Nigel Brown, CTO of Microserve Not every voice at Dell Technologies World last week belonged to a vendor. For a partner perspective on the week’s biggest themes, In The Channel sat down with Nigel Brown, CTO of Microserve – a Burnaby, BC-based solution provider, Dell Titanium partner, and Dell’s Client Solutions Partner of the Year in Canada in consecutive years. Brown walked away from DTW with deskside agentic AI as his headline takeaway, particularly after hands-on time in a Dell lab showcasing NemoClaw – NVIDIA’s enterprise-governance take on the OpenClaw open-source agent framework. “They’ve set it up closed by default – it can’t leave the box,” Brown says. “That’s a safety net that really opens the conversation.” That said, he’s clear-eyed about where most of his public sector and enterprise clients actually are. “Broad scope, it’s ahead. The hardware is going to follow it.” The tokenomics reality landed hard too. Brown shared a personal story about spending a hundred dollars testing Claude on a single flight – a relatable example he’s started using to frame the real cost implications of unmanaged AI usage, well before any on-premises or local inference conversation begins. On cyber resilience, Brown says he’s had to evolve his approach: “I got to be more of a jerk. I was being too nice.” His firm’s managed backup practice has seen firsthand the damage when clients – and even other MSPs – treat backup as a checkbox. When you show up after a ransomware event to find the backup server was on the same domain and hit just as hard, the conversation changes. And on Canadian data sovereignty, Brown goes beyond the standard data-residency talking points. FISA Section 702 and the CLOUD Act, he argues, represent far more serious legal exposure than most clients realize – even those who believe a Canadian cloud region is sufficient protection. The conversation also covers the AI PC refresh cycle colliding with supply chain pressure, the end-user adoption gap that’s undermining Copilot investments, and what Dell’s revised partner incentive structure signals about where the growth opportunities are. Read Full Transcript Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In the Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca and your host for the show. Last week, I was at Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas, Dell’s big annual customer and partner event. Over the course of the week, I had a number of conversations that I’ll be bringing here on In the Channel. Last week, we featured three Dell executives. This week, we’re bringing you some partners. Today, we start on that partner perspective, specifically from one of Canada’s top Dell partners. Nigel Brown is CTO of Microserve, a Burnaby, BC-based solution provider that has earned Titanium status with Dell and taken home Dell’s Client Solutions Partner of the Year in Canada in consecutive years. Microserve serves an enterprise and public sector-heavy client base, which means Nigel’s job is regularly about taking what gets announced on a stage in Las Vegas and translating it into something that makes sense for organizations that don’t necessarily move at conference speed. I caught up with Nigel on site at DTW last week. We covered a lot of ground – deskside agentic AI and what it’s actually going to take to make that real for customers, the very real cost of token economics, why he’s had to be, as he put it, more of a jerk about cyber resilience, and why the Canadian data sovereignty conversation is more urgent than most people realize. Let’s get right to it. My chat with Nigel Brown. Nigel, thanks for taking the time. Appreciate it. Nigel Brown: Happy to be here. Thanks for having me. Robert Dutt: So you guys are here, obviously, as a Titanium-level Dell partner, consecutive years as the Client Solutions Partner of the Year in Canada. What’s your overall read on this week? What made your ears stand up? What caught your attention? What are you taking back to both your team and to your customers when you go back to Burnaby? Nigel Brown: That’s a really good question. It’s also a big one. There’s been a lot of announcements, a lot of dialogue over the last couple of days. I’m trying to process that a little bit, assuming you were going to ask me that. I think the biggest takeaway I had – everybody’s heard of OpenClaw, everybody’s heard all the IT people are terrified of it, so it’s more, how do we get rid of it in our environments? Seeing this whole push around deskside agentic AI, especially given our market where we play a lot with clients – I actually had the opportunity, I did the lab today because I couldn’t resist seeing what it’s like. The governance and security wrapper on it totally makes sense and it’s opened my eyes. I think that’s probably the biggest. Beyond that, I would say the Dell hardware being able to run frontier models, seeing Gemini running local for sovereignty conversations – I think that’s a really good thing to see as well. Robert Dutt: Along those lines, obviously you touched on one of the big stories this week, which is deskside AI – the idea of physical infrastructure that’s at or near the customer’s desk, either in the data center or right there in the PC, that’s processing the models locally. It sounds like something that you’re interested in. I’m curious where it lands for your customers. Is it something that’s a conversation point, or is it ahead of where they are in the AI discussion at this point? Nigel Brown: I would say broad scope – I don’t want to lump all my customers into one bucket – but broad scope, it’s ahead. I don’t think you’re seeing a lot of organizations ready for it. We also deal heavily with public sector enterprise accounts, for example. We’re doing more and more in the commercial market where you’re going to see a little bit more playing and adoption within tech teams. But in ours, yeah, I’d say we’re definitely ahead right now. So it gives you a chance to get in there and pitch the idea as something new and plant those seeds. Once I get it past my IT and security folks, then that’s where it’s all going to start. If I can’t get it through mine in a good conversation, then I’m never going to be able to with our clients. Robert Dutt: But it sounds like there’s at least that – from your comments on OpenClaw, it sounds like there’s that door, that area of interest. Nigel Brown: Seeing it today under the NemoClaw and Viya umbrella – yeah, I think there’s definitely something there. They’ve set it up closed by default. It can’t leave the box. That’s what I saw in the lab today. So until you set up essentially like a firewall rule to allow it to do something, it’s a safety net that I think really opens the conversation and allows the idea of end users actually playing. Those are really early adopters anyway. And how could I integrate agentic AI into organizations? Robert Dutt: Man, how often does it come back down to governance with AI? Nigel Brown: Oh, absolutely. That’s pretty much the name of the game everywhere. And so we’re doing it well, and many are still scrambling. Robert Dutt: You touch on you guys having a lot of public sector, healthcare, education, all those kinds of verticals – not always the fastest to move on new tech. Along the lines of the previous questions, but sort of taken out a notch – how much of what the AI announcements we’ve heard this week translate directly to where your customers are at, versus how much needs to be, shall we say, adapted for the reality of your accounts? Nigel Brown: Well, you go to any of these events and it’s, “We’re behind if we’re not doing agentic AI everywhere.” Reality is, it’s just not true. I think it’s very forward-thinking – or very optimistic – to think we’re all moving that fast. It’s headed in that direction quicker and quicker. Executive tables are always the ones sitting there going, “We want it, we need it in our organizations, we’re going to get left behind.” So it’s very top of mind. But some organizations have very niche deployments – they’re figuring out the right solutions. Healthcare – I’ve seen it, they’ve done some phenomenal things in radiology and other areas. So it’s picking up. We’re dealing with one client right now that’s looking at online pharmacy and they’re looking at a huge Dell compute cluster to run AI on. So you see it, but it’s not commonplace. It’s not every organization. Certainly as you get into municipalities and things like that, it’s Copilot at best – that’s really where they’re trying to play – and their user base just isn’t adopting, not even close. Robert Dutt: So it sounds like there are at least a couple of steps that need to happen to get to the point of, A, using what’s already in place and, B, potentially looking at building out something internally – and the stuff that’s been talked about here a lot, the idea of running those AI workloads internally on the data center side. Nigel Brown: Yeah. I think it’s going to get there for sure. Right now the conversation has to be outcomes – not “I want AI.” And right now it’s so heavily, “Well, I know I need it, I don’t know what for yet.” I’ve seen it even in some peer groups – the dialogue is, “Well, we’re going to do AI, we’re going to build agents.” So, what for? And then there’s a long pause. Driving outcomes conversations is where it’s going to start, in my opinion. The hardware is going to follow it. And that really ties into, well, where are you going to run it? Do you understand token economics – or tokenomics, whatever the buzzword is right now – and that’s a really big deal. For me, getting that message out really loud and clear around the cost of tokens – I’ve done it, I’ve gotten burned. I spent a hundred bucks on a plane because I wanted to see Claude do something cool. And you’re going, wow, if I can do that in 10 minutes, think of what larger organizations will spend if they don’t find a smarter way to run it. Robert Dutt: That’s a good point – it’s not something you necessarily understand, but it’s something you can sure feel if you start to have adventures with the stuff. Nigel Brown: Well, exactly. And all it’s going to take – like I said, a lot of organizations started with Copilot under the Microsoft umbrella, because it was like an easy button. It was there for them, it was already set up. I am worried about some of those days changing, where that subscription turns into usage-based models. And we’ll see where that goes. You’re seeing it with Anthropic, you’re seeing it with Perplexity. I bounce off my limits all the time. Most of what I’m doing I can wait till tomorrow – but it’s easy to get out of control. Robert Dutt: And user computing is pretty core to what you guys do. There are a few things going on there – Windows 11 end-of-life support coming in October, the AI PC push coming from every direction at the same time. I’m curious if those two things are coming together in customer conversations as one refresh decision, or are they still separate tracks – the need to modernize for the Windows upgrade versus the need to modernize to get the most out of AI workloads? Nigel Brown: I think the end-of-support conversation and hardware refresh, honestly, is the biggest driver of the conversation that I’ve seen. And then that leads into, well, do I need an AI PC, and why, and what’s going to run on it? Everybody’s exploring and curious about it. There’s more skepticism about whether you need it now. Robert Dutt: How is that hitting along with the current fun situation with hardware constraints and prices spiking? And we’re hearing pretty directly from Jeff Clarke that, you know, telling customers, let us know what you want as early in the process as you can. I think the natural addendum to that is, make decisions knowing you might have this machine for a little bit longer than you previously expected. Nigel Brown: Totally right. So it’s very much my dialogue with our clients – it’s future-proofing. You better do it now. You don’t want to be stuck with a machine that can’t run an NPU for the next five years. So even if right now there’s skepticism about how much is going to run on it today, I think it is an important conversation to have and make sure that we’re ready for the moments where we’re really seeing workloads and inferencing running on device. You have to have that conversation now and pre-plan for it. But yeah, it’s been – especially in public sector – a hard conversation to have right now. Supply chain – we’re like a broken record. It still surprises me how many clients we talk to that haven’t seen this coming, that don’t know it’s real, or you get the ones going, “Well, I think it’s going to clear up in September, I’ll just wait till then.” Oh man. Brace for it. We’ve got to be ready. It just feels like a conversation on repeat these days – and it’s more than worth it, making sure we’re doing model selection with the future in mind. Robert Dutt: I find it’s a fun time to be a partner in that particular space. Nigel Brown: Well, you know, quote volume has quadrupled, because that same customer deal might take four different passes before they’ve made it through, especially in government. Pricing validity is a real challenge. It’s a moving target – no decision ever gets made fast. Robert Dutt: I want to talk a little about cyber resilience – another big topic here at the event. You guys run a managed backup practice, I understand, and you’re doing a lot of what vendors are asking MSPs to evolve towards. When you get into a customer environment today, what’s the most common gap between what they think their backup situation looks like and the reality of the situation? Nigel Brown: That’s an interesting question. It’s a real mixed bag. I always start with, “How confident are you in your ability to recover?” And most leaders – business leaders, outside of IT – there’s like a long pause. “Well, I don’t know.” Okay. Have you ever tested your recovery capability? No. Well, that’s where we’re going to start. And in other dialogues, they think they’ve got the backups running, but nobody’s been looking at them – they’re coming from doing it themselves, or maybe a mom-and-pop IT person taking care of it. They’re not watching, they’re not looking at tools, they’re not getting alert notifications on whether it’s keeping up and whether they’re protected. So that’s very foundational. Warning new clients – it’s just, let’s take them on that journey, do an assessment of the whole environment, make sure we’re protected. And a lot of conversations are, “Do you know that you’re not protected? Like, if you got ransomware tomorrow, there’s nothing I could do to help you, even though I’m your MSP.” That’s a scary reality. I’ve seen that have to go back to boards and make some tough decisions, find budget and solve it. They usually do – they react fast – but you’ve got to make the risk abundantly clear. Robert Dutt: That makes sense. In talking to Rob Emsley, who’s on the marketing team for the cyber resilience side at Dell, he was saying that 97% of cyber attacks now are specifically targeting backup infrastructure – because it turns out that’s where all the stuff is. Does that match what you’re seeing, and has that shift changed what you’re recommending to customers about what being protected really means for them? Nigel Brown: I wouldn’t say it’s really changed our messaging. I’d like to think we were maybe ahead of the curve in talking about storage and immutability – some of these key elements of, well, you just need it. That’s how we run our hosted service for clients that use it. And if we’re building out an architecture for another client, it’s just fundamental these days. You can’t even consider a solution that doesn’t include immutability protection, being able to spot bad things happening. But I’ve seen it – we’ve come into a disaster client where, “Hey, we got ransomware, can you help us recover?” And you go to the backup server to find out it was ransomwared too. “Do you have any tapes floating around?” It’s a tough chat to have. You see that less these days, but you definitely see the attempts – people trying to do it. And even other MSPs – I hate to say it – they’re not mature enough in how they’re protecting. They took the backup server, joined it to the domain – it’s just another device on the network. And sure enough, that’s exactly what gets hit because they didn’t plan it out. So it’s all planning and doing it right in the first place. Robert Dutt: It’s a checkbox as opposed to something that’s more firmly thought through. Given that, how do you approach it with customers? Do you come at it as, “This is something you should do, these are the reasons why, this is the potential downside” – or is it a thou-shalt kind of conversation? Nigel Brown: You know, a pile of years ago, after seeing an incident hit a new customer, I kind of resolved – I’ve got to be more of a jerk. I hate to say it. I got to be a lot tougher in my stance. I was being too nice. So yeah, in all things on this, my position is to generally take a pretty firm line. It’s all about risk, though. And to business leaders especially, that’s a term they understand. I’m not telling them, “Okay, you need this type of backup solution and it’s going to do these things.” It’s all about, how do we address the risk that you have right now? Leave it to us to figure out the details as we design the solution. Rarely do we get into the weeds of it unless it’s a larger client where we’re dealing with a large IT team that has opinions. But usually in those larger environments, there are groups that are already aligned – they know what they should be doing, maybe just haven’t done it themselves yet. The new architecture is absolutely going to include all those steps. So it’s an easier conversation to have. In some ways, it’s giving them permission if you’re coming in as a new supplier – it’s the stuff they’ve wanted to do, but haven’t really had the air cover to make the case. Robert Dutt: Yeah, you come in as that outside opinion to say, this is how it needs to be. Nigel Brown: And our job is often more of just a translator for those IT teams to their leadership – to help support the business case. Robert Dutt: I want to talk about the Modern Partner Platform and some of the partner program changes that have rolled out this week. One of the big things is obviously the revised incentive structure, with cyber resilience particularly called out as a premium rebate area. From your seat as a Titanium partner, what does the new structure tell you about where Dell sees the biggest growth opportunities for partners? Nigel Brown: Well, I think it does exactly that – it says where the growth opportunities are. And largely there was no surprise. In my opinion, when you look at it, it aligns to how we want to lead deals, it aligns with the conversations we’re already going to have. Now it’s just helping incentivize that dialogue. Nothing surprising there – I just see better alignment. Robert Dutt: Let’s play a little bit of “anything can happen here.” Vendors like Dell are starting to build agentic AI into their programs, their portals, their tools – all the stuff you guys work with every day. Where do you see the most genuine value for an organization like your own in vendors – agentifying, for want of a better word – their partner programs and tools? And the flip side: are there any potholes you’re watching out for as that rolls out? Nigel Brown: You know, the more the merrier – more tools you can bring in is great. We’re always excited to see what they come up with. But to me, the bottom line is back to outcomes. It’s about reducing friction in the sales process. What do we want our sellers to do? We want them out selling. Living in a partner portal trying to find what they need, deal registration, all of those things that can be painful – sometimes it’s just admin work taking you away from conversations with clients. Reduce friction – that’s the name of the game. Do I want to see more AI-generated marketing content? No. We can do that ourselves – one prompt, feed something in, done. To me, the more you can expose what matters to us and reduce friction, the better. It keeps us doing what we should be doing and not sitting there doing admin work. Robert Dutt: It sounds like based on that comment, what Dell and a lot of its peers are doing is already on track – because I’m sure they’re asking these exact same questions of partners around the world right now. Nigel Brown: Oh, they’ve got way smarter people than me working in these massive organizations. They know the outcomes we want to achieve. And I’m excited that we’re at a point in time where we can see some of this come to fruition. Ten years ago, this was never a reality. Robert Dutt: What’s the biggest misconception you think your customers have about what it means to be AI ready right now? Nigel Brown: I think it depends on who the conversation is centered around. If it’s C-suite leadership, it’s back to, “We want AI, I don’t know what for, I don’t know what it is, but I know I need it.” There are tough conversations to be had. AI readiness is really, is your data ready? We heard that on stage this morning. Most organizations we walk into – it turns out they’ve got no data governance. So, let’s define some of this, let’s build some process, look at the right tools. In the Microsoft lens, we do a lot around Microsoft 365 and modern workplace. Well, then it’s a Purview conversation. And they get confused – “Why are you talking about DLP and Purview? I thought we were talking about AI readiness.” That’s exactly what it’s all about. The other big one I think they’re not taking seriously enough is the end-user adoption side. I’ve seen organizations – you go into their portals and have a look with them – their adoption of Copilot, where they’ve spent a whole pile of money, is abysmal. So then the dialogue is, “What you actually need to do is get your users excited. Train them, show them the cool things.” I think we’ve been really successful doing that inside our own organization, and now that’s something we deliver to our clients as well – we need to get your teams ready and thinking differently. At a C-suite level, they’re usually surprised at the path it takes, or in some cases how long it might take to get there. “Your data is in such rough shape – you’re two years away. You need to build a foundation before you can really consume it.” Now, some of the announcements this morning – okay, that starts changing the equation. We could get there faster if we have the right infrastructure in place. Robert Dutt: For a variety of reasons, the Canadian data sovereignty question feels like it’s getting louder. And I have to imagine, especially in your public sector footprint, how are you helping customers think through AI infrastructure decisions when data residency and compliance are an increasing part of the equation? Nigel Brown: It’s a non-negotiable for most of our enterprise and public sector clients. It’s going to run on-prem. They cannot afford to run on cloud. Yes, they want the latest models, the frontier models, the cool bells and whistles as we all do. But really – I presented at a conference last year on exactly this topic, why it’s important to bring it back on-prem. Never mind the tokenomics conversation – now there’s just more ammunition. I chatted with one IT leader, a commercial client, not public sector, who was all proud of how he’d migrated everything to cloud. We were in a session where they talked through the tokenomics challenge and another reason why sovereignty matters. And you watch the look on his face go, “Wow, I’m going to have to start building a data center again. I thought I got out of that.” And he was sitting there with his CEO in the room for that conversation. Kind of a wake-up call. So my dialogue is, let’s talk through what does the Patriot Act mean? What does FISA Section 702 mean? It’s a little bit scary, and people are shocked – “I thought running in Google Cloud or AWS, running it in a Canadian location was good enough.” No. That provider has access to your data. Have you heard of the CLOUD Act? That’s nothing compared to FISA 702 – they don’t even need to ask. They can just go and get it. And that’s pretty scary. So yeah, a lot of our job now is just sharing and communicating the right things to our clients and making sure they’re aware. Robert Dutt: Aside from your efforts to bring that education – do you find that the level of general awareness is on the rise? Are we getting to more of a discussion about how to solve for this, rather than still defining the scope of the problem? Nigel Brown: I would love to say it’s more mature. The reality is no – it’s still early-stage conversations. You get anomalies. We were with some clients who are way ahead and have just deployed Azure Local on Dell infrastructure. They’re doing amazing things, moving fast. So now it’s more, “How can I partner with you to go share this message? Why you went there, why you built it this way, what are you doing about it?” But no, it’s going to be a continued push – much like the supply chain story here – these dialogues just repeat as you walk into client after client. Robert Dutt: Last one for me – along the same lines as the first question, but a slightly different lens. What’s one thing from this week that you think will genuinely change what Microserve brings to customers in the next 12 months? Nigel Brown: I come back to where we started – the whole side of agentic AI. That was not on my radar, not in a serious way. “Let’s play around with this, let’s lab it out, see where it’s getting explored.” When you see a name like Dell behind what we’re doing, that got me more excited than I would have thought. I want to pilot inside our org. And if we can start building something that works here, then absolutely – taking that to clients and saying, “Okay, look at the GB10s, look at the GB300s, let’s move up the ladder.” There’s a tangible path that gives them more value than trying to build massive solutions right out of the gate. There are quick wins there, and that’s what excites me – showing a customer how there could be a quick win if we did this right. And it ties into the last thread we were pulling on – “Okay, you’re telling me I shouldn’t have all this stuff running on public cloud, so where’s it going to run?” And you’re not talking megawatts and massive data centers here. All I want to do is automate tasks and do some of this lower-level stuff. I think that’s going to be an interesting entry point for a lot of clients – making it more accessible. Everybody’s used ChatGPT, Claude, whatever their tool of choice is, so they’re into prompting. Nobody’s really understanding Copilot or understanding agentic – it’s a big buzzword. That’s our job. We can show them a slice of the possible, mock up these use cases, and those are quick wins. Then it is something deployable at scale – you just move it from the little box to a bigger box. The more people take advantage of it and keep moving up the scale, you don’t need to go spend millions upfront to play around with something like that. It’s going to open more doors. Robert Dutt: No shortage of interesting opportunities. Good luck getting out there and chasing those, and thanks again for making the time this week. Nigel Brown: You bet. Thanks for having me.

Today’s headline news for Canadian IT solution providers: ASUS Canada Country Manager: ASUS Canada has announced the appointment of Vernon Coutinho as Country Manager for its System Business Group. Made ahead of the ASUS Business Summit 2026 in Toronto, the move underscores the company’s long-term growth ambitions in the commercial market as it accelerates its focus on AI-ready devices. 7AI PLAID ELITE Launch: Security vendor 7AI has launched PLAID ELITE, a fully managed, AI-native security operations solution. The platform uses agentic AI to autonomously complete the majority of investigations end-to-end, offering partners a way to scale security operations without increasing headcount. Guardz Appoints Channel Leader: SMB cybersecurity platform Guardz has appointed former Pax8 executive Danni Munro as its new Director of Channel Sales for the ANZ region. The hire reflects a broader global channel push by the vendor to help MSPs meet the accelerating demand for consolidated security services. ChannelNEXT Toronto: TechnoPlanet’s ChannelNEXT conference kicks off tomorrow in Toronto, gathering Canadian VARs and MSPs to tackle pressing channel challenges. The event will feature extensive discussions on the future of the channel ecosystem. ManageEngine Autonomous AI: ManageEngine is rolling out an autonomous AI push designed to streamline IT operations. The initiative aims to help MSPs handle increasingly complex environments with automated workflows. Tech Builders 2026: Global Startups will host the Tech Builders 2026 conference in Toronto on June 16, focusing on the new digital economy. The event will explore AI, venture capital, and Canada’s role as a global innovation hub. Tech Financing Adoption: Mitsubishi HC Capital Canada is urging the channel to embed financing into partnerships. Director of Technology Finance Jim Moschos believes this approach will help clients overcome the high upfront costs of complex technology implementations. CRTC Streaming Demands: The CRTC has officially ordered streaming giants like Netflix and Apple TV to boost their spending on Canadian content. The regulatory move is designed to support the domestic production industry. Read Full Transcript Welcome to The Buzz from ChannelBuzz.ca, I’m Robert Dutt, today is Wednesday, May 27th, and here’s what’s happening in the channel today. Yesterday, ASUS Canada announced the appointment of Vernon Coutinho as Country Manager for its System Business Group. The announcement, which came just ahead of the ASUS Business Summit in Toronto, reflects the company’s long-term growth ambitions in the Canadian commercial market. Coutinho, who brings nearly 30 years of industry experience, will oversee strategy and performance across consumer, gaming, and commercial segments. For Canadian MSPs, this signals a deepening of the ASUS partner ecosystem locally. The company is actively accelerating its focus on AI-ready commercial devices, bringing its consumer DNA into the workplace. According to ASUS, the goal is to elevate the business laptop experience by delivering devices that are secure, manageable, and enjoyable to use. Also on Tuesday, 7AI announced the availability of PLAID ELITE, a fully managed, AI-native security operations solution. The platform combines autonomous investigation by AI agents with expert oversight from 7AI security engineers, delivering a continuous, follow-the-sun security outcome. The company is positioning the tool as a way for organizations to protect their environments without needing to build or scale an internal operations team. What makes this relevant for the channel is the service model. Rather than relying entirely on human analyst shifts, PLAID ELITE’s coverage scales with investigation volume through agentic AI. 7AI noted that agents are now autonomously completing the majority of investigations end-to-end, allowing partners to drive security outcomes through technology rather than headcount. Cybersecurity platform Guardz has appointed former Pax8 executive Danni Munro as its new Director of Channel Sales for the Australia and New Zealand region. While this is an international appointment, Munro’s background in scaling Pax8’s operations underscores a broader channel push by Guardz. The company is actively deepening its partner relationships to meet accelerating demand from small and medium-sized businesses facing rising ransomware threats. This move highlights a continuing global trend where cybersecurity vendors are relying on seasoned channel veterans to help MSPs deliver consolidated security services to clients who lack the internal expertise to manage threats independently. In Brief – TechnoPlanet’s ChannelNEXT conference kicks off tomorrow in Toronto to address pressing partner challenges. ManageEngine says its new autonomous AI push will streamline IT operations for managed service providers. Global Startups is set to host the Tech Builders 2026 conference in Toronto on June 16. Mitsubishi HC Capital Canada is urging the channel to embed financing into partnerships to offset complex technology costs. The CRTC has ordered streaming platforms like Netflix and Apple TV to boost their spending on Canadian content. Full details and links in the show notes or the blog post. Later today on In The Channel, we will be airing our conversation with Coro CEO Joe Sykora to discuss security stacks and the 2026 threat landscape. And if you haven’t heard it yet, be sure to check out yesterday’s episode featuring Nigel Brown, CTO of Microserve, for a practitioner’s take on AI readiness and tokenomics from Dell Technologies World. That’s how we’re seeing the headlines today. I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, thanks for listening. Have a great day.

Anthony Tanoury, senior director of distribution at Dell Technologies Distribution doesn’t get a lot of editorial love. It’s easy to treat it as the background infrastructure of the channel – the warehousing, the credit lines, the logistics layer that keeps product moving. But as anyone who’s been paying attention knows, that picture is well out of date. At Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas this week, In the Channel sat down with Anthony Tanoury, Dell’s senior director of distribution, to talk about what distribution actually looks like in 2026 – and the conversation ranged from supply chain strategy to AI-assisted deal registration to the shifting economics of the partner ecosystem. The headline number: Dell moved approximately ten thousand partners to a distribution-led buying model last year. Partners who previously purchased direct from Dell now route exclusively through distribution. The more interesting data point is what happened next – those partners are growing faster than the ones who remained on a direct model. Tanoury attributes it to the enablement depth that distributors can offer at a scale that Dell simply can’t replicate directly. On the Modern Partner Platform rollout – one of the bigger announcements at DTW this week – the conversation came down to speed. Deal registration that today takes two to three days is being redesigned, with AI-assisted automation in the pipeline to bring that down to two to three hours. The plumbing involves integrating Dell’s systems tightly with distributor platforms, streamlining the multi-system, multi-email-thread process that currently slows everything down. And when asked for the single most underutilized resource available to partners through distribution, Tanoury didn’t hesitate: the AI accelerator programs that distributors have built to help partners get started in the AI practice space. With every partner asking “where do I begin,” the answer may already be sitting in the distributor’s enablement catalogue. Read Full Transcript Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor at ChannelBuzz.ca and your host for the show. We’re continuing our coverage from Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas this week, and I wanted to close the series of Dell execs with a conversation that I think will resonate with pretty much anyone who moves Dell product – which, let’s be honest, is a lot of you. Distribution is one of the topics that often gets taken for granted. It’s the plumbing, it’s the logistics, it’s the credit line. Except that’s not really what distribution is anymore, and Anthony Tanoury has about as good a vantage point as anyone to explain why. He spent 30 years in the industry on both the vendor and distributor side of the table, and he’s now Dell’s senior director of distribution, which means he’s the person responsible for making the relationship between Dell and its distributor partners actually work at scale. This week at DTW, Dell announced some significant changes to how it’s thinking about its partner ecosystem, and distribution’s right at the center of that. We talked about the evolution of distribution from warehouse and financing shop to AI enablement engine, what it actually means for partners that Dell moved 10,000 of them to distribution-led buying last year, and what the promise of deal registration in hours rather than days actually requires to make real. Let’s get right into it. My chat with Anthony Tanoury. Anthony, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it.Anthony Tanoury: Thanks for having me. Robert Dutt: To kick things off – the definition of distribution, and the definition from distributors themselves of what they do, has changed so dramatically over the last few years, as you’ve been party to on both sides of the fence, vendor and distributor, with your background. Sitting where you are now as senior director of distribution, how do you define the core value proposition for your distribution partners today compared to the way it may have looked a few years ago if you were in the seat, or in a previous seat managing distribution? Anthony Tanoury: Yeah, I think 30 years in distribution – dating myself here. The idea of a distributor was warehousing, finance, so on. Really, the way that that’s evolved – and still evolving, because not everyone fully understands distribution and the value of distribution – but it’s really become the engine for all of us OEMs to really dive deep into the mid-market, and as lead generation for all of us. So SMB, mid-market, and then really leveraging their enablement platforms for our partners. So as an example, this week here at Dell Technologies World, we’ve launched our full AI portfolio. And really at the end of the day, it’s a platform to build off of. And our distributors, through our partners, are really enabling those partners – especially in the mid-market. The enterprise partners have hired data scientists and so on. And those mid-market and SMB partners, they need our help. And we really rely on our distributors, who have AI accelerator programs and can really take a partner through the journey of how to look at AI, how to start, and then how to implement and really get started in this space. We’ve met with multiple partners at this show and we’ve had our partner advisory boards. And that’s the number one takeaway when we’re talking to our partners: “How do I get started?” And I think Jeff Clarke and Michael Dell talked about that on stage – it’s really, we’ve got the platform to build off of, and then really rely on our distributors to go enable all of our partners out there to have those conversations, and then to build the proof, the POCs for us with their customers and take it to the next step. Robert Dutt: Let’s talk about this moment in time and managing distribution right now. Whenever I think of running a hardware vendor, running distribution, or being on the purchasing side of the solution provider right now – boy, that’s an interesting challenge – with the supply chain issue, with the pricing issue, with all of that. I guess it boils down to, from your perspective: how are you leaning on distribution differently to help you guys and your partners ultimately, especially the smaller ones, handle this issue of availability, of supply chain, of capacity, as we’ve seen the component price challenges across the industry? Anthony Tanoury: Yeah, so that’s not unique to Dell. We’re all challenged with the supply chain challenges, and it’s really about having a consistent message to our partner community, to our customers, on how – or why – to partner with Dell in these times. And our distributors have really leaned in with us right now and are getting that message out to our partners that “Dell’s got a plan. Here’s the plan.” And this is how we want you to message that and relay that to your partner community. So as an example, I did a keynote speech at one of our large partner events recently, and my talk track was based on how to navigate those supply challenges with us. I spent a lot of time on that, and had multiple partners come up afterwards, catching me outside. And the comment was, “That’s what we need to hear. That’s our challenge today, and you’re tackling that head on.” So to get back to your question from a distribution perspective – they enabled me to take that message to them, and then they’re expanding on that to their 20,000 partners in their ecosystem. Robert Dutt: As you bring up an interesting thread there – I don’t have time obviously to go through the whole keynote, but the elevator pitch, boiled-down version of it – what’s the advice to partners on tackling it from where you sit and from where Dell sits? Anthony Tanoury: Yeah, really leaning in with us and going deeper with your customers. And so that’s where you’re going to work with Dell and get priority allocation – looking long-term versus short-term, “I just need this product in the next week to get through this phase.” Now, let’s look at a long-term solution together and let’s plan two years out. Let’s plan longer in some cases, and then we’ll take it from there. Robert Dutt: And that’s something we heard also from Jeff Clarke in Q&A – that idea of build out those long-term plans, put your hand up as early as you can. Because it sounds like if you’ve got your hand up early, you’ve obviously got the best chance of getting that list fulfilled. Anthony Tanoury: Yeah, whether it’s a customer or a partner – I mean, that’s a true partnership and we’ll lean in when customers want to lean in with Dell. Robert Dutt: I wanted to touch on the changes that are coming to the partner program, specifically as it involves your interactions with distribution. The Dell portal is getting redone and the Dell program is getting redone with the modern partner platform rolling out this year. You guys are baking agentic AI into your partner platform. Meanwhile, your distributors are doing the same thing with their partner platforms. I’m curious – obviously very early in the game – but how are you and your distribution partners thinking long-term about how those various platforms interact with each other, in terms of delineating who covers what base, when it comes to serving the partner and what you may be able to do down the road as a result of having those platforms? Anthony Tanoury: Yeah, so the key is cutting down on SLAs. How do we take getting pricing out to a partner, out to a customer, from two to three days down to a matter of hours, right? And we’ve worked closely with all of our distributors over the last year or two, because our partners rely on our distributors’ platforms. And how does that integrate with ours? But the key is speed. How do we do things faster? And that is, as you stated, embedding AI into that. And so again, can’t get too far ahead, because we’re still going down this path and things sometimes get pushed out. But we’ve been working on this for a long time with them. We’ve had a lot of meetings with them here. We’ve gone deep into their platforms. They’re all rolling out new platforms as well. So making sure we’re doing it all at the same time, and together, has been key. Robert Dutt: One area I did want to double-click on there. One of the big promises of the new platform is deal-reg approval in minutes, AI-generated demand signals, those kinds of things. As Dell is accelerating its own systems, how does distribution plug into that? How does the distributor help manage and act on those AI-driven demand signals and facilitate a faster quote-to-deal-reg? Anthony Tanoury: Without getting too deep into deal-reg, there are a lot of nuances there. But yes, today where you’ve got multiple partners of record and you’ve got multiple partner IDs – simplifying that down to one or two partner IDs versus 20 today that we have – and then with deal registration, having partner of record is key in that mix, and we do have that today. But the distributors are really where it starts. So a partner comes to the distributor, says, “Hey, I need pricing on this and I want deal registration.” Today it might take the full SLA – the two to three days we just talked about – to get deal registration approved, with multiple systems flowing back and forth. In the future – and when I say future, we’re close, we’ll get there – is having that one stream go, starting from the distributor, through AI, plays into that, where it’ll do the work of looking in and making sure: here’s the partner of record. Is there a partner on record? Does the end user qualify? And without multiple people, multiple email streams going back and forth, it locks it in. And so now you’ve got an answer back in two to three hours versus two to three days. Robert Dutt: A lot of MSPs prefer to consume technology as a service, because it’s kind of in what they do – the name’s kind of on the tin – and bundle that with vendors like Microsoft or security or what have you. How are you working with distributors to make APEX and infrastructure solutions seamlessly consumable within distribution, and particularly on their marketplace? Anthony Tanoury: Yeah, so that’s a good question. So there’s APEX, right? We have Dell APEX, and our competitors have their own, but we have Dell APEX. But our distributors also have their own versions of APEX, or as-a-service models. And at the end of the day, we leverage theirs just as well as we do our own. And it depends on the customer, depends on the contract situation, but there are multiple vehicles to get an as-a-service deal done today that didn’t exist a year ago, didn’t exist two years ago, right? And then there’s – moving to another topic, and really the same topic – device as a service, right? And that was something we’ve been talking about for a few years now and hasn’t really taken off, but that’s all part of this now. Because the device at the edge is co-mingled now – especially in the new AI world – with your server infrastructure. So it could all become part of a recurring revenue stream for MSPs. Robert Dutt: And I think it makes potentially hardware more compelling to the MSP. When you’ve gotten that tie-in – I know it’s early days and it’s a way off from being fully operationalized – but what you’re talking about, and what Jeff Clarke was talking about today about basically acting as the arbiter, sort of an open orchestration layer, saying “all right, this particular bit is best handled in the infrastructure and the data center, this particular bit is best handled right here on the machine sitting by the desk side.” Anthony Tanoury: Absolutely. Robert Dutt: We’ve heard a lot this week about the focused accounts incentive, rewarding partners for selling across lines of business. And it’s kind of a cliche almost, in that vendors such as yourselves who have multiple lines of business are always looking for great ways to get partners to sell across those businesses. And certainly incentives are a classic way of doing that. How are you using distribution to train, enable, and facilitate partners making that leap across the portfolio – especially as this seems to be something that Denise Millard and the team are putting a lot of the wood behind? Anthony Tanoury: Yeah, so you mentioned the partner program – and that’s really what we leverage with the push coming from distribution. You typically focus where you can earn the most dollars. And so we’re putting the dollars on driving all lines of business for us. So today you may have a lot of infrastructure-focused partners – like MSPs, they don’t want to sell the client the edge device. But again, with AI driving from both ends now, it’s become an imperative that they don’t ignore the edge devices anymore. So really leveraging distribution both ways. We’ve got CSG partners that don’t sell storage and infrastructure, and then we’ve got partners that are trying to move in that direction. And then we’ve got other partners saying, “Hey, I’ve got to get on board too,” that are in the infrastructure space and have got to move in the other direction. And that’s where we leverage distribution – they have multiple enablement engines, all of our distributors, to enable those partners to do that. So for us – and again, to the partner program – we’ve announced some changes here at this event, with our partner advisory board meeting coming up. Partner programs, you want to keep them simple, predictable for partners, with tweaks along the way. And AI is one of those tweaks where we’ve got to pull the levers in different directions to get partners and distributors moving in that motion. So yeah, it’s an exciting time to be at Dell with this opportunity in front of us. Robert Dutt: That’s a big tweak – or more accurately, a big series, whole family, whole universe of tweaks to be made. But you don’t want to pull a whole program apart. You’ve got partners that have invested and distributors that have invested in that program. So you’ve got to make sure you do those incremental tweaks when you need them, but not blow up the whole program. Anthony Tanoury: Absolutely. Robert Dutt: You mentioned off the top the classic framing of distribution as the warehouse and the bank kind of structure. Let’s touch on the bank side of things a little bit there. In light of everything that’s going on today, in light of the infrastructure refresh opportunity that’s out there, the constraints in the marketplace – financial engineering is probably more critical than ever. Dell Financial Services is doing a lot of heavy lifting, but how do you view the role of the distributor when it comes to PO financing, terms, bridging the financing gap for complex projects, and helping partners manage this whole multiple-balls-in-the-air situation? Anthony Tanoury: You can’t look at a partner just through the lens of what they do with Dell. The business they have with Dell – partners procure from many places. We love them to only sell Dell for us, but they have other options, other solutions, other areas of the business that we’re not focused on. They procure through distribution. Distributors have huge businesses with a lot of these partners. They have financial terms through the distributors that maybe we can’t offer them through Dell – and leveraging our partner programs to deliver extended terms in this environment. With the supply shortages and lead times getting pushed out, really leveraging distribution with terms that we can’t give them today. There are multiple levels, and they have much higher credit lines with the distributors than maybe we have with them. And then going back to the as-a-service model – really leveraging distributors who have all those options in place for them today, that maybe they don’t have with us. Robert Dutt: When you’re looking at distribution, what’s the one metric you look at first to judge whether a distributor is meeting the bar – is delivering net new value to Dell? Anthony Tanoury: New partner recruitment, right? Multiple lines of business – not just focused in one area of our business, but selling across all lines of business. Then we rely on distribution. We just moved 10,000 partners last year over to distribution-led. Where those partners could procure direct from Dell in the past, now they can’t, and they buy strictly through distribution. Those are our authorized partner community – and potentially in the future, expanding that to other levels of our business and offloading them to distribution. Dell is a more channel- and distribution-friendly company than we get credit for. I think that doesn’t always get seen, and we’re moving that way. Robert Dutt: How did that process go, and any learnings from moving those 10,000 partners that may inform what you do in moving the next group, if there is a next group to be moved? Anthony Tanoury: Exactly, a lot. A lot of that is in data transfer and making sure that the distributors have the right data to target those partners and give those partners the service they need. The distributors all had to ramp up their infrastructure to support those partners – credit line facilities with those partners – because they didn’t do business with those partners before. Onboarding some of those partners as net new to distribution, who had never bought from distribution before. And then again, really letting those partners know the value of distribution. Since we’ve moved those partners over, those partners that have embraced distribution are growing faster than the partners that haven’t. It’s sometimes a lot easier to get that additional support, that additional attention from a disti, than it is to try to navigate that directly. In some cases, they can support them better than we can, and it’s proven out in the last year. Robert Dutt: What’s the single most underutilized resource that you guys have through distribution, in terms of what partners are using? Anthony Tanoury: I would say the AI accelerator programs I spoke about earlier. That’s key. Going back to the enablement piece – I just don’t think a lot of partners understand the value. They come to these events, they make the statements, “Hey, we need help here. We need to leverage distribution for that help.” Especially when you come to a Dell Technologies World, or you go to one of our competitors’ or peers’ events. Our distributors have that enablement piece for you to get started, that you need to leverage, because it’s not just a point-solution type of conversation, it’s broad. Really leveraging them to help. Robert Dutt: Along the same lines, but a little bit different – obviously we’ve touched on the idea of cross-selling, and the idea that, surprise surprise, Dell would like partners to sell more of the portfolio, better together, all that kind of stuff. For an MSP or VAR whose primary look at Dell to date has been selling end devices – laptops, desktops, et cetera – sourced through distribution, what do you see as the most likely next logical step to expand that relationship? To get thinking across lines? What are some of the common threads for the best ways to approach that? Anthony Tanoury: Yeah, that’s a tough question. Common ways to approach how to sell across lines of business – take it back to the customer level. Your customer is buying these products, and they may be buying them from somebody else or they may be buying them online, depending on the size of the organization, so on. Again, the service model – going back to it, it’s another service revenue stream that they can leverage. But I think when you look at the distributors, they have a lot of talk tracks with the partners on how to do that, and frankly do it better than we do. So that’s why we really leverage them. When we say, “Hey, we want to sell more of our client and peripheral devices,” we start with distribution. We start with the partner community, and it’s paid off. I think it’s just – really, don’t leave revenue on the table. We’ve been saying it for years and I think it’s starting to resonate, and leveraging distribution to push that message forward. And I think partners are starting to catch on. Robert Dutt: All right, great insights. Anthony, I thank you for taking the time. I’m sure it’s been a busy week for you here. Thanks for joining us. Anthony Tanoury: Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. Robert Dutt: There you have it, Anthony Tanoury from Dell Technologies. I’d like to thank Anthony for carving out some time in what I’m sure was a very busy week on the show floor here at DTW. Few things from the conversation that I thought were worth pulling out. First, the 10,000 partners that Dell moved to distribution-led buying last year – that’s not a small number, and the fact that those partners are outgrowing the ones who haven’t yet made that transition should be a data point for anyone still on the fence about how they structure their Dell relationship. Second, when Anthony named net new partner recruitment as his primary metric for judging distributor performance – not revenue, not attach rate, net new – that tells you something about where Dell thinks its distribution channel still has room to grow. And third, if you haven’t looked at the AI accelerator programs your distributor is running, that came up twice as the single most underutilized resource available to partners right now. Probably worth a phone call. I’d like to thank you as always for listening to the show. Please follow or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts – Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, most directories. Ratings and reviews are always appreciated as well. Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.

Today’s headline news for Canadian IT solution providers: Zscaler launches Project AI-Guardian: Zscaler announced a new initiative on Tuesday called Project AI-Guardian, partnering with global systems integrators Cognizant, EY, HCL, Infosys, TCS, and Wipro to help enterprises secure AI deployments. The program leverages Zscaler’s AI Protect portfolio – covering AI asset discovery, access controls for AI services, and real-time guardrails for AI infrastructure – to address what the company describes as the security blind spots created by autonomous AI agents acting with delegated permissions. According to CEO Jay Chaudhry, the initiative is designed to “ensure that AI adoption does not come at the cost of security.” Jamf names Beth Tschida CEO: Jamf named Beth Tschida as chief executive officer, effective immediately, on May 20. Tschida moves from interim CEO and former CTO to the permanent role, becoming the first woman to lead the company in its more than 20-year history. The appointment comes roughly four months after Francisco Partners completed its $2.2 billion acquisition of Jamf in January 2026; Tschida’s tenure as CTO saw Jamf’s security ARR grow 40 percent year over year to represent more than 30 percent of total revenue. Aura + TD SYNNEX: Aura Business has partnered with TD SYNNEX to bring its identity-centric BYOD security solution to MSPs through distribution. Aura debuted the offering at MSP Summit 2026, with Omdia research finding that demand for BYOD security among MSP clients is surging. SOCRadar AI agents: SOCRadar launched an AI Agent Marketplace and Identity Intelligence platform designed to help security teams automate detection and response against identity-driven attacks, positioning the agents as additions to existing security stacks. Akamai acquires LayerX: Akamai Technologies announced a definitive agreement to acquire browser security vendor LayerX, extending its workforce security strategy with browser-level visibility and governance over AI usage. Cisco Canada marketing: Jennifer Rideout has rejoined Cisco as head of Canada marketing, noting on LinkedInthat she is about a week into the new role. Read Full Transcript Welcome to The Buzz from ChannelBuzz.ca, I’m Robert Dutt, today is Thursday, May 21, 2026, and here’s what’s happening in the channel today. On Tuesday, Zscaler announced Project AI-Guardian – a formalized initiative that brings together six major global systems integrators under a common framework for securing enterprise AI deployments. The partners are Cognizant, EY, HCL, Infosys, TCS, and Wipro, and together they’ll leverage Zscaler’s AI Protect portfolio to deliver what the company describes as a full 360-degree view of an organization’s AI footprint. The program is designed to address what Zscaler calls the “agentic world” problem – the reality that AI models don’t just respond to queries anymore. They act autonomously, connect to data and apps, trigger downstream actions with delegated permissions, and in doing so, create blind spots that traditional security tools simply aren’t built to see. According to Zscaler’s CEO Jay Chaudhry, “AI adoption does not come at the cost of security” – and the GSI partnerships are meant to scale that posture across the largest enterprises in the world. The GSI framing is enterprise-scale, but the underlying framework – discover your AI assets, control who accesses AI services, secure what AI builds and runs – is a blueprint that maps directly onto the conversations solution providers at every level are already having with their clients. As more organizations ask harder questions about what’s actually running on their networks, the partners who have this conversation early will have an edge. Jamf named Beth Tschida as its permanent chief executive officer yesterday, effective immediately. Tschida has served as interim CEO since March, and before that was the company’s chief technology officer. She becomes the first woman to lead Jamf in its more than 20-year history. The announcement lands about four months after Francisco Partners completed its $2.2 billion acquisition of Jamf in January, taking the company private. Strosahl, who shepherded that transition, has stepped away. Brian Decker of Francisco Partners cited Tschida’s “technical depth, operational discipline, and strategic vision” in a statement. The headline number from her CTO tenure: Jamf’s security ARR grew 40 percent year over year under her watch and now accounts for more than 30 percent of total company revenue. Her stated priorities going forward include autonomous device management, opening the platform for third-party AI tools, and building out an AI governance layer – all of which signal where the product is heading. The Francisco Partners angle is worth a second look. The PE firm also owns SonicWall, BeyondTrust, and Boomi – a portfolio of security and integration assets that, taken together, creates interesting possibilities for cross-platform plays. Channel partners who move Apple devices, or who sell into environments where Apple is a growing presence, should keep an eye on where this leadership takes the product roadmap. In Brief – Aura Business partners with TD SYNNEX to bring its identity-centric BYOD security solution to MSPs through distribution. SOCRadar launches an AI Agent Marketplace and Identity Intelligence platform targeting identity-driven cyberattacks. Akamai announces a definitive agreement to acquire LayerX, a browser-based AI usage control and workforce security vendor. Jennifer Rideout has rejoined Cisco as head of Canada marketing. Full details and links in the show notes or the blog post. Later today on In The Channel, Anthony Tanoury from Dell Technologies joins me to talk about how distribution has become the primary on-ramp for mid-market AI, and what that means as Dell’s Modern Partner Platform takes shape. It’s the last of three conversations I had at Dell Technologies World this week and a good one to end on. And if you haven’t caught Wednesday’s episode yet, Rob Emsley from Dell makes the case that the backup is the target – and why data protection needs to be reframed as a full cyber resilience practice. That’s how we’re seeing the headlines today. I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, thanks for listening. Have a great day.

Rob Emsley, director of cyber resilience marketing at Dell Technologies For most of the history of managed services, backup has been foundational but frankly unremarkable. You back up the data. Customers sleep better. Everyone moves on. That model needs to evolve. In this episode of In The Channel, recorded at Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas, Rob Emsley, director of cyber resilience marketing at Dell Technologies, makes a compelling case for why MSPs need to reframe their entire backup practice around cyber resilience – and why the opportunity to do so has never been bigger or more urgent. The stat that sets the table: 97% of cyber attacks now involve targeting the backup infrastructure directly. Attackers know that if they can compromise the backup, the game is essentially over. An MSP whose backup practice is not built around isolated, immutable copies is not selling a last line of defense – it’s selling false assurance. Central to the conversation is the idea of the “minimum viable company”: a framework Emsley encourages MSPs to bring to their customers, ideally at the board level. The question is deceptively simple – if everything goes down, what are the absolute minimum systems and data sets required to bring the business back online? Building a resilience strategy around that answer changes how you architect backup, and how you price and position it. Emsley walks through Dell’s PowerProtect portfolio, including the Data Domain platform and its multi-tenant capabilities for MSP environments, the Workspace Protection endpoint play, and the new premium rebate incentives for cyber resilience solutions in Dell’s Modern Partner Platform. His most practical advice for the mid-market? Have an incident response plan – and print it out. Because when ransomware strikes, the runbook sitting on the encrypted server is not going to help anyone. Read Full Transcript Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca, and your host for the show. We’re still coming to you from Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas this week, where AI Factory and agentic AI have understandably grabbed most of the headlines. But while I was on the show floor, I also wanted to bring you a conversation that I think is going to resonate long after the conference fades. The question of how MSPs should be thinking about cyber resilience – not just backup or data recovery, but the full picture of what it actually takes to bring a customer’s business back to life after a ransomware attack – sits at or near the top of virtually every board-level buying agenda right now. And with AI increasingly in the hands of the bad guys as much as the good guys, the calculus around protecting data is changing fast. I sat down with Rob Emsley, director of cyber resilience marketing at Dell Technologies, for a conversation about the difference between disaster recovery and cyber recovery, the concept of the minimum viable company, and why MSPs who are still selling backup the old-fashioned way may be leaving both value and their customers seriously exposed. Let’s get right into it. My chat with Rob Emsley. Robert Dutt: Rob, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it. Rob Emsley: Yeah, great to meet you, Robert. Robert Dutt: Director of cyber resilience marketing. You’re sitting in a pretty fascinating place right now, I have to think. Let’s start by sort of setting the table a little bit for an MSP and solution provider audience. How do you define cyber resilience at Dell today and how is that different from what it looked like even a couple of years back? Rob Emsley: Yeah, I mean, for many years, what the portfolio that I market was really the data protection portfolio. And like many vendors in the industry, one of the things that’s dramatically changed over probably the last decade, I would say, is the increase in cyber attacks and really the concern over things like ransomware, over things like insider threats, basically anything where bad actors are going after your data. And over the last probably 10 years, you’ve seen a lot more interest in cyber recovery as opposed to disaster recovery. Disaster recovery has been around forever. Bad things happen to good people. Do I have a set of infrastructure that I can restart from, whether it’s a natural disaster or human error, et cetera, et cetera. And the interesting thing with cyber recovery is the frustrating reality is that your hardware is probably still in good shape. You’re not under five feet of water or your infrastructure hasn’t been destroyed by a tornado. So everything looks as if it’s recoverable, but you know it isn’t because it’s been impacted, it’s been infected, and your good data is now bad data. So many MSPs that work with vendors in this market have seen an evolution of those vendors changing their messaging to certainly become more security companies. And some of that, you could argue, is based on vendor evaluations, especially private companies that are looking to go public or be acquired, et cetera, et cetera. So Dell Technologies was probably one of the last to really make a hard pivot from the products that we sell, predominantly delivering backup and recovery, but really to position those products and market those products as cyber resilience offerings. And cyber resilience really drives us to have new conversations with different parts of the customer’s team. Certainly it’s the old adage that when you’re selling data protection, you take the elevator to the basement to talk to the infrastructure team. When you’re selling cyber resilience, you take the elevator to the top floor to talk to the board, and it really has become a board-level discussion. So I think for managed service providers, the topic of cyber resilience is a much broader conversation that they can have with prospective customers. I think that customers know that there’s only two things that they’re afraid of losing. One is their employees, and two is their data. Losing either of them is really a bad day. So I think that when you look at buying intentions from many analyst firms that do those types of research projects – Omdia, for instance, is one – cyber resilience tops the top three, if not the top two or even top one, buying intentions for the coming years. And it has done for many, many years. So I think that’s why cyber resilience is an opportunity for managed service providers to expand the conversations and the people that they’re talking to, because it’s a horizontally required discipline. One of the things that customers, unfortunately over the years, have overspent on – maybe not overspent, but maybe not got the balance correct – is they’ve spent a lot of their budgets on cybersecurity products, trying to make their environments more secure. Basically build a wall. Firewalls fall into that category of technology, ransomware detection, those types of things. The area where we’ve tried to get a better balance in IT budgets is on recovery and resilience, based on the premise that there’s no such thing as absolute security. So you need to be prepared to have a good copy of your data to bring back to life, to bring your company back to life. Robert Dutt: Obviously, a lot of talk about AI because it’s the 2020s and we’re at a tech conference. Everyone’s going that way, which is good news in some regards and bad news in other regards in the security sphere, because it turns out the bad guys have access to it. Rob Emsley: Yeah. And that’s true for, as you imagine, a lot of technology. If you think about just life in general, there’s a lot of things that are available in the market that can be used for good and can also be used for bad. It all depends on what hands those technologies are in. And certainly, if you look at the use of AI to manufacture more sophisticated cyber attacks, certainly if you think about the use of AI to provide more sophisticated phishing emails, that’s certainly one thing I think we’ve seen. And certainly the concern around using AI to more quickly identify vulnerabilities – that’s been something that’s been top of mind in the news over the last few weeks, a couple of months. But again, I think both of those just reinforce the importance of having a surety that you have a good known copy of your data that you can take to the bank to bring the company back online. And I think from an MSP perspective, offering an infrastructure that gives their customers that assurance is really beneficial to customers. The old adage of customers want to sleep well at night – and if an MSP can help them do that, then a good night’s sleep is worth a fortune sometimes. Certainly my wife would say so. Robert Dutt: I think after 365, backup has been a fundamental underpinning of managed services for such a long time. I’m curious what you think is most common for MSPs to miss in terms of evolving and doing more than just the old-fashioned backup technology and getting more out of that. Rob Emsley: Yeah, I think if you look at a lot of the backup technologies that are available, certainly backup has always been that last line of defense. And unfortunately, being that last line of defense, the bad actors realize that if you compromise the backup infrastructure, you can pretty much do whatever you want. All bets are off. The customer doesn’t have a last line of defense. So if you think about some of the research that’s in the industry, 97% of cyber attacks involve attacking the backup infrastructure. And that doesn’t matter whether or not it’s managed by the customer or managed by an MSP. So I do think that MSPs need to become much more conversant in explaining what they are doing and how they have implemented a backup infrastructure that really is that last line of defense. And that’s something which you start getting into the concept of offering isolated copies of backups – maybe not for every single data type, but certainly we believe wholeheartedly in the concept of the minimum viable company, which really is a discussion to have with the board about when everything is gone, what needs to come back in order for you to be viable. Because I think that’s the killer – some people have a laissez-faire attitude to, well, everything’s important. But if everything’s important, then nothing’s important. So I do think that the MSPs that are in the backup industry need to realize that the backup value has changed. It used to be very much around being there for operational recovery. Having backups is just good hygiene, but having backups that aren’t secure is a no-no in today’s market. So that becomes a very important shift for MSPs that are in the backup market. Because I do agree with you – backup, God bless it, has been a great value creator for MSPs. Many customers realize that they need to back up their data. Subscribing to a service to do that is certainly an easy way to use your resources for more productive work to drive revenue. But at the end of the day, if you’re not secure, it’s difficult to innovate with confidence. Robert Dutt: All right. How does the portfolio that you guys are offering today help partners position their customers to be able to bounce back based on what really happens when they get attacked, breached, when their backup is part of that? Rob Emsley: Yeah. So within the Dell Technologies portfolio, this occurred probably about seven years ago. When I came back to Dell in 2018, we were simplifying the infrastructure portfolio of the company – storage predominantly, servers, and at the time data protection and cyber resilience. So many of our customers and our partners realized we have a portfolio of Power-branded products: PowerEdge, PowerStore, PowerMax, PowerSwitch. And probably in 2019, we introduced PowerProtect. So PowerProtect is the umbrella portfolio for everything we do in that backup and recovery, data protection, and cyber resilience space. Within there, we sell software to create copies of data and store them on hardware. And the hardware that we sell is something that we’ve been very lucky to have ownership of for literally 20 years. It’s an acquisition that was made by Dell Technologies, actually prior to the acquisition of EMC – it was an EMC acquisition, a company called Data Domain. And Data Domain has been really foundational for delivering cyber resilience. It falls into the category of what IDC calls the purpose-built backup appliance market. So unlike general purpose storage that many backup vendors use, this is a storage tier that was specifically developed for the purpose of storing backups. So it was developed with three attributes in mind. One was performance – how fast can I back up, how fast can I recover? It was built on efficiency – backup is a very repetitive process, so how can I store multiple backups in less physical capacity? So data reduction, deduplication. And then scalability – how can I start small and scale? But then overarching to that is how can you make it rock solid and secure? So the security features of our PowerProtect Data Domain appliances are something that’s very advantageous. And many of our managed service providers have stood that up in their data centers and offered that as the foundation for cyber resilience. The nice thing is that Data Domain, as well as supporting Dell Technologies software – so PowerProtect Data Manager, and other software assets that we’ve had for even longer, products like Networker and Avamar – it also has a very healthy ecosystem. There’s a protocol called Data Domain Boost that we use to allow third parties to integrate with Data Domain directly. Because the reality is that an MSP, when they go and talk to a customer, that customer has more than likely already made choices around the backup software that they’re using. And it’s more than likely not just one. And sometimes when they go to the MSP, they’ll say, well, can you basically choose a backup software application? But even the nice thing is, from an MSP perspective, Data Domain is multi-tenant. So you can slice up Data Domain into an ability to serve many MSP customers using different software if the customer so chooses. So if you look at our expo floor this year, we’ve got companies like Commvault exhibiting, companies like Veeam exhibiting. That’s the way that our portfolio is set up to provide that backup infrastructure for MSPs to leverage. Robert Dutt: Obviously, one of the big occurrences here from a partner point of view is the Modern Partner Platform that’s rolling out. And in part of all of those changes, you got the specific call out for cyber resilience solutions as one of the differentiated product areas for premium rebates. That’s a pretty big carrot. What does it say about the signal to the channel about where you see the biggest growth opportunities across Dell? Rob Emsley: Yeah, we have historically done the majority of our business through the channel, but we also recognize that the channel has a lot of choices. Many of our competitors, in fact most of our competitors in that cyber resilience backup solution space, are all pure-play individual companies, most of which have very little direct sales capabilities. So very channel-focused and therefore have blanketed the channel to sell their wares, sell their products. We wholeheartedly believe that the Dell Technologies portfolio, either standalone from a cyber resilience solutions perspective, but also taken in context of the other key elements – you think about things like private cloud and AI – gives a channel partner the concept of delivering secure infrastructure and the opportunity to take advantage of that broader portfolio. And as we talked about earlier, you can’t deny that cyber resilience is top of mind. It’s as high on the board’s agenda as, hey, how are we going to take advantage of artificial intelligence? Some could argue that cyber resilience is either on par or if not, for many customers, more of a concern, because it’s that ever-present danger of – is the infrastructure that I have now, even before I’ve implemented AI, secure enough to allow us to sleep at night? We certainly see the pivot from data protection to cyber resilience fitting well with the other vendors that our MSPs talk to. We certainly have a portfolio that addresses small customer needs to large customer needs, can absolutely be leveraged by our MSP partners to build a practice behind. And also, with cyber resilience solutions, there’s that upfront services component built in – identifying what is the minimum viable company that needs to be the most secure, the most isolated, to give those customers the peace of mind and actually show the MSPs as valued trusted partners. Robert Dutt: So much of the focus is obviously on enterprise data, on the data center, on the infrastructure side. But you also have the Workspace Protection offering going on. How important is securing the endpoint in the overall resilience strategy, and what’s the play there for partners from a resilience point of view? Rob Emsley: Yeah, certainly if you think about the entry point into most networks, the endpoints are clearly the most numerous, just by the volume of endpoints compared to the volume of elements in the data center. So certainly when we look at cyber resilience, we look holistically – not only at the data center infrastructure, but absolutely the endpoints that we sell. We continually look at the elements of security across the portfolio. And there’s a lot of foundational technology across the Dell product line, whether it be in the client space or in the server or storage space. The concept of trusted boot, secure BIOS, really carries forward through the PC line all the way into our server line and then the leverage of those servers into our storage portfolio. And then from an MSP standpoint, when you engage with Dell from a purchase perspective, you gain the advantage of the secure supply chain that Dell uses to its advantage. Our supply chain forever has been an incredible value, not only to ourselves, but also to anybody that buys from us, including our partners. But the fact that the way that we leverage that supply chain securely gives a lot of peace of mind. Because many of our partners, when they’re working with security companies, those security companies are not manufacturing their devices. Certainly they’re not manufacturing endpoints. Most of the time, they’re not manufacturing data center servers and data center storage solutions. They’re buying from somebody else. So the concept of a secure supply chain becomes harder to rationalize when you have multiple suppliers providing your solution. So at the end of the day, one of the advantages when it comes to Dell is that if you choose to work holistically with Dell, you get this foundational benefit across the portfolio of a lot of commonality when it comes to security and resilience. That’s one take-it-to-the-bank benefit that an MSP can achieve when they work with Dell Technologies across the entire portfolio. We’re fortunate enough to be in a position to have that entire portfolio, and long may that continue. And certainly that’s one of the advantages – when we look at security and resilience, we can look at it from the endpoint all the way to the data center and beyond. And I think that’s something that is a big benefit for MSPs to lean into the whole portfolio, as well as the advantages of aggregation of benefits and different tier levels by having a single-vendor, multi-portfolio opportunity, as opposed to slicing and dicing their vendor engagements across half a dozen different vendors. Robert Dutt: What do you see as the most common gap, especially in the mid-market, in terms of incident response plans today? Rob Emsley: I think it’s one, having one that is documented and printed out. That may seem very basic, but… Robert Dutt: Until your systems are locked down by ransomware. Rob Emsley: Exactly. So the very basic advice of have a plan and print it out may sound very old-fashioned and simplistic, but in the mid-market, that is probably something that people should consider. Certainly, practice does make perfect is not a trite saying. Practice, practice, practice in the mid-market becomes important. You don’t want to be developing a plan or using a plan for the first time when the house is on fire. You want to know where the exits are, where the fire extinguisher is, and you want to know how to use it. You want to make sure that when you use it, they work. Something which we can probably all think about in our own home lives, to be honest. So I think that’s probably something which, no matter what size company you are, it comes back to – you don’t want to lose your employees, you don’t want to lose your data. And when it comes to cyber resilience, you’re never too small or too big to take a fresh look at what you do and what your plan is. Robert Dutt: Once again, I appreciate you taking the time. Great chat. Rob Emsley: Great. Thanks, Robert. Robert Dutt: There you have it, Rob Emsley from Dell. I’d like to thank Rob for carving out some time during what has been a very busy week on the show floor at DTW. A couple of things from the conversation that I think are worth mentioning. First, that 97% figure – 97% of cyber attacks now involve targeting the backup infrastructure directly. If you’re an MSP and your backup practice is still built on the assumption that the backup is the safe harbor, that’s a foundational problem. The attackers know exactly where the life raft is. And second, the idea of the minimum viable company sounds simple, even obvious, but it’s actually a board-level conversation that most MSPs probably aren’t having and probably should be. What are the absolute minimum systems, data sets, and processes that a business needs to restart their operations? Answering that question and then building a resilience stack around that answer is the real difference between selling backup and selling business continuity. And his parting advice – have a plan and print it out – almost laughably basic until you consider how many organizations discover their incident response runbook is sitting on the encrypted server when they need it the most. I’d like to thank you as always for listening to the show. Please follow or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts – Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, most directories. Ratings and reviews are always appreciated and always help. Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.

Today’s headline news for Canadian IT solution providers: Dell PowerStore Elite and the reimagined data center: Yesterday at Dell Technologies World, Dell Technologiesintroduced Dell PowerStore Elite, a new enterprise storage platform delivering up to 3x performance over the prior generation and an industry-best 6:1 data reduction guarantee. The platform packs 5.8 petabytes into a single 3U chassis using standards-based E3 NVMe flash, and introduces Dell Cyber Detect, which identifies ransomware with 99.99% accuracy and pinpoints the last known clean copy for recovery. PowerStore Elite ships in July 2026; Cyber Detect for PowerStore follows in Q3. The broader Day 2 announcement also included 11 new PowerEdge servers, expanded Dell Private Cloud support for Broadcom, Microsoft, and Nutanix stacks, Dell PowerProtect One for simplified cyber resilience, and two new automation products: the Dell Automation Platform and Dell Automation Studio. Jeff Clarke’s tokenomics keynote: In Tuesday’s Day 2 keynote at DTW, Dell COO Jeff Clarke presented a set of ten fundamental shifts from the past year whose through-line is what he called tokenomics. The math: model prices fell 80% per token; token consumption is up 10x; GenAI software spend tripled. Net effect – AI is getting more expensive for most organizations, not less. Clarke illustrated the stakes with a concrete example: one developer running a single agentic use case on the public cloud can burn approximately $3,400 per day in token costs; the same workload runs at zero incremental cost on on-premises infrastructure. Clarke confirmed Dell moved its own operations to on-prem after internal token costs became untenable, and described work underway on what he called “token routing” – an orchestration layer that would automatically direct tasks to either a deskside AI workstation or data center hardware based on workload. He closed with three imperatives: know your token consumption, find your super users, and lead the operating model change or be disrupted by it. Intezer launches Amplify Partner Program: Intezer has officially launched its Intezer Amplify Partner Program, naming channel veteran Mark Daggett as vice president of global channels and alliances. The program formalizes Intezer’s channel investment as demand for AI-driven security operations grows and the talent gap in security operations continues to widen. According to Intezer, the program is designed to help MSSPs and solution providers step in where internal security teams lack the capacity to operationalize AI-powered alert triage and threat investigation, translating the company’s platform capabilities into managed and co-managed service offerings. Check Point agentic network security orchestration: Check Point announced an agentic network security orchestration platform on Monday designed to replace decades of rule-based complexity, reducing network policy management from months of manual effort to minutes of verified, automated action. The announcement is part of a broader Check Point push into agentic security capabilities across its Infinity platform. Zendesk unveils Autonomous Service Workforce: At its annual Relate conference, Zendesk announced the Autonomous Service Workforce, a product vision built around specialized AI agents priced per resolution rather than per seat. Key launches include a no-code Agent Builder, omnichannel coverage with shared context, and a real-time Quality Score applied to every interaction – human or AI. Riverbed extends Aternity AIOps: Riverbed has released new Aternity digital experience (DEX) capabilities positioning AIOps as proactive disruption prevention rather than reactive monitoring, giving IT teams predictive intelligence before end-user experience degrades. WinMagic brings zero trust to legacy OT: WinMagic has introduced Continuous Identity Assurance, a hardware-bound approach to endpoint identity that extends zero trust controls to air-gapped systems and legacy operational technology environments traditionally outside the reach of modern identity platforms. Read Full Transcript Welcome to The Buzz from ChannelBuzz.ca, I’m Robert Dutt, today is Wednesday, May 20, 2026, and here’s what’s happening in the channel today. Continuing coverage from Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas, where yesterday’s Day 2 product announcements shifted the spotlight from the partner program to the infrastructure portfolio. The headline item was Dell PowerStore Elite, which Dell is positioning as a new class of enterprise storage platform built for what it calls an AI-era data center. According to the company, PowerStore Elite delivers up to three times the performance of the previous generation through software-driven improvements, and backs it all with what Dell describes as an industry-best 6:1 data reduction guarantee – up from 5:1 – a number it says carries real weight in today’s supply-constrained flash market. The platform packs up to 5.8 petabytes of effective capacity into a single 3U chassis using industry-standard E3 NVMe flash rather than proprietary drives, giving partners and their customers more flexibility on cost and sourcing. The cyber resilience angle is where it gets interesting for MSPs. Dell is introducing Dell Cyber Detect for PowerStore, which inspects data at the byte level and is positioned as being able to identify ransomware with 99.99% accuracy – surfacing the last known clean copy so organizations can recover fast. That capability will be available in Q3 2026. PowerStore Elite itself is set for global availability in July. The broader data center announcement also included 11 new PowerEdge servers spanning both air-cooled and liquid-cooled environments, expanded Dell Private Cloud support for Broadcom, Microsoft, and Nutanix software stacks, and two new automation products: the Dell Automation Platform, which pairs AI agents with a conversational interface for infrastructure deployment and management, and Dell Automation Studio for building custom, full-stack orchestration workflows. Nearly 20,000 customers already run PowerStore globally, and Dell is emphasizing that existing deployments can cluster with PowerStore Elite without disruption – a meaningful selling point for partners managing live customer environments. The second big story out of Las Vegas yesterday is one that deserves some unpacking. During his keynote, Dell’s chief operating officer Jeff Clarke laid out what he called ten fundamental changes in the past twelve months – and the thread running through the whole list is a single concept: tokenomics. The numbers Clarke presented tell a story that’s easy to miss if you only hear the headline. Model prices have fallen roughly 80% per token in the last year – sounds like great news. Except token consumption is simultaneously up ten times. And GenAI software spend has tripled in twelve months. The net effect is that AI is actually getting more expensive for most organizations, not less. Clarke made it concrete with a single example: one developer, one agentic use case, building a software tool. On the public cloud, that use case can run up roughly $3,400 a day in token costs. Running the equivalent workload on on-premises infrastructure with local models? Zero incremental dollars. Clarke went further and confirmed that Dell itself made the shift to on-premises AI after its own token costs became untenable – which is a different kind of endorsement than anything you hear from a keynote stage. He also flagged something worth watching: Dell is working on what he called token routing, an orchestration layer that would automatically determine whether a given task is better handled by a deskside AI workstation or by data center infrastructure. He was clear it’s still in development, but it signals where Dell sees the intersection of its PC and server businesses heading. Clarke closed his keynote with three actionable imperatives: know your token consumption, find your super users, and lead the operating model change or be disrupted by it. That first one is the real challenge for most organizations – and the one an MSP or trusted advisor can walk into and own. Away from Las Vegas now, and Intezer has officially launched its Intezer Amplify Partner Program, naming industry veteran Mark Daggett as vice president of global channels and alliances to lead the effort. The program formalizes the company’s channel investment at a moment when demand for AI-driven security operations is accelerating. Intezer’s pitch to the channel is essentially a gap-filling argument: internal security teams are drowning in alert volume while the talent required to triage and investigate those alerts remains in short supply. The Amplify program is designed to equip partners to step into that gap, delivering Intezer’s automated alert triage and threat investigation capabilities as a managed or co-managed offering. The appointment of a dedicated channel VP is the clearest signal yet that Intezer is treating the channel as a primary route to market, not a secondary one. Partners building out managed security or MSSP practices looking to differentiate around AI-augmented SOC capabilities have another option worth a closer look. In Brief –  Check Point launches an agentic network security orchestration platform it says collapses months of manual policy work into minutes of verified action.  Zendesk unveils its Autonomous Service Workforce at the Relate conference, introducing per-resolution AI agent pricing and a no-code Agent Builder.  Riverbed announces new Aternity digital experience capabilities designed to shift AIOps from reactive visibility to proactive disruption prevention.  WinMagic introduces Continuous Identity Assurance, anchoring identity verification in hardware to extend zero trust protocols to air-gapped and legacy OT environments.  Full details and links in the show notes or the blog post. Later today on In The Channel, still from the show floor at Dell Technologies World, I sit down with Rob Emsley, director of cyber resilience marketing at Dell Technologies, on why 97% of cyber attacks now specifically target the backup infrastructure – and what it actually means to build a resilience strategy around the concept of the minimum viable company. And if you haven’t heard yesterday’s episode yet, check out my conversation with Alan Ashby, Dell’s senior director of Americas data center presales and specialty sales, on the practical infrastructure realities of the AI boom – from a deskside AI workstation for an SMB to consolidating 13 legacy servers into one. That’s how we’re seeing the headlines today. I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, thanks for listening. Have a great day.

Alan Ashby, senior director of Americas data center presales and specialty sales at Dell. Today’s episode of In The Channel comes to you from the floor of Dell Technologies World 2026, where the expansion of the Dell AI Factory has been dominating the headlines. But what does that mean for partners who aren’t selling multi-million dollar deployments to the Fortune 500? To find out, we sat down with Alan Ashby, senior director of Americas data center presales and specialty sales at Dell. Ashby breaks down the practical realities of the AI infrastructure boom, explaining how partners can start small by deploying “AI supercomputers” like the Dell Pro Max GB10 directly to SMB desktops to unlock local, highly secure agentic AI workflows. We also dive into the economics of on-prem AI versus the public cloud, how partners can help customers escape “prototype purgatory” by narrowing their focus, and the massive opportunity remaining in traditional data center modernization—including the staggering claim that Dell’s new 18G platforms can consolidate 13 legacy servers into one. We also touch on how Dell is leveraging its Customer Solution Centers to help partners de-risk these complex deployments before the customer signs the PO. Read Full Transcript Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In the Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca and your host for the show. We’re coming to you today from the floor of Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas where the expansion of the Dell AI Factory and new agentic AI capabilities have completely dominated the Day 1 headlines. But as we know, the keynote hype doesn’t always translate immediately to the loading dock. To understand how partners are supposed to actually size, architect, and sell these new AI infrastructure solutions, I sat down with Alan Ashby. He’s the senior director of Americas Data Center pre-sales and specialty sales at Dell. We dig into the economics of on-prem AI versus the public cloud, how partners can get mid-market customers started with an AI supercomputer right at their desk, and why the traditional data center refresh is still a massive and highly lucrative play for the channel. Let’s get right into it. My chat with Alan Ashby. Alan, thanks for taking the time. Appreciate it. Alan Ashby: Absolutely. Thanks for having us. Robert Dutt: Americas Data Center pre-sales and specialty sales. That’s a broad title. A lot of ground to cover there. To set the stage for MSPs, solution providers, folks listening to this, what can you tell me about what your team actually does kind of day-to-day when it comes to working with partners around infrastructure and AI solutions? Alan Ashby: Yeah, absolutely. So we’ve got a handful of folks that, you know, we’re aligned and dedicated to the partner ecosystem focused across the Americas. We have a couple of primary roles. So from a pre-sales perspective, helping support our partners from a technical enablement, understanding our product portfolio, understanding how to position the products correctly, both amongst the portfolio itself, but also kind of competitively in the marketplace. We also run what we call a technical account plan with our partners. So, you know, supporting them on their certifications, their enablement motions, etc. And then we also run what we have a program we call Heroes for our partners. So Heroes is our foundational enablement motion for partners. We run in the Americas somewhere between 15 and 30 regional face-to-face sessions every single quarter. Those we’d love to see partners participate in, try to do them all over the country. And those are deep dive sessions, you know, going through products and roadmaps and futures and how to position products, etc. And, you know, those have been an enablement motion for the last several years and been incredibly successful. Robert Dutt: All right. We’re hearing a lot this week, obviously, about the expansion of Dell AI Factory and the idea of bringing AI on-premise to the edge, closer to the enterprise itself. And from an infrastructure perspective, you’ve got PowerRack, the pitch there being you go to live customer workloads from kind of the box to deployed in six hours and change. For a partner who’s trying to sell into the mid-market or the enterprise, you know, how does that kind of speed of value fundamentally change the conversation that they’re having with their customer, whether that’s the CEO, CIO, or the business leader? Alan Ashby: Yeah, I don’t think there’s been a more exciting time for our partners with what the market’s putting out there for us. You know, when we look at, you know, you mentioned the mid-market space, I actually think there’s a massive opportunity for partners to go support those customers, especially with some of the agentic workflow processes that we announced today with some of the platforms. You know, it may not be those 100 million, 200 million dollar opportunities, but almost every single small business and medium business, you know, you start with maybe a product like the Dell Pro Max GB10, and you start there and you start building out that agentic workflows, you know, building out automated dashboards with AI assistance built into it. You know, a lot of great things that a partner could go deliver that everybody can see value in. Sometimes in that mid-market space and small business space, it’s easier to get started on some of these agentic flows because they don’t have data that’s kind of messy. They don’t have legacy debt from a data center infrastructure perspective. And then from a larger enterprise or commercial customer, you know, we have seen a number of very good successes across our partner ecosystem with delivering services and value to our customer sets collectively, you know, to help customers really try to find value through their AI journeys. Understanding and identifying key use cases or workloads that they think they can get value out of it, understanding the infrastructure, the architecture that’s designing it right. You know, early days, you know, we had a lot of times where, you know, customers and partners struggle with just, you know, how do we deploy this thing because power and cooling needs are maybe bigger than what I was expecting and, you know, managing through that challenge. So partners have a phenomenal opportunity, I think, to help provide that value to our customers collectively together. You know, every one of our partners, they bring a unique skill set and differentiators on their own to the marketplace and help support those customers to that kind of their own journeys together. Robert Dutt: What is that infrastructure pitch down to that, especially that mid-market or even SMB customer? In the past, there was interest in doing it, I think often they would end up, if they were going to do it, doing it on public cloud, because the alternative was a big old infrastructure solution that doesn’t really fit them, unless maybe a partner can bring it on and kind of do a multi-tenant kind of situation there. But where are we at in terms of having right-fit infrastructure to make that work? Alan Ashby: Yeah, I think, you know, even the stuff that we announced today on stage, you know, products we announced at GTC, I think really helped kind of build out that situation and story for a small customer to be able to scale. You think about going back to the Dell Pro Max GB10, you know, you can take that device and you can, you know, run a small business basically off that depending on the concurrent users and be able to move up from that to some of our Pro workstations all the way up to the GB300. You know, we can run a model as big as a trillion parameters, it’s kind of crazy what you can do on a desktop, you know, and that doesn’t require any unique power requirements, I can plug that into a normal outlet. And then I could scale into, you know, actual infrastructure depending on the size of what the need is. And that’s where I think there’s a lot of opportunity for partners to think through, you know, how do they help customers scale through that. And so we talked a lot today at the show around, you know, the economics of everything. And in the long term, it’s going to be very challenging economically to run things in a public cloud. Yeah, on-prem is going to be a massive opportunity. And the fact that Michael today even talked about things about running foundation models and open source models on-prem, you know, your data is fully secure, you manage it all yourself. You know, it’s a lot easier to think about how I actually, you know, pull and extract value out of those different solutions. Robert Dutt: Well, and that’s the pitch right for the desk-side agentic AI solution is the idea, I think that the number was 87% reduction in token cost and in terms of comparing the cost of acquiring, deploying, running the solution on-prem. I think the break-even was three months or something like that against running the same kind of solution in public cloud. Alan Ashby: Yeah, I think that’s where customers are challenged today is, you know, you can have a lot of different, you know, foundational models and, you know, some of the agentic tools that are out there today that are subscription-based, cloud-based. And you can run through usage real fast without getting a lot of value out of it. When you start thinking about deploying stuff on-prem, you know, you know exactly what your output per day could be, and you can scale accordingly. Robert Dutt: How does that change how a partner approaches both selling and thinking about running, maintaining that infrastructure as opposed to something that’s all outsourced to the cloud and has those significant question marks of cost attached? Alan Ashby: I think there’s a lot of stuff we’re still figuring out, to be honest. You know, I think a lot of partners are trying to understand that and every customer is going to be a little bit in a different spot in their journey. And I think, you know, that’s where some of our partner ecosystems have tremendous value to help meet them where they are and help them take that first or second step forward to try to be able to deliver overall value to the company. Robert Dutt: Do you see that kind of time to value, that reduction in overall costs being something that can get unstuck some of those classic cases of AI workloads that are getting put into prototype, into test phase, but never quite see the light of day, partially perhaps because of that economic headwind that you discover when you start trying to scale these things? Alan Ashby: I think there’s that. I also think sometimes some customers probably try to maybe bite off more than they can chew at one time. And I think when we start thinking about these AI use cases, sometimes we’ll talk with some customers and partners helping them through them. They have, you know, two, three dozen things they want to try to accomplish out of one solution or one opportunity. It’s how do we narrow that down a little bit to where we actually extract value out of that particular use case that you’re trying to drive value with. And we’ve seen some really great success with some of our partners being able to help, you know, negotiate and navigate partner customers through that journey. You know, I think it takes a skill set that’s unique, and we’re starting to see more and more of our partners, you know, invest in and put attention to building out dedicated AI practice teams, helping them understand the skill set. The market’s moving incredibly fast, unlike ever before. And so, you know, it takes somebody who has a real passionate interest and a lot of curiosity to understand how these things all work together and all the pieces fit together and how do you take advantage of everything as you go forward. Robert Dutt: How do you see the co-delivery model evolving over time as you say, things are moving fast. When it comes to deploying AI factories, I think we heard earlier that, you know, the model is sort of Dell handling deployment and management of the overall environment while partners are being asked to focus on the application, the vertical, those kinds of things. How do you see the role of the channel, I guess, especially professional services and advisory-type partners evolving? Alan Ashby: Yeah, I think that to your point, I think it’s evolving. And I think that, you know, there’s a lot of opportunities here from an educational services perspective, consulting services perspective, services for our partners, you know, very few customers, especially when you think about, you know, a traditional commercial customer, mid-market customer, know exactly what to do and what to do next. You know, they might have started a pilot out in the public cloud. And then they’re trying to figure out where to go from here. And like, there’s a lot of service opportunity for our partners there. When it comes from, you know, other deployment services, I think there’s opportunities there for our partners, you know, depending on the solutions. When you look at post-delivery of the product into the customer, I think that there’s even more opportunity for partners of how, once things are deployed and installed, what’s next? And how do you help customers really extract value out of the infrastructure they spent a lot of money on, and have pretty high expectations of the ROI and the benefits they get out of it? I think there’s a massive opportunity for partners to help those customers through that journey. I think there’s a big opportunity for partners to take a product like our GB10, GP300 products and say, how do I go show you how to build an agentic workflow on those systems that can deliver value for your customers? You know, those are all going to be partner-delivered opportunities. Robert Dutt: All right. It sounds like even though it’s relatively early in the process, we are at the point where some of those next steps are becoming clear then. Alan Ashby: Yeah, I would say so. I mean, the question is, how fast do things change? You know, and it’s one of those things like I look at the agentic opportunities, probably one of the biggest things that can bring value for our partners. We’re really looking for a partner ecosystem that has the skill sets to deliver those for customers. Robert Dutt: Speaking of things changing, moving from traditional virtualization workloads to AI is a pretty big shift in how you think about structure, infrastructure, especially around storage, IO, networking, GPUs, needless to say. How’s the pre-sales team helping partners to figure out what the right size is for these solutions, both for current state and future state, so that you’re not either over-provisioning or under-provisioning customers? Alan Ashby: That’s a great question, actually. I mean, we’ve done a lot of things internally at Dell to get better ourselves and have the right talent and resources to support the partner ecosystem. You know, we have teams that can help support partners, both from a sizing, scoping of the opportunity, all the way down to configuring and deploying that solution if the partner needs that help. We’re also trying to help up-level our partners to be able to do it on their own. It’s kind of self-service and building the tools to help them through that motion. A couple of years ago, we started launching AI workshops, the different skill sets to help up-level and help that motion for a lot of our partners. The partners that have participated in those have seen a lot more success than those that didn’t. We do those multiple times a quarter and encourage partners to participate through those motions. We have an AI workshop multiple times a quarter in North America, and we go through every step of the phase from how do you have a conversation with a customer all the way through, how do you narrow down use cases, to all the way to how do you actually develop, design, and build the systems for what you need. Robert Dutt: Along those same lines, but a little bit more customer-facing and kind of looking at the economics of it, AI projects carry a lot of financial and technical risk for CIOs. What resources are there, whether it’s proof of concept, technical validation, or specialty engineering teams that partners can tap in to kind of prove the math and de-risk a solution such as AI Factory for customers? Alan Ashby: Yeah, there’s a couple of them actually, and I encourage all partners to kind of look at the options. We have at Dell, we have what we call our Customer Solution Centers, and those Customer Solution Centers have the ability to be able to work with a pre-sales specialist, a pre-sales expert on various different solutions. We have data centers where partners can take advantage of and leverage to be able to do proof of concept for customers, proof of value with those folks, and that can vary from any size of the architecture, from small all the way up to very large, and help support them through that. Also encourage partners to reach out to their Dell teams and how do you take advantage of those CSC resources. It’s a very simple process, but work through Dell teams. Same thing would be to go spend time with us in our labs. We have a great lab up in the Hopkinton area where AI factories are manufactured and built, and love to take partners through that facility to be able to see what’s possible there. We have an AI lab down in Austin to help them through that as well. So there’s a lot of opportunities. I would say the other one is we have a lot of partners also building out their own capabilities, their own labs, and we’ve helped support them through that as well. I think that they’re providing some amazing value to their customers, being able to do their own POCs and demonstrations and whatever it might be to help support that customer throughout the process. Robert Dutt: AI obviously gets the big headlines because it’s the 2020s as it is. But customers still have traditional enterprise apps and aging infrastructure that is going to need a refresh. I guess, how does your team handle guiding partners around going after the new shiny thing, the big opportunity that’s out there versus the kind of day-to-day operational challenge of standard data center modernization and refresh? Alan Ashby: Yeah, it’s hard when they have two of these really big shiny objects out there that have a lot of potential value for customers, both with AI but also just traditional data center modernization. We’ve seen a really great success over the last year of helping customers, I would say, clean up the data center, think through what they’ve got today in there and how to modernize it and right-size everything. When you look at some of the things that we’ll announce here at the show, it’s pretty exciting, honestly. There’s some great announcements we had in the Day 1 keynote, Day 2 keynote will be just as exciting, more from an infrastructure perspective of things. I’m really excited what we’re doing just with traditional servers and we’ve seen a lot of great success by our partner ecosystem over the last several quarters with them going in and helping customers look at consolidation of those environments. Our 18G server platforms, which we’ll announce, can consolidate 13 legacy servers into one. That’s kind of crazy math when you think about that. It’s easy now to think about how do I help customers free up space and modernize things that makes it so AI is possible in their own data centers; consolidating racks in the servers is kind of a crazy concept. Then you think of how we’re looking at modernizing just traditional architecture with HCI architecture and the disaggregated architecture providing real value for customers with right-sizing, both compute capacity and storage capacity to be able to extract as much value as possible across the ecosystem of the portfolio. Robert Dutt: Along those lines, any other, I guess hidden opportunities for partners, things that maybe don’t get the big attention of the desk-side AI or PowerRack or some of those things, but still represent—sort of along the lines of the data center example you just gave—opportunities that are worth pursuing, that are worth looking at, but maybe not quite the highest profile? Alan Ashby: I mean, 100%. It’s easy to get excited with what we’re doing in AI. The market’s obviously kind of dictating a lot of that, but there’s a lot of opportunity, a lot of money to be made for our partners to be able to focus on classical data center architecture. We’ve got some great solutions. Our Dell Private Cloud is one that’s extremely exciting for partners, the opportunity to be able to help those customers through that process and think through that. I also am extremely excited with what we’re doing around the security front with our data protection portfolio, our PowerProtect product lines. Security is one that I think in the age of AI, we need to think through security differently. There’s some additional opportunities for partners to think about how do they provide those services, those extra value pieces to help make sure all of these customers are ready for what could be an AI security threat. Robert Dutt: I assume there’s a better together story to be told there between the hardware, the infrastructure, and the cyber protection. Alan Ashby: 100%. That’s one of the biggest values that we have at Dell. There’s inherent value between the products themselves being able to support each other differently, but also they have the large Dell value prop with the Dell supply chain, our security chain, how we build products. Everything provides value across the entire portfolio. Robert Dutt: What’s the single biggest misconception you see customers have around the idea of deploying on-prem AI in particular? Alan Ashby: That’s interesting. The big one I would say is where do I get started and how big do I need to get started? I think that we saw early days, a lot of customers thought initially you had to just get in line for supply on large GPU systems when you could run a lot of workloads, really interesting and exciting AI workloads on a server with a PCIe-based GPU, and now even more so with some of the other platforms with workstations or GB300, GB10. The biggest misconception is just thinking about how big I have to get started. I would encourage almost every executive, every leader of every company to start thinking differently about you probably should have an AI PC in your office and on your desk. You should have one of our, I always call it an AI supercomputer on your desk with the GB10. It’s about who’s going to be the most curious. There’s nothing that limits you from capabilities with what the models can do today. We really just need people to start using and playing and practicing and helping support the overall value to the customers and to our partners. Robert Dutt: It’s an interesting concept that a computer with a better NPU or GPU on board can unlock that curiosity towards AI and ultimately drag to infrastructure refresh down the road, I think. Alan Ashby: I think the key thing is you don’t have to be a coder. You don’t have to be a developer. Really today, anybody could be a developer. You could build your own application if you wanted to. You can build your own dashboards if you wanted to. You can run it 100% on-prem if you wanted to. You can use a coding assistant to help you manage through that. All you have to do is understand how to talk to it. How do you manage it like an individual and how do you manage it like an agent? It’s a secondary employee that helps you basically give you superpowers. Robert Dutt: If an MSP wants to get serious about the data center and AI with Dell, what’s the first step if they’re already in terms of certification, competency, that kind of thing that they should be looking at? Alan Ashby: Yeah, again, the portfolio is changing very quickly. I would say that table stakes obviously is having a good understanding of our compute platforms with what we’ve got put together with NVIDIA. That’d probably be step one. Step two would be thinking about what you can provide from a storage perspective and how you take advantage of both PowerScale and ObjectScale and all the way up through our lightning file systems, having good understanding how you can deploy that for your customers at scale. Then the other one would be how do you work closely with the Dell teams? That’s one of the things that is always encouraging for partners to think through is Dell has this incredibly large sales force that can help give them scale, give them opportunity. How do you share as a partner? How do you share your value back to the Dell teams? Make sure that they understand where you can be supportive of their customer experience. How do you work collaboratively with the Dell teams across the ecosystem? So forth. Tons of opportunity. We’re always looking for partners that have the right skill sets and the right capabilities. Our Dell teams want to bring them into customer accounts because we need their support. We need their help. Robert Dutt: Acknowledging this might be a wide range, what are some of those common threads that make for a good partner for you in terms of skill sets, areas of focus, that kind of thing? Alan Ashby: Yeah, I think it’s evolving over time. Today, I look at partners that have unique skill sets are incredibly important. Partners that have a competency across our portfolio. Table stakes of having competencies around our compute platform, our storage platforms, but then thinking even deeper, how do you have competency around some of our more isolated platforms like what we do in our unstructured storage space with PowerScale and ObjectScale and access scale that we announced today? Same thing with our data protection portfolio, our cyber resilience platforms, our SRP platforms, like partners that have deep technical specialty expertise in those areas, they’re always going to be needed and valued in our partner ecosystem. AI is one other area to differentiate a partner from, but there’s a lot of those opportunities. Even today with our Dell Private Cloud, I always tell partners that whenever you see a pivot change in our portfolio, like we did when we launched the Dell Private Cloud, this is an opportunity to differentiate yourself as a partner from other partners. To jump in early and be able to build the skill sets that our Dell team is looking for out of a partner to support their customers. Our Dell teams are always looking for those partners that can help lead the charge, especially from a technical perspective with the customers to validate the solution themselves to be able to provide that extensive value to the customer themselves. Robert Dutt: All right. Last one for me, without naming any names or with naming names, should you feel like doing so? What’s the most creative, unexpected, surprising use case for a Dell AI factory that you’ve seen a customer deploy thus far? Alan Ashby: Wow, that’s a hard one. I mean, there’s a lot of really interesting ones I’ve seen. I mean, early days, some of the ones I thought was some of the most exciting stuff that we did with Amarillo County in Texas. It’s a county that there’s a lot of languages natively spoken there and the community there needed to provide basically language services to a very large broad-based set of individuals in the community in their native tongue. And the Dell team worked closely with those folks to make that happen. All the way down there to where we got a number of partners helping small entities, both commercial and public entities, really think about how they can drive agentic workflows and some of the things that are dealing around that with dashboarding. Chat, agents, obviously is an easy one. And then helping customers through kind of how do you do code assist models. Those are probably the really big ones that we see from a use case perspective from our partners. Robert Dutt: No shortage of opportunities. Alan Ashby: Oh my gosh, it’s unbelievable how many there are today. Robert Dutt: Thank you for taking the time. Alan Ashby: Absolutely. This is great. Thank you. Robert Dutt: There you have it. Alan Ashby from Dell. I’d like to thank Alan for his time, carving out a few minutes for me amidst the chaos of day one here at DTW. My big takeaway from that conversation is that you don’t have to be deploying a multimillion dollar PowerRack system to get into the AI game with Dell right now. Between the new desktop workstations running localized agentic workflows and the massive 13 to one server consolidation plays they’re seeing in the traditional data center, there’s a very practical immediate path towards revenue here for partners in the mid market. I’d like to thank you as always for listening to the show. If you’re enjoying our coverage from Dell Technologies World, please do take a second and follow or subscribe in the podcast app of your choice. You can find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, wherever you get your audio. And if you have a moment to leave a rating or review, always hugely appreciated. Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for channelbuzz.ca and I’ll see you in the channel.

Today’s headline news for Canadian IT solution providers: The AI supply chain squeeze: Yesterday, we brought you a special mid-day look at the new partner platform and AI Factory announcements from Dell Technologies World. But if you look past the glitz of the main stage, there was a sobering reality check delivered during the partner-specific keynote. Pete Trizzino, president of global sales at Dell Technologies, warned partners that supply constraints are officially back. Driven by voracious hyperscaler demand for AI infrastructure, the squeeze on GPUs, CPUs, and memory is tightening rapidly. In fact, Trizzino warned that the supply chain issues we are starting to see now could be significantly worse in 2027. For Canadian MSPs and VARs, this is the klaxon sounding for hardware lifecycle planning. Partners need to be having capacity conversations with their clients today, locking in orders, and potentially leveraging IT financing to bridge the gap while hardware makes its way through a congested supply chain. CIRA targets the MSP model: Closer to home, the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) is preparing to launch a new channel-oriented product platform at the ChannelNEXT conference in Toronto later this month. Led by channel executive Tim Brien, the upcoming platform marks a dedicated pivot toward a managed service provider model. As Canadian organizations face an increasingly complex threat landscape complicated by strict data privacy regulations like Law 25 and PIPEDA, the demand for sovereign, domestic cybersecurity infrastructure is accelerating. By embracing a multi-tenant channel model, CIRA aims to provide Canadian solution providers with a localized alternative for DNS and enterprise security services, removing the administrative friction of scaling broad deployments. PraisonAI zero-day and Operation Ramz: In the cybersecurity space, threat actors are actively exploiting a critical authentication bypass vulnerability in PraisonAI (CVE-2026-44338). The zero-day flaw was targeted within hours of its disclosure, meaning anyone building agentic AI pipelines with the framework needs to apply patches immediately. On a positive note, INTERPOL has announced the results of Operation Ramz, a massive cybercrime crackdown across 13 countries in the Middle East and North Africa that resulted in 201 arrests and the seizure of dozens of malware and phishing servers. In Brief: Lumina emerges from stealth: Cybersecurity startup Lumina has officially launched an AI-native platform designed to reduce alert noise by 87 percent across cloud, identity, and endpoint environments. With security operations centers overwhelmed by false positives, Lumina is using AI to automatically triage and contextualize threats, freeing up analysts to focus on genuine incidents. Nordian and Starlink partner up: Connectivity provider Nordian has signed a reseller agreement with Starlink to embed high-speed satellite internet directly into industrial equipment. Targeted at the agriculture, mining, and transportation sectors, this allows Canadian edge deployments in remote areas to maintain constant connectivity, enabling real-time telemetry and predictive maintenance. Noah Labs builds local AI: Software developer Noah Labs is building Sentinel, an AI-native integrated development environment designed to run 100 percent on-device. As data sovereignty becomes critical, Sentinel allows developers to build and test AI models locally, removing the risk of exposing sensitive proprietary data to public cloud APIs during the development phase. NSF’s deep-tech initiative: The United States National Science Foundation has announced a $1.5 billion X-Labs initiative to fund deep-tech research. The massive influx of capital is expected to heavily influence cross-border commercialization and innovation in North America, focusing on autonomous systems, quantum networking, and advanced materials. Read Full Transcript Welcome to The Buzz from ChannelBuzz.ca, I’m Robert Dutt, today is Tuesday, May 19, 2026, and here’s what’s happening in the channel today. Yesterday, we brought you a special mid-day look at Dell’s new Modern Partner Platform and the massive expansion of the Dell AI Factory. But if you look past the glitz of the main stage, there was a very sobering reality check delivered during the partner-specific keynote. Pete Trizzino, president of global sales at Dell Technologies, took the stage to warn partners that supply constraints are officially back. Driven by the voracious hyperscaler demand for AI infrastructure, the squeeze on GPUs, CPUs, and memory is tightening rapidly. In fact, Trizzino warned that the supply chain issues we are starting to see now could be significantly worse in 2027. For Canadian MSPs and VARs, this is the klaxon sounding for hardware lifecycle planning. If you are waiting until the quarter a client needs a server refresh, you are going to be too late. Partners need to be having these capacity conversations with their clients today, locking in orders, and potentially leveraging IT financing and distribution partners to bridge the gap while hardware makes its way through a congested supply chain. Closer to home, the Canadian Internet Registration Authority, or CIRA, is preparing to launch a new, heavily channel-oriented product platform later this month at the ChannelNEXT conference in Toronto. Led by channel executive Tim Brien, the upcoming platform marks a dedicated pivot toward a true managed service provider model for the national internet registry. For years, Canadian organizations have faced an increasingly complex threat landscape complicated by strict data privacy regulations like Law 25 and PIPEDA. The demand for sovereign, domestic cybersecurity infrastructure is accelerating. By embracing a multi-tenant channel model, CIRA aims to provide Canadian solution providers with a localized alternative for DNS and enterprise security services. The new program is designed to allow channel partners to self-provision services, exert granular control over technical deployments, and scale enterprise-grade security offerings to their small and medium-sized business clients. Ultimately, this move is intended to remove the administrative friction associated with scaling broad deployments, allowing partners to integrate CIRA capabilities directly into their existing recurring revenue security stacks. In the cybersecurity space, it has been a busy 24 hours. First, a major warning for developers and security teams working with autonomous agents: threat actors are actively exploiting a critical authentication bypass vulnerability in PraisonAI, tracked as CVE-2026-44338. The zero-day flaw was targeted within hours of its disclosure, meaning anyone building agentic AI pipelines with the framework needs to apply patches immediately. On a more positive note, INTERPOL has announced the results of Operation Ramz, a massive, coordinated cybercrime crackdown across thirteen countries in the Middle East and North Africa. The first-of-its-kind operation resulted in 201 arrests and the disruption of major cybercrime networks, including the seizure of dozens of malware and phishing servers that have been targeting businesses globally. In Brief: Cybersecurity startup Lumina emerges from stealth today with an AI-native platform designed to reduce alert noise. Connectivity provider Nordian has signed a reseller agreement with Starlink to embed high-speed satellite internet into industrial equipment. Software developer Noah Labs is building Sentinel, an AI-native integrated development environment designed to run entirely on-device. And the United States National Science Foundation has announced a 1.5 billion dollar X-Labs initiative to fund deep-tech research. Full details and expanded stories on all of our In Brief items can be found in the show notes or the blog post at ChannelBuzz.ca. Later today on In The Channel, we have more from Las Vegas. I’ll be sitting down with Alan Ashby, Dell’s senior director of Americas data center presales, to break down the practical realities of the AI infrastructure boom for mid-market partners. And if you haven’t heard yesterday’s episode yet, that’s probably because there wasn’t one, because outside of Dell Technologies World, it was Victoria Day back home. That’s how we’re seeing the headlines today. I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, thanks for listening. Have a great day.

Today’s headline news for Canadian IT solution providers: Dell‘s ‘Modern Partner Platform‘ brings AI directly to deal registration: Launching in the second half of the year, this unified portal introduces an “agentic partner experience.” Powered by a family of AI assistants, the platform connects demand signals, sales collaboration, deal registration, and pricing into a single interface. The impact on velocity: The new platform promises to reduce deal registration approvals from days to just “minutes.” It also features dynamic, real-time pricing—meaning partners can generate competitive, account-specific quotes without the friction of endless email loops with a Dell rep. AI matchmaking: Dell is using AI to analyze partner install bases and proactively surface cross-sell opportunities. In FY26 alone, Dell pushed more than 200,000 of these “demand signals” to its channel partners. Incentivizing a $6.1 trillion addressable market: Dell’s programmatic changes go live in August, aimed at helping partners capture an enterprise IT market where more than $4 trillion is delivered through the channel. Focus Accounts incentive: In a massive win for the platform MSP model, Dell is finally building a structured incentive that rewards partners for line-of-business expansion (e.g., cross-selling storage to a client device customer) rather than strictly prioritizing net-new logos. Differentiated base rebates: Partners will earn a premium rebate when selling strategic solutions. Dell explicitly named Dell Private Cloud, Dell Automation Platform, Cyber Resilience solutions, PowerStore, Z-Series networking, and premium Client+ products as the qualifiers. Advisory and SI recognition: Dell is formalizing a co-sell track that recognizes the influence of systems integrators and advisory partners who architect complex cloud and AI solutions, decoupling their reward from the ultimate hardware transaction. The ‘DeskSide Agentic AI’ sandbox tackles spiraling token costs: On the product side, Dell announced a massive expansion of the Dell AI Factory with NVIDIA, creating an on-premise development environment aimed at organizations suffering from public cloud API sticker shock. The economics of local AI: Built using NVIDIA NIM, OpenShift, and Dell Precision workstations, this secure sandbox allows developers to build and test AI agents locally. Dell claims this setup can reduce token spend by up to 87 percent compared to the public cloud, offering an ROI break-even point in as little as three months. Ecosystem expansion: Dell is also officially weaving Hugging Face, Mistral, xAI, Palantir, and ServiceNow natively into its validated AI ecosystem. PowerRack standardizes AI infrastructure: To help partners deploy complex AI infrastructure faster, Dell introduced a new turnkey, rack-scale solution for compute, networking, and storage. Speed to value: Designed for extreme rapid deployment, PowerRack allows partners to go from delivery on the loading dock to running live customer workloads in just six and a half hours. Read Full Transcript Hello and welcome to a special mid-day Holiday Monday episode of The Buzz from ChannelBuzz.ca. I’m Robert Dutt, and today is Monday, May 18, 2026. While you’re all hopefully back home enjoying Victoria Day, I’m here live from Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas, where Dell has announced a major overhaul of its partner experience, betting heavily that AI and new incentive structures will remove friction for the channel. The centerpiece is what Dell is calling its “Modern Partner Platform,” scheduled to roll out in the second half of the year. Chief Partner Officer Denise Millard says the platform is designed to connect demand signals, sales collaboration, deal registration, and pricing into a single hub. It delivers an “agentic partner experience,” relying on a new family of AI assistants to guide partners through quoting and post-order support. Critically for velocity, Dell promises this new platform will enable automated deal registration with approvals in minutes, alongside dynamic, real-time pricing that reduces the need for partner reps to negotiate via email. The platform will also proactively surface “demand signals,” using AI to analyze a partner’s install base and suggest perfectly timed cross-sell opportunities. On the programmatic side, Dell is launching new incentives in August that align directly with the platform MSP model. A new Focus Accounts incentive will reward partners for line-of-business expansion within existing accounts, rather than strictly prioritizing net-new logos. Also, Dell is formalizing a co-sell track that rewards systems integrators and advisory partners who architect complex AI and cloud solutions, decoupling influence from the ultimate transaction. Partners will also see a new differentiated base rebate targeting strategic solutions like Dell Private Cloud, PowerStore, and Cyber Resilience products. While the partner program announcements focus on how the channel goes to market, Dell’s Day 1 product announcements focus on what they are selling, highlighted by a massive expansion of the Dell AI Factory with NVIDIA. For the channel, the most actionable announcement is the introduction of a new “DeskSide Agentic AI” sandbox. Recognizing that public cloud API costs are spiraling out of control for developers building AI agents, Dell has created an on-premise, secure sandbox utilizing NVIDIA NIM, OpenShift, and Dell Precision workstations. Dell claims this local development environment can reduce token spend by up to 87 percent compared to public cloud alternatives, offering a break-even point in as little as three months. Dell is also formalizing the Dell AI Ecosystem, bringing validated solutions from players like Hugging Face, Mistral, xAI, Palantir, and ServiceNow natively into the fold. To support these massive AI workloads, Dell introduced PowerRack, a new turnkey, rack-scale solution encompassing compute, networking, and storage. Designed for rapid deployment, PowerRack can go from delivery to running live workloads in just six and a half hours, giving partners a highly standardized, rapidly deployable AI infrastructure offering. There’s more information on all of these announcement in the show notes or the blog post for this episode, and stay tuned to the site and the podcast all week for full coverage and interviews from Dell Technologies World. And if you’re a Canadian partner on-hand here in Vegas this week, drop me a note, I’d love to have a chat. That’s how we’re seeing the headlines today. I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, thanks for listening. Have a great Victoria Day.

Jeff Taylor, executive director of global partner ecosystem and operations for Lenovo There are not many conversations where you get both the global architect of a vendor’s partner program and the Canadian channel chief in the same room. In this episode of In The Channel, recorded the week after Lenovo 360 Acceleratewrapped up in Austin, we had both: Jeff Taylor, executive director of global partner ecosystem and programs at Lenovo, and Craig Taylor, senior director and Canada channel chief. The headlining number from the conversation is the dramatic simplification of Lenovo’s incentive structure. Jeff confirmed that Lenovo has reduced its active global incentives from 2,300 down to approximately 200 – a 92 per cent reduction – while maintaining the same total investment pool. The analogy he reached for: the same pizza, fewer slices, each one bigger. The earning power stays; the complexity goes. For Canadian partners, Craig noted that over 90 per cent either maintained or improved their tier status in the move to the new Lenovo 360 Authorized, Gold, and Platinum structure. Craig Taylor, senior director and Canada channel chief at Lenovo The conversation moved quickly into services. Lenovo is targeting a 15 to 20 per cent partner revenue mix from services and solutions within the next one to two years. Craig pointed to TruScale as the on-ramp, noting Canadian partner feedback has consistently positioned it as more flexible than competing offerings in market. On AI, Jeff described a “reimagination of enablement” – moving partner portals from static, backward-looking data tools into agentic AI-driven platforms that are intuitive and forward-looking. Craig pointed to Lenovo’s CIO Playbook as the practical tool helping Canadian partners move customers from proof of concept to proof of execution on their AI investments. Read Full Transcript Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last sixteen years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor at ChannelBuzz.ca and your host for the show. You want to understand how a global technology vendor thinks about its partner program, not the press release version, but the actual mechanics of how design decisions get made and how they land in markets like Canada. Today’s conversation is a fairly rare opportunity. We have at the same time the global architect of the Lenovo partner ecosystem and the Canadian channel chief. Jeff Taylor is executive director of global partner ecosystem and operations for Lenovo, responsible for the Lenovo 360 framework that governs how the company works with partners worldwide and for the new consolidated partner ecosystems and program structure for the international markets that Lenovo unveiled earlier this year. Craig Taylor is senior director and Canada channel chief at Lenovo, a 2026 CRN channel chief and the person responsible for translating all that global framework into real outcomes for Canadian partners on the ground. We recorded this conversation just after Lenovo 360 Accelerate, the company’s annual North American partner event wrapped up in Austin, Texas. So this is about as fresh a read on the state of the Lenovo partner ecosystems you’re gonna get. We covered the dramatic simplification of Lenovo’s incentive structure, the push towards services-led selling and recurring revenue, how AI is reshaping both the partner conversation with customers and Lenovo’s own approach to enablement, and how Canadian partners should be thinking about a volatile period in hardware pricing. And yes, they’re both named Taylor. We had asked some questions. Let’s get right into it. My chat with Jeff Taylor and Craig Taylor. [Music] Gentlemen, thank you for taking the time. Jeff Taylor: Hey Robert, how are you? Robert Dutt: Very well, thank you. Craig Taylor: Excellent. Good afternoon, Robert. Robert Dutt: Interesting situation, one of those channel journalist dream situations, chatting with both the global architect of the partner program and the Canadian channel chief at the same time. And as fate would have it, you’re both just coming back from Austin. Jeff, for people who weren’t there in the room for Accelerate this year, the event was themed “unified as one” — pretty deliberate choice of words, I dare say. What were you trying to signal with that framing? Jeff Taylor: Yeah, well, I mean, obviously one with our partners is probably the first and foremost thing, but also to represent Lenovo holistically. From Motorola all the way through our devices, tablets, PCs, etc. and then into the data center. So we are one company and as an extension of that, one company includes our partners and the whole intent of the event was to bring everybody together and unify. Feedback has been really, really positive and it’s, you know, it’s only been a week, but lots of really good discourse and wonderful event. Robert Dutt: Craig, from a Canadian perspective, what did the Canadian attendance look like and what did Austin feel like compared to previous Accelerate events from a Canadian partner point of view? Craig Taylor: Yeah, our Canadian partners had very positive feedback to Jeff’s point. We’re always very well represented in these types of North American based events. We always punch above our weight class, I’d like to say. So all of the key strategic partners across our ecosystem were there in present and actively participating in our discussions as to how we’re going to strategize for our next fiscal year. Robert Dutt: Jeff, one thing that stood out for me from Austin was the choice of putting Jay McBain, Steve Brazier and Tiffany Bova on stage together, three analysts who ostensibly compete against each other in the market. Curious what the goal was in putting them together and what came out of that conversation that you think partners should take away. Jeff Taylor: Yeah, I think a couple of things. First of all, the moderator of that panel was with Alex Smith. So we had four great analysts all on the stage at the same time. I think if you take a step back and just look at the theme overall, what we’re trying to accomplish at Accelerate, it was really about industry topics. So we had representatives from the US Department of Energy as an example, talking about power and what’s happening at a governmental level. And part of that was to get these four analysts together who, as you say, they mix in a lot of the same circles, but they’d never been on the stage at the same time. And the idea was to propagate a little bit. And in some cases, they were aligned in a lot of their messages to the channel. In some cases, they differed. And it was a really lively and engaging conversation. And folks at Lenovo, we engage with these folks all the time, but having them all together, kind of representing their unique perspectives on the market right now was super valuable and engaging. Robert Dutt: So to dig into what you guys have been doing on the partner side of things, back in March, you announced the new consolidated partner ecosystem and programs, International Markets Organization. Now that Accelerate’s happened, partners have had a chance to hear it explained in person. What’s the clearest way to explain what operationally changed and what didn’t? Because from the outside, centralize where it makes sense can go a lot of different directions. Jeff Taylor: Yeah, look, I think the easiest way to explain it is we now have a single common framework across the globe. That framework is a guidepost, very intentionally set up as a framework, because execution has to remain local. And the input, the guidance, the feedback that we receive from our Canadian partners, from Craig, representing the viewpoints of those Canadian partners is absolutely critical to what we’re doing. And so by, you know, over time, as we had a lot of different markets and a lot of different geographies kind of expand over time as the company grew, there was similar objectives happening in multiple markets. And maybe the execution model was slightly different. And we thought by kind of bringing some of that together, we could simplify and we could gain efficiencies for our partners. But it’s really important to understand that the execution happens locally, sales happens locally, channel partners happen locally. And so it’s one really about standardizing the framework and not centralizing execution. Robert Dutt: How has that landed here in Canada, both with Canadian partners and in terms of how things operate for you, Craig? Craig Taylor: Yeah, the feedback has been really positive, Rob. You know, from a Canadian perspective, it’s all about leveraging our local teams and our local relationships, which haven‘t changed. And feedback from our partner community is we are often best in class when it comes to how we represent our organization in front of the partner ecosystem. What I think is what more exciting for me now is we’re elevating those relationships to be consistent as to how we’re going to market with our partners. Consistency in the programs, consistency in the incentives, and also how quickly we can execute. What that means is our partner facing team can spend more time in market with our partners trying to win opportunities together with our mutual customers. Jeff Taylor: And if I could add, Rob, real quick, I mean, this was a very thoughtful process. This wasn’t something that happened kind of quick and without a lot of forethought. We have been working on this for years through the introduction of Lenovo 360 as that kind of framework itself. And then over time, as we’ve built some meat on the skeleton, the timing was just really right for us to go do this. But again, that premise of local execution is probably the most important thing. Robert Dutt: Well, I know that internally you guys have kind of had the mantra of “global might, local fight” internally for a while now, kind of being applied to the partner org, it seems here. I guess I’m still a little curious where there is a certain tension between global consistency and local relevance. You’ve kind of unpacked it, but where does that actually land in terms of which side takes the lead? Jeff Taylor: Yeah. So let me give you some real tangible numbers and examples. Three years ago in market across the globe, we had 2,300 active incentives in the market. I’m going to repeat that. We had 2,300 active incentives in the market. So if you think of your investment pool as a pizza, right, and you divide that 2,300 ways, the relative impact of those individual slices can be quite small. Now, what we found in talking to markets was that there was absolutely a consistency and intent. And maybe that intent was new customer acquisition, or maybe it was growth targets, or maybe it was something else. There was consistency in intent, but the execution was different, and that created operational complexity. It created our ability to report seamlessly and consistently over time more of a challenge than simplification. So in just the last two years, we’ve gone from that 2,300 partner incentives to about 200. So almost a 92% reduction without any change in investments, any negative change in investments, because the intent was still there, right? The intent was consistent across the globe. So that’s one where we centrally can look at the forest through the trees. We can see an opportunity for simplification. Then we can bring that to the markets while still driving that strategic intent that we want to accomplish with our partners. So that’s just one example. Craig Taylor: Yeah, well said. Just to add to that, Rob, one of the things that was very important was to make sure we had local input to the global framework that was being created at Jeff’s level. So we had many conversations as to what our market needs and demands were, and make sure that we shaped it to be properly represented within the framework. That worked out very, very well. We also are allowed to have some nuances in this organization as well. And so what we’re allowed to do is perhaps if a certain pathway doesn’t make sense to the Canadian market, for example, being more of an SMB-based market, we’re going to pivot and we’re going to make those changes to make sure that we service our partners the best that we should. And kind of beef up that SMB-facing side of things. Robert Dutt: Yeah, that makes sense. Jeff Taylor: It’s really interesting. It’s interesting, Robert. From day one, we called Lenovo 360 a framework and not a program from day one. And the whole idea was that we wanted to ask three basic questions like, how do you best engage with your partners? How do you best connect with your partners and how do you best grow with your partners? But depending on the conversation, the answers to those three questions might be different. So as an example, if you’re talking to a traditional hardware solution provider, you have answers for those three questions. If you’re talking to a GSI or an MSP or an MSSP, same questions may be very different answers. And so the whole idea with this framework was to be able to flex accordingly. And that went down all the way to the market level. So Craig mentioned that Canadian being more oriented towards an SMB type of approach, the framework has to flex to be able to support that. Whereas in other markets, it may flex a slightly different way, but it’s still all about engaging, connecting and growing. Robert Dutt: OK, back to your pizza point, Jeff, and one of my favorite, probably apocryphal Yogi Berra quotes, “cut my pizza in four slices, please, I can’t eat eight.” Curious, though, for a partner who looks at it and says, “all right, well, I used to have three incentives applied to my business and now there’s only really the one. The math doesn’t work for me.” What’s sort of the answer for them? Because the earning power says we didn’t take away the earning power. Jeff Taylor: So again, it’s the intent stays the same. The earning power stayed the same. The whole idea now is operationally, it should be easier for… the intent was that it would be easier for the partners to have a path towards that earning power. So instead of Jenga or a very complicated jigsaw puzzle, the intent here was to simplify that. So it’s a clear path to that earning potential with the same intent around growth, acquisition, those types of things. Craig Taylor: Yeah. And Robert, one of the things our partners have been asking us for is to provide more direction, focus as to where they want us to go win together in the market. And I think by simplifying these programs, it’s also allowed us to provide more focus to our partner community in the ecosystem to make sure that we’re winning together in the areas that we want to win. Jeff Taylor: And Robert, it goes beyond just traditional incentives programs, too. So we’ve simplified things like our certification programs. I’m going to get this number slightly wrong, but in the ballpark, in the last two years, we’ve driven 80,000 new certifications globally through some of the simplified changes that we’ve made. So all of these things, it’s look at the globe and then apply it locally. And again, with the full intent of making it as easy as possible for the partner. Robert Dutt: As with most partner programs slash framework changes, updates, you’ve acknowledged that some partners will land at a different tier under the new structure. How are you managing the transition and what should a partner do if they feel the new placement doesn’t reflect where they’re actually at in the relationship with Lenovo? Jeff Taylor: We’re very conscious about that. And I think, Robert, you know, any time there’s even a small change in some type of construct within the program, there’s some unfortunate circumstances associated with that. But we really tried to minimize it. And I’ll just give another example to hit a tier level. We have a volume requirement. OK, that’s the framework. But what that volume requirement is, it’s going to differ by market. So, you know, it might be very different in the U.S. than it is in France, than it is in Canada, than it is in Indonesia, as an example. And the whole intent there was through our analysis was to kind of minimize those impacts as much as possible while still creating the right type of incentive and the right value associated with each of those tier levels. Craig Taylor: And to that point, Robert, it was very thoughtful in Canada as to what the thresholds should be in order to properly reflect our market. And what’s happened as a result of that is over 90 percent of the partners have either maintained or actually improved their tier status as a result of the simplification and restructuring. What we’re doing with that remaining 10 or less than 10 percent is getting out in front of our foot, making sure that we have those discussions, working together through joint business plans to determine how we’re going to get them not only to the next threshold, but have a future plan to get us to the one after that and up-tier them as we continue our relationships with them. Robert Dutt: The services shift. Jeff, you put out a specific target there in recent interviews. 15 to 20 percent of partner revenue mix coming from services and solutions over the next year or two. The services business, as I understand it, has grown in the channel for the last five years or so with channel growth outpacing overall growth. That’s certainly real numbers and real growth. What’s driving customers towards the as-a-service and TruScale model specifically right now? Jeff Taylor: Yeah, I think it’s one word. It’s complementary. Our strategic approach is to have complementary services to those of our partners. We want to be able to ensure that our mutual end users are getting the best possible experience that they can get. In many cases, those services are provided 100 percent by the partner themselves. But in other cases where they don’t have those capabilities, our job is to complement those with the service capabilities that we have. The idea is that, first of all, I think you know Robert, the services space, like the TAM, is massive. There’s so much opportunity really for everybody to play in a meaningful way. You just have to be smart about it. I think that’s the first thing. The second thing is communicate. If there is an instance in which maybe there’s a perception of competing for services revenue, we’re going to communicate. We’re going to talk. We’re going to figure out what the best solution is for that end user and then move forward that way. Craig Taylor: Yeah, the other thing I would add and maybe another word for thought is flexibility as well. Feedback from our Canadian partners is that the Lenovo TruScale offering is much more flexible than other competitive offerings in market. Because we understand that not all customers look and feel the same. So this allows our partners to scale with us during their journey as they create more of a services-led go-to-market motion for their customers. Jeff Taylor: One of the conversations, Robert, that came out, you mentioned the Accelerate event last week in Austin. Obviously, a lot of discussions around AI and a lot of discussions around how do we best build an AI practice to go serve customers, whether they’re small businesses or large enterprises. And that’s a really scary thing for a lot of solution providers right now because they see that market exploding and they want to get it right. And this is a great example of where Lenovo can come in and partner with our partners on developing an AI practice that includes not just hardware and software, but also services. Robert Dutt: Craig, for a Canadian partner to whom Lenovo still means primarily ThinkPads and infrastructure hardware, what’s the first move usually looked like for a partner who wants to shift towards services with you guys and where are most partners sitting today against that 15-20% target? Craig Taylor: Yeah, great question. I think Jeff mentioned it earlier. It’s about communication. Often, it’s a miss when we don’t understand the partner services capabilities. We are a channel-led organization. We’ll continue to be with our services engagement in order to scale and address the Canadian customers. We need the channel and we will continue to work with the channel in order to win in services, but we have to understand what it is they can offer. So our team is working very closely with our partner community through this joint business partner plan in order to understand and make sure that we’re aligning their services capabilities with the needs of those customers. That’s first. Second of all is internally, we’re making sure that we have a motto of sell with, sell for, and sell through the channel. And so our Lenovo customer-facing sales teams understand the importance and the value that our partners are bringing to our mutual customers. And together, we’re winning more than we ever have before. Jeff Taylor: Hey Robert, there’s almost like a macroeconomic driver here as well. So partners are, and we’re seeing this globally, that there’s a realization that to maximize the value, to increase the multiple on their valuation, a move towards MRR or ARR models is extremely important, right? And those are services-led models. And so we are seeing a lot of these traditional partners who are very accustomed as us being a PC or an infrastructure provider, really needing our help in moving towards this recurring revenue model that’s going to increase their valuation and their multiples. So we’re seeing that trend everywhere right now, probably more so in North America than anywhere else, but it’s definitely happening globally. Robert Dutt: To that point where I wanted to go next was the MSP pathway. 3,000 partners signed up globally, 150 million or so last year for you guys, real proof point. You’re expanding to new geographies. What can you tell me about where that pathway is at in Canada? And as you’ve expanded geographically, are there any new developments on the Canadian front, either announced at Accelerate or along the way? Jeff Taylor: Why don’t I take kind of the big picture and then Craig can go deeper into Canada? Again, this move towards recurring revenue models is happening everywhere. And so not only has Lenovo’s growth in that space been even better than expected, dare I say, we’re seeing it, the growth of MSPs just in pure numbers globally is growing very, very rapidly. And again, I think it’s this financial macroeconomic driver that’s making that happen. To go back to our framework around engaging, connecting and growing, those answers are so different with an MSP than they are with maybe a traditional Lenovo partner. And so we spent the first year developing this program by listening, literally going to conferences, setting up a booth. We had MSPs coming up to us saying, “What are you doing here?” And we would be like, “We’re just listening. We just want to hear what motivates you and what is your business driver.” And so that was the genesis of creating this program because we wanted it to be bespoke specifically for those MSPs that are just operating in a kind of a different way than traditional VARs or traditional service providers. And now I’ll hand it over to Craig. Craig Taylor: Yeah, no well said. And you’ll see that the way that we’ve set up the Lenovo 360 for MSP pathway is the solutions hub within our online support and the way that we work with those partners looks different. The incentive stack is aligned to the needs, as per Jeff’s saying, and we have dedicated campaigns and road shows and community engagements in order to make sure that we’re addressing the needs of those MSP partners. What’s most exciting in Canada is it’s actually opened up a new route to market for us and new partner relationships where we haven’t had them before. You know, I would say that until this pathway was created, we were probably under penetrated from a Lenovo Canada perspective within the MSP community. Now the opportunity is vast. The partners, those MSP related partners are interested in working with Lenovo more than ever. And I think together we’re going to go win in the market. Robert Dutt: Are we still in the early innings of operationalizing that and realizing that or is that something that’s sort of matured with the program being out there? Craig Taylor: I think we already had a head start. And so, you know, some of the relationships with the key MSP partners in the Canadian ecosystem, those relationships already existed. I think this is now an opportunity just to extend our reach and better support the masses of MSP partners that are in the Canadian marketplace. So we’re well down the path, but no pun intended. But I think this framework actually allows us to go even deeper and have more intimate relationships with this set of partners. Jeff Taylor: I think globally, if I could interject here, we’re probably in the second inning of a nine inning game. There’s so much more we can and we’ll be doing with this MSP community. And at the same time, there’s tens of thousands of MSPs out there. So the opportunity is huge and our interest and our investment kind of matches that opportunity. But we still have many innings to play here. So we’re excited about it. Robert Dutt: I don’t know if you guys have noticed over the last few months, but memory costs have been a little bit volatile. You guys, you know, Ryan McCurdy was out in front of that publicly and the Top Choice Express model guidance for pricing some of the ISG deals. Real things that partners are navigating. How do you counsel a partner who’s trying to manage customer conversations when prices can shift before product ships? And what specific tools or protections do partners have inside Lenovo right now that they need to know about? Jeff Taylor: Yeah, again, I’ll just kind of take the big picture here. Lenovo culturally within our partner community has always been one based on trust and communication always. And we’ve navigated tough waters before, whether that was the pandemic or this situation that’s affecting the entire industry. And our approach is complete candor, open communication. We don’t hide behind any potential downside or any risk. We’re very communicative up front as we get information, we share that information. That can at times be frustrating for partners, but at the same time, if they, you know, at the end of the day, when they take a step back, they really appreciate Lenovo just being super transparent. It is a tricky deal right now. It is complicated and things are moving very quickly. I do not envy our sales folks and I don’t envy our partner sellers out there right now because there’s a lot of tricky, tough conversations that have to happen. You had mentioned Top Choice and Top Choice Express. We have invested in a model for Top Choice Express where we do have a supply. We can commit to an order to ship SLA that other vendors can’t right now. And again, I think that’s very well received by the partner community. It may be that the exact configuration is slightly different, but at a time like this, it’s a great way for us to service those customers collectively with our partners and with a high quality solution from Lenovo. Craig Taylor: Yeah, just to add to that as well, I would say resiliency and agility have always been built into our supply chain. We currently manufacture in over 30 locations in 10 different markets worldwide. That global footprint allows us to be more agile as we go to market during these challenging times. Recently, Gartner has rated us as the number eight most robust supply chain in the world. I think that’s going to work to our advantage as we go and continue through these challenging times. Robert Dutt: Switching to AI, you guys have posted 72% year-over-year growth in AI-related revenue. I want to unpack that a little bit. Jeff, where’s that coming from? Is that AI PC, infrastructure services, mix of all three through the hybrid AI advantage program and the Nvidia work? What does the enablement for a partner who wants to build an AI practice actually look like? Jeff Taylor: Lots of questions in there, so let me make sure I can get them all back. In terms of our mix, it really is cross portfolio. We are leading the way in AI PC, which is fantastic. I think we’ve just scratched the surface on that device side. I still think some consumers and users are wondering, what is the real AI value here? Those use cases will continue to come and we’ll continue to see that market expand. In terms of our infrastructure business, everywhere from being able to service the big hyperscalers all the way into the enterprise and the SMB space is a testament to the strength of our portfolio. That growth is represented from everywhere from the hyperscalers to enterprise to mid-market to SMB. Again, on the services side, we talked about that a little bit ago. It’s really about partnering to make that happen. We are very fortunate to have partners. You had mentioned Nvidia, also Intel, also AMD, all the silicon guys are very much working with us on making sure that, A, the solutions are there, and that, B, the way we’re enabling those solutions, which is also a little bit different, Robert. We have to be enabling around outcomes and not around feeds and speeds. You have to be talking to customers about what are they trying to accomplish. It’s not feeds and speeds anymore. How we’re enabling our partners, Craig had mentioned our Lenovo 360 Solution Hub as an example. It is an outcome-based platform where our partners can come in and learn what’s available from an outcome’s perspective. The solutions, the hardware and the software is really incidental to the conversation around the outcome itself. I think all of those things play together. Robert Dutt: Craig, where do you find Canadian partners are with AI at this point? There’s a spectrum with some building real AI practices, many still figuring out what the first customer conversation looks like. So I guess both acknowledging there’s a range of answers, where do you find partners are at? What’s the realistic, most common entry point for a mid-market focused Canadian partner? Craig Taylor: Yeah, to answer the first part of the question, it is a vast spectrum as to where each partner is on their AI journey. But rest assured, because of the Lenovo services portfolio, we can actually support each of those partners independently and complement their offerings as they scale their AI journey. I would suggest that many of them probably are moving from proof of concept with their customers to now proof of execution with their customers. More and more, there’s a demand on measuring an ROI on the AI investments that have been made. And I think that’s where partners and customers are looking for Lenovo for some direction. We recently created a CIO playbook, which actually helps our customers and partners be able to capture what that ROI is and what the financial returns are getting as a result of their AI investments. And feedback from that from our partner community has been very good. The other thing I would suggest is that because these AI workloads are now going from modeling into the cloud, now into being actually practically used within the customer sets, it creates a massive opportunity for our infrastructure solutions group business. And you heard Jeff mention that several times. One of the things we’re doing with our partner community is making sure that we’re over-investing with their technical architects and solution architects within the partner community to drive even more familiarity with the Lenovo solutions around AI playbook to make sure that we’re being suggested, recommended, and considered when customers are coming to them for advice. Robert Dutt: Jeff, Austin’s in the rearview mirror. You got the program changes out. New org is in place. What have you done for me lately? What does the rest of 2026 look like? And what would tell you by year end that this consolidation worked the way you wanted it to? Jeff Taylor: Yeah, first, I’m going to take a nap. I’m tired. There’s a lot that has to happen. I mean, the first thing is we have a commitment to our partners and to our partners like Craig, our internal partners, that everything continues to move from a local perspective, that we want to make sure that whatever changes we’re making, services our geographies, services our markets, and most importantly, services our partners. So that’s kind of the first priority in my mind to go do that. The second thing, and we briefly mentioned this before, is I think the world of enablement is changing quite a bit. And I think AI is driving that. And we throw around the word transformation quite a bit and things still aren’t really transformative. They’re more evolutionary. I actually think at this point, we’re at a transformative part in terms of channel management. So we are investing heavily in our digital platforms to move from just kind of basic LLM models into AI agents and eventually into agentic AI that’s going to completely change the way that we enable all of our partners, big and small. It’ll be more efficient. It’ll be more intuitive. It’ll be more timely. It’ll be more forward-looking than backwards-looking. I think, Robert, you know most portals are somewhat static and kind of represents yesterday and not tomorrow. I think all of that is going to change. And so a big focus for myself and working very closely with our IT and digital transformations organizations is this reimagination of enablement in this world of AI. And you’ll see more and more from Lenovo in that regard. Robert Dutt: I think that is going to be one of the most interesting things from a partner program structure point of view over the next couple of years is how you and your peers address those challenges and really potentially change the shape of what programs and enablement look like. It’s exciting. Jeff Taylor: It really is an exciting time for us channel nerds that have been around for forever. This is like, “Yes, we’re going to be able to rock the world. It’s going to be great.” Robert Dutt: Craig, for a Canadian partner listening to this, what’s the one thing that you want them to do differently or think differently in their relationship with Lenovo over the next little while? Craig Taylor: Yeah, I think we’ve talked about some of them already. We need to continue to protect and grow the core, which is our client computing and PC business. We have to grow at a premium to market. And I think we’re well positioned for that. I need the channel community to help us to continue to accelerate our ISG, our infrastructure solutions group business, around the data center to make sure we continue to drive relevance, focus on those technical relationships and leverage Top Choice Express, which will better service all of our customers by getting the right products in their hands quicker. We talked about helping our customers and our partners on this services-led selling journey. So we’re going to spend more time on that. But the last two, I think, are probably where a majority of my focus will be for the second half of the year. The one is continuing to make sure that we demonstrate ourselves as the easiest partner to do business with. So whether it be through our portfolio like Top Seller and Top Choice, whether it be the program optimization that Jeff and his team are doing fabulous work on, or whether it be the alignment of our portfolio coming together to represent one Lenovo, that’s going to be the key to our success and where our partners should continue to challenge us. Internally, I’m challenging my team to operate and act like an owner of your own business. And so we’re empowering our people to make decisions in market in front of their partners in order to have a more agile relationship with those customers. We’re enabling them with the right tools. And then finally, we’re educating them properly to make sure they represent this more complex portfolio of offerings that continues to be positioned in the marketplace and satisfy our customers’ business outcomes. So a lot for the second half of the year, but I’m very bullish that we’re positioned properly for success. Jeff Taylor: Robert, if you don’t mind, I would add just one quick thing there. And you had mentioned, like, we are in difficult times right now with memory and price increases and things like that. Partners are smart. They are going to lean on the partners that they trust, and they’re going to lean on the partners that have been there with them, or their partners that have been with them through these difficult times previously. And while nobody wants this situation, I think Lenovo is actually in a really good spot right now because we are that trusted advisor and have been for years. It’s not just words, right? It’s years and years and years of building relationships, the work that Craig and his team have done in Canada. You know, we have these relationships that allow us to navigate these waters maybe better than others. Robert Dutt: And my last super serious question to end this is, I’m basing this on an inference off a small sample size of two. But do you guys have any problems finding Taylors to run the channel orgs in all of the countries you operate in worldwide? Jeff Taylor: Go ahead, Craig. Say what you always say. Craig Taylor: Listen, I like to tease Jeff that he’s my dad, but our age delta is probably much more closer than makes that physically possible. But hey, listen, we’re going to take the best of the best. We happen to get two Taylors on this call with you, Robert. That’s what you’re getting today. And we’ll look for more next time we meet. Jeff Taylor: He’s definitely the better of the two. So it’s a funny thing. We were actually talking in Austin about how we might be able to mess with you a little bit, but we just don’t have to. Robert Dutt: Good to know. And Craig, I’ll send you the audio clip of him saying you’re the better one for your performance review. Craig Taylor: As long as that is your final edit, Rob, I’m happy. Robert Dutt: Gentlemen, thank you for taking the time. It’s been a fun conversation and we covered a lot of ground very well. Thank you. Jeff Taylor: Yeah, thank you, Robert. Craig Taylor: Yeah, look forward to seeing you soon, Robert. Thank you. Robert Dutt: There you have it. Jeff Taylor and Craig Taylor, both from Lenovo. I’d like to thank both Jeff and Craig for the time. It’s genuinely not that often you get the global and local perspective on the same conversation at the same time. And I thought the dynamic made for a richer discussion than either could have delivered on their own. A few things were taken away from this one. The incentive consolidation is real and it’s significant. Going from 2,300 active global incentives down to about 200, a 92% reduction, while keeping the total investment pool intact. Meaningful simplification. Jeff’s pizza framing is a good one. Same amount of pizza, fewer slices, each one bigger and more impactful. Earning power stays, operational complexity goes. If your business has been navigating a patchwork of overlapping incentives, the cleaner path to earning should be welcome. On the tier transition, Craig was direct that over 90% of Canadian partners either maintained or improved their status in the move to the new authorized gold and platinum structure. If you’re in the 10% that didn’t, the message was clear. Get in front of your Lenovo rep, build a joint business plan. There’s a path forward, but you have to start the conversation. The services shift didn’t seem like a someday conversation. Lenovo’s targeting 15 to 20% of its partner revenues from services and solutions over the next one to two years. TruScale is available and more flexible than a lot of partners probably realize. The partners who are going to win here are the ones who can articulate their own services capabilities clearly, so Lenovo can align around them rather than compete with them. On AI, I found Jeff’s forward-looking comments on agentic AI and the reimagination of enablement genuinely fascinating. Most partner portals are, as he said, static. They show you yesterday, not tomorrow. That is going to change. And how it changes will shape how partner programs actually function. Worth paying attention to across the industry. And for the hardware volatility piece, Top Choice Express is the practical answer right now for partners trying to manage customer conversations when prices are moving before product ships. If you’re not comfortable with it already, your first call tomorrow should be with your Lenovo rep. Oh, and yes, we did keep the clip of Jeff saying that Craig is the better Taylor. It’s in the edit. You’re welcome, Craig. If you enjoyed this episode, please follow or subscribe to the podcast wherever you get your podcasts. We’re on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, most of the major directories. Ratings and reviews are always appreciated and genuinely do help the show find a wider audience in the Canadian channel community. Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca and I’ll see you in the channel.