner Growth Summit on Monday – a dedicated partner day before the main conference begins. This year’s theme is “The Power of One”: one portfolio, one program, one integrated experience through HPE’s Partner Ready Vantage. Jenson sees it as a signal of HPE’s direction on program simplification and consolidation.
Jenson’s advice to partners watching this week: don’t try to absorb everything. Pick one area – data center networking, cloud and hybrid cloud storage, or AI acceleration – and go deep on it.
A follow-up episode focused on the specific partner program announcements out of Discover is coming later this week.
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.
HPE Discover 2026 opens this morning in Las Vegas, running from June 15 to 18 at the Venetian Convention and Expo Center, and if you’re on the ground in Vegas today you’re probably settling in to the Partner Growth Summit as you’re listening to this.
The headline theme this year is “architecting AI, starting with the network.” HPE’s Antonio Neri takes the main stage tomorrow morning with that framing, and it’s a deliberate point of view. The network isn’t the last thing you figure out when you’re deploying AI – in HPE’s view, it’s the foundation. That’s worth unpacking.
Joining me today is Jeremiah Jenson, vice president of North America Channel at HPE, who oversees partner strategy across the United States and Canada. I chatted with Jeremiah ahead of the show, so nothing embargoed is in here – none of the announcements are really covered. We’ll get to those in future episodes. This one is about setting the stage: who’s there, what the big themes are, how the week flows, and what Canadian partners following along from home should be paying attention to.
Let’s get right into it – my chat with Jeremiah Jenson.
Jeremiah, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it.
Jeremiah Jenson: Yeah, thanks Robert.
Robert Dutt: So for listeners who may not know you, can you give us a quick rundown of your role at HPE, and especially what that means in the context of an event like Discover this week?
Jeremiah Jenson: Yeah, well, I lead HPE’s channel strategy across North America – both the United States and Canada – and that gives me a very close, direct view into what partners care about heading into Discover. My role is really to understand what partners care about and how to help them grow. I have responsibility across the full portfolio of Hewlett Packard Enterprise – compute, our hybrid IT business, all the associated software components, the networking business, and the services pieces as well. I really like to help connect our strategy to partners for ultimate delivery to customers.
Robert Dutt: Let’s start with the event itself. It’s your flagship event, and it’s a big one. What does the scale look like, and particularly from where you’re sitting and what you’re responsible for, what kind of partner presence are you expecting – both in general and on the Canadian side? Do you have a sense of what the Canadian contingent looks like, both on-site in Vegas and watching virtually?
Jeremiah Jenson: Yeah, I mean, it’s our flagship event and it’s always a major moment for the partner ecosystem across our portfolio, which includes networking, cloud, and AI. Massive event – and I would just say, first off, we’re oversubscribed. Demand for the event has been unlike anything we’ve ever seen. I have a fair bit of tenure with HPE and there is just a tremendous amount of interest, and I think that stems from the themes we’re bringing forward at Discover – helping not only our customers but partners shape and plan for the upcoming months. It’s a big moment for the HPE ecosystem.
Canadian partners play a huge role. They’re a huge part of North America, a huge part of the market. Canada is a differentiated market, and I think they’re paying quite a bit of attention to this event because it helps them shape where they want to focus next – where do they want to make that next investment, what is the next opportunity for them to help serve their customers.
Robert Dutt: I don’t want to get ahead of any of the announcements to come, but Antonio Neri’s keynote on Tuesday is publicly framed as “architecting AI starts with your network” – and that feels like a pretty deliberate point of view. It’s not just saying AI is everywhere, it’s saying the network is where AI actually gets built, actually runs, actually lives. What’s driving that framing from HPE’s perspective, and how does it translate into what channel partners are being asked to bring to their customers?
Jeremiah Jenson: AI is a huge opportunity – it’s part of every conversation, it’s part of everyday life at this point. And what we’re seeing is that customers need the right foundation in place to move from interest to real outcomes. Now is the time to build that underlying foundation, and AI success really depends on the quality, security, and intelligence of the underlying infrastructure – and in particular, the networking. Whether that’s networking for AI or AI for networking, for partners that creates a bigger opportunity to lead conversations around readiness, security, and performance.
Robert Dutt: How have you seen that conversation around AI with partners evolve since the last time HPE brought partners together for Discover?
Jeremiah Jenson: If anything, the AI opportunity has accelerated. In years past there may have been questions about where AI would ultimately land, what the impact would ultimately be. And I think the thing that has changed – or maybe the right word is accelerated – is that AI isn’t a future opportunity anymore, it is a current opportunity. It is happening now, and now is the time to talk to your customers about the business outcome they intend to drive with AI. And that has just accelerated, whether that’s in networking as we discussed, whether it’s in some of our storage capabilities that we’ve brought to market, or generalized compute or high-performance compute. The opportunity has done nothing but accelerate.
Robert Dutt: Partners are kicking off the week with the Partner Growth Summit today – later in the day on Monday – before the main conference even starts, and the general session theme is “The Power of One.” What’s the thinking behind having that dedicated partner day, and what does it mean in terms of how you’re trying to communicate with the channel right now?
Jeremiah Jenson: I love Partner Growth Summit because, first, it speaks to how sincere we are about partnerships – partners are part of our DNA, they’re part of who we are and how we go to market. The Power of One theme is really the emphasis on one portfolio, one program, and one integrated experience through Partner Ready Vantage. It’s a signal about where we’re going – with a portfolio of our size and a channel of our size, we’re on a constant quest for simplification. Partner Growth Summit is really a dedicated moment for partners to focus on what HPE’s strategy means to them, how they can implement that strategy within their business, and it’s about making HPE easier to work with, more profitable to grow with, and more efficient to operate within.
Robert Dutt: Certainly the idea of having a partner conference attached to a big customer-centric event like Discover is common practice across the industry. But it’s interesting that instead of “partner summit,” “partner conference,” or “partner day” – the names you see elsewhere – it seems quite intentional to have the word “growth” in Partner Growth Summit. Can you speak to that decision?
Jeremiah Jenson: Absolutely. Partners are powering our growth – they’re part and parcel to who we are, and how and where we’re growing. While dedicated partner days might in some cases be fairly standard, ours is very deliberate. We start with the partner strategy, from there into the broader company strategy, and then into deeper technical and customer conversations. From my standpoint, that growth element starts with the partner – painting the areas of strategic growth and strategic investment, where we are going together as one, in the markets that we want to help take advantage of.
Robert Dutt: Walk us through how the week actually plays out for someone on the ground here in Vegas. We start off Monday with the Partner Growth Summit, the main conference runs Tuesday through Thursday – what’s the rhythm and shape of the week, and what should people be watching for as it unfolds?
Jeremiah Jenson: So the week starts with Partner Growth Summit on Monday – that starts with the partner strategy, how we’re simplifying and consolidating our programs, driving efficiency, and presenting real growth opportunities, and that’s directly linked to the following days. That goes right into the broader company strategy: CEO keynote Tuesday, CTO general session Wednesday. Then the showcase and one-on-one meetings throughout. What you see is that move from partner strategy to broader company strategy and then into deeper technical and customer conversations with individual bespoke meetings throughout.
The other piece I’d highlight is that customers and partners have the opportunity to follow along remotely, so the key there is to focus on the themes, the keynotes, and the signals around where HPE is investing. And it all wraps up Wednesday night – for those who are at least in Vegas – at Allegiant Stadium. A big celebration night with our customers, our partners, and the broader HPE ecosystem, with Steve Aoki and Imagine Dragons headlining that evening. A big send-off for everyone.
Robert Dutt: Pulling back the lens to Canada specifically – you’re running North America Channel. What can you tell me about what the conversation with Canadian partners looks like heading into this show? Where is the Canadian partner community with HPE right now, and is there anything distinctive about what they should be watching for this week at Discover?
Jeremiah Jenson: It’s a great question, because the Canadian channel partner ecosystem is one that is distinct and unique, but also very deliberate and focused on customer outcomes. I always really appreciate that about that market.
Discover is both a strategy event – in terms of where are we investing, what are the strategic areas and customer opportunities – and a business event: where is demand moving, how are those themes translating into opportunity and profitability? Some of the areas I’d draw their attention to: certainly networking, and in particular data center networking – there’s a huge opportunity there with what’s happening around networking for AI. I’d also call their attention to our cloud offerings and sovereign cloud offerings, which are particularly important for a lot of Canadian businesses and Canadian partners. We’re seeing a tremendous amount of opportunity around sovereign cloud, whether that’s in the Canadian public sector or some of the other businesses we historically serve or are targeting in Canada. They’re very focused on the deliberate opportunity with their customers, and the real question is how do we translate those strategic areas into real business, real profitability, and real growth.
Robert Dutt: It’s interesting – it sounds like you’re describing the Canadian channel as sort of ahead of the curve, if anything, on selling on outcomes. That’s obviously been a focus for more than a year now. Sometimes I think the Canadian market writ large gets painted with a brush of being a little conservative in terms of adopting technology, and maybe that focus on outcomes is a way of managing that – getting through to customers who don’t necessarily want to be first out of the gate, but want something that’s proven and ready to go.
Jeremiah Jenson: Yeah, for me, I wouldn’t use the word “conservative.” I would use the word “intentional.” The Canadian partners I do business with are very exciting and forward-thinking, but intentional. They’re close with their customers – they have a level of customer intimacy that I’m often impressed with – and they’re very focused on where they can add value and help customers accomplish their business goals. So conservative is not a word I would use. They’re just very forward-thinking and intentional.
Robert Dutt: Last one – sort of a two-header, one from your perspective and one from a partner perspective. You’ve covered some of this, but just to narrow it down: if I’m a Canadian partner heading to Vegas or following along online, what’s the one thing you’d make sure you walk away from Discover this week understanding? And from your perspective, what does a successful week look like for you?
Jeremiah Jenson: If I’m a partner about to watch Discover – either in person or following along online – I would challenge yourself to personalize it: where’s the next growth opportunity for me? Hewlett Packard Enterprise offers such a huge portfolio, so the question is, what is the next opportunity I can take to my customer or customer base? I’ll point out a couple of very strategic areas: data center networking, and how we’re bringing that strong networking portfolio together; our cloud offerings, hybrid cloud software, and storage; and what we’re doing in AI, where we’re seeing massive acceleration. Pick one, and challenge yourself personally – where can I invest in myself that will help me produce a better customer outcome for the customers I serve? Pick one and be really deliberate about how you can understand that more deeply.
And for me – what does success look like coming away from this year? I want clarity of message to be impressed upon the entire North America Channel, and probably most importantly, the Canadian channel. How do we make this real for Canadian partners in their differentiated market? Clarity of message, and making sure we all walk away with the same mission, one goal, and one very clear definition of success.
Robert Dutt: Big goals for a big week. Good luck – I hope it’s a very successful Discover for you.
Jeremiah Jenson: Thanks so much for the opportunity. I’m looking forward to seeing everybody in Las Vegas.
Robert Dutt: There you have it – Jeremiah Jenson from HPE. I’d like to thank Jeremiah for his time.
Just a heads up – this is part one. We’ll be back later this week with another conversation, as Jeremiah and I are going to talk a little bit after the Partner Growth Summit’s main stage so we can get a look at the specific partner program announcements coming out of Discover. Keep an ear out for that, and of course we’ll have the news breakdown tomorrow morning on The Buzz as well.
Thanks as always for listening. A couple of things I want to leave you with from this conversation. First: the “networking for AI – or AI for the network” framing. The argument HPE is making is that the network is the enabling layer for everything your customers are trying to do with AI. That’s a positioning opportunity worth thinking about in your own customer conversations, wherever you sit in the stack. Second: Jeremiah’s challenge to partners watching or attending Discover this week – don’t try to absorb everything. Pick one area, whether that’s data center networking, cloud and hybrid cloud storage, or AI acceleration, and go deep on it. That’s how you turn a week of announcements into something you can actually bring back to your business. I thought that was good advice for following any big vendor event.
If you’re enjoying the podcast, please do subscribe or follow wherever you listen. We’re available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and most of the usual places. And if you can leave a rating or review, those are always appreciated.
Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.
June 15, 20265 min
The Buzz: HPE Discover kicks off, Cato Networks launches integration hub, and Checkmarx report flags CISO pressure on security compliance
Today’s headline news for Canadian IT solution providers:
HPE Discover 2026 kicks off: HPE Discover 2026 opens today at The Venetian in Las Vegas with the Partner Growth Summit, the partner-exclusive day that precedes the main conference. The General Session – “The Power of One” – is led by HPE channel head Simon Ewington and focuses on HPE’s unified partner strategy under the HPE Partner Ready Vantage program, spanning networking, cloud, and AI. This is the first Partner Growth Summit since HPE’s $14 billion Juniper Networks acquisition closed, and HPE is presenting partners with a fully unified portfolio story for the first time. ChannelBuzz.ca is on the ground all week: Tuesday’s Buzz will feature a full Partner Growth Summit recap, and In The Channel this week features a multi-part series with Jeremiah Jenson, HPE’s vice president of North America channel and partner ecosystem, covering the Discover announcements in depth.
Cato Networks launches integration hub: Cato Networks has launched a new Technology Partner Program and a Platform Integration Hub, debuting with more than 100 out-of-the-box integrations with third-party security, cloud, and networking solutions. The SASE provider says the program is designed to simplify how partners and customers connect Cato’s platform with existing enterprise technology stacks. The move is significant for Canadian MSPs and MSSPs: a robust integration catalog reduces the custom API work that often slows deployment and increases delivery costs, making it easier to position Cato alongside the broader tools in a customer’s security environment.
Checkmarx flags CISO compliance pressures: A new 2026 Future of Application Security Report from Checkmarx, based on a survey of more than 2,000 developers and CISOs, found that 95 per cent of CISOs report being pressured to suppress or delay compliance-related security issues when business deadlines loom. The research also highlights how AI-generated code is expanding the attack surface faster than many security teams can manage. For Canadian MSSPs, the data reinforces the value of independent, third-party security oversight – and the case for structured application security as a managed service.
Dataminr and TD SYNNEX partner on AI cyber defense: Dataminr has signed a strategic distribution agreement with TD SYNNEX, making Dataminr for Cyber Defense available to more than 35,000 North American resellers. The platform combines external risk signals with internal telemetry to help security teams prioritize threats in real time. For Canadian partners already working with TD SYNNEX, the deal adds an AI-driven threat intelligence offering to the distributor’s security portfolio at a time when customers are asking for earlier warning around cyber risk.
inforcer launches Microsoft 365 TDR platform: inforcer has launched inforcer Threat Detection and Response, a new platform that gives MSPs a single environment to manage detection, incident response, and reporting across the full Microsoft 365 estate – including Entra, Defender, Purview, Teams, and SharePoint. According to the company, the platform’s advantage is its existing policy and configuration context for each tenant, which it says allows the detection engine to separate real threats from alert noise. The product launched in early access at Pax8 Beyond last week.
ConnectSecure introduces Patch 360: ConnectSecure has launched Patch 360, a patch management solution designed specifically for MSPs. According to the company, the platform gives MSPs more control over patch prioritization, testing, and approval workflows, and is designed to reduce deployment risk while accelerating patching across operating systems and third-party applications.
NetRise launches Discovery Partner Program: Software supply chain security firm NetRise has launched the Discovery Partner Program for VARs, MSSPs, distributors, and systems integrators. The program provides partners access to the NetRise Platform, which analyzes compiled software artifacts – including binaries, firmware, and containers – to identify components and risks that may not appear in source-code scans or vendor-provided SBOMs. NetRise is positioning the program as a way for partners to address growing customer demand for independent software supply chain verification.
Read Full Transcript
This episode of The Buzz is brought to you by HPE Discover 2026. HPE Discover runs June 15 to 18 at The Venetian in Las Vegas. Discover what’s next at hpe.com/discover.
Welcome to The Buzz from ChannelBuzz.ca, I’m Robert Dutt, today is Monday, June 15th, and here’s what’s happening in the channel today.
The biggest event on HPE’s calendar opens today at The Venetian Convention and Expo Center in Las Vegas, and ChannelBuzz.ca is on the ground for the full week. But before the main conference opens to the broader audience tomorrow, today belongs exclusively to the channel.
The HPE Partner Growth Summit – the partner-only day that kicks off Discover week – is underway as you’re hearing this. The centrepiece is the General Session called “The Power of One,” led by HPE channel head Simon Ewington alongside a lineup of HPE senior executives. The name captures the message HPE is sending its partner ecosystem heading into the back half of 2026: one comprehensive portfolio, one unified program under HPE Partner Ready Vantage, and one integrated experience across networking, cloud, and AI.
The afternoon breakout agenda is dense – covering GreenLake and hybrid cloud, Aruba networking with AI, monetizing accelerated compute and agentic workloads, and HPE’s evolving service provider story. It’s also worth noting the context: this is the first Partner Growth Summit since HPE’s $14 billion acquisition of Juniper Networks cleared regulatory review and officially closed. Partners are getting their first look at a fully unified networking and compute story from a company that can now tell it cleanly.
We’re bringing you the announcements as they happen all week.
In just a couple of hours on In The Channel, I’ll help you get ready for Discover, as I preview the event with the help of none other than Jeremiah Jenson, HPE’s vice president of North American channel and partner ecosystem.
Tomorrow on The Buzz, we’ll have all the news from Partner Growth Summit, and tomorrow’s In The Channel will also feature Jenson, as we take a deeper dive into the HPE’s partner programs and where he sees the biggest opportunities for the channel right now.
Be sure to stick with us all week as we bring you full coverage from Vegas.
Cato Networks is expanding its ecosystem with the launch of a new Technology Partner Program and a Platform Integration Hub. The SASE provider says the hub debuts with more than 100 integrations out of the box, offering streamlined connectivity with third-party security, cloud, and networking solutions. According to Cato, the program is designed to simplify how partners and customers integrate its platform with existing enterprise technology stacks, reducing friction and speeding up deployments.
A vendor-led integration effort at this scale matters for the channel. As enterprise environments grow more layered and complex, MSPs rely on platforms that connect cleanly to an existing stack rather than requiring months of custom API work. Out-of-the-box integrations mean less time troubleshooting compatibility and more time delivering security outcomes to clients. It’s worth noting that Cato’s channel chief said earlier this year that seven out of ten deals the company closes are already partner-led. A stronger integration story could deepen that dependence on the channel by making it easier for MSPs and MSSPs to position Cato alongside the other tools in a customer’s security stack.
A report released last week by application security vendor Checkmarx is putting hard numbers on a dynamic that security-focused channel partners have likely been seeing for some time. The 2026 Future of Application Security Report, based on a survey of more than 2,000 developers and CISOs, found that 95 per cent of CISOs say they have been pressured to suppress or delay compliance-related security issues when business deadlines loom. Compounding the problem: the adoption of AI-generated code is accelerating, which Checkmarx says is multiplying the attack surface in production environments faster than many security teams can manage.
The business case for external, independent security oversight has rarely been clearer. When internal security leaders are being overruled on vulnerability management, an MSP or MSSP operating as a neutral third party – accountable to security outcomes rather than product launch timelines – steps into a genuine gap. The data also validates the case for application security as a structured managed service. As AI-generated code becomes standard in the development pipeline, organizations that can’t close that gap internally will need to find a partner who can.
In Brief – Dataminr and TD SYNNEX have signed a distribution agreement that makes Dataminr for Cyber Defense available to more than 35,000 North American resellers through TD SYNNEX’s channel network.
Security vendor inforcer has launched inforcer Threat Detection and Response, a new platform designed to give MSPs a single environment to manage detection, incident response, and reporting for Microsoft 365.
ConnectSecure has introduced Patch 360, a patch management solution built specifically for MSPs that the company says reduces deployment risk while accelerating patching across operating systems and third-party applications.
NetRise has launched the Discovery Partner Program, targeting VARs, MSSPs, distributors, and systems integrators with software supply chain security capabilities built around compiled binary analysis rather than source code or vendor-provided SBOMs.
Full details and links in the show notes or the blog post.
That’s how we’re seeing the headlines today. I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, thanks for listening. Have a great day.
June 11, 202635 min
All in on Dell: Turning Point’s Josh Singh on the single-vendor bet, AI for SMB, and why backup is the last line of defense
Josh Singh, sales director at Turning Point Technology Services
Josh Singh didn’t arrive at Dell Technologies World simply as a partner – he arrived as someone who spent nearly eight years on the vendor side, in Dell sales roles, before crossing over to Turning Point as the company’s sales lead.
That dual perspective shapes everything about how Turning Point operates. The Vancouver-based solution provider, founded in 2012, runs exclusively on Dell in the data center – a deliberate, all-in single-vendor bet that Josh frames not as a constraint but as a competitive advantage. Nearly half of the team is ex-Dell, which means when a customer needs an answer fast, Turning Point knows exactly who to call inside Dell’s notoriously complex internal matrix. That navigational fluency, Josh argues, is the kind of differentiation that doesn’t show up in a spec sheet but shows up every time there’s urgency.
Turning Point recently formalized that depth by opening what Dell designates as its first official solution center in Canada, in their Vancouver office, giving the team and their clients hands-on access to the full portfolio – including the GB10 for deskside AI development.
On AI, Josh’s read is that the “AI factory” framing was right directionally but too large a first step for most of the Canadian market. Dell’s move toward more modular, consumable AI infrastructure – starting at one or two servers, proving a use case, then scaling – is what actually unlocks adoption for SMB customers. Small wins first, then the appetite for something bigger.
On security and resilience, Josh drew a clear line: backup is the last line of defense, and if that last line gets hit – or gets frozen by a ransomware insurance claim – you’re rebuilding from scratch. Dell’s Data Domain and its proprietary DDBoost protocol, alongside Veeam, form the core of what Turning Point puts in front of customers who need to actually recover, not just theoretically recover.
And rounding it out: the supply chain disruption, compounded by Broadcom‘s reshaping of the virtualization market, is forcing Canadian organizations to plan differently – more external awareness, more budget flexibility, earlier commitment. That’s a challenge across the industry, Josh notes. But for partners who can guide customers through it, it’s also an opening.
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.
We’re continuing our series from Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas. This week, we’re deep on the partner perspective. Today’s guest brings a point of view you don’t usually get. Nearly a decade inside Dell Technologies, followed by a move to the partner side – specifically to a partner that has made one of the most deliberate, all-in single-vendor bets you’ll find in the Canadian channel.
Josh Singh leads the sales team at Turning Point Technology Services, a Vancouver-based solution provider founded in 2012 that operates exclusively on Dell in the data center. Not mostly Dell, not primarily Dell – exclusively. In a channel where diversification is almost reflexively treated as risk management, Turning Point went the other way, and they did it right at the beginning of Dell’s channel investment cycle, which turned out to be good timing.
Josh brings to that an unusual lens. He spent almost eight years in Dell’s sales roles, where he learned early that the channel was the key to his success, and that knowing how to navigate Dell’s internal matrix is an advantage that translates directly into faster, better outcomes for customers. Roughly half of Turning Point’s team is ex-Dell. They recently opened what Dell designates as its first official solution center in Canada, right there in their Vancouver office.
We talked about what it actually means to make the single-vendor bet and why it’s holding up. How the AI adoption conversation is changing for SMB customers who weren’t ready for the Dell AI Factory, but might be ready for something smaller. The security and data resilience story, and why backup shouldn’t be confused with business continuity. And what the supply chain situation, plus Broadcom’s disruption of the market, is doing to how customers have to plan.
Let’s get right into it. My chat with Josh Singh.
Josh, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it. I’m sure it’s been a busy week.
Josh Singh: It has been a busy week, and thanks for having me.
Robert Dutt: I guess to open it up, I want to start with a question that frames the perspective that you have at an event like this. Turning Point made the explicit call to go all-in on Dell on the infrastructure side, as I understand. A lot of partners diversify, carry multiple vendors, pick and choose their spots. What’s the logic behind that bet? What does a week like this one – where Dell’s making a lot of big moves around AI and the direction of the partner program and all that – feel like for a shop that’s tied its future to the Dell story?
Josh Singh: Very good question. I’ve been asked this numerous times, and it’s clear you’ve done your research on us. As you said, Robert, we are 100% Dell-exclusive in the data center. We do have other technologies that are complementary to Dell to give our clients an end-to-end ecosystem of technology, but we have doubled, tripled, and quadrupled down on Dell in the data center.
Turning Point was formed in 2012. Three founders – Lee, Sean, and Lauren – they came from a value-added reseller that sold a multitude of technologies. What they found out at the time was Dell had a portfolio that covered the end-to-end, especially in the data center. They branched out, all three of them from [Seven Group – verify company name], and they formed Turning Point. They just realized that Dell was at the beginning of their partner program. You’ll see a legacy fabric still embedded in some aspects of Dell Technologies where they still are partial to selling direct, but they have put a large amount of emphasis and investment in the channel over the last fifteen years. Turning Point was formed at the very beginning of that cycle. Since then, we have had no regrets. Dell has really come to the table as a really solid partner for us, allowing us to offer our clients the end-to-end data center strategy with Dell Technologies.
Robert Dutt: Your lens is unique too in that you have some time at Dell EMC – a viewpoint that a lot of partners don’t have in terms of having seen both sides of that fence, especially around the same vendor. What does that vendor-side time teach you about what Dell actually needs and wants from partners, and the reality of what Dell values in a partner?
Josh Singh: Yeah, that’s a really good question. I spent almost eight years at Dell in various sales roles. I learned very quickly, and early on in my Dell sales career, that the channel was the key to my success. The core reason why is I’m one individual. I have a solutions engineer, I have some overlays, and we manage a pretty large territory. I found that if I could just introduce a channel partner into the mix, I could lob it over the fence, play quarterback a little bit, get enough updates from the channel partner so I can update my leadership – because that’s really important. But I was able to scale my business significantly when I started to work with the channel.
Actually, Turning Point was one of those channel partners that I worked very closely with. So it’s a bit of a full circle moment for me to come back and I lead the sales team at Turning Point.
Robert Dutt: I have to imagine the Dell team is happy to have you, because clearly you’ve got that lens for exactly what they are looking for from you as a partner.
Josh Singh: Yeah, you know, every vendor has their own methodology and go-to-market culture. And so it does help. Actually, almost half of Turning Point’s team is ex-Dell Technologies employees. So that really gives us a unique perspective on how Dell wants to sell, how to update Dell, what’s important to them – what’s important to each level in the organization, from the sales rep to the manager, to the director, to the senior director, to the president. So we understand what is important to Dell Technologies.
And also, for our customers, it’s really important to pick the right technologies. But as we all know, this world is moving so fast and our customers need answers, and they need us to be on their requests in a really time-sensitive way. And so, typically with most vendors, you know your account executive and that individual is the key to the organization. When you come from Dell, you all of a sudden know how to navigate the matrix of Dell. And so when a customer has a question, you know exactly who to call. You can pick up the phone and get that answer in a much more time-sensitive way than navigating the matrix of Dell, which can be large and daunting.
Robert Dutt: So the secret sauce is as simple as spending more than half a decade inside the company itself.
Josh Singh: Simple. Yeah, easy peasy.
Robert Dutt: Big week for AI infrastructure here, and the Dell AI thesis – in so much as they’ve for a while been pulling on the idea of running AI models on-prem and on their infrastructure – was really amplified this week. Between that, desktop agentic AI, and the whole server and storage announcements underneath that, how does what was announced here resonate with what you guys are doing now and what your customers are asking for in terms of technology and how it’s delivered?
Josh Singh: Yeah, no, that’s a really good question. So I’ve been at Dell Technologies World almost every year, and I’m finding a big difference in the talk tracks this year. AI was a concept, it was a lot of buzzwords, it was a lot of fluff, to be honest with you as well. Everyone’s trying to chase what AI means to them. But I think this year is the first year where I started to see concepts materialize into practicality, whether it comes to data locality or infrastructure, or really how to go to the next steps of adopting AI.
The Canadian market is more pragmatic in their approach to adoption of technology – a little laggard, but not in a negative way, just a bit more conservative. And so what Dell Technologies World enables me and us to do is learn from people actually deploying AI in a much more meaningful and scalable way, for us to then be able to go back to Canada and start to talk about potential use cases, potential outcomes – because it is a very daunting topic, AI, sometimes it can be very overwhelming. So Dell Technologies World allows us to take some key facts about AI, bring them back into our local market, and then help them through that journey. And also, we’re meeting a lot of experts here as well. So it’s not just that we take these concepts and go back to Canada and try to do it ourselves – we’re really supported by the Dell channel ecosystem as well, to help our clients evolve in their AI journey.
Robert Dutt: What are the ideas that you’re hearing that specifically are making you think, “All right, this is going to change something in how we do business internally, or this is something I have to take to customer X, customer Y, customer Z,” because it maps to what they’re thinking about or where they should be thinking?
Josh Singh: Yeah. I think Dell, when they first wanted to address AI, they came out with the Dell AI Factory, and that was the message. So for a lot of Canadian organizations – which are largely SMB – adoption of an AI Factory is not consumable. It’s too large. They need to prove the model out. And then as soon as they get some small wins and successes, then they can scale out, because the smallest AI Factory was large for them.
And this is what we noticed, actually, in the last twelve months. So what Dell is doing now is making it a bit more economical, a bit more consumable – in the AI data platform, starting at one server, maybe two servers, a little PowerScale, and then using that to prove out a use case. And then once we prove out a use case, our customers say, “Hey, there’s really something to this AI thing that everybody keeps talking about.” Now they can really start to invest in a much more scalable, larger way.
So I think what Dell has released – very small products with the GB10 all the way up to that massive AI Factory – I mean, you saw when Michael Dell came out with Jensen, and he came out on stage and showed the entire portfolio of AI with a small little itty-bitty – not quite Raspberry Pi size, but not too far from that.
Robert Dutt: Really, yeah.
Josh Singh: And then having Jensen talk about the next model and how much more powerful that next model is – 100x, 100x, 100x, all the way up to that big AI Factory. So I think it just allows us to be a bit more practical in AI adoption rather than, “Mr. Customer, you have to adopt an AI Factory and that’s how you’re going to achieve AI.” So yeah.
Robert Dutt: Has some of the stuff they’re talking about – deskside AI, and specifically deskside agents – when you talk about a GB10 and the lower end of that, and even for more casual users, they would make the case down to the AI-enabled PC – how does that kind of map with how your customers are approaching AI, given that they aren’t going to be going out and buying even a bottom-end, full-on AI Factory experience as a day-one thing?
Josh Singh: Yeah. So at Turning Point, we have our data center – it’s actually a solution center. Dell has multiple across the world. There was none in Canada. So actually, with Dell leadership, we opened up Dell’s first solution center in Vancouver in our office. There was a big unveiling with the president of Dell Canada, all Dell leadership came out, and we stood up our solution center in conjunction with Dell.
So in that solution center, we have every piece of technology that Dell has – from PowerStore to PowerScale to ObjectScale. And we recently adopted the GB10 so we’re able to actually learn it, use practical use cases that actually help Turning Point, and then we can actually know how to speak to our customers as an adopter ourselves of the GB10 and some of the use cases. So anything from OpenClaw to using different language models and trying to help business productivity in that manner.
We serve customers in almost every single vertical. So we are working with healthcare – we’re doing some work right now with healthcare and looking at different use cases when it comes to X-rays and things like that. And then we also work with legal, looking at contractual ways to actually pull out data from thousands or millions of contracts to find commonalities to help an organization improve their operational efficiency.
So we’ve got our system in our solution center and we’re actually going through those use cases ourselves so that we can better serve our customers.
Robert Dutt: Given that you’ve got that data center and you’ve got that – choose your own analogy, eat your own dog food, drink your own champagne – approach to things, how have you guys approached AI internally, and what have you learned from how you’ve done that over the last year or two?
Josh Singh: So it’s a good question. Admittedly, we are a little bit at the beginning of that journey as well. So at Turning Point, as well as many of our customers, we were a bit overwhelmed with what AI meant. And so we have a practice when it comes to consultation to navigate what AI means for them. We do specific workshops to get a client to understand what they want out of AI and to conceptualize what AI is capable of doing. Now we’re really getting into how product is going to help that. So this is the next iteration of our AI journey to help our customers – going over and beyond the consultative nature of how AI works and models and inferencing and all those buzzwords that customers understand but don’t really understand. And then we’ll take whatever is the output from that workshop, and now with our solution center, we’re looking to actually take the results of that and try to replicate it using product and technology and actual outcome.
Robert Dutt: How often do you find that the outcome of the workshop – “this is what AI would do best for you” – maps with what they came in thinking AI would do best for them?
Josh Singh: It’s fascinating to see, actually, because in a lot of SMB organizations, there is no AI data scientist, there is no AI leader. So it’s essentially decision by committee. And that committee could be a storage admin, a network admin, a compute admin, an application admin, all the way up to leadership, cybersecurity, of course, for governance and compliance.
So seeing the different perspectives in these AI committees is really interesting – to watch the customer look at each other and each individual have their own expertise and go, “Oh, that’s interesting. Oh, that’s interesting. Why did I know you viewed the world through the lens of this?” And so coming in with these workshops, it’s typically not one outcome. It’s actually allowing a conversation between these committees at our customer organizations to really help push what AI means for each of those individuals. And then they branch out, actually not with Turning Point but internally, to foster more discussion. And then we come back in and help prod and push in certain areas with our AI knowledge.
But really, it’s more contextual. It’s not really about language models and things like that. It’s more about blue sky – like, what do we want to do? And what’s success for you, and what’s success for you, and what’s success for you? You’ll notice that success for each of these individuals is very different. So it’s been fascinating for us to watch.
Robert Dutt: It’s funny how often some of these things do – for all the technology behind it – come down to breaking down internal silos.
Josh Singh: Yes, yes, yeah. It’s a big part of our job. We help bridge technology to business, to legal, to cybersecurity, all the way up to business goals. So it’s really – it’s an honor to work in this industry and see those conversations play out.
Robert Dutt: We saw some fairly significant changes to the partner program and the rollout of the Modern Partner Platform – in terms of the agentic AI stuff that’s rolling into the partner portal and the partner experience, deal registration improvements, a whole bunch of things – especially where you guys are at as a boutique, exclusively Dell-focused operation on the data center side. What did you see in there that really caught your interest – “okay, that’s going to make my life better”? And in a more art-of-the-possible mode, what do you think AI appearing in partner platforms is going to mean in the long run in terms of what you can do, and what you can get from the overall experience you have with key vendors like Dell?
Josh Singh: Yeah, good question. So they haven’t fully rolled out the One Dell Way platform yet – they’re chipping away at it. First is with CSG on the client side, and they’re starting that internally. So we haven’t actually seen the result of a lot of that change yet. But I do know theoretically what the plan is for that, and I think it’s going to be really advantageous for us.
We are seeing a little bit of the benefits right now where human intervention – as vendors start to consolidate a bit more in sales and back office – the role of the sales rep is changing. There are a lot of tasks that that sales rep now has to do. And so they can sometimes be the bottleneck of operational efficiency. Let’s talk about deal registration, for example: they will get an email, and if they’re busy in meetings, by the time they get to that email and press OK, it could be twenty-four, it could be forty-eight hours, it could be seventy-two hours if that person’s out of town. So then you have to chase – and with how fast IT is moving with our customers, we can’t afford to wait that long.
So we’re starting to see a bit more intelligence and automation in how deal registrations are approved. It is a bit of a complicated topic because the channel relies on Dell’s ability to recognize who our accounts are, who our loyal customers are. And so there have been some conflicts since then. But I do see that Dell is on it and they are working it out. And I do love the transparency and honesty from Dell in owning up where mistakes were made and correcting them in the field. So I am seeing some AI adoption when it comes to the partner program, but it’s not fully rolled out yet. So I am looking forward to seeing what they come out with.
Robert Dutt: In terms of future state – whether it’s stuff that they’re already discussing or stuff that’s just possible but not yet on the roadmap – what would be the most impactful for you and your organization to move to a more automated, more agentic motion with a key vendor like Dell?
Josh Singh: Yeah. I’m sure you’ve heard of Dell Sales Chat. It’s basically their version of GPT, but it references all of Dell’s information – presentations, documents, white papers, service briefs, and things like that. So the Dell rep just types in a query into Dell Sales Chat, and an answer comes out while referencing all Dell documentation. What I really want to see is Dell enabling that for the channel. And so I’ve talked to Dell leadership – specifically people that own this product – and that is the plan. And so I’m really, really excited for that, because especially when we respond to RFPs in public sector, it’s a very time-consuming endeavor. And so for us to be able to type in queries on very specific questions that public sector has about technology would be really valuable.
And I do know that there are compliance and governance issues as well. The labeling of documentation has to be accurate – otherwise, the channel would get access to potentially confidential data from Dell Sales Chat. But that’s the biggest thing that I’m waiting for Dell to offer the channel.
Robert Dutt: Cool. I wanted to talk a little bit about security and data resilience, because that was another theme here at the event – an area where you guys have a fair bit going on with vCISO and MDR, cyber recovery, all that kind of stuff. Basically, how does the Dell cyber resilience narrative from this week connect with what you’re already doing? Does it strengthen the story you’re telling clients? Does it give you new opportunities? How are you viewing the message here?
Josh Singh: Yeah. So I actually come from the security and resilience team at Dell – that’s my most recent role there. So it’s near and dear to me and my heart, and I am seeing a lot of product updates when it comes to security. That’s really exciting for me to see, actually.
So Dell has a security and data platform in Data Domain, and there are other partners in the ecosystem like Druva and others. There are some partnerships with CrowdStrike and other MDR companies. And that’s what I really appreciate about Dell – they did have Secureworks for a period of time, which got spun off, but I do appreciate Dell constantly looking at where their gaps are from a technology perspective and then partnering up with other vendors to complete the end-to-end strategy.
As I mentioned, each individual product in the technology portfolio – they are releasing a lot of security updates and functionality embedded in PowerStore, more in Data Domain when it comes to immutability and things like that, and PowerScale anomaly detection in each of the different products, end-to-end encryption with secure [HPAs – unclear; possibly “HBAs” or “APIs” – verify]. So there’s a lot of attention right now when it comes to security.
And to come back to AI – AI is really cool and it can create a lot of really cool outcomes. That’s if you’re wearing a white hat. If you’re wearing a black hat, it can be equally exciting for them as well. And so Dell has to keep up now with not just asking what are the positive outcomes that can drive more efficiency and unlock human progress, but what are the black hats going to be doing with AI, and how do we respond?
Robert Dutt: I was sharing a detail this week that backup infrastructure is kind of a primary target for attacks. Curious – does that kind of match with what you’re seeing? And how do you, especially with customers who are newer to you or just going through the process, help them reconcile what they think they’re protecting with their backup versus what they actually have in terms of protection?
Josh Singh: Yeah, this is – I mean, every backup vendor says the same thing. This becomes really difficult, actually, to undo a lot of the conditioning from a lot of the backup vendors. I joined DPS – which is now the SRP, the Security and Resiliency Platform, at Dell – for a very specific reason. I actually used to also work for Secureworks. And I realized that talking to people about managed security services was resonating at the time. But the answer was always, “Hey, we just go back to our backup target and we restore, we recover, we’re up and running within a couple of hours.” So I thought, I could spend the same amount of time with a different team and a different product and achieve much more success, because that’s what most organizations are relying on. So they really rely on backup.
Now, backup should not be confused with business continuity. Backup is the last line of defense – and it really is the last line of defense. So when you have a last line of defense, you need to make sure that that is locked down. If you don’t trust your last line of defense, it doesn’t really matter what you do on top of that. You can spend millions of dollars per year operationally on subscriptions and monitoring and things like that. But if you don’t trust your last line of defense, you are hooked.
And so Dell’s backup product, Data Domain, is the most secure, purpose-built backup appliance out there in the market – hands down. It’s not even a comparison, from my perspective – and it could be a biased perspective – against other competition and other vendors that also play in the same area. There are just so many features in Data Domain when it comes to immutability and governance and compliance and DDBoost, which is a proprietary protocol – it’s not CIFS, it’s not NFS. A bad actor can scan a CIFS or NFS directory so easily and then just encrypt it.
So while we do work very well with PPDM – which is Dell’s backup software – we also use Veeam as well. And so the Veeam-to-Data Domain story is very powerful, and it’s really good for the SMB market as well. So we’re constantly looking at the market and seeing what’s compatible, what plays well with Dell products, and we’re introducing that into our ecosystem as well.
Robert Dutt: All right. To wrap it up – sitting where you sit as a partner who’s made a pretty significant single-vendor bet on Dell, what’s the one thing from this week that you sit back and go, “Yeah, that validates the decision”? And also, was there anything that gives you pause – that makes you go, “Okay, I need to learn more about that before I’m sure that we’re aligned”?
Josh Singh: Yeah. I mean, I can’t deny that we haven’t been forced to think about more vendor adoption. And as every company needs to iterate and evolve and stay on top of industry trends, we need to constantly be surveying other technologies. And we do. We look at NetApp all the time. We look at Pure. We look at HPE constantly. And what we’ve noticed is we don’t need to take on a different vendor.
And especially – one thing I will say about Dell, and I’m not sure if this is an answer to your question, but I do have to mention this – Dell’s supply chain is second to none. So we’re in this world right now which is shifting aggressively to shortages and components and things like that. And that’s where Dell’s really shining right now – in their ability to go to different geographic areas and fast-track product from other areas. So that’s just one thing that I have to plug Dell for: very impressive about what they’re doing there.
But from a Dell perspective, they’re constantly innovating. All the thought leaders of the world – in different companies and different partners and vendors – they’re all here. And so if we have that big bet on Dell and they’re constantly innovating and adding new partnerships and are at the forefront of innovation, then that means we are too. And if we are, then we don’t need to look anywhere else – and we’re going to double down on the bet.
Robert Dutt: To go back to what you were saying about the supply chain situation – it’s no doubt wild times trying to get infrastructure for everyone on the planet right now. And we hear pretty clearly from Jeff Clarke the idea, the message to customers: put your hand up early – really early, if you can – because that’ll give you the best chances of getting what you want when you want it. If you’re thinking two years out or something, how are you approaching timelines and guidance to customers on – okay, so you want to be here at some point – speccing that out in light of the uncertainty of availability, the uncertainty of price, all the fun stuff that’s going on right now?
Josh Singh: We’re living in that world right now and it’s changing the way customers have to respond to their stakeholders in their organizations. Back in the day – and by back in the day, I mean six months ago – a customer needed compute and they would buy compute and they would get it within three weeks, likely two. Now we’re looking at two months, three months, sometimes six-month delays, depending on if they need very specific components. So it is a little bit like the COVID days, where there was a big push to remote connectivity. Now customers are looking at public cloud again in a bigger way because they need immediate resources.
So what we’re trying to do as an organization is say, “Yes, you could go to the cloud – that is an option. It always has been an option and always will be an option. But is that the right thing for your organization economically, from a security perspective, from a latency perspective?” There are so many more considerations, especially in the Canadian market with data sovereignty.
And so the shift of parts shortages – and this wouldn’t be a current interview unless we talked about Broadcom and the changes they’ve made in the market as well. These two very big changes in our market are now affecting the way that organizations have to respond to their stakeholders and the immediacy of resources. So planning now is critically important.
The way that customers are now trying to secure budget within their organizations is changing, because they need to be a bit more adaptable and flexible to what’s externally offered. Previously, it was internal operational methodologies on how they adopted technologies. Now they’re being affected by the external. So they have to be a bit more flexible and adaptable as to how they need to support their growing environment – by way of data, by way of compute resources, and especially AI. Now that I need GPUs and memory and CPUs, which are now in shortage, it is a very big challenge. But it’s not a Dell challenge, it’s a customer challenge. It’s happening across the entire industry. So that’s a good thing for us. If it was a Dell challenge, then we’d have a challenge ourselves and be in a bit of a corner.
But it’s a global challenge right now that we are constantly seeing changes to. And I suspect we’ll continue to see changes for the rest of the year.
Robert Dutt: It’s wild times when you hear folks who are very intelligent on these things saying this is going to be a multi-year kind of cycle. I guess AI giveth, AI taketh away.
Josh Singh: Yes, yes. And geopolitics – we’ve got some leaders in the world right now that are making decisions that are affecting our geopolitical climate as well, which is then downstream affecting IT. So it’s interesting times. Exciting times. And I think we’ll look back on today just like we looked back on COVID – we’ll get through it. We’re all in it together.
Robert Dutt: Here’s hoping the war stories end up good at the end of the day.
Josh Singh: That’s right.
Robert Dutt: Thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it.
Josh Singh: Thanks very much, Rob. I appreciate it. Thank you.
Robert Dutt: There you have it, Josh Singh from Turning Point Technology Services. I’d like to thank Josh for his time in Las Vegas.
The full-circle element of his story – spending years inside Dell, working alongside Turning Point as a channel partner, and then joining the company he was selling through – comes through clearly in how he talks about the business. And I think that perspective showed throughout the conversation.
A few things I’d like to take away from this one.
First, the single-vendor bet argument. A lot of partners hedge on vendor relationships as a form of risk management, but Turning Point went the other way. And the case Josh makes is essentially that depth beats breadth – that knowing how to navigate a large vendor’s internal matrix quickly is itself a competitive advantage for customers. When someone needs an answer today, knowing exactly who to call inside Dell and getting it done in hours instead of days is a real differentiator. Doesn’t show up in a product spec, but it does show up in the relationship.
Second, the AI adoption ladder. The AI Factory is the right concept, but maybe too large a bite for most of the Canadian market. What’s changing now – and what you heard Josh describe with the solution center and the GB10 pilots – is AI becoming consumable at the entry level. Small win, prove the model, scale it up. That’s how it actually gets adopted in the mid-market and SMB space, and the partners who figured out how to structure that journey are the ones who are going to win those accounts.
And third, backup is the last line of defense, not the first. Josh put it plainly: if you don’t trust your last line of defense, it doesn’t really matter what you spend on top of it. And if your backup infrastructure gets hit with a ransomware attack – which is increasingly the whole point of the attack – and you’ve filed an insurance claim on top of that, you can’t touch it until the insurance company is done with their analysis. You’re building from scratch. That air gap, clean recovery point is the whole game. Not a nice-to-have.
If you’re enjoying the show, please follow or subscribe wherever you listen. We’re on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, the usual suspects. And if you have a moment to leave a rating or review, please do. Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.
June 11, 20264 min
The Buzz: Pax8 crowns the MIP era at Beyond26, Arrow launches partner experience centers, and Mitel names a new channel chief
Today’s headline news for Canadian IT solution providers:
Pax8 Beyond26 – managed intelligence: Pax8 wrapped its annual Beyond conference in Salt Lake City on Tuesday with over 3,500 attendees including 200+ from Canada, centering the show on the transition from managed services to the Managed Intelligence Provider model. The headline announcement was Microsoft Agent 365 for Managed Intelligence – multi-tenant governance of agentic AI across MSP client environments through the Pax8 Agent Store, arriving in July – alongside the launch of the Managed Intelligence Provider Program, Voyager Alliance Rewards, and the Managed Intelligence Alliance. CEO Scott Chasin argued that as AI models commoditize, the trust MSPs have already built with clients is their primary competitive advantage going forward.
Arrow Electronics global experience centers: Arrow introduced a network of global experience centers on Tuesday, built in close collaboration with channel partners in North America and Europe to reflect how partners actually go to market today. Facilities in the US and Sweden are fully networked to deliver a consistent design and testing experience regardless of location, and are designed specifically to help partners accelerate the move from AI and cloud evaluation into deployment and monetization.
Mitel names new channel chief: Mitel has appointed Ben Macdonald as vice president of global channel go-to-market, bringing experience from Owl Labs, Poly, Juniper Networks, and Ekahau. The hire comes as Mitel’s own research shows 68 percent of businesses are running communications infrastructure more than seven years old, with 92 percent of modernizing organizations choosing an integrated-hybrid strategy – a dynamic the company says positions its 6,000-plus channel partners at the center of one of the largest communications refresh cycles in a decade.
Cork Cyber wins Pax8 Startup Vendor of the Year: Pax8 recognized Cork Cyber at Beyond26 for its AI-native remediation platform built for MSPs, which remediates threats automatically, reduces ticket volume, and provides financial payback when risks slip through. The award was presented on the Beyond mainstage by Pax8 president Nick Heddy.
Canada’s cloud market: A new report from the Canadian Anti-Monopoly Project, covered by CBC News, calls the Canadian cloud computing market “broken,” warning that Amazon, Microsoft, and Google control approximately 85 percent of the market. The report argues that even adding domestic sovereign alternatives will not fix the problem without interoperability standards, coining the term “maplewashed dependency” for the risk of trading one lock-in for another.
Pentesting research: New research from Cobalt and Omdia finds that 53 percent of security leaders believe traditional penetration testing is now outdated, with demand growing for continuous, AI-assisted approaches.
iCOUNTER leadership: iCOUNTER has appointed Joel Molinoff, formerly of BlueVoyant and CBS Corporation, as chief operating officer.
DataStrike expansion: DataStrike has expanded its Linux managed services practice by hiring Jon Cain as senior Linux infrastructure engineer to meet growing client demand.
Read Full Transcript
Welcome to The Buzz from ChannelBuzz.ca, I’m Robert Dutt, today is Thursday, June 11, 2026, and here’s what’s happening in the channel today.
Pax8 wrapped its annual Beyond conference in Salt Lake City on Tuesday, and the event made a clear statement about where the distributor sees the managed services business heading. With more than 3,500 attendees – including over 200 from Canada – the show centered on what Pax8 is calling the Managed Intelligence Provider model, or MIP. The idea is that MSPs are no longer primarily managing infrastructure. The next phase of the business is orchestrating agentic AI and delivering outcomes that SMB customers cannot build on their own. The headline product announcement from the show was Microsoft Agent 365 for Managed Intelligence, which will give MSPs multi-tenant governance of agentic AI across their client base through the Pax8 Agent Store, arriving in July. Alongside that, Pax8 announced the Managed Intelligence Provider Program, the Voyager Alliance Rewards program, and the Managed Intelligence Alliance, all aimed at helping partners navigate that business model transition. CEO Scott Chasin’s central argument was that as AI models commoditize rapidly, the trust that MSPs have already built with their clients becomes the primary competitive differentiator. It’s a different kind of pitch than many vendors have been making this year, and the Canadian partner contingent at the show was among the largest regional groups in attendance.
Distribution giant Arrow Electronics introduced a new set of networked global experience centers on Tuesday, and the design philosophy behind them is worth paying attention to. According to Arrow, the facilities in the US and Sweden were built in close collaboration with channel partners across North America and Europe, specifically around how partners actually go to market today, where they face constraints, and what slows them down. The two locations are fully networked, meaning the design and testing experience is consistent regardless of where the customer or partner is located. Arrow has operated various lab facilities over the years, but this iteration is explicitly oriented around solving the commercial and operational friction partners face in moving customers from AI and cloud evaluation into deployment. For solution providers working to differentiate on deep technical expertise and pre-sales capability, the ability to leverage distribution infrastructure at this level is increasingly part of the value equation.
Mitel announced Tuesday that Ben Macdonald has joined the company as vice president of global channel go-to-market, making him the company’s new channel chief. Macdonald comes from Owl Labs, where he led the shift to a scalable B2B and enterprise channel model including strategic alliances with Microsoft and Lenovo. He has also held senior channel roles at Poly, Juniper Networks, and Ekahau. The appointment arrives at a moment Mitel describes as one of the largest communications refresh cycles in a decade. According to Mitel’s own research, 68 percent of businesses are currently running communications systems that are more than seven years old, and 92 percent of organizations actively modernizing are choosing an integrated-hybrid strategy. Macdonald’s specific background – building recurring revenue models out of historically transactional, hardware-centric businesses – aligns directly with what Mitel says it needs. For the more than 6,000 channel partners in Mitel’s ecosystem, including a significant number of Canadian resellers and MSPs with established UC practices, the appointment signals an intent to activate that market opportunity through the partner community.
In Brief – Pax8 named Cork Cyber its Startup Vendor of the Year at Beyond, recognizing the MSP-focused AI remediation platform that remediates threats automatically and pays out financially when risks slip through. A report from the Canadian Anti-Monopoly Project calls Canada’s cloud computing market “broken,” warning that Amazon, Microsoft and Google control 85 percent of the market and domestic providers risk creating what the report calls “maplewashed dependencies.” Cobalt and Omdia research finds that 53 percent of security leaders believe traditional penetration testing is now outdated. iCOUNTER appoints Joel Molinoff, formerly of BlueVoyant and CBS Corporation, as chief operating officer. DataStrike expands its Linux managed services practice by hiring Jon Cain as senior Linux infrastructure engineer. Full details and links in the show notes or the blog post.
Later today on In The Channel, we’re hearing from Josh Singh at Turning Point Technologies in Vancouver – it’s a conversation about running a single-vendor Dell practice, AI for SMB, and why backup is the last line of defense against ransomware.
And if you haven’t heard it yet, yesterday on In The Channel I sat down with ESTI’s Earl Gosick on AI infrastructure, cyber resilience, and why Saskatchewan may be Canada’s next data center hub.
That’s how we’re seeing the headlines today. I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, thanks for listening. Have a great day.
June 10, 202630 min
It all comes back to storage: ESTI’s Earl Gosick on AI infrastructure, cyber resilience, and the Prairie data center opportunity
Earl Gosick, CTO at ESTI Consulting Services
Earl Gosick has been attending Dell’s annual event since the EMC World days, and the ESTI Consulting Services co-founder brought to this year’s Dell Technologies World a perspective grounded in 35 years of building deep technical expertise on the Prairies.
ESTI, the Saskatoon-based solution provider that won Dell’s Data Centre Solutions Excellence Award for Canada last year, runs a pure-play Dell infrastructure practice with particular depth in storage and data center design. Earl also sits in Dell’s CTO Connect program – a small, invitation-only group of partner technologists with early visibility into Dell’s product roadmap and a real voice in shaping it.
His framing for the week: AI is fundamentally a data story, and data stories are storage stories. The push toward on-premises AI infrastructure – from deskside devices up through the newly announced Exascale and Rackscale solutions – is being driven as much by data governance requirements and token economics as by raw performance. Organizations that don’t control their data, Earl argues, can’t truly control their AI outcomes.
On cyber resilience, he made a point worth underlining for anyone running managed services: ransomware insurance changes the recovery equation in ways clients don’t always anticipate. When a claim is filed, infrastructure gets frozen for forensic analysis. Recovery speed from a clean, air-gapped golden image – built with technology partners like Index Engines – isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the whole game.
And to close: Saskatchewan and Alberta may be poised to become Canada’s next significant data center hubs. With regulated power, guaranteed energy supply, and a provincial government that has now seen a CoreWeave-scale facility successfully built in the province and is actively pursuing more, Earl sees a real and growing opportunity – and ESTI is already working to support it.
Read Full Transcript
Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In the Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor at ChannelBuzz.ca, and your host for the show.
We’re continuing our series of conversations from Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas. This week, we’re shifting from the Dell executive perspective to the partner perspective, and today’s guest has been making the trip to this event since the EMC World days.
Earl Gosick is co-founder and senior consultant at ESTI Consulting Services, a Saskatoon-based solution provider that just celebrated 35 years in business and took home Dell’s Data Centre Solutions Excellence Award for Canada last year. Earl also sits inside Dell’s CTO Connect program, a small, invitation-only group of partner technologists who get an early look at where Dell’s roadmap is actually heading – and, importantly, a real opportunity to push back on it.
Earl’s a storage specialist at his core, and that turned out to be a useful lens at a conference that was fundamentally about AI infrastructure. Because if you pull on that AI thread long enough, it leads you back to data, and data always leads you back to storage. We talked about what the Exascale and Rackscale announcements mean for real customer deployments, why the cyber resilience conversation is as much about recovery speed as backup integrity, and a genuinely interesting thread about why Saskatchewan and the broader Canadian Prairies may be sitting on one of the most underappreciated data centre opportunities in North America right now.
Let’s get right into it. My chat with Earl Gosick.
Earl, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it.
Earl Gosick: I appreciate you having me here. It’s always nice to talk about what we’re doing with Dell.
Robert Dutt: No doubt, and you guys are doing a lot. I understand this is by no means your first DTW rodeo.
Earl Gosick: No, I’ve been coming since the EMC World days, and I’ve never – I missed a year through COVID, that was about it.
Robert Dutt: Well, I guess we’ll allow you that. So you’ve got this background here, you do the CTO Connect with Dell. What’s different about this year, if anything? What’s the tone or the energy that tells you something about where the industry is at right now, and not necessarily just where Dell would like it to be going?
Earl Gosick: I think the driving factor of today is really the supply constraints. You can see what AI is doing and the effect that’s having across the board on every product that has memory or CPU or flash drives in it – which is everything in technology. So that’s really setting the tone. But it also shows how effective AI is as a market driver, and what people think is going to come out of that technology – which is, I think, very important for people to understand. It’s ubiquitous technology that’s going to drive a lot of change in our industry. And we’re seeing a leading edge of that. And if this is the leading edge, there’s some pretty exciting things coming, I suspect, and it’s going to do some pretty important and probably quite wonderful things for our clients.
Robert Dutt: We heard from the main stage the idea of encouraging customers to get their hand up early – to get those orders, or even an inkling of where things are going for orders, in as early as possible – and that that will, in effect, Jeff Clarke was suggesting, get folks the best possible results. What’s the guidance you guys are providing your customers around that whole issue, and thinking about availability and pricing of hardware in this current super-fun environment?
Earl Gosick: Our position does align with what we’re hearing from Dell when we’re dealing with Dell Technologies, so we try and pass on the messages as transparently as we can, understanding there are supply constraints coming. And we have to deal with those in the only way we have, and that is to figure out what we need. Let’s plan early. Let’s plan the budgets we have for the year, and we can make some estimates about what’s going to be happening six months from now – but they’re estimates, and they’re going to be higher. So it’s probably going to be cheaper for you to have technology that’s sitting on the floor unused for a few months and waste through some support potentially, as opposed to delaying the purchase for three months. So if we know what we’re going to buy, we should operate in a manner that allows us to order those technologies as soon as possible and make sure you’re not waiting for something that delays your business initiatives.
Robert Dutt: You guys won the Data Centre Solutions Excellence Award last year for Canada. Take your victory lap. Tell me – what is it you guys are doing in the data centre space that earned that, and what does winning the award tell you about where your practice is focused?
Earl Gosick: I hope it helps demonstrate our success. So what ESTI likes to do as a business – our business model is really to build highly competent experts all the way from solution architecture to implementation of those technologies at the customer site. That takes a lot of effort on our behalf, and so it’s nice to get a reward that says we’re doing the right things. Because if you can build a strong rapport with a client who trusts your experts in their field, that creates long-term relationships – which is what both ESTI and Dell are after, and what our clients want.
Robert Dutt: You’re a storage specialist at a conference that has been at its core all about AI infrastructure. But at the same time, you go back to when it was – you said – EMC World, all about storage. The more I heard this week, the more it feels like the AI story is really a data story, and data stories are storage stories to at least some degree. How are you seeing that translate in terms of what your customers are actually asking about, or what they’re going to be asking you about?
Earl Gosick: It’s significant. You’re right. In order for any type of artificial intelligence to derive a useful data product out the end, it’s built on the data that you have. So customers are coming to the realization that they have to store everything. So it is driving a lot of demand for storage. It’s driving storage in different ways and they just keep everything. Then there’s another product that comes after that, which is cleaning that data – building the data pipelines. When I talk about storage, it’s really about data, and AI is a data-driven product. So it’s doing great things for the storage industry. But the clients understand that they do have to have the data – it has to be there, it has to be available. And then when they build these data products, they have to protect those data products. They’ve got to make sure they’re secure. So it’s driving a lot of initiatives on both sides of the fence that are good for all of us.
Robert Dutt: Especially with new or newer customers, or customers who are looking to expand what they’re doing with AI – and acknowledging there’s going to be a range from folks who have had the religion since day one and folks who’ve just been randomly shoving stuff digitally wherever they can. Where do you find those newer customers are at, generally speaking, in terms of sophistication of data management and data governance and all that kind of fun?
Earl Gosick: Unfortunately, I’d like to say there’s a median in there. There is not. Everybody is at a different stage in that cycle for them. So you really have to be a little bit cognizant and ask the questions to find out where they’re at before you can really sort of hold their hands and walk them down the road. Many people who started that journey early – you can learn from them. And so they’re going to tell us to start and do something, and you may fail, there may be some things, but you’re going to learn something from that. The second time will be more successful. Then you take that information, you pass it on to the newer people who are trying to get quick value from those investments they’re making on the AI front. So it could be things about how to connect those various data sources because they’re spread everywhere, to how do they build, or select which ones they put their money and their efforts behind. And so you take from the ones that have been doing this for a while, you pass that information on to the ones that are starting on this journey, and you connect the dots. You provide value and make pain go away wherever you can. And customers appreciate that.
Robert Dutt: And that sounds like that’s where you’re kind of bridging that gap that exists and trying to bring customers to the level they need to be at to get something out of this.
Earl Gosick: Absolutely. Like I said, everybody’s on a journey at a different stage of that journey. And so you have to communicate well to understand where they’re at and what they’re trying to achieve. Once you know that – we don’t always have the answers, but we leverage great partners like Dell who do have somebody that knows the answer. And so building this sort of ecosystem of potential partners to bridge that gap is great. And Dell does that not just from us and the partner community, but their partner community as well, to support all the component pieces that go together to build these pretty highly complex solutions in some cases.
Robert Dutt: Of all the announcements, all the stuff that we heard on the main stage and elsewhere this week, what kind of caught your attention – your major aha moment – the thing that’s going to be interesting going back to your business or going back to your customers with new opportunities or the ability to do something better, faster, more?
Earl Gosick: So as we talked about, I am a storage guy. So I look at something like Exascale. They’ve been talking about this for a couple of years now in the CTO cycles that I’ve been to. To see that product sort of come to fruition, where you have something and you can just put a personality on that module and build something out – I think that could be very game-changing, especially for AI. They might want to do a lot of things with file storage today, object storage tomorrow. Being able to build up a cluster and put a personality on it that meets the needs of the day – I think that could be quite interesting. That Rackscale solution you saw on the stage with Michael Dell and Jensen the other day – for the larger clients, something like that could be quite interesting. I mean, we’re building these large data centers right now and trying to fill them. Rackscale infrastructure that helps with power and energy and doing a lot of powerful things is going to probably be a game changer for a lot of people.
Robert Dutt: One of the things that struck me here is what I want to call the AI agnosticism, as long as you’re doing it on Dell infrastructure – that Dell is talking about here, ranging from, if you’ve got really basic needs, run it locally on your AI PC, moving up a bit there’s the GB10, which is more of a deskside machine, up to the big old box that Jensen signed on stage. How does that map with what you see in terms of customer needs for AI, and what do you think of that kind of approach to structuring both the data center and broader AI processing across the enterprise?
Earl Gosick: I think as we touched on earlier, everybody’s on a different stage in that journey. So if you’ve got a guy that’s working at his desk and he’s trying to do some cool things, but he doesn’t have access to a million tokens – that little GB10 you put on the desk beside him and he’s going to do some development, he’s going to learn some wonderful things. Then as you move up the stack in your journey, you’ve got some big clients who are going to do small proof-of-concept type scenarios where they might want a smaller box and then move up that stack. I think it’s important to have a product that covers a diverse range of those people because nobody’s in that one sweet spot – they’re all over the map. Having that full technology set supports wherever they happen to be in their life cycle.
Robert Dutt: You touch on tokens, and Jeff Clarke’s presentation was really deep into tokenomics and the kind of the trap there. I’m curious how that maps with what you’ve seen in customers as they’ve started to explore AI. Are they seeing these same challenges, and how are they thinking about it?
Earl Gosick: Tokens are the buzzword of the day, but they’re out there for a reason. Everybody has finite resources to put towards the solution they’re trying to build. They may or may not know what that solution is – they’re working towards something, they need tokens to achieve that. What I find interesting is the people who are very early into the game of AI and building solutions around that – it doesn’t take them long before they’re like, “I’m out of tokens. I need to do some stuff.” So it just comes back to the fact that there are only so many resources to solve the needs you have, and you only have so many tokens, and you’ve got to learn to live within what you can get your hands on. And that’s driving the economy, whether it’s at a data center level or at an internal level for any business.
Robert Dutt: And does that in turn drive – which I believe is Dell’s thesis here – does that in turn drive the interest in building out infrastructure in-house, so that the relative incremental cost of those additional tokens goes way down because it’s bought and built versus rented?
Earl Gosick: Yeah. I think there’s a step along that AI journey where people have potentially outgrown what they can do in the cloud in an economic fashion. We see the supply constraints are driven by CPU and memory usage. If you look at what the cloud hyperscalers offer, when you get into highly intensive memory and CPU, it starts to get very expensive. A lot of storage, a lot of bits and bytes moving back and forth – very expensive. All those things are prevalent in AI. You’re moving a lot of data back and forth, you’re touching a lot of things, you need a lot of memory at times. So once you get to a point where you’re doing useful things with your AI and building generative models, no matter what you do with inferencing, it starts to get really expensive. Then it becomes a time where you can move those things into a data center you control. You can get some economics from it and you can get some sovereignty out of it. A hyperscaler outside of your control can turn things off – they can’t do that when it’s your data center. So you’ve got a lot of control as well as the economics behind how you’re achieving the outcomes you’re looking to achieve.
Robert Dutt: I used a word which is actually where I wanted to go next, which is sovereignty. When we’re talking about data center infrastructure and moving bits around and enterprise storage, how is data sovereignty trending among your customers, especially folks who have regulatory concerns and that sort of thing?
Earl Gosick: Being a Canadian company, predominantly, we have a larger focus on sovereignty and data sovereignty and sovereign solutions than maybe you’ll see south of the border here. And we find our friends in the European Union are a little bit different – they’re ahead of us even. But it’s a really big concern, especially when you have any type of government agency that you’re dealing with, or anybody that really has intellectual property that they’re looking to protect. They’ve learned that open AI models may expose things – even if it’s just from how they’re creating their algorithms. But if the data gets out there, it’s a concern. They’re protecting their assets as well. These AIs are delivering very useful outcomes for them. They need to make sure they own those outcomes and that they can actually reach them when they need them. So part of data sovereignty is not just the sovereign part of your data, but it’s the actual access to your data. We’re learning things from not just the AI piece but from ransomware – all of a sudden your data goes away. The same thing could happen with a hyperscaler for some people. Sovereign IT solutions are going to be, I think, increasingly important moving forward.
Robert Dutt: On that note, you mentioned ransomware, and data resilience and protection is another area I wanted to touch on. We heard the figure that 97% of cyber attacks are now specifically targeting backup infrastructure – because of the old line about, I forget the particular bank robber’s name, but why do you rob the banks? Because that’s where the money is. Why do you go after the backup? Because that’s where all the data is. Does that match with what you’re seeing, and if so, how does that change how you’re designing and recommending data protection for your customers?
Earl Gosick: It is absolutely changing people’s realization of how they need to protect their data. This one doesn’t matter if it’s AI or your regular business practices – your data has value, whether it’s to support applications that are running your critical business or you’re building AI products that you need to protect. That has value and you need to access it. What we’re seeing more and more – and we’ve built a really strong practice around this – is building things like cyber vaults and using Dell’s technology partners like Index Engines, where they come in and they can quickly identify threats inside your environment and act on those. Because these guys loiter around for potentially months at a time. They know how to get to your backups. They know they’re not getting paid if you can recover. So they’re going to do everything they can to try and disrupt that. They have AI engines just like ours, but they have a lot of money and they don’t have the constraints about how they use their AI. I mean, these people are criminals, so they act in a method that makes them money. We’re going to be facing even more potential threats in the future, and some of those are going to be AI-driven. We’re going to have to react at AI speeds. There are changes coming, but certainly people are learning to build protection mechanisms that are air-gapped and can respond very quickly to threats.
Robert Dutt: When you’re sitting in front of a client who thinks they’re covered – they’ve got a backup solution, they’ve got someone who’s responsible for it – what are the most common gaps that you find between what they think they have and what they actually have?
Earl Gosick: I think for many clients, they don’t really understand how disruptive it’s going to be if they run into a ransomware attack. If you’re a client that may have ransomware insurance, for example, and they get hit – you have to tell them, “Do you understand you’re not going to be able to touch any of that infrastructure? Because your insurance company is going to want to do some analysis on that to see how the threat came in.” That infrastructure is dead and gone. You’re starting from scratch. You need a golden image – you need something you know nobody has touched. Protecting the data is only the first piece. Rebuilding from that data, and how fast you can do that – that’s the very critical component. That’s where an air-gapped cyber recovery solution like Dell Cyber Recovery is critical, because you can understand what data to recover and you can recover quickly. Having the data there – that’s the great first step and that’s where you should start. But following that, that is only the first step.
Robert Dutt: Your client base is different from a lot of partners I talk to. Given where you sit and who you’re focused on – not necessarily organizations that are under the same kind of pressure or have the same kind of resources to pursue AI – how do you translate and filter what you hear at a conference like this, where a lot is focused towards big enterprise, to a message that makes sense for your customers and scales to their needs and appetites?
Earl Gosick: That’s one I think isn’t really that difficult – it’s not as difficult as you would think. Because everybody has the same problems. They run into the same problems. How they build solutions to those problems might change on the scale, but you just have to understand and recognize that everybody’s having the same problems. You can articulate and communicate to them that you’re not the only one that has this. We can resolve this problem at a large scale, but we don’t have to. You came back to it earlier when we talked about the product sets, from small to large – you just pick the right one to meet the solution that these guys have. How you solve that problem of the day doesn’t necessarily change for a really, really large client versus a very, very small client. It’s really just the scale of the end solution and the architecture that’s put together to solve the need.
Robert Dutt: From a Titanium partner’s seat, what did the program changes that we saw rolled out – the agentification of the program, some of the incentive shifts – tell you about where Dell sees growth opportunity, and how does it align with where you’re already going or where it might take you?
Earl Gosick: I think you can see very easily that Dell is putting a large focus around AI and what it can do for them to streamline their business and be successful. We, like any other company we deal with, are doing the same thing. What they’re doing with their Dell One program, and having a single operation from lead generation down to quoting and pricing and follow-up – it matches what we’re doing on the back end and trying to automate that. Because as long as we can automate that process and reduce the friction in those programs and dealing with Dell, we can spend that time focusing on our clients’ needs. You see Dell, I think, leveraging the same technologies to do that. And if we’re smart business people today, we’re looking to the people around us who are being successful and trying to do what they’re doing in a sense. That’s true for us and our clients. Leveraging AI and seeing how that’s being successful for our partners is driving what we’re all doing – to drive automation and simplification through the processes that are just painful every day that we have to do better at, to support our clients.
Robert Dutt: I’m guessing you guys are pretty far down this road already because you’re pretty much a pure-play Dell on the infrastructure side, as far as I understand. But when a company like Dell rolls out these incentives focused on expanding customer footprints – getting a Dell storage customer into Dell PCs or any of the other solution lines – just curious if that moves the needle for you in terms of the incentive, or is it already baked into what you’re doing?
Earl Gosick: It’s baked into what we’re doing. In the end of the day, you are trying to build a rapport with a customer based on being a trusted expert. You’re not going to flip your technologies around based on what’s going to get somebody a little bit more money. You’ve got to do the right thing for the customer today and every time you deal with them. The advantage of dealing with Dell is they typically tie their incentives to the product that they are investing in today – that they see the future growing into. So they usually coincide. They understand the pain points of the year, and the incentives usually match the requirements of the day as well. So they’re really good at that. And then they usually have a lot of tools to support that initiative of IT transformation, whatever it is for that time and place in our industry.
Robert Dutt: You mentioned earlier you’re on the CTO Connect program – pretty small room, an exclusive group. Tell me about what that relationship looks like on the inside of the room, and the value that an organization like ESTI gets from sitting in there.
Earl Gosick: I guess I’ll put it this way. We deal with some technology providers – predominantly Dell. Dell puts us in a room, they tell us what they’re doing for the next year or two, and they ask us if they’re on the right track. That’s telling to me – they care and they listen. They talk about the technologies that we’re going to see upcoming, so it’s helpful for us to talk to our clients about where the industry is headed. But they do sometimes say, “We’re going to do this,” and the room says, “Oh, no, you can’t do that. Our customers love this,” or, “We like this for this reason.” And they say, “Oh, okay.” And we have a dialogue about those things. So I think that’s one of the most important things that comes out of CTO Connect – we hear about industry trends, but they also ask us our opinion on whether they’re on the right track, and then they listen to that opinion. I think that’s telling for any company you deal with – one that engages not only with their clients, but with their technology partners. It’s one of the things I really like about CTO Connect.
Robert Dutt: You guys just turned 35 or so, as I understand, as an organization. That’s a long time to be running a consultancy in any market – and markets move, vendors come and go. What’s the philosophy behind building something that durable in a market that changes so fast, and especially in an area of the country that doesn’t necessarily get as much headline attention from vendors as a Toronto or a Vancouver or a Montreal?
Earl Gosick: I think it comes back to what I stated earlier around building strong and capable expertise across the board – and that’s building relationships with the clients, building relationships with partners like Dell to solve the solutions of the day. Our clients respect that because they know they can come back to us again and again and we’ll do the right thing together. So that’s really the crux of it. Our business model is a little different in that we support a little bit more of an entrepreneurial aspect to our business. When young, capable people come on board and they build differentiating products, they get a seat at the table – and that’s critical for ESTI and the way we operate. But it’s really about looking at modern technology solutions and being agile to support those ever-changing technologies. It makes our industry exciting. You’re never doing the same thing every day. And as long as you can recognize the fact that you won’t be doing the same thing tomorrow and you just have to find a way to deal with it – that’s how we thrive in our company, and in working with Dell as well.
Robert Dutt: All right, so let’s close with asking you to do a little bit of the impossible, given that pace of change. What’s one thing that you’re thinking about today, but maybe not totally all-in on at this point, that you think is going to be shaping the business for ESTI and your customers when we’re sitting here at DTW 2027?
Earl Gosick: Well, that’s a really hard question. On the investment side, we do look at some of the technologies today – and as we talked about, AI is big for us. We need to build services that our clients don’t have. So we spend a lot of focus on where they have skills and where they don’t. We’re going to build a lot of expertise around cleaning data, building data pipelines and that kind of stuff, to focus on the needs our clients are asking us to help them solve. So that’s kind of an easy one because everybody sees that going forward. Beyond that – we’re making a strong effort in Saskatchewan and Alberta to build a sort of data center economy to support a lot of these data centers that need to be built. We already have access to power infrastructure to support those things. That’s going to drive a little bit of a change in our operating model just to support our local governments as they try and take advantage of the differentiators we have. That’ll drive some change for ESTI. And then as we expand across the rest of Canada, different geographies have different requirements as well. So lots of change, lots of new people coming on board all the time – interesting but dynamic.
Robert Dutt: That will be an interesting thread to pull on. I remember going to an event – God, it must have been 15 years ago now – talking about how Canada really should be a data center powerhouse. When you consider we have power, clean power in relative abundance, we have cold, which turns out to be important – it sounds like maybe there’s an opportunity to realize some of that with what you guys are doing and what governments are starting to look at more seriously.
Earl Gosick: They are. Also, right outside my hometown, they just announced a very large data center which is going to house some infrastructure from CoreWeave – and we’re going to see more of that, I think, because that process went very well. I sat in on a conference a couple of weeks ago where it was government and industry getting together to talk about why they were successful, what they bring to the table. Saskatchewan is unique because they have regulated power, energy, and land. They can guarantee, “We will give you power, we can guarantee you’ll get LNG.” Those types of things are very important for anybody trying to build a data center – it’s the critical piece. And with the government having control over all of those, they can guarantee them. That’s where I think Saskatchewan is going to have a real differentiator to support that technology, and the government is well aware of that fact now. They’re going to want to do more of these things. And then our neighbors in both Alberta and Manitoba are sort of on board as well. Certainly Alberta has done a few key data centers to support AI and those are going to continue to happen. We’re sometimes slow to move because it’s government. But once they realize the differentiators they have and what it can do for the market, I think there’ll be some traction there.
Robert Dutt: Should be interesting times, and sitting where you’re sitting sounds like a big opportunity.
Earl Gosick: Absolutely. I think it’s a big opportunity for all of us – supporting your community around you as well as building a thriving business.
Robert Dutt: Earl, I appreciate you taking the time once again. I hope this has been a good DTW for you.
Earl Gosick: It’s been a great discussion and a good DTW, so thanks a lot for having me.
Robert Dutt: There you have it – Earl Gosick from ESTI Consulting Services.
I’d like to thank Earl for his time last week in Las Vegas. Thirty-five years building deep technical expertise from Saskatoon, in a vendor relationship game that tends to reward proximity to the bigger centres – that’s not an accident, and it came through in the conversation.
A few things I’ll take away from this one.
First, the AI-is-a-storage-story framing. Every AI product ultimately requires data to be collected, governed, moved, and protected. That’s not news to Earl, but it’s a useful reframe for anyone still trying to connect their existing practice to the AI conversation. The hardware gets the headlines. The data work actually gets the contracts.
Second, on cyber resilience – the ransomware insurance point Earl raised is worth sitting with. The moment a client files a claim, that infrastructure gets frozen while the insurance company figures out how the breach happened. Your ability to recover doesn’t just depend on whether the backup is intact – it depends on whether you built a clean, air-gapped golden image that nobody has touched. That’s the conversation. And if you’re not having it with your clients, maybe someone else is.
And third, keep an eye on Saskatchewan. Regulated power, guaranteed energy supply, and a provincial government that has now seen a CoreWeave-scale data center get successfully built in the province and wants more of them. Earl thinks that’s just the start of something, and I’m inclined to agree.
If you’re enjoying the show, please follow or subscribe wherever you listen. We’re on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and most of the usual podcast directories. And if you have a moment to leave a rating or a review, that really does help folks in the channel find the show.
Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.
Is this your show?
Claim this listing to keep it up to date, reach guests who want to pitch you, and manage bookings with Guestify.
