Channel Brief: Dell Embraces Partners, Open Text Acquires Pillr

Happy Thursday everybody. ChannelE2E managing editor Sharon Florentine is taking a few well deserved days off, so I’ll be drinking the coffee and sitting in the driver’s seat from now until May 28. Buckle your seatbelts! 

I just got back from Dell Technologies World where Dell channel executives were telling me about how they’ve incentivized their internal sales reps over the last year or so to work with partners. Basically, they said, sales reps get paid more if they do deals with a partner vs. without a partner. It makes sense that Dell was extending these offers to areas such as storage and servers where the cloud has represented a big competitive threat in recent years. The more people selling Dell solutions the better for Dell. 

Dell extended an aspect of the program, Partner of Record, to cover its client devices – i.e. PCs – including the five new AI PCs that founder and CEO Michael Dell introduced this week from the keynote stage. You can check out our full coverage of the AI vision here, and the partner announcements here. It’s exciting to see Dell evolve its channel program to push partners to the front of the line. 

Remember, Canalys has predicted that channel partners will account for 73.2% of the tototal IT market in 2024. And that percentage is growing. 

Here’s what else you need to know about today.

Today’s Tech, Channel and MSP News

1. Cybersecurity acquisition - OpenText Corp. has acquired MDR platform Pillr from Novacoast Inc. Pillr is a cloud native, multi-tenant MDR platform for MSPs. As an MDR platform, it includes threat hunting capabilities. The combination of Pillr technology and OpenText expertise accelerates OpenText’s Cybersecurity product roadmap to offer key features including API integrations and product/pricing bundling for MSPs.

2. IBM Think Partner Day - Dell wasn’t the only tech giant celebrating its channel partners this week. IBM kicked off Think 2024 in Boston with Partner Plus Day. And guess what? IBM also put a big focus on the opportunities around AI. The event came a year after IBM introduced its Partner Plus program that IBM says embodies a new era of partner-first collaboration. IBM’s parner ecosystem includes ISVs, hyperscalers, resellers and distributors, service providers, technology partners, systems integrators and MSPs. You can read more about it in this blog post here by Kate Wooley, GM of Ecosystem at IBM. 

3. Cloud/Government Partnership -  Samsara, a connected operations cloud provider has forged a new partnership with Carahsoft Technology Group to serve as its Master Government Aggregator. This agreement will make Samsara’s technology solutions available to the Public Sector through Carahsoft’s reseller partners and National Association of State Procurement Officials (NASPO) ValuePoint and OMNIA Partners contracts. 

4. Phishing Phunding - Silicon Valley-based Bolster, a provider of multi-channel phishing protection with an AI-based approach to security protection against phishing, announced a $14 million funding round led by M12, Microsoft’s venture fund. Bolster says its platform is unique because it can review content and discern intent like a human would, but much faster and at scale using AI. Bolster has used AI and ML to train models on more than 100TB of data and has scanned more than 1.5 billion websites.

5. Phishing Volume, Complexity On the Rise - SlashNext, a provider of genAI cloud email, mobile and web messaging security’s 2024 Mid-Year Assessment on The State of Phishing report showed a 341% increase in business email compromise (BEC) and advanced phishing attacks

7. Hurry Up, Cloud MSPs! Submit Your Survey to Our Top Cloud MSPs List - Every year that I’ve worked on an MSP ranked list, I’ve blasted out the deadlines and written blog posts and sent emails telling people over and over that the deadline is close. And once the window closes to submit your MSP, there are always a handful of companies that beg me to reopen the survey so they can submit their companies. Somehow they missed all the messages. Don’t let this be you! Our Top 250 Public Cloud MSPs survey is open now, but it closes in June. Don’t wait until the last minute. Get it done and check it off your list today so you don’t miss the deadline. If your MSP practice includes working with a cloud provider, this survey is for you. Here’s the link to participate. Participation is free. The survey closes in June. Submit your MSP here for recognition today! And if you want to check our lists from previous years, you can find them here.

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