CRN December 2021 - Issue 1408 by The Channel Company

ISSUE 1408 • DECEMBER 2021

crn.com

PRODUCTS OF THE YEAR PAGE 18

TECH INNOVATORS PAGE 28

NEXT-GEN SOLUTION PROVIDER LEADERS PAGE 44

NEWS, ANALYSIS AND PERSPECTIVE FOR VARs AND TECHNOLOGY INTEGRATORS

Selipsky Style Only five months into his new role as CEO of AWS, Adam Selipsky is harnessing his insatiable curiosity, technology transformation smarts and leadership skills to drive innovation and partner success. PAGE 8

Channel Stars, Let Your Light Shine CRN’s prestigious award lists recognize the channel’s leading power players. Don’t miss out! • • • • • •

Channel Chiefs Managed Service Provider 500 Partner Program Guide Solution Provider 500 Women of the Channel And More!

Computer Reseller News

December 2021 Selipsky Style

Columns 6 The Final Cut By Steven Burke

On The Record By Robert Faletra

Features 44 Next-Gen Solution Provider Leaders

They have a passion for problem-solving and a drive to elevate their companies’ strategies working with their vendor partners. For the second year, we celebrate those solution provider executives who exemplify a rising generation delivering a host of new ideas.

For reprints and plaque requests, please contact The YGS Group at 800.290.5460 or http://crnlicensing.com

RN (ISSN 1539-7343), also known as Computer Reseller News, is published 14 times a year (February, April, June, August, October, December and 8 Special Issues) by The Channel Company, One Research Drive, Suite 410A, Westborough, MA 01581, and is free to qualified management personnel at companies involved in the reselling/distribution of computers/ networking systems, software and services. One-year subscription rates for all others in the United States are $209.00; Canada $234.00. Overseas air mail rates are: Europe $380.00; Mexico/South America $380.00; Africa $380.00; Asia/Australia $480.00. Please mail all subscription inquiries along with checks or money orders to The Channel Company, Dept: CRN Subscriptions, One Research Drive, Suite 410A, Westborough, MA 01581. For renewals or change of address, please include the mailing address label appearing on the front cover of the publication. Periodicals postage paid at Worcester, MA, (and additional offices, if applicable). POSTMASTER: Send address changes to The Channel Company, Dept: CRN Subscriptions, One Research Drive, Suite 410A, Westborough, MA 01581. FOR SUBSCRIPTION SERVICES go to crn.com/subscribe Copyright© 2021 by The Channel Company. All Rights Reserved. Registered for GST as The Channel Company, GST No. R13288078, Customer No. 2116057, Agreement No. 40011901. Return undeliverable Canadian addresses to: APC Postal Logistics, LLC PO Box 503 RPO W Beaver Cre, Rich-Hill ON L4B 4R6

Five months after taking over as CEO of AWS, Adam Selipsky is tapping into his leadership skills to drive innovation and partner success to new heights.

Products Of The Year

Solution providers on the front lines of bringing products to their customers have spoken. Check out this year’s vendor winners and finalists across 30 technology categories.

Tech Innovators As digital transformation continues to explode and the shift to the cloud accelerates, innovative vendors have stepped up to the plate with a bevy of differentiated and channel-friendly products. Here are our 2021 Tech Innovator winners and finalists.

There’s More Online Most-Read Stories

1. Dell Spins Off VMware To Shareholders

2. Pure Storage CRO

Dominick Delfino Jumps Ship To Nutanix

3. Channel Mourns Passing Of Former CDW CEO Tom Richards

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DECEMBER 2021

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THE FINAL CUT

Optiv: A Security Superstar CEO KEVIN LYNCH HAS TRANSFORMED THE COMPANY INTO A ‘CO-INNOVATION’ PARTNER By Steven Burke THOSE LOOKING to protect themselves from cybercriminals in an age in which security threats are ubiquitous need look no further than Optiv, the world’s largest pure-play security solution provider. Optiv CEO Kevin Lynch has transformed the Denverbased company into a next-generation security services co-innovation partner that is charting a new path for customers to beat the bad actors. Lynch has upped the company’s services quotient and has it operating at the ever-accelerating speed of the fast-moving security threat market. Before he took the helm, Optiv was primarily a static security product reseller. Now, the company is advising, architecting and acting as a co-innovation partner with an eye on managing infrastructure for customers in an as-a-service model. Lynch, who detailed the new competitive dynamics reshaping the security market at CRN parent The Channel Company’s BoB (Best of Breed) conference, said speed is the “No. 1 imperative” he has been driving since he took the helm in April 2020. That means speed to innovate, speed to market, speed to business outcomes and even speed to bring on talented new members of the Optiv team. What Lynch has done is dramatically increase the rate at which Optiv can deliver business outcomes for customers. That means cutting the time to put boots on the ground or deliver virtually for a customer to less than a day, as opposed to the multiple days it took Optiv to deliver with static offerings before Lynch changed the model. That ability to respond quickly has changed the Optiv customer relationship. First and foremost, it has brought a razor-sharp clarity to delivering security business outcomes for customers in an era where threats are changing by the minute. That’s no small matter given that the average Optiv customer has 75 to 90 different security technologies, with 30 percent of those not deployed or deployed with the wrong telemetry, according to Lynch. Even worse, he said, many of those customers lack a strategic security plan or even an incident response plan. Lynch has, in effect, flipped the old reactive security product reseller model and put in its place a services-centric methodology that is delivering a new aggressive security posture to cybersecurity-fatigued enterprise customers. Lynch has a dire warning for those solution providers not moving to meet the new market dynamics. He said the old-world “static security partner” model is coming to a close. “The signals from our market are very, very clear if you just listen a little bit,” Lynch told attendees at the BoB conference. “The market is asking for an innovation partner—a co-innovation partner.” That notion of becoming a co-innovation partner has been welcomed with open arms by customers frustrated with partners hawking multiyear security subscriptions. The problem, he said, is those static, multiyear subscriptions are simply not delivering the security or business outcomes customers are demanding. “This notion of a fixed scope over a long threshold with a dynamic market is coming to a close,” he said. “But the idea of having an innovation mindset when you take that contract on—where you’re actually thinking about innovating the assets, changing the platform and helping them to expand the use cases and deliver a differentiated value—is selling off the shelves as fast as we can provision it. There’s quite a big difference.” ■ B A C K T A L K : Are you a co-innovation partner for your customers? Let me know at sburke@thechannelcompany.com.

DECEMBER 2021

Women of the

Channel

Leadership Network

The Women of the Channel Leadership Network is an online community dedicated to helping women across the IT channel thrive professionally and personally. • Embrace the power of community • Network and foster relationships with women from across the tech industry • Gain peer insight through live discussions, online forums and interactive networking groups • Connect with community members to gather best practices and advice for solving business challenges • E xplore content for thought leadership and professional development • Utilize the platform to build your personal brand and establish yourself as an industry leader • Discover how to improve company culture, while unleashing the power of inclusion

Join at: thechannelcocommunities.com/

How To

Succeed

by Seeing the Whole Story

Dynabook Puts The Channel First Q. Why would a reseller choose to work with Dynabook?

Fo r m e r l y T O S H I B A P C Co m p a n y

A. Two things come to mind: inventory and our heritage in the laptop industry coupled with our invigorated channel focus. Dynabook—formerly Toshiba PC Company— delivered orders in weeks while our competitors were quoting four-to-five-months for delivery. To champion our heritage and rally around the channel, we made several significant changes to the organization, including the adoption of a “Channel First, Channel Best” strategy; additional headcount to support both the large national solution providers like CDW, SHI, Zones and the SMB channel. We transformed our preferred partner program into a robust three-tier program with significant benefits. These changes, plus our ability to deliver the product in a matter of weeks, are a massive game-changer for Dynabook. We are seeing resellers lead with our product because of our ability to deliver orders in a timely fashion. We will continue to invest in the channel to help us grow faster. If you are looking for a partner that is easy to work with and can deliver orders in a timely fashion—Dynabook is the right choice.

Q. How does the Foxconn relationship help Dynabook with the supply chain?

A. Our relationship with Foxconn has provided our product planning team with vis-

ibility into the supply chain and given us a significant competitive advantage. With this line of sight, we have stayed ahead of the shortages many other manufacturers have faced. We have provided thought leadership to our end users on their buying choices, steering them into components and specs that could be fulfilled faster. By having availability and inventory in the channel with SKUs in stock and ready to ship— which very few manufacturers have today—we have picked up market share. We are prepared to deliver products when customers need them.

Q. What is Dynabook’s “Channel First, Channel Best” strategy?

A. It’s simple. It means we are a channel company. We are one team, driving toward

one goal, serving the needs of our customers. We are growing the company by scaling through the channel, especially with the deep brand heritage and relationships we have. The channel is going to be our true driving force for growth. Adopting this strategy has allowed Dynabook to develop a degree of faith and trust within the reseller community for our brand and mobile computing solutions. We understand that committing fully to the channel via NSPs, MSPs and traditional VARs gives Dynabook tremendous reach and will allow the organization to scale quickly.

Learn how to enhance your profitability and reward sales performance: www.dynabookpartnerprogram.com.

James Robbins

General Manager Dynabook Americas

”

We are one team, driving toward one goal, serving the needs of our customers. We are growing the company by scaling through the channel, especially with the deep brand heritage and relationships we have. The channel is going to be our true driving force for growth.

”

COVER STOR Y

Selipsky Style Five months after taking over as CEO of AWS, Adam Selipsky is tapping into his leadership skills to drive innovation and partner success to new heights.

By Donna Goodison

f there’s one trait that has served Adam Selipsky well throughout his career, it’s his inquisitive nature. “I really believe in being a lifelong learner,” Selipsky said in a recent interview with CRN in Seattle, three months after taking over as CEO of Amazon Web Services in July. “I probably had a bit of that natural bent to start with and then had people in my life who have helped to stir the embers of that curiosity or have led me to understand how rewarding and how fulfilling it can be for me if I do question and attempt to understand more.” His family “placed a lot of importance on learning and on education and on reading,” while teachers and professors at prestigious institutions—Seattle’s elite Lakeside School, then Harvard University and Harvard Business School—helped those early sparks catch fire. “I had an amazing high school philosophy teacher who I think really helped to open up my eyes to different ways of thinking about the world,” Selipsky recalled. “I think I’m just really curious, and so I really enjoy seeing how a lot of different people operate,” Selipsky said. That curiosity led him into a career in the technology business. Following a stint at Mercer Management Consulting, Selipsky landed at streaming pioneer RealNetworks for six years before an 11-year run at AWS, where he worked in a chief operating officer-like role overseeing marketing, sales and support, reporting directly to then-CEO Andy Jassy. Then, in 2016, Selipsky left AWS to become CEO of Tableau Software, which he ushered through a $15.7 billion sale three years later to Salesforce.com.

“I thought that it would be interesting, it would be fun, and I would really learn from them,” he said of his decision to take the CEO post at Tableau. “And I really did.” Each of the technology companies he has worked for has been driven by a “missionary”-like zeal to change the world for customers with innovative technology, Selipsky said. “What excited me then [at the beginning of my career] is the same thing which fundamentally excites me now, which is in each one of these areas within technology, there is the possibility of transformation—to transform how people consume things,” Selipsky said. Now Selipsky will tap his own leadership style—bringing to bear his insatiable curiosity and own technology transformation smarts—to drive AWS innovation, customer obsession and partner success to new heights. “It’s important for me to embrace who I am and lead in a way that works for me, which in some ways will be consistent with Amazon and many other AWS leaders,” he said. “And, just like for anybody else, some of those things will be really my own style.” For Selipsky, his second act at AWS—a role he clearly relishes— is an opportunity to scale the cloud infrastructure and services business far beyond what either he or Jassy likely could have imagined when they first began working together 16 years ago. Even with AWS now on an annualized revenue run rate of $64.44 billion, coming off its best growth rate since the first quarter of 2019, Selipsky is undeterred.

DECEMBER 2021

“No matter how successful we have been in the past—just given the rate of change in the industry, how quickly our market segment is evolving and just the rate of growth of AWS—there are always going to be big opportunities … to double down even further on successes, to find new areas in which our customers need us to innovate and to improve existing things we do,” he said. “So I’ve really been trying to find and focus on the most important of those.” Among the changes early in his tenure is a revamping of the channel guard, with Cisco veteran Ruba Borno slated this month to replace AWS global channel chief Doug Yeum, who is leaving for parent company Amazon.com’s retail division. As Cisco’s new CEO in 2015, Chuck Robbins tapped Borno as a change agent when he unveiled his executive team with her as chief of staff and vice president of growth initiatives. Borno most recently was senior vice president and general manager of Cisco’s global customer service centers after leading its managed services. In addition, Jeffrey Kratz, who headed AWS’ public sector business in Latin America, Canada and the Caribbean and international sales, will take over the global public sector partner program as Sandy Carter leaves that post after two-plus years to work for a startup. Now it’s up to Borno to lead the charge in driving a new era of channel growth under Selipsky.

Looking At The World From The ‘Outside In’ Salesforce co-founder and CEO Marc Benioff said what distinguishes Selipsky’s leadership style from other executives is his proclivity to look at an organization “from the outside in.” While he believes in product strategy, Selipsky always looks at the external ecosystem and how it can become a greater success. “I was always very impressed with how he always wanted to know what is happening from the outside—that could be from the channel, the competitors, customers,” said Benioff, who worked with Selipsky after Salesforce acquired Tableau. “He does a great job by looking not just at how the world is from the corporate view, but how the world looks from the external view. That’s a really unique and important aspect of his leadership and how he thinks. He takes this outside-in feedback as the critical part of how he builds his core strategy. You can see that in how he originally built AWS.” Selipsky’s business ethos reflects Amazon.com’s “customer obsession” leadership principle and extends to how he sees partners fueling customers’ success. As the company prepares to mark the 10-year anniversary of the AWS Partner Network (APN) in April, Selipsky is clear about the increasing role that partners will play in the cloud computing leader’s growth—and how AWS plans to facilitate that. “We’re going to do more,” Selipsky said, when asked to delineate his message to partners. He pointed to areas such as free or very heavily discounted

training for partners, as well as the ISV Accelerate program through which hundreds of independent software vendors (ISVs) and consulting partners are going to market with the cloud giant as evidence of ways that AWS already has been “doubling down” on investments in the channel. “We’re really just entering the meat of adoption of the cloud, and as we get there, and we move more and more into that mainstream and into very use-case-specific and industry-specific needs, the importance and the role of the partner ecosystem will only continue to increase,” Selipsky said. He envisions AWS leveraging partners to drive deeper into vertical markets—whether it is telecommunications, consumer goods or financial services—as customers demand more targeted solutions. “I think it will be really important that we have really strong partners in each of those areas,” he said. Selipsky’s drive to double down on partners comes as AWS is ramping up its investments in co-selling with its 100,000-plus ecosystem partners and pouring more resources into programs with distributors to help on-board solution providers and expand globally. AWS also has added new partner incentives and brought more features to AWS Marketplace, its sales channel for ISVs and consulting partners to sell their solutions and services to customers. “I hope a few years from now we’ll have done an even better job in terms of providing capabilities to make it really easy for partners to on-board, to skill up and ultimately to serve end customers with us in a very seamless way,” Selipsky said. Eran Gil, CEO of Denver-based AllCloud, expects Selipsky to be a very positive force for AWS and its ecosystem as a leader who recognizes the importance of partners in moving the business ahead. Selipsky benefits not only from his background at AWS, but at Tableau and under Salesforce, Gil said. “Adam will bring a good fresh set of eyes into the system and upon the community, and I believe he will help drive it forward,” said Gil, whose company, an AWS Premier Consulting Partner, expanded its strategic collaboration with the cloud provider in November. “He knows how the operations work, he knows Andy [Jassy] very well. He has seen how the Tableau ecosystem has evolved. Adam probably has a very good view of what a very healthy ecosystem and maturing ecosystem like Salesforce is and would bring that to the table.”

The Father Of The APN Selipsky started shadowing Jassy in mid-May, before the title exchange in early July when Jassy officially replaced Jeff Bezos as the CEO of Amazon.com. He had worked side by side with Jassy from the beginning of AWS to build Amazon’s cloud business from the ground up. He ran most of AWS’ external-facing capabilities, also overseeing its business development and partner alliances programs. For the latter, Selipsky asked his partner team to develop a program that would nurture solution providers, including systems integrators, consulting partners and ISVs, to help them further develop their

DECEMBER 2021

COVER STOR Y businesses with AWS. Under his guidance, the APN launched in the organization are from technology partners that have had a 2012. It has since grown more than 100 percent, on average, very well-defined channel strategy, so I’m hoping that that conyear over year and is adding 50 partners per day. tinues to sort of permeate throughout the organization and that AWS’ partner ecosystem has been a critical plank of the over- they bring that experience and that knowledge of how to work all AWS strategy from the beginning, Selipsky said. “Since we with the channel to more of AWS,” said Ethan Simmons, manopened our doors to customers, we’ve had partners who were aging partner at PTP, a Norwood, Mass.-based AWS Advanced vital to our customers and therefore vital to AWS,” he said. “All Consulting Partner. we’ve really done is to expand the capabilities that we offer Top rival Microsoft says its partners have a hand in 95 percent and expand our ability to work well with partners. The plan is of its commercial revenue, and Google Cloud has committed to to really continue that momentum, continue that acceleration.” moving toward a 100 percent go-to-market plan with channel When Stephen Orban joined AWS as global head of enterprise partners. Historically, there has been no such commitment from strategy in 2014, he worked closely with Selipsky on a number AWS. Selipsky said he “doesn’t think of it as a quantitative of projects, including the launch of the Migration Acceleration goal,” and that he wants to “serve each customer in the way Program in 2016, and witnessed Selipsky’s partner focus. that’s best for that customer.” “I would say very con“In some cases, that fidently that Adam was will mean a very light very partner-obsessed partner element; in other ‘Adam remains super adamant that then, and he helped cases, it’ll mean a deep we provide partners with the best guide us to make sure partner contribution that we had the right where the partner is even experience to reach customers and partner ISV tools and leading the relationship build solutions on. He’s always professional service and leading the engagepartners who could help ment,” he said. putting himself in the seat of the partner and customers drive migraSimon Anderson, CEO what we need to do to work backwards from tions faster and more of AWS Premier Contheir needs.’ efficiently through ausulting Partner Mission tomation,” said Orban, Cloud Services, said he — Stephen Orban, General Manager, AWS Marketplace, now general manager of sees AWS doing the right Control Services and Data Exchange AWS Marketplace, Conthing with regard to its trol Services and Data partner program and goExchange. to-market alignment. Following Selipsky’s return, the two since have met to discuss “Every year, we see improvements in how they engage, but various initiatives involving AWS Marketplace. there are always bumps along the way, as with any partner or “Adam remains super adamant that we provide partners with channel organization,” Anderson said. “The tooling for partners the best experience to reach customers and build solutions has improved. AWS recently updated the solution provider partner on,” Orban said. “He’s always putting himself in the seat of the program to give additional financial incentives to partners like partner and what we need to do to work backwards from their Mission that drive above-baseline usage of AWS by customers. needs. Whether it be driving more automation for how they go They have been making some material improvements in all the to market or doing better co-sell with them, he’s very adamant billing outputs that we really need to … bill our own customers. about that.” There’s still a bunch of improvements we’ve asked for ... that are Forrest Danson, global chief commercial officer for the Amazon/ in the works, but that’s been progressing pretty nicely as well.” AWS alliance at New York-based Deloitte Consulting, an AWS Anderson credits Yeum for setting “the right tone” for the APN Premier Partner, said Selipsky has been spending time “getting since becoming AWS channel chief in mid-2019. smarter” about how partners are engaging with AWS and their And PTP’s Simmons sees evidence that AWS sales reps are joint customers. increasingly recognizing they need to leverage the channel more “He did pledge his ongoing commitment to partners and being to hit their internal growth targets, even though they don’t partner-led,” Danson said. receive incentives to bring in partners on deals as they do for That pledge could help AWS make strides in overcoming a AWS Professional Services. criticism that while it’s partner-friendly, it’s not partner-centric “Since the last AWS sales kickoff [in February], we’re seeing enough. Some solution providers say that while the APN is mov- far more activity from sales reps ... including us in opportuniing in the right direction, there’s still room for improvement. ties,” Simmons said. “They’re engaging us on deals, and I think “From what I’m seeing, a lot of people that were brought into part of that is due to some things on the AWS side. As they

DECEMBER 2021

continue to work that more into their strategy for growing, the better it’ll get for partners.”

Driving More Co-Selling With Partners When Intel veteran Rachel Mushahwar started this year as Americas partner sales leader for AWS’ commercial sales team, she was tasked with looking at how to drive higher partner attach rates and help partners co-sell and create unique sales offerings with AWS. “We want to increase our partner attach year over year,” Mushahwar said. “We don’t have a specific goal, but we do know that partners … will continue to fuel our growth. Our partners have got deep industry expertise. They create new solutions that solve very specific problems leveraging AWS services and infrastructure. They help our customers grow new revenue streams, they increase the operational efficiency of our customers’ infrastructure, and they reduce risk. And as more and more customers mobilize, migrate or modernize their infrastructure, we will need our partners to help us do that.” At AWS re:Invent 2021, which was slated to kick off Nov. 29 in Las Vegas, Mushahwar planned to spearhead a first-ever panel where partners could hear directly from all of AWS’ global sales vice presidents about the critical role of partners in delivering more value to customers. “A big part of it is really getting all of our VPs of sales completely ingrained in the importance of partners,” Mushahwar said in an interview ahead of the event. “Developing the program, developing the pipeline and really helping with certifications—all of those are extremely important. But at the end of the day, our partners want to hear from sales, and our partners want to hear how we can go be successful together, focused on customers. So we’re evolving our partner sales organization to be even more partner-friendly than we have been in the past.” Mushawar said partners attending the panel would hear about the strategic investments that AWS is making to grow shared customer accounts. “We’re going to talk about our joint co-sell strategy and how teaming agreements will help us continue to be successful together, really align sales motions and find some new opportunities that will bring new value for customers,” Mushahwar said. “We’ll talk about partner attach and how we want to increase that partner attach. What is our sales strategy by region? What does that look like in terms of workloads, in terms of modernizing infrastructure and in terms of bringing new customers to the cloud?” Some partners told CRN they get lost in the AWS crowd and said it takes a lot of work to make sure AWS sales reps know what solutions they offer. Leads trickle in, they say, and it requires them to lean into a complex and ever-shifting organization in the hope of getting included in deals. “A big part of what we are shifting to is to address that specific feedback,” Mushahwar said. “With the partner sales organizations—and this is from our global partners’ sales perspective—our [partner sales managers and independent software

sales managers] will be the sales reps accountable for making sure that we’ve got those connections into the field and into those customers.”

Ramping Up Distributor Programs AWS also is ramping up its efforts with distributors, which play a key role in accelerating the growth of AWS and its partners. It’s working with companies including Ingram Micro Cloud and the newly formed TD Synnex—along with regional distributors in its Europe, Middle East and Africa region and Asia-Pacific and Japan—to help bring on smaller partners and expand into regions where it doesn’t have a presence. AWS is “just scratching the surface” when it comes to using distributors to build out a broader partner ecosystem and is now working to catch up, Yeum said prior to the anouncement of his new role. “It’s a fact that a company like Microsoft, they’ve worked longer with distribution partners,” he said. “We have been working with distribution partners for a while, but not at the scale that we think we will be able to going forward. ... We think they can provide us with leverage that we don’t have, especially in the SMB space.” AWS signed strategic collaboration agreements with Ingram Micro Cloud in March and TD Synnex (then-Tech Data) in August to expand AWS business together and is seeing good traction, Yeum said. Irvine, Calif.-based Ingram Micro Cloud, also an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner, plans to scale adoption with emerging ISVs and SMB customers and continue to expand its work with AWS systems integrators and value-added resellers, including public sector partners. “The strategic collaboration agreement really deepened and broadened how we plan to grow together,” said Tim FitzGerald, Ingram Micro Cloud’s vice president of global infrastructure-asa-service go to market. “It is indicative of [AWS’] belief in the role that the channel can play in accelerating growth and better meeting the needs of the clients that we all serve. It’s about scale. They’re looking for us to develop a partner ecosystem that’s deeply competent on AWS technologies. Key areas like sales enablement, practice development, technical enablement, and business and financial support underpin the value [proposition] that we represent that [AWS] is benefiting from.”

The Battle For Enterprises At stake is a worldwide end-user spending pool on public cloud services estimated to reach $332.3 billion this year and $397.5 billion in 2022, according to research firm Gartner. AWS leads the industry with 33 percent market share of cloud infrastructure services spending, followed by Microsoft at 20 percent and Google Cloud at 10 percent, according to Synergy Research Group. Selipsky has been meeting with partners to get a sense of how they’re working with enterprise customers, as partner-led engagements now are at a different scale and level of sophistication

DECEMBER 2021

COVER STOR Y than during his previous tenure, when they were more focused more,” Danson said. “That goes beyond just Kubernetes and on high-tech and midmarket customers. some of the open-source standards. It’s how do you start to He points to AWS’ cloud dominance since its inception in making build some connections into the native services and some of the case for why enterprise customers should give their business the other clouds. How do you seamlessly operate and manage to AWS instead of Microsoft, which benefits from decades-long security and governance around it is the right place to start.” enterprise relationships and is estimated, according to Wedbush There are third-party vendors coming up in that space, but Securities, to have made cloud converts of less than 40 percent of the good news for AWS is that it tends to be one of the clouds its huge on-premises customer base. used by most of Deloitte’s big clients, Danson said. “Because so many other old-guard vendors were first dismissive “[It’s] not the exclusive one, but owning the management inof the cloud and then dismissive of AWS’ ability to provide cloud frastructure and kind of the front door to those environments is services—and then dismissive of the relevance of the cloud to en- pretty critical,” he said. “A lot of what we’re working on is how terprises—we actually got off to a multiyear head start in creating to make that easier, and I think [AWS] could start to engineer our various services,” Selipsky said. “And because we’ve managed to some things towards that front. They’ve started softening some of keep on innovating more quickly than anybody else, we still have a that message. I remember re:Invent—probably the last live one [in portfolio of services that is 2019]—it was almost like both broader in the num‘multi-cloud’ was a bad ber of services and deeper word. You really weren’t ‘AWS has the right to play at that in the capabilities that we allowed to say it. They’ve [enterprise] level and is getting into offer in each service than started to move beyond any other cloud provider.” that, but they can start those conversations, but it’s That’s demonstrated by to take leadership in that definitely a battle in there right now. the sheer size of AWS’ space as well, which I cloud computing business think will be important.” As IBM and Oracle are fighting hard to get back as well as the breadth and Selipsky said that AWS into this game, too, I think it’s going to be an depth of its customer refwill follow its customers’ interesting time going forward in the enterprise erences, Selipsky said. lead. “If you look around the “The thing we hear for sure.’ world, in every industry, most loudly from cus—F orrest Danson, Global Chief Commercial Officer, with every use case—the tomers is that they want Amazon/AWS Alliance, Deloitte Consulting really deep and compelus to keep innovating ling deployments that within AWS,” Selipsky customers have done that said. “There are a lot of they’re willing and eager to talk about publicly—it really doesn’t new services they want us to build, there are a lot of new capacompare to anybody else,” Selipsky said. bilities within existing services that they want us to build. There But AWS can’t just rely on being the most mature provider are plenty of examples of where we are interoperable in a very and its feature functionality, said Deloitte Consulting’s Danson. seamless way with all sorts of other capabilities out there, and “They have to articulate why they’re the best in that space,” we’ll continue to work on those as well.” he said. “If you look at some of the progress that Microsoft’s He pointed not to interoperability with rival clouds, but to [made], a little of it’s engineering and quality of product, a lot of September’s launch of Amazon FSx for NetApp Ontap, a fully it’s understanding how to engage at the enterprise level. They’re managed service that provides file storage built on NetApp’s already in the inner workings of those organizations. AWS has the Ontap file system, and AWS’ support of Microsoft SQL Server, the right to play at that level and is getting into those conversations, open-source PostgreSQL and “many other flavors” of databases. but it’s definitely a battle in there right now. As IBM and Oracle “We actually make it very easy for customers to move their are fighting hard to get back in this game, too, I think it’s going workloads wherever they want to,” Selipsky said. “If you took be an interesting time going forward in the enterprise for sure.” your data that was in Ontap on AWS, and you wanted to move it either back on-premises or to another cloud if they had OnAWS’ Take On Multi-Cloud tap capabilities, we will have built nothing to slow down the AWS also needs to articulate a commitment to enabling multi- ability to do that migration. We don’t believe in trying to create cloud connectivity, according to Danson. technical lock-in. We want customers to be here because they “AWS was traditionally dismissive of multi-cloud strategies, want to be here. In fact, philosophically, we believe that the less and now that 90 percent of the enterprises are multi-cloud to lock-in there is, the more willing and eager customers will be some extent, it’s time for AWS to focus on that interoperability to move to the cloud.”

DECEMBER 2021

AWS partners also can help customers run workloads in multiple places, Selipsky said. “We have ISVs like NetApp, but there are many, many others with whom we partner to enable customers to run workloads in multiple places,” he said. “We have a ton of systems integrator partners who are more than capable of working with customers to help them migrate workloads to wherever those customers want them to be.”

Innovation On The Horizon It isn’t Selipsky’s intention to make wholesale changes out of the gate at AWS, whose rapid pace of innovation under Jassy included custom AWS-designed chips, the Amazon Connect customer contact center solution and AWS Outposts, a fully managed hybrid service that extends AWS infrastructure, services, APIs and tools to virtually any data center, co-location space or on-premises facility. AWS brought in $45.4 billion in revenue last year, up 29.5 percent from 2019. In this year’s third quarter, revenue increased 39 percent to $16.1 billion from the same period last year. “Clearly AWS is not a turnaround,” Selipsky said. “This is a very successful business. I think my job is to help us double down in the things that we’re already doing that are important and that are going well, then also to help us identify new areas that we can be in or existing areas where we think we can do better.” Data and analytics is one area where there is clear demand from customers for more innovation, according to Selipsky, even while AWS already has a broad data and analytics portfolio— from databases, data warehouses and data lakes to different services for querying and business intelligence, he said. “Customers still have a lot of needs that we’re going to have to understand and work and innovate very quickly on to meet,” Selipsky said, “and so we’re going to continue to apply a lot of resources in that whole data and analytics space.” Selipsky’s data and analytics focus is informed by his four and a half years as CEO of Tableau, whose business analytics software helps users visualize and understand data. The company quadrupled in value under Selipsky’s leadership in the three years leading to its sale to Salesforce, in what was then the third largest acquisition for the software industry. “One thing I’ve really come to appreciate over the past few years is that when you think about data, it’s important to take a very holistic view,” noted Selipsky, who said he sometimes jokes about a “day in the life of a bit.” “You have to think not of point solutions but of the entire life cycle of data.We’re going to continue to work not only to have really effective point solutions, but also to create the overarching capabilities that enable the management of that data over time.” Customers also want AWS to build new services that directly help them with machine learning, according to Selipsky, who also sees a big opportunity to incorporate more machine learning capabilities inside many of AWS’ existing services. “Not only at AWS, but for the world in general, it’s still very

early in the development of AI and machine learning services,” he said. “We’ve put considerable resources into our [machine learning] capabilities and have really exciting services such as Amazon SageMaker … which continue to grow really rapidly.” Launched in 2017, Amazon SageMaker is AWS’ flagship, fully managed machine learning service that data scientists and developers can use to quickly build and train machine learning models and deploy them into production-ready hosted environments. It’s one of the fastest-growing services in AWS history. “We will continue to offer those … base-level services directly to customers, so they can use these machine learning services in all sorts of applications,” Selipsky said. “Our partners consume many of those machine learning services as well and utilize them in the value-added services that they’re providing to customers. In addition, we will continue to bury those machine learning capabilities inside of … capabilities that we provide to customers, just to make those services better. Customers won’t even necessarily know that it’s an Amazon machine learning service that’s doing something smarter and intelligent inside of the application that they’re consuming.” Eamonn O’Neill, co-founder and chief customer officer for Atlanta-based Lemongrass, hopes Selispky can maintain the blinding pace of innovation that took place under Jassy. “These guys are phenomenal,” said O’Neill, whose company is an AWS Premier Consulting Partner. “AWS is giving more features to customers that they want to see, and their innovation has been mind-blowing. Technically, the services are better—they’re better written, they innovate faster, they crash less. If he can keep going at the same pace as Jassy was running it, I’d be delighted. That, in itself, would be a great achievement.”

‘I’d Always Loved Amazon’ When the opportunity came to return to AWS, Selipsky found the idea compelling for many reasons. “I’d always loved Amazon,” he said. “I felt like I fit in well here. The culture was always one in which I thought I could work well and could thrive.” His admiration for the company’s focus on customer obsession as well as its innovative spirit also called to him. “Those are wonderful, wonderful things to be part of,” Selipsky said. In a March email to employees announcing his replacement, Jassy said Selipsky—in addition to knowing the culture and business well—would bring “strong judgment, customer obsession, team-building, demand generation and CEO experience to an already very strong AWS leadership team.” Among the advice that Jassy gave to Selipsky: keep innovating at a fast clip, it’s still very early in the cloud game with most IT still running on-premises and, finally, just be himself. “Different leaders have different characteristics,” Selipsky said. “We all have our own unique strengths and weaknesses, and no one … can be successful if they just try to be somebody else.”

DECEMBER 2021

COVER STOR Y

AWS CEO Adam Selipsky: ‘You Can’t Be CustomerObsessed If You’re Only Obsessed With Selling According To Your Own Calendar’ Adam Selipksy returned to Amazon Web Services this year as CEO, bringing both 11 years of Amazon experience and an outsider’s perspective as an AWS technology partner from his time leading Tableau Software. The ﬁrst time Selipsky landed at Amazon, in 2005, it was after getting a phone call from the company’s head of executive recruiting about “turning the guts of Amazon inside out.” “I have to confess, I didn’t really understand what she was talking about, but it sounded intriguing,” Selipsky said. It turned out that AWS, which launched a year later, “really transformed how IT happens on the planet and ultimately how customers can be innovative and can move faster in their businesses,” he said. Selipsky sat down with CRN in October to discuss the role of partners and AWS’ technology offerings and strategy. He also fended off criticism of AWS’ alleged sales tactics and cloud costs, including egress fees. Here are edited excerpts from the interview at AWS’ Seattle headquarters.

In its Magic Quadrant Cloud Infrastructure and Platform Services report in July, Gartner noted dozens of its clients across geographies had reported pressure from AWS sales to increase annual spending commitments by 20 percent to renew contracts. It also said the practice was not AWS policy and would be stopped if customers escalated the issue. Is that accurate and should customers have to escalate? With all due respect, I think that’s absolutely not accurate. To take a step back, we’re almost a [$65-]billion-a-year business, which last quarter grew at about [39] percent year over year. In a business that size, with the number of employees we have, I could probably find you one or more of anything— be it wonderful, be it awful or be it indifferent. The ability to find a very small number of anecdotes about anything, whether it’s positive or negative, in a business that size is not particularly helpful. What’s more helpful is to look at the overall patterns. It is absolutely clear, if you go out and talk to AWS customers, that they tell us all the time that we behave very differently than their old-guard technology vendors, and that it is a completely different dynamic. Literally this morning, I was with the CEO of a Global 1000 company, and he was telling me that the best part about what they’re doing with us is the relationship that they have with all the field resources with whom they work—that’s the salespeople, the solutions architects, the support staff and the partner

DECEMBER 2021

alliance managers that help them work with partners. I hear that all the time, and it’s honestly the highest compliment that anyone can pay us. We do not run our business based on pressuring customers at the end of quarters or at the end of our fiscal year. You can’t be customer-obsessed if you are only obsessed with selling according to your own calendar. First and foremost, what we’re trying to do is build long-term, trusting relationships with customers, with our ecosystem partners. I believe that for all of us—partners and AWS alike—that will actually create the best and the biggest business over time if we behave that way.

Can you talk about AWS’ custom silicon strategy? A few years ago, we decided that there was a great opportunity to improve raw performance as well as value, which I would define as price performance, for customers if we could optimize the processors—the chips that customers use. So we began to do custom development of processors. We obviously will use those chips inside of the compute instances that we provide to customers. If you compare our Graviton2-based compute instances to the prior generation—which are not Graviton—there’s [an average] 40 percent price performance improvement. That’s extremely validated. It’s not manipulated numbers, it’s not in a lab. We are told very consistently by customers that they’re seeing that 40 percent improvement. Those are the types of dramatic gains we think it’s really important

that we strive for, and we’re going to continue to innovate. There will be future generations of processors as well aimed at basic core computing, aimed at GPU workloads, machine learning workloads and more.

Can you address the issue of AWS bandwidth and egress fees and whether it’s legitimate to say they’re excessive? Is this an AWS issue or a cloud provider in general issue? This is not an issue that customers have raised with us in any material way, and that’s because, overall, AWS pricing is extremely low. And, frankly, it’s revolutionized the IT costs of almost all of our customers compared to what they’ve traditionally paid for a wide swath of their hardware, software, networking or data center services that they consume. AWS has lowered costs well over 100 times in our history. We have a really strong track record of always looking to innovate to lower our own costs and then to lower the price that we charge for customers. If you look specifically at providing bandwidth, I think there’s been a lot of misinformation out there. The majority of costs required to transfer data is actually in fixed network equipment. It’s not about the variable bandwidth of moving a bit. AWS remains extremely cost-following in the way that we choose to price in each of our services. It’s really a philosophy that we have. If you look at how we price across most of our 200-plus services—where do we charge for storage and where do we charge for throughput, and where do we charge for compute and where do we charge for database cycles—it becomes pretty obvious that we’re trying to only charge customers for the resources that they actually consume in a very fair way. We are going to continue to innovate, and I imagine in many areas across AWS that we’ll continue to lower our prices over time as we lower our costs.

A May report from Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz stated while the cloud delivers on its promise early on, particularly on public software companies’ journeys in terms of cost and innovation, the pressure it puts on margins and market cap can start to outweigh the benefits as a company scales, and growth slows. Do you see any validity in that? The notion that companies can run more cost-effectively on

their own instead of on AWS is highly misguided for even large and scaled customers, and there are a number of reasons for that. Our customers are all in business to serve their customers, and they’ll have the things that they need to do to add value to their customers—and they’re really good at that. And what we need to do to serve our customers is to build infrastructure which is highly secure, highly available, can operate at massive scale and can run at really low cost. That’s what we have to do well and, frankly, that’s just not the business that most of our customers are in. Given our scale, given that we are almost a [$65-]billion-ayear business operating worldwide with over 25 infrastructure regions around the world, over 75 availability zones—which you can think of as data centers or data center complexes around the world—we have a scale and the ability to invest that is very hard for other companies to duplicate. But at the end of the day, I think the best answer to the question is the answer that customers give. If you look at ... technically savvy internet or software companies—if you look at Netflix, if you look at Airbnb, if you look at Pinterest, and there are many, many, many other examples—they are all running on AWS. They know that both their cost structure—but more importantly, their agility and their flexibility and their ability to innovate—are much, much higher partnering with us and running on AWS. Together with our partners, the capabilities that we’re building do mean that we can serve customers both more cost-effectively and with more innovation than they can accomplish if they run on their own premises.

Do you see AWS going any deeper into collaboration tools for workers? This is an area in which there’s going to be a lot of innovation in the world for years to come, and I think lots of different companies have their own take on it. We have a lot of important capabilities already. One is Amazon Chime, which is our videoconferencing and chat service. That’s consumed both by customers directly, as well as OEMed by various partners for use inside of some of their technology. I think absolutely AWS will continue to innovate and come out with services that are really important for our customers in collaborating. And by the way, this is an area where our partner ecosystem is really important. We’re great partners with Slack. We’re great partners with Salesforce overall, who, of course, now owns Slack. And both Slack and Salesforce more broadly have really interesting collaboration capabilities. I think both with the things we produce as well as, importantly, partnering with other companies, we’ll take really a multipronged approach. ■

DECEMBER 2021

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9/23/21 8:35 AM

Products Year 2021

of the

Take It From The Top By Kyle Alspach & Wade Tyler Millward

Our 2021 Products of the Year awards honor the leading partner-friendly products that launched over the past year—as chosen by the solution providers who are on the front lines of bringing these products to customers. To get things started, our editors selected product finalists in 30 technology categories among offerings that were launched or updated from September 2020 to September 2021. The categories ranged from AI and big data, to cloud and collaboration platforms, to security, storage and devices. We then asked solution providers to choose winners based on how the products rate on technology, revenue and profit opportunities, and customer need. The survey received more than 5,000 product ratings from solution providers, and the product receiving the highest overall score in each category was named the winner. Notably, five companies took home multiple top prizes in this year’s contest: Cisco had four category wins; Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, and Microsoft had three each; while HP Inc. and IBM each had two. What follows are the winners and finalists in CRN’s Products of the Year awards for 2021. Scan here to see the full database on CRN.com

APPLICATION PERFORMANCE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE– MONITORING ENTERPRISE PLATFORM IBM OBSERVABILITY BY INSTANA APM

MICROSOFT AZURE MACHINE LEARNING

Wit h IBM’s ac q uis ition of

Microsoft’s Azure Machine Learning

application performance

platform offers enterprise-ready

monitoring provider Instana in

machine learning services that can

December 2020, the company

be used to build models at significant

has made the IBM Observability

scale. Azure Machine Learning

by Instana platform available for

supports large-scale distributed

enabling robust enterprise application performance monitoring.

training and inference on CPU

The offering is designed to manage microservices and cloud-native

and GPU clusters, complete machine learning operations life-cycle

applications in multiple environments, including hybrid cloud and

automation, reproducible pipelines and data drift detection—as well

bare-metal machines, and provides a domain-specific AI engine to

as continuous integration and continuous delivery, comprehensive

speed up issue resolution and improve event management. IBM

security and collaborative notebooks. Microsoft recently updated

also recently rolled out the ability to remotely monitor multiple

Azure Machine Learning to improve cross-location computing,

IBM instances on the platform, a capability that supports agents

enabling greater space efficiency and virtual machine SKUs for

including Linux, Windows and Unix OS on AIX. In addition, IBM

specific regions while removing the need for manual creation of

has enabled inspection for nine additional languages and expanded

individual models to produce hierarchy data forecasts.

WINNER: OVERALL

Instana Host Agent installation to different Red Hat OpenShift configurations.

Finalist: AppDynamics Finalist: Datadog APM Finalist: New Relic One Finalist: Splunk Observability Cloud 18

DECEMBER 2021

WINNER: OVERALL

Subcategory Winner—Revenue and Profit, Technology: Amazon SageMaker Subcategory Winner—Customer Need: Google Cloud Vertex AI Finalist: HPE Ezmeral Finalist: IBM Watson Studio

BIG DATA

COUCHBASE CAPELLA WINNER: OVERALL

Couchbase Capella, previously known as Couchbase Cloud, is a Database-as-a-Service offering that’s recently gained broader usability by becoming available for Microsoft Azure deployment. A fully managed version of NoSQL database Couchbase Server, Couchbase Capella brings Azure users a memory-first architecture, SQL-friendly query language, schema-flexible JSON format and single-pane control of multi-cloud management and crossdata-center replication. Couchbase recently made its Cloud API generally available with the goal of simplifying automation, enhancing data import functionality and improving the in-product support user experience. The company also made its full-text search indexes more available through a new ability to configure replicas with the control plane.

Finalist: Databricks Lakehouse Platform Finalist: MariaDB SkySQL Finalist: Oracle Autonomous Database Finalist: Snowflake Data Cloud

Subcategory Winner—Technology: Tableau (tied with Qlik Sense) Finalist: Looker 21 Finalist: Microsoft Power BI Finalist: SAP Business Technology Platform

COLLABORATION— ENTERPRISE CISCO WEBEX

WINNER: OVERALL With a focus on improving meeting

quality

and

productivity, Cisco Systems has introduced more than 800 new capabilities and features over the past year for its flagship collaboration platform, Webex. In particular, the Webex platform—which brings together calling, meetings, messaging and events—has seen the addition of numerous features powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies. The recently added AI-driven features include Webex Audio Intelligence and enhanced noise-cancellation technology for improved audio clarity; Gestures, which enables users to

BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE AND ANALYTICS QLIK SENSE

WINNER: OVERALL A provider of end-to-end business analytics and data

communicate non-verbally during meetings without the need for tapping an icon; and Real-Time Translations, which offers live translations from English to more than 100 languages.

Subcategory Winner—Technology: Zoom Finalist: Google Meet Finalist: Microsoft Teams

flagship offering is the Qlik

COLLABORATION—SMB

Sense self-service data

INTERMEDIA UNITE

integration software, Qlik’s

discovery, analytics and

WINNER: OVERALL

visualization platform. Recent

Intermedia Unite brings

enhancements to Qlik Sense have included additional functionality

voice and videoconferencing

for the platform’s AI assistant, Insight Advisor, such as a new

together with team chat,

chat experience that uses natural language processing and natural

contact center and file backup,

language generation in order to better understand and respond

with a focus on serving the

to the user. Insight Advisor can also now be customized by users

collaboration needs of small

through the creation of business rules and metadata. Other new

and midsize businesses. Recent updates to the Intermedia Unite

features for Qlik Sense have included Collaborative Notes, which

platform include the debut of new options for integrating Unite

enables collaboration on analytics processes for a distributed team,

with the widely used Microsoft Teams collaboration app. With

and Hybrid Data Delivery, which allows data sets to be updated

the Intermedia Unite for Microsoft Teams package, for instance,

automatically as data sources change.

partners and customers can add Unite’s cloud-based phone

DECEMBER 2021

PRODUCTS OF THE YE AR system directly into Teams. Meanwhile, Intermedia Unite’s mobile

in the cloud and offers simplified management—enabling easier

capabilities include the ability for users to place and receive calls

monitoring of backups and rapid restoration of data. And as a

from their work number on their mobile device.

cloud-native platform, the offering provides massive scale and

Subcategory Winner—Customer Need : Revenue and Profit: 8x8 XCaaS (tied with Intermedia Unite) Finalist: Cytracom Finalist: Nextiva Cospace Finalist: RingCentral MVP

CRM/ERP

ORACLE NETSUITE WINNER: OVERALL

Recent enhancements to NetSuite—the Oracleowned platform for cloud ERP, CRM and e-commerce tools—have brought a focus on improving automation, efficiency, data analysis and management. New automation capabilities released this year include consolidating purchases across multi-subsidiary organizations, generating vendor payments from a single location, email approval for transactions and SuiteCommerce webstore pages, and the ability to add featured blogs to SuiteCommerce sites. SuiteAnalytics Workbooks gained native language support and new integrations with SuitePeople to improve employee performance tracking. And new inventory management capabilities have included adding an extra verification step and grouping orders with the same shipping routes.

Finalist: Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finalist: Salesforce Finalist: SAP S/4HANA Finalist: ServiceNow Customer Service Management

resiliency. Barracuda recently rearchitected its Cloud-to-Cloud Backup offering to provide enhanced performance for searching and restoring data; improved visibility via a redesigned user interface; additional data security functionality including data loss prevention and data classification; integration with Barracuda threat protection and other security services from the company; and capabilities to extend the offering to additional data sources, including new SaaS applications.

Subcategory Winner—Customer Need: Veeam Backup & Replication V11 Finalist: Axcient x360Recover Direct-to-Cloud Finalist: Commvault Metallic for MSPs Finalist: StorageCraft ShadowXafe Finalist: Zerto 9

HYBRID CLOUD INFRASTRUCTURE IBM HYBRID CLOUD PLATFORM WINNER: OVERALL IBM and its Red Hat subsidiary continue to advance the IBM Hybrid Cloud Platform with more capabilities around artificial intelligence and improvements to the Red Hat OpenShift suite that powers the platform. A recent update to IBM’s Cloud Pak for Data can now provide answered distributed queries that are eight times faster than before, while IBM

DATA PROTECTION AND MANAGEMENT

recently launched AutoSQL to automate data access, integra-

BARRACUDA CLOUD-TO-CLOUD BACKUP

automate scheduling, approvals, proposal planning and other

tion and management without the need for migration. Other recent updates have included the launch of Watson Orchestrate, a tool for business professionals with any coding skill level to

WINNER: OVERALL

routine tasks. Meanwhile, Red Hat updates have included a

Offering protection of

Red Hat Process Automation capability to enable deployed

data in Microsoft 365

business decisions as containerized microservices in OpenShift

apps including Teams

and other cloud-native environments; the expansion of the Red

and SharePoint, Barra-

Hat Insights predictive analytics offering to include OpenShift

cuda Cloud-to-Cloud

for use in multi-cluster environments; and general availability

Backup runs natively

of the Red Hat OpenShift Service on Amazon Web Services.

DECEMBER 2021

PRODUCTS OF THE YE AR Subcategory Winner—Revenue and Profit: HPE GreenLake Subcategory Winner—Customer Need: AWS Outposts Finalist: Dell Technologies Apex Cloud Services Finalist: Lenovo TruScale Infrastructure Services Finalist: Microsoft Azure Stack HCI

HYPERCONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE NUTANIX HCI

WINNER: OVERALL Major updates to Nutanix

UCS X-Series was also designed to support future generations of technology in terms of processors, accelerators and computing interconnects. Crucially, the system is integrated with the Cisco Intersight cloud operations platform—enabling the use of tools such as the Intersight Cloud Orchestrator. The low-code automation framework simplifies complex workflows, allowing for easier orchestration of infrastructure and workloads and accelerated delivery of services. Ultimately, with its UCS X-Series, Cisco enables customers to transform their data center operations as they move resources to the cloud.

ubcategory Winner—Technology: S Dell EMC PowerEdge XE8545 inalist: HPE ProLiant DL345 Gen10 Plus Server F Finalist: Lenovo ThinkSystem SR665 Finalist: Supermicro A+ SuperBlade

HCI have included a new ability to run Google Cloud’s Anthos managed applications platform; an enhanced storage summary

IoT/EDGE CISCO IoT GATEWAY SERIES

widget for improving consumption visibility; a configurable capacity

WINNER: OVERALL

alert threshold to increase efficiency; and a new rebuild progress

With its recently launched

indicator that shows administrators how long until clusters restore full

IoT Gateway Series, Cisco

resilience. Meanwhile, the launch of Nutanix’s AOS 6.0 has brought

enables IoT connectivity use

new disaster recovery capabilities, expanded workload support for

cases—both for indoor and

big data and analytics applications and resiliency improvements. The

outdoor environments—at

capabilities include a native, always-on data loss offering for Nutanix

significant scale. The Cisco

HCI applications and Acropolis Dynamic Scheduling support for

IoT Gateway Series also

virtual machines with virtual GPUs. In addition, a new partnership

offers simplified setup, with

between Nutanix and Microsoft now allows Azure management

the ability to easily connect to assets that hadn’t previously been

capabilities for Nutanix HCI on-premises Kubernetes clusters.

connected. Notably, the IoT Gateway Series comes packaged

ubcategory Winner—Technology: S Scale Computing HC3 Finalist: Cisco Hyperflex HX-Series Finalist: Dell Technologies VxRail E Series Finalist: HPE SimpliVity Finalist: Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series

INDUSTRY-STANDARD SERVERS CISCO UCS X-SERIES WINNER: OVERALL

The Cisco UCS X-Series was designed with hybrid data center operations in

with Cisco’s cloud-based IoT Operations Dashboard offering, which provides secure deployment and monitoring of industrial networking devices. Key features include zero-touch provisioning of devices, secure remote equipment access (without the need for added software installation) and support for operational workflows that can be used to configure IoT devices.

ubcategory Winner—Technology: S Eaton 5P UPS Subcategory Winner—Revenue and Profit: HPE Aruba ESP Finalist: Amazon Lookout for Vision Finalist: Microsoft Azure Percept Finalist: Schneider Electric EcoStruxure Micro Data Center R-Series

mind, offering rack and blade systems that support workload versatility. The

DECEMBER 2021

LAPTOPS HP ELITE DRAGONFLY MAX WINNER: OVERALL

HP’s Elite Dragonfly Max debuted this year and—in addition to being the top pick of solution providers for our Products of the Year awards— the notebook ranked as our favorite business laptop of 2021 at the CRN Test Center. Along with offering a portable design and strong performance via 11th-gen Intel processors, the Elite Dragonfly Max stands out in the crowded laptop market with enhanced collaboration features. Those features include a 5-megapixel webcam and four wide-range mics optimized for conferencing, as well as a quadspeaker system driven by four amplifiers. Optional 5G connectivity and up to 16.5 hours of battery life are among the other great features for remote workers—as is the laptop’s 13.3-inch touch display with

Subcategory Winner—Revenue and Profit: Lexmark MC3426adw Finalist: Epson WorkForce EC-C7000 Finalist: HP Color LaserJet Enterprise MFP M480f Finalist: Ricoh IM C6500

NETWORKING—ENTERPRISE HPE ARUBA 630 SERIES WI-FI 6E WINNER: OVERALL

As the first lineup of enterprise-grade Wi-Fi 6E access points on the market, the 630 series APs from Aruba Networks leverages the additional spectrum made available through the opening up of the 6GHz band. Offering Wi-Fi 6E provides customers with faster connections, lower congestion and broader channels. The Aruba 630

up to 1,000 nits of brightness and reduced blue light technology. And

access points offer speeds of up 3.9 Mbps—using three dedicated

on portability, the notebook is both lightweight (at 2.49 pounds) and

radios, which cover the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands in addition to

thin (at 0.63 of an inch)—while still allowing for work-friendly ports

6GHz—enabling high bandwidth and low latency even for demand-

including USB-A and HDMI in addition to USB-C.

ing services such as IoT, video and AR/VR. A part of the Aruba Edge

Subcategory Winner—Technology, Customer Need: Apple MacBook Pro (M1) Finalist: Dell Latitude 9420 Finalist: Dynabook Satellite Pro L50 Finalist: Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Nano Finalist: Microsoft Surface Laptop 4

MULTIFUNCTION PRINTERS XEROX ALTALINK C8100

Services Platform (ESP), the access points also benefit from Aruba ESP capabilities such as prediction and resolution of device issues before they become a problem; data analysis and identification of anomalies; and securing of unknown devices connected to the network.

Subcategory Winner—Technology: Cisco Catalyst 8000 Edge Series Finalist: CommScope Ruckus ICX 7550 Finalist: Extreme Networks CoPilot Finalist: Juniper Networks EX4400

Xerox’s AltaLink C8100 color

NETWORKING—SMB

multifunction printers stand out

HPE ARUBA INSTANT ON AP22

WINNER: OVERALL

with a tablet-like, intuitive user

WINNER: OVERALL

interface to speed up repetitive

With its Instant On AP22 access point,

tasks, a native mobility feature for

Aruba Networks is bringing fast Wi-Fi

printing to any device and built-in

performance, lower latency and

security through Xerox’s ConnectKey Technology. Recent additions

enhanced security to small businesses.

to the Xerox App Gallery for AltaLink printers include Touchless

The Wi-Fi 6 access point offers speeds

Access, which enables smartphone access to office devices through

of up to 1.7 Gbps and 4X capacity

QR codes—avoiding local network connection—and new connec-

compared with 802.11ac APs—along

tions with Microsoft 365 and Google Drive. The AltaLink C8100

with capabilities to simultaneously handle multiple clients on each

series devices bring a duty cycle of up to 300,000 images per

channel, minimize interference from cellular networks and work

month with print speeds of up to 70 pages per minute, and offer

with all legacy devices. Key security features include two-factor

options including Xerox’s integrated RFID card reader.

authentication to protect against compromised credentials; secure

DECEMBER 2021

PRODUCTS OF THE YE AR Wi-Fi access through WPA2/WPA3/OWE authentication; and

optimizations, AI performance will be improved by 74 percent over

embedded TPM for securely storing credentials and keys.

the prior generation and offer significantly enhanced performance

Finalist: Cisco Meraki MS120 Finalist: Linksys Cloud Manager 2.0 Finalist: Netgear WAX630 Finalist: Zyxel Nebula

POWER PROTECTION AND MANAGEMENT

for cryptographic algorithms. For high-peformance computing workloads, Intel said it will deliver up to 18 percent faster performance than competing processors on the Linpack benchmark that is used to measure the world’s top supercomputers. The Ice Lake lineup also promises speedier performance for a range of other workloads as well, such as cloud and 5G—with 50 percent faster performance for latency-sensitive workloads in the cloud over its predecessor and up to 62 percent faster performance for 5G network workloads.

EATON 9PX

Subcategory Winner—Revenue and Profit: AMD EPYC, 3rd Gen

Power management company Eaton has debuted a number of enhancements to its uninterruptible power supply technology with the recent launch of its 9PX lithium-ion UPS. Now offering an improved battery life span and a smaller 1U form factor, the new UPS better meets the needs of edge and light industrial environments. The new battery life span of up to eight to 10 years far outlasts the average of three to five years for a comparable UPS with lead-acid batteries. The Eaton 9PX options include a 20 percent lighter rackmount model or 40 percent lighter extended battery module versus counterpart UPS models with lead-acid. The UPS also sees benefits when paired with Eaton’s PredictPulse remote monitoring service, with capabilities including predictive analytics about potential component failures and

Subcategory Winner—Customer Need: Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090

WINNER: OVERALL

remote diagnosis of issues.

Finalist: Apple M1 Finalist: Xilinx Alveo SN1000

PUBLIC CLOUD MICROSOFT AZURE WINNER: OVERALL Microsoft’s

Azure

public

cloud platform received the highest overall rating from solution providers who voted in CRN’s Products of the Year awards for 2021, sweep-

Subcategory Winner—Revenue and Profit: CyberPower PFC Sinewave Mini-Tower UPS

ing the three subcategories

inalist: Schneider Electric APC Smart-UPS Ultra F Finalist: Tripp Lite S3M SmartOnline UPS Finalist: Vertiv Liebert PSI5

marks follow similar results in CRN’s inaugural Cloud Barometer

PROCESSORS INTEL XEON SCALABLE, 3RD GEN

of Technology, Revenue and Profit, and Customer Need. The high survey earlier this year, where Azure got the highest partner satisfaction rating to beat out Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud. Azure is “superior to AWS and Google” because of Microsoft’s partner-friendly program and business model, said Reed Wiedower, global alliances leader and CTO for the Cognizant Microsoft Business Group, an Azure Expert Managed Services Provider. At

WINNER: OVERALL

Logicalis Group, another Azure Expert MSP, CEO Bob Bailkoski

Intel’s latest line of third-generation

said that the growth opportunity with Azure is larger than it is

Xeon Scalable Processors delivers

with AWS. “Microsoft’s articulation of the opportunity that’s avail-

significant innovation in artificial intelli-

able with Azure is much easier for our customers to understand—

gence, cryptography, high-performance

especially in the C-suite—than it is perhaps with AWS, which is a

computing and other workloads. The

slightly more technical, developer-style solution,” he said.

Ice Lake Xeon Scalable Processors are the first server chips to use Intel’s 10-nanometer manufacturing process, bringing an increase of Xeon’s maximum core count to 40 from 28 in the previous generation. By deploying Intel’s DL Boost instruction set and software

Finalist: Amazon Web Services Finalist: Google Cloud Finalist: IBM Cloud Finalist: Oracle Cloud Infrastructure DECEMBER 2021

PRODUCTS OF THE YE AR

SD-WAN

HPE ARUBA EDGECONNECT WINNER: OVERALL

Following the acquisition of Silver Peak, HPE Aruba has made the Aruba EdgeConnect SD-WAN platform available to partners and customers while enhancing the offering through integration with Aruba management and security offerings. Key capabilities for Aruba EdgeConnect include application-specific routing—with

Subcategory Winner—Technology: CrowdStrike Falcon Horizon Finalist: Check Point CloudGuard Cloud Native Security Finalist: McAfee Enterprise MVision Unified Cloud Edge Finalist: Microsoft Cloud App Security Finalist: Palo Alto Networks SaaS Security

SECURITY—EMAIL MIMECAST EMAIL SECURITY WITH TARGETED THREAT PROTECTION

automatic programming for app routing, performance and security

WINNER: OVERALL

policies to all sites—as well as centralized SD-WAN management

Mimecast’s Email Security

via Aruba Orchestrator, consistent application experience and

offering—augmented with

continuous adaptation based on real-time conditions. Recent

Targeted Threat Protection

integrations include with the Aruba ClearPass Policy Manager—

capabilities—brings security at

offering an automated way of defining roles that are enforced

the email perimeter and net-

across the network—as well as with Aruba Threat Defense, extend-

work, as well as beyond the

ing capabilities for advanced intrusion detection and prevention

perimeter. The company’s Secure Email Gateway offers cloud-based

to EdgeConnect appliances.

protection against malware, spear-phishing spam and zero-day attacks

Finalist: Cisco SD-WAN Finalist: Masergy SD-WAN Secure Finalist: Palo Alto Networks Prisma SD-WAN Finalist: Versa Titan Finalist: VMware SD-WAN

SECURITY—CLOUD CISCO SECUREX

WINNER: OVERALL With a focus on simplifying security for partners and customers, Cisco’s cloud-native SecureX platform provides a unified and customizable dashboard, automation of routine tasks, threat response capabilities, integrations with third-party offerings and comprehensive device insight. Recent enhancements include capabilities to reduce the dwell time for security operations while bringing automation to tasks related to detection and remediation of threats. The capabilities include automated workflows for phish-

with a combination of applications, policies, detection engines and security intelligence feeds. The company’s Targeted Threat Protection offerings guard against targeted email attacks such as ransomware, impersonation and spear phishing. Capabilities include URL protect (which checks for website security at the time of click); attachment protect (using analytics and sandboxing to block malicious attachments); impersonation protect (which secures against sender and domain spoofing attempts); and browser isolation (enabling users to click on embedded URLs and use the web safely with all phishing attempts and malware blocked).

Subcategory Winner—Revenue and Profit, Technology: Zix Secure Cloud Finalist: Barracuda Total Email Protection Finalist: Check Point Harmony Email & Office Finalist: Proofpoint Email Security and Protection

SECURITY—ENDPOINT PROTECTION SENTINELONE SINGULARITY

ing investigations and threat investigations—dramatically reducing

WINNER: OVERALL

the time needed to detect and remediate threats. Other updates

SentinelOne Singularity seamlessly

have included capabilities to simplify the transition from EDR to

fuses together the data, access,

XDR with improved orchestration capabilities as well as additional

control and integration planes of

prebuilt workflows and integrations.

its endpoint protection, endpoint

DECEMBER 2021

detection and response, IoT security and cloud workload protec-

Arctic Wolf’s flagship Managed

tion into a centralized platform.With Singularity, organizations gain

Detection and Response offering

access to back-end data across the company, providing a cohesive

enables advanced threat detection

view of their network and assets by adding a real-time autonomous

along with response to and recovery

security layer. Singularity detects, responds and hunts in the context

from attacks—including sophisti-

of all enterprise assets, allowing organizations to see what has never

cated evolving threats. In addition

been seen before and control the unknown.

to 24/7 monitoring that’s delivered

Finalist: CrowdStrike Falcon Finalist: McAfee Enterprise MVision XDR Finalist: Microsoft Defender for Endpoint Finalist: Sophos XDR Finalist: VMware Carbon Black Cloud Endpoint

SECURITY—IDENTITY AND ACCESS MANAGEMENT

MICROSOFT DEFENDER FOR IDENTITY WINNER: OVERALL

A centerpiece of Microsoft’s security strategy, the Microsoft Defender for Identity offering—previously Azure Advanced Threat Protec-

by a dedicated concierge security team, key detection capabilities include broad visibility and analysis of massive amounts of security data to find advanced threats. Meanwhile, response capabilities for Arctic Wolf MDR include managed investigations, log retention/search and rapid incident response. Recovery capabilities include guided remediation, root cause analysis and personalized engagement via regular meetings to optimize a customer’s security posture.

Finalist: Cybereason Managed Detection and Response Finalist: Mandiant Managed Defense Finalist: SentinelOne Vigilance Respond Finalist: Sophos Managed Threat Response

SECURITY—NETWORK

PALO ALTO NETWORKS NEXTGENERATION ML-POWERED FIREWALLS

tion—enables protection of

WINNER: OVERALL

on-premises identities and correlation of signals with the Microsoft

Palo Alto Networks’ Next-

365 productivity suite. Key capabilities include eliminating on-

Generation ML-Powered Fire-

premises vulnerabilities to proactively halt cyberattacks, as well as

walls expand protection up to

threat assessment to enable security operations teams to focus on

the hyperscale data center, in-

the biggest legitimate threats. Using analytics and data intelligence

ternet edge and campus segmentation deployments—and down

to prioritize threats, Microsoft Defender for Identity allows security

to a desktop form factor. The PA-400 series is built for the dis-

teams to rapidly respond to incidents, investigate the riskiest users

tributed enterprise and offers up to 10X more performance with

(using a score that’s based on their behavior and previous incidents)

security services and decryption compared with the previous

and efficiently hunt for threats with advanced queries.

generation. The PA-400 firewall also offers easier and flexible deployment, including zero-touch provisioning to simplify rollout

Subcategory Winner—Customer Need: Okta Identity Cloud

to branches, even at large scale. In addition, the firewall offers a

Finalist: CyberArk Identity Security Platform Finalist: ForgeRock Identity Cloud Finalist: ThycoticCentrify Platform

of scenarios. Meanwhile, the PA-5450 firewall secures traffic that

quiet, compact design with multiple mounting options for a range is nearly fully encrypted and is purpose-built to apply decryption and machine learning-powered security to stop zero days as well as known threats. The firewall offers 120-Gbps performance

SECURITY—MANAGED DETECTION AND RESPONSE

ARCTIC WOLF MANAGED DETECTION AND RESPONSE WINNER: OVERALL

With 24/7 monitoring of networks, endpoints and cloud workloads,

with security services enabled, offering 4X the performance of the previous generation.

ubcategory Winner—Technology: S Cisco Umbrella Finalist: Fortinet FortiGate 3500F Finalist: SonicWall NSa Firewalls Finalist: Sophos Firewall XGS Series Finalist: Zscaler ZPA Private Service Edge DECEMBER 2021

STORAGE—ENTERPRISE

PURE STORAGE FLASHARRAY//X90 WINNER: OVERALL

STORAGE—SOFTWARE-DEFINED NETAPP ONTAP SELECT WINNER: OVERALL

FlashArray//X90 is the top-of-the-line

With Ontap Select, NetApp offers

model in Pure Storage’s FlashArray//X

software-defined storage that can

portfolio of all-flash, all-NVMe arrays.

be deployed on commodity hard-

The FlashArray//X90 offers a 5:1 data

ware and provides capabilities for

reduction average, up to 3.3 PB of

data protection and resilience—as

effective capacity, ultra-low latency

well as simplified management and movement of data across hybrid

(as low as 150 microseconds), 99.9999

environments. It leverages NetApp’s Ontap 9 storage operating sys-

percent availability and artificial intelligence-powered management.

tem and benefits from Snapshot copies and remote backup to protect

Pure Storage recently updated the Purity software used by the

data, and uses NetApp Volume Encryption for data at rest. Ontap

FlashArray//X series with improvements that include acceleration

Select can co-locate with application virtual machines to optimize

of Windows applications and reduced downtime from ransomware.

hardware use and allows users to consolidate network file system,

The reduced downtime comes through the addition of SafeMode

common internet file system and internet small computer system

snapshots—which provide immutable snapshots, retention-based

interface applications and workloads on local and remote hosts.

policies (which can secure data for as long as 30 days) and the ability to rapidly restore expired data.

Finalist: Dell EMC PowerStore 9000 Finalist: HPE Alletra 9000 Finalist: IBM FlashSystem 9200 Finalist: NetApp AFF A700

STORAGE—SMB

LENOVO THINKSYSTEM DM5100F

Finalist: DataCore Swarm Finalist: Dell EMC PowerFlex Finalist: HPE Cloud Volumes Finalist: IBM Spectrum Fusion Finalist: VMware vSAN

TABLETS

HP ELITE X2 G8

WINNER: OVERALL

HP debuted the Elite x2 G8

Unveiled last December as the

this year featuring a number of

newest member of Lenovo’s

updates and new capabilities. The

ThinkSystem storage array line,

tablet offers options for its 13-inch

the ThinkSystem DM5100F offers

touch display including a model

all-flash storage at a price point that’s ideal for SMBs while still

with 3,000 x 2,000 resolution and

providing strong performance and minimal latency. The all-NVMe

up to 450 nits of brightness. It can also be configured with a

array offers raw storage capacity of up to 737 TB and a 45 per-

1,920 x 1,280 resolution display, featuring the Sure View Gen 3

cent performance improvement over its predecessor model. Other

integrated privacy screen and up to 1,000 nits of brightness. On

updates include improved data protection and native management

performance, the tablet offers a choice of 11th-gen Intel Core pro-

of object storage. The enhancements enable management and analy-

cessors. The Elite x2 G8 has a built-in kickstand and is made from

sis of all types of data on one storage platform to reduce costs of

CNC aluminum and can attach to a full-size backlit keyboard.

infrastructure and accelerate analytics processing.

Subcategory Winner—Revenue and Profit: HPE MSA Gen 6 Finalist: Dell EMC PowerStore 500 Finalist: IBM FlashSystem 5200 Finalist: Pure Storage FlashArray//X10

DECEMBER 2021

Subcategory Winner—Technology: Microsoft Surface Pro 7+ for Business Subcategory Winner—Customer Need: Apple iPad Pro (M1) Finalist: Dell Latitude 7320 Detachable Finalist: Lenovo ThinkPad X12 Detachable

CRN

Products Year of the

Intermedia Combines Award-Winning Intermedia Unite® Solution With CRN 5-Star Rated CORE™ Partner Program Intermedia has become a cloud communications leader by truly putting partners first. We do this by developing the hybrid work-ready cloud solutions that enhance employee productivity, collaboration and greater levels of responsive customer care, and then back them with channel programs and support designed to maximize partner potential and long-term profitability. To that end, we’re proud of our recent recognition from CRN’s 2021 Products of the Year awards for our Intermedia Unite solution, as well as being a multi-year recipient of CRN’s 5-Star Partner Program rating. At Intermedia, we’re only successful if our partners are successful, and recognition like that received from CRN reinforces that we are on the right path. Intermedia Unite was recently named the 2021 Tech Innovator Solution of the Year in the overall “Collaboration” category as well as the “Technology” and “Customer Need” subcategories. An integrated communications, collaboration and customer experience solution, Unite delivers features designed to help businesses of any size realize more productive, efficient employee collaboration, as well as more informed and responsive customer care and support. Users receive voice, video conferencing, team chat, file sharing and backup, as well as call queues, active call routing, contact directories and many more contact center features. And all are delivered and experienced on one, highly reliable, secure and unified platform—with desktop and mobile apps that allow for anywhere, anytime access. With Intermedia’s innovative, CRN 5-Star rated Customer Ownership Reseller (CORE) model, partners can brand Unite as their own or co-brand with Intermedia, maintain ownership of their customer relationships, earn fivetimes more revenue than traditional commissioned agent models and build long-term value in their businesses. Intermedia even calculates and remits complicated telecommunications taxes for its partners. Paired with six years running J.D. Power-certified technical support, a full suite of comprehensive sales, training, marketing and onboarding support and resources, as well as 99.999 percent uptime service level agreements, Intermedia continues to prove that it truly does put partners first. Intermedia Unite and CORE are either trademarks or registered trademarks of Intermedia.net, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks, service marks, trade names, and copyrights used herein are the property of their respective owners. J.D. Power 2021 Certified Assisted Technical Program, developed in conjunction with TSIA. Based on successful completion of an audit and exceeding a customer satisfaction benchmark for assisted support operations. For more information, visit www.jdpower.com/business or www.tsia.com.

Learn more about Intermedia’s partner program so you can take this award-winning cloud communications product to market the way you want. intermedia.com/resellers

Jonathan McCormick

Chief Operating Officer and Chief Revenue Officer

INTERMEDIA UNITE

In the ofﬁce, at home, on the road or anywhere in between, Intermedia’s cloud communications solutions keep your customers connected wherever work takes them. Video | Phone | Chat | Contact Center | Files

T E C H I N N O VAT O R S

What Counts As True Innovation In 2021?

Here’s Who Stepped Up By Kyle Alspach

As demand for digital transformation continues to surge across industries, the pace of technological innovation continues to accelerate as well. The pandemic has brought about massive changes in the business world, and the widely held expectation is that there is no going back. For instance, the hybrid, distributed workforce is here to stay; online meetings will continue to reduce the need for travel; and the shift to the cloud is showing no signs of slowing down any time soon. In this dynamic environment, innovative vendors across the tech industry have stepped up to the plate with differentiated products. But what counts as true innovation in 2021? And what are the new products creating the biggest opportunities for the solution providers who are on the front lines with customers? To help with uncovering products that are truly differentiated and channelfriendly, the 2021 CRN Tech Innovator Awards showcase offerings that bring significant advances in technology as well as partner growth opportunities— across segments including cloud, infrastructure, security, software and devices. The awards honor innovative vendors in 46 categories, along with two Editor’s Choice awards for deserving products that didn’t fit elsewhere. The winners and finalists were chosen by CRN staff from among 373 applicants.

AUTOMATION

BIG DATA

With its recent release, UiPath has introduced an array of new capabilities, including Automation Ops—which gives administrators an easier way to set up policies while providing centralized control of major deployments to IT. The 21.4 release also brings new offerings around artifical intelligence-powered automation discovery such as task mining, which uses machine learning to identify repetitive tasks that could be automated without causing interruption to workers. Expanded capabilities in the UiPath Automation Cloud include the ability to run software robots in the cloud in Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services.

Recent enhancements to the Snowflake Data Cloud include new global governance features such as the ability for Snowflake’s classification capability to automatically detect personally identifiable information and then annotate the data, enabling control of access to it. Other updates have included data programmability improvements (such as enabling users to bring custom code and business logic to Snowflake); improved storage economics (through better compression); better support for interactive experiences (a 6X improvement on query throughput for a compute cluster); and a new usage dashboard.

Winner: UiPath Platform 21.4 Release

Finalists: Aisera Service Desk Alation Data Catalog Automation Anywhere Robotic Interface BitTitan Voleer Dashboards CloudBolt Software OneFuse 28

DECEMBER 2021

Winner: Snowflake Data Cloud

Finalists: Ahana Cloud for Presto Couchbase Server 7.0 Domino Enterprise MLOps Platform Kyligence Cloud 4.5 Monte Carlo Data Observability Platform

BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE AND ANALYTICS Winner: HPE CloudPhysics

Following Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s acquisition of CloudPhysics in February, the HPE CloudPhysics offering has been made available to partners as a tool to provide comprehensive analysis of on-premises IT environments—ultimately driving critical insight such as recommendations for infrastructure upgrades, application modernization and cloud migrations. The remote, agentless HPE CloudPhysics software provides continuous monitoring and analysis of IT environments, enabling partners to accurately forecast the impact of recommendations such as right-sizing a virtual environment, moving to the cloud or optimizing on-premises infrastructure.

Finalists: DataRobot 7.1 NWN Carousel: Experience Management Platform Tableau Augmented Analytics TIBCO Spotfire 11.4 Virtusa: vLife 6.0

CLOUD SECURITY

Winner: Snyk Infrastructure as Code Snyk Infrastructure as Code helps ensure security for cloud-native applications by enabling secure configuration for Kubernetes and Terraform, eliminating the need for manual reviews that frequently lead to errors. The platform allows best practices around infrastructure-ascode to be turned into code fixes within a developer’s workflow— serving as a single platform for secure, streamlined building throughout a cloud-native application’s code. Key capabilities of Snyk Infrastrucure as Code include testing and monitoring for Terraform and Kubernetes, providing detection of configuration problems that could create a security vulnerability.

Finalists: Aqua Security Aqua Platform Cisco Umbrella Guardicore Centra Illumio Core McAfee Enterprise MVision CNAPP PerimeterX Platform

CLOUD TOOLS AND MANAGEMENT Winner: Microsoft Endpoint Manager

A centralized cloud management platform for provisioning, deploying, managing and securing all of an organization’s endpoints, Microsoft Endpoint Manager unifies the widely used Microsoft Intune and Configuration Manager tools. Recently added features include cloud config, which offers a simplified method for applying configurations that can turn devices into easily managed endpoints. Cloud config brings configurations that are recommended by Microsoft for typical users, enabling faster and easier deployment of cloud-managed endpoints. Other recent updates to Microsoft Endpoint Manager include support for Windows 365, Microsoft’s cloud-based, browser-accessible Windows desktop service. Using Microsoft Endpoint Manager, partners and IT teams can now deploy and manage Windows 365 desktops with the same tool they use for managing physical PCs.

Finalists: Cisco Intersight Hybrid Cloud Platform Nerdio Manager for MSP NetApp: Spot Ocean for Microsoft Azure Prosimo Application eXperience Infrastructure SkyKick Cloud Manager

COLLABORATION: DEVICES Winner: The Poly Studio P-Series

With the Poly Studio P Series, which debuted in February, Poly is offering videoconferencing equipment that is both professionalgrade but intended for an individual’s use—such as while working from home. The series consists of the Poly Studio P5 Webcam, which offers 1,080p resolution, 4X digital zoom, a directional microphone and built-in privacy shutter; the Poly Studio P15 Personal Video Bar, offering 4K, automatic camera framing and an integrated speaker and mic array featuring enhanced noise-blocking; and the Poly Studio P21 Personal Meeting Display, a 21-inch display primed for videoconferencing with a camera and audio built in.

Finalists: DTEN ME Pro Jabra PanaCast 50 Sharp 4T-B70CT1U Aquos Board Owl Labs: Meeting Owl Pro

DECEMBER 2021

T E C H I N N O VAT O R S COLLABORATION: ENTERPRISE Winner: Webex by Cisco

As Cisco’s flagship collaboration offering, Webex brings together meetings, calling, messaging and end-to-end event management. Over the past year, Cisco has rolled out more than 800 new features and capabilities to Webex for boosting meeting productivity, regardless of the user’s location. Key feature additions—all of them powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies—have included Webex Audio Intelligence and new noise-cancellation technology for improved audio clarity; RealTime Translations, which offers live translations from English to more than 100 languages; and Gestures, which enables users to communicate non-verbally during meetings without the need to tap an icon.

Finalists: Avaya Spaces Citrix Wrike

COLLABORATION: SMB

CONTACT CENTER SOFTWARE

Winner: Amazon Web Services: Amazon Connect

As Amazon Web Services’ cloud-based contact center offering, Amazon Connect is designed to help companies improve customer engagement at lower costs. Amazon Connect provides a unified contact center for voice, web and mobile chat capabilities, which is managed as a service with pay-by-the-minute usage fees. The offering leverages AWS artificial intelligence services to automate interactions, use textto-speech to create personalized messages in real time, transcribe calls, show caller sentiment in real time and analyze customer data. Recently added capabilities include Amazon Connect Customer Profiles, which provides agents with a fuller profile of each customer during a call.

Finalists: Cisco Contact Center Genesys Multicloud CX LogMeIn: GoToConnect Contact Center TCN Operator

Winner: Intermedia Unite

Focused squarely on meeting the unified communications and collaboration needs of small and midsize businesses, Intermedia Unite brings voice and videoconferencing together with team chat, contact center and file backup. Mobile capabilities include the ability for users to place and receive calls from their work number on their mobile device. Recent key updates to the Intermedia Unite platform include the debut of new options for integrating Unite with the widely used Microsoft Teams collaboration app. With the Intermedia Unite for Microsoft Teams package, for instance, partners and customers can add Unite’s cloud-based phone system directly into Teams.

Finalists: CoreNexa 7.0 Cytracom Shared Inboxes

CONTAINER TECHNOLOGY Winner: Red Hat OpenShift

OpenShift, Red Hat’s widely used Kubernetes container platform, provides a hybrid cloud foundation for enterprise development of containerized applications—offering consistency across on-premises and public cloud workloads. Recent updates to OpenShift have included new capabilities to enable faster development, such as through improved serverless functionality and allowing developers to use their Git workflow for automation of CI/CD pipelines. OpenShift also recently received security enhancements, such as providing applications with interoperability for IPv6 environments (used by federal agencies). And, in March, Red Hat debuted its OpenShift platform natively running on Amazon Web Services.

Finalists: HYCU Protégé for Kubernetes Kasten by Veeam: Kasten K10 v4.0 NetApp Astra Control NeuVector 4.0

DECEMBER 2021

How To

Succeed

by Seeing the Whole Story

Everbridge’s Critical Event Management Solutions Represent New Opportunities for Channel Partners Q. Can you please share more details about Everbridge, and the Critical Event Management (CEM) category you helped create?

A. Everbridge’s mission is to keep people safe and organizations running faster. We

help organizations and governments protect the things they care about (such as their people, assets and supply chains), from the things they worry about (like cyberattacks, IT outages, severe weather and the pandemic). We are the global leader in CEM software applications that automate and accelerate organizations’ operational response to critical events. We define critical events as anything that causes a disruption to an organization, whether digital, manmade or natural.

Q. What are some CEM use cases that Everbridge’s channel partners can offer to their end users to help them manage digital and physical risks?

A. Over the years, we have significantly broadened our capabilities to meet our customers’ life safety, operational resilience, supply chain and IT alerting needs. We work with our channel partners to help their end users manage all kinds of critical events, keeping their people safe and organization running. Representing exciting opportunities for our channel partners, Everbridge’s expanded solutions include CEM for: 1.) People and Life Safety, 2.) Operations and Business Continuity, 3.) Supply Chain Risk, 4.) Smart Enterprise and 5.) Digital: Incidents and Cybersecurity. Providing these solutions in partnership with our channel partners represents a few of the opportunities we must work together to help companies build more resilience.

Q. What does success look like for you and your channel program?

A. For Everbridge and our channel program, success means partnering with com-

panies to help safeguard their people, keep their operations running smoothly and protecting their business and revenue streams from disruption. For example, our CEM platform quickly and reliably aggregates and assesses threat data, locates people at risk and responders able to assist, automates the execution of pre-defined communications processes through the secure delivery to over 100 different communication devices and tracks progress on executing response plans.

Learn more about Everbridge’s partnership program here: https://www.everbridge.com/about/partner-program/

Jasmina Muller

”

VP of Channel Sales

We work with our channel partners to help their end users manage all kinds of critical events, keeping people safe and organizations running. Today, we serve more than 6,000 customers globally, reaching more than 1 billion people in over 200 countries and territories.

”

T E C H I N N O VAT O R S DATA AND INFORMATION MANAGEMENT

DATA SECURITY

Winner: Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud

Winner: Proofpoint Information Protection and Cloud Security

With the aim of revolutionizing enterprise cloud data management, Informatica’s Intelligent Data Management Cloud is a cloud-native platform capable of elastic scaling. The platform provides data integration, app integration and data management from a single location, and offers more than 250 cloud services for cataloging, ingesting, integrating, cleansing and sharing data. The Intelligent Data Management Cloud also runs on any platform—across cloud and multi-cloud, on-premises and hybrid environments—and leverages an artificial intelligence engine to rapidly derive insight from data. Additional capabilities include low-code and no-code cloud data management, making the platform applicable to users without coding skills.

With a focus on data loss prevention (DLP), Proofpoint’s Information Protection and Cloud Security platform takes a people-centered approach to DLP by determining if a user who triggered a DLP alert is negligent, compromised or malicious—and then providing that insight to the organization in a timeline view. The cloud-native offering brings in telemetry from behavior, content and threat intelligence to generate an understanding of data loss scenarios for user profiles, assessing the risk of data loss from users. Other key capabilities include the ability to apply Proofpoint’s common DLP classification across channels, saving time and administrative effort, as well as awareness training modules on data loss for end users.

Finalists: Cockroach Labs: CockroachDB (20.2 and 21.1) Cohesity DataProtect delivered as a Service Cribl LogStream 3.0 M-Files New Web Talend Data Fabric

DATA PROTECTION SOFTWARE Winner: The Zerto Platform

With Zerto 9, the cloud data management and protection offering has introduced new capabilities aimed at defeating malicious modification or deletion of data, such as in a ransomware attack. The Zerto 9 user interface includes a new feature for managing immutability settings on long-term data retention—enabling users to determine how long a backup can stay unaltered and ensuring that backups are kept safe in the cloud. Other key capabilities include new automated protection for virtual machines and a new instant restore feature for easily restoring virtual machines directly into production.

Finalists: Arcserve Unified Data Protection 8 Axcient x360Recover Direct-to-Cloud Barracuda Cloud-to-Cloud Backup Commvault: Metallic Backup and Recovery Solution Rubrik Cloud Data Management Platform Veeam Backup & Replication V11 32

DECEMBER 2021

Finalists: ALTR: Snowflake Cloud Integration Digital Guardian: Managed DLP Service for Midsize Companies The NetWitness Platform Salt Security API Protection Platform Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 Office v5

DEVOPS PLATFORMS

Winner: HashiCorp Terraform Cloud With Terraform Cloud, HashiCorp enables faster adoption of the Terraform multi-cloud provisioning offering—providing streamlined provisioning of infrastructure as well as complete management of security, compliance and operational risks. Recent enhancements have included the Controlled Remote State Access feature, enabling granular controls to be established for state accessibility. The capability allows the state of a workspace to be shared globally within the organization—or alternatively, it can restrict the sharing to certain workspaces or prohibit sharing entirely. Other recent updates have included workspace tags, which add contextual awareness at the workspace level.

Finalists: GitLab 14 Rafay Kubernetes Operations Platform

EDGE COMPUTING

ENDPOINT PROTECTION

With the Scale Computing HC3 Video Surveillance offering, edge computing specialist Scale Computing offers a system that is purpose-built for meeting the demanding requirements of modern digital video surveillance systems. The system leverages Scale Computing’s new HyperCore for Video Surveillance technology and high-availability appliances to meet the data storage and processing needs of digital, IP-based video surveillance. The offering enables simplified management of video storage and analytics workloads in a single system, as well as automatic scale-out capabilities as resource needs grow.The offering brings the high availability and scalability of the company’s HC3 infrastructure platform to video surveillance running at the edge.

With the aim of replacing manual endpoint detection and response activities with automation, SentinelOne Storyline Active Response (STAR) offers an engine for automated hunting, detection and response that is integrated with the company’s ActiveEDR offering. STAR enables the creation of custom detection and response rules, which can be deployed in real time—to the whole network or just a subset—providing proactive threat detection and response. Other key capabilities include the ability to create hunting rules, which trigger an alert and an automated response when a match is detected by the rule.

Winner: Scale Computing HC3 Video Surveillance

Finalists: Oracle Roving Edge Infrastructure Schneider Electric EcoStruxure IT Expert-enabled Dispatch Services StorMagic ARQvault Active Intelligent Repository Zadara Federated Edge Zededa

Winner: SentinelOne Storyline Active Response

Finalists: Check Point Harmony Cybereason XDR Malwarebytes Endpoint Detection and Response McAfee Enterprise MVision XDR Sophos Intercept X ThreatLocker Elevation Control

EMAIL SECURITY

HYBRID CLOUD INFRASTRUCTURE

Mimecast CyberGraph uses artificial intelligence to detect impersonation and phishing attempts and prevent attacks from being successful. The offering, which is an add-on to the Mimecast Secure Email Gateway, works by creating an identity graph that stores information about sender and recipient relationships, allowing for detection of anomalies. Other key capabilities include blocking embedded trackers in emails; mask of the location of the email recipient; prevention of the threat actor’s attempts to understand the level of engagement with the malicious email; and dynamic warning banners that empower users to see if an email is potentially malicious or if it is safe.

With its UCS X-Series, Cisco enables customers to transform their data center operations as they move resources to the cloud. The system was designed with hybrid data center operations in mind, offering rack and blade systems that support workload versatility. It also was designed to support future generations of technology in terms of processors, accelerators and computing interconnects. Crucially, the system is integrated with the Cisco Intersight cloud operations platform—enabling the use of tools such as the Intersight Cloud Orchestrator. The low-code automation framework allows for easier orchestration of infrastructure and workloads and accelerated delivery of services.

Winner: Mimecast CyberGraph

Finalists: Area 1 Horizon Cofense Protect MSP Proofpoint Threat Protection Platform Trustifi Cyber Security Solutions Vade for M365

Winner: Cisco UCS X-Series

Finalists: Fungible Data Center HVR PacketFabric Cloud Router Red Hat Enterprise Linux

DECEMBER 2021

T E C H I N N O VAT O R S HYPERCONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE

IoT

A hyperconverged infrastructure offering jointly developed by Dell Technologies and VMware, Dell EMC VxRail received a revamp earlier this year that added a number of new features and support capabilities. New additions included VxRail dynamic nodes—compute-only systems that can help simplify operations, improve management of storage resources and cut costs. The feature allows for the extension of VxRail environments to include options for external storage, while VMware Cloud Foundation on VxRail can be configured with dynamic nodes to use Dell’s PowerStore, PowerMax or Unity XT as primary storage. In addition, recent VxRail updates added support for Dell’s latest PowerEdge servers featuring Intel’s third-generation Xeon Scalable processors or AMD’s third-generation EPYC processors.

Aimed at enabling secure deployment and monitoring of industrial networking devices, the Cisco IoT Operations Dashboard offers zerotouch provisioning of devices along with a user-friendly interface for on-boarding devices. Other key features in the IoT Operations Dashboard include Cisco-validated network design configurations, role-based access and incident alerts. Additional notable capabilities include secure equipment access, using only a browser, to devices that are connected to Cisco industrial routers via the cloud—as well as support for operational workflows that can be used to configure IoT devices or troubleshoot device issues.

Winner: Dell EMC VxRail

Finalist: IBM Spectrum Fusion HCI

IDENTITY AND ACCESS MANAGEMENT Winner: CyberArk Identity Security Platform

With a focus on privileged access management, the CyberArk Identity Security Platform provides secure access for all applications and across cloud and on-premises environments. Recent updates to the platform have included new offerings such as Dynamic Privileged Access for provisioning access to hybrid and cloud workloads that is “just in time,” lowering the risk of standing access. Other updates have included Secure Web Sessions, which provides added security for access to browser-based applications that are considered high risk; Lifecycle Management for Privileged Users, which speeds up employee on-boarding; and cloud-native shared services such as a unified identity management, authentication and authorization layer.

Finalists: Cisco Duo Ivanti Neurons for Zero Trust Access JumpCloud Protect Ping Identity: PingOne Cloud Platform SecurID Transmit Security: BindID

DECEMBER 2021

Winner: Cisco IoT Operations Dashboard

Finalists: Asimily ProSecure Kisi Security: Kisi Reader 2 Nextivity Cel-Fi GO Smart Signal Booster Phizzle EDGMaker Digital Air Series

IoT SECURITY

Winner: Ordr Systems Control Engine (Release 7.4.2) Ordr has brought forward a major update to its Systems Control Engine with Release 7.4.2, including more than 160 new features and integrations. The offering secures all connected devices—both managed and unmanaged—by discovering all devices, profiling the behavior and risks of the device and providing an automated response. New features in Release 7.4.2 include a reduced infrastructure footprint with visibility using telemetry data rather than sensors; workflow-based dashboards to enable rapid lookup of devices matching certain conditions; and security updates including optimizations for tracking and detection on the platform.

Finalist: DigiCert ONE

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T E C H I N N O VAT O R S IT INFRASTRUCTURE MONITORING

Winner: Cisco: ThousandEyes Internet and Cloud Intelligence in AppDynamics Dash Following the acquisition of network monitoring company ThousandEyes last year, Cisco has been working to integrate its technologies into its product portfolio. Cisco has brought ThousandEyes capabilities in network and internet performance metrics into AppDynamics Dash Studio, providing a common operating language across network, application and cloud. This full-stack observability allows for rapid isolation and resolution of issues throughout the digital ecosystem. The integration of ThousandEyes technology provides a complete view of the application experience—enabling data to be more easily uncovered and visualized for improved insight and faster remediation.

Finalists: Cyxtera Portal New Relic Explorer SolarWinds APM Integrated Experience Splunk Observability Cloud Virtana Platform

LAPTOPS

Winner: HP Elite Dragonfly Max New this year, HP’s Elite Dragonfly Max stands out with enhanced collaboration features, a portable design and strong performance via 11th-generation Intel processors. In terms of collaboration, the convertible notebook includes a 5-megapixel camera, four wide-range mics optimized for conferencing and a quad-speaker system driven by four amplifiers. On portability, the notebook is lightweight at 2.49 pounds, and also thin, measuring 0.63 of an inch—while still allowing for work-friendly ports including USB-A, HDMI and USB-C. Other key features include optional 5G connectivity; up to 16.5 hours of battery life; and a 13.3-inch touch display offering high brightness (up to 1,000 nits), reduced blue light technology and an optional integrated privacy screen.

Finalists: Acer TravelMate Spin B3 Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Nano Samsung Galaxy Book Pro

MANAGED DETECTION AND RESPONSE Winner: Sophos Managed Threat Response

Focused on threat hunting, detection and response, Sophos Managed Threat Response offers a fully managed and customizable approach to finding and stopping cyberthreats—which is capable of meeting the needs of all customer sizes, including SMBs. Key additions to the offering over the past year have included Sophos Rapid Response, a remote incident response service that activates a 24/7 team to halt in-progress attacks—such as ransomware—and eliminate attackers from the network. The service entails a 45-day, fixed-fee engagement, and the service team can activate in as little as a few hours and triage most attacks within a 48-hour timespan. Leveraging human analysis and machine-learning technology, Sophos Rapid Response ultimately offers the ability to quickly find and neutralize sophisticated threats.

Finalists: eSentire Cyber Investigations Portfolio Graylog Enterprise v4.0 ReliaQuest GreyMatter Secureworks Taegis ManagedXDR Stellar Cyber Open XDR Platform v4.0

MONITORS

Winner: Dell UltraSharp 40 Curved WUHD Monitor (U4021QW) Earlier this year, Dell debuted what it called the first 40inch ultrawide curved WUHD monitor on the market. Dell’s UltraSharp 40 Curved WUHD Monitor (U4021QW) is aimed at work-from-home professionals seeking an immersive visual experience, with its impressive 5K WUHD (5,120 x 2,160) resolution, wide color coverage and sizable curved display. For enhanced audio, the monitor also includes dual 9W speakers. Other features include ComfortView Plus, which brings low blue light technology to the screen to reduce harmful emissions of blue light without affecting color accuracy.

Finalist: ViewSonic VP3481a ColorPro Monitor

DECEMBER 2021

MSP/MSSP PLATFORMS

NETWORK SECURITY: ENTERPRISE

With the goal of simplifying and improving the way that MSPs bring security to their customers, the WatchGuard Cloud platform recently received a number of major updates including a centralized new interface. The update makes life easier for MSPs by providing a single location for delivering and managing customer security across network security, advanced threat detection and multifactor authentication (MFA). Other key enhancements include simplified network policy creation and management; the addition of WatchGuard’s ThreatSync threat correlation service; and enablement of risk-based MFA as a way for MSPs to bring zero-trust security to their customers.

With its FortiOS 7.0 operating system, Fortinet has rolled out more than 300 new features including zero-trust network access (ZTNA) for remote access and application control. The capability allows for “out-of-the-box” deployment of ZTNA—reducing the attack surface, hiding key applications from the web and improving the user experience. Through the update, Fortinet said it’s now the only company to offer ZTNA that is firewall-based. Other key additions in FortiOS 7.0 include improved security consistency using secure access service edge (SASE) capabilities; self-healing SD-WAN; enhanced wireless network performance; optimizations for performance and security in multi-cloud deployments; and improvements to Fortinet’s web protection offering that are focused on securing work-from-home scenarios.

Winner: WatchGuard Cloud

Finalists: Druva Managed Services Center Liongard MSP360 RMM

MULTIFUNCTION PRINTERS

Winner: HP LaserJet Enterprise 400 Series Seeking to meet the needs of the athome workforce, HP’s LaserJet Enterprise 400 Series offers a reduced form factor paired with numerous businessfriendly features. The series offers the most compact enterprise-ready experience available from HP, along with more than 100 embedded security features. Key capabilities for businesses include fleetwide remote management, runtime intrusion detection and self-healing from cyberattacks. With the Color LaserJet Enterprise MFP M480f, a multifunction model in the series, HP provides print speeds of up to 29 pages per minute, copying speeds of up to 28 pages per minute and two-sided scanning speeds of up to 49 pages per minute.The MFP also features an 850-sheet maximum capacity, a 4.3-inch color touch screen and printing from mobile devices.

Finalist: Epson WorkForce Enterprise WF-C21000 Color

Winner: Fortinet FortiOS 7.0

Finalists: Appgate SDP Clientless Fastly Security Pro Pack Gigamon ThreatINSIGHT Guided-SaaS NDR Infoblox 3.0 SonicWall Gen 7 Network Security appliance (NSa) Series

NETWORK SECURITY: SMB

Winner: Check Point Quantum Spark With its Quantum Spark series of gateways for SMBs, Check Point Software Technologies provides protection against advanced attacks on the network along with simplified deployment and management—reducing the need for cybersecurity skills within an SMB organization. Key capabilities for Quantum Spark include automated threat prevention, leveraging Check Point’s SandBlast Zero Day Protection and its more than 60 threat prevention services; rapid setup through zero-touch provisioning; connectivity options including Gigabit Ethernet,Wi-Fi and integrated LTE modems; and management using any browser or via Check Point’s WatchTower mobile app, allowing for threat monitoring and mitigation directly from a mobile device.

Finalists: Perimeter 81 Cloud Firewall SonicWall SMA 1000 Sophos Firewall Untangle Network Security Framework WatchGuard Firebox M4800 and M5800 DECEMBER 2021

DECEMBER 2021

T E C H I N N O VAT O R S NETWORKING: ENTERPRISE

OFFICE PRODUCTIVITY SOFTWARE

With the Catalyst 8000 Edge Platform, Cisco addresses the complicated requirements of modern networking environments, including edge application support, evolving SD-WAN needs and multi-cloud architectures. Included in the series are the Catalyst 8500 Series Edge Platform, aimed at large-scale data center or colocation sites with integrated 40G and 100G Ethernet ports in a single rack unit. The 8500 is powered by Cisco’s proprietary ASIC for high performance, scale and integrated security. The Catalyst 8300 Series Edge Platform brings a focus on enabling connectivity at branch sites, offering a variety of connectivity choices as well as enhanced SD-WAN performance. The Catalyst 8000V Edge Software provides the capabilities of the 8500 and 8300 in a software format and can be deployed in a cloud or virtualized environment.

With its cloud-based work operating system, Monday.com offers a no-code/low-code platform that enables the creation of custom apps and tools for work management. The Work OS platform provides building blocks, which can be utilized through drag-and-drop and easy-to-use recipes, to build workflow apps that are specific to an organization or team. Key capabilities include the ability to integrate Work OS apps with other platforms such as Microsoft Outlook and Teams, Zoom and Gmail, while users can also make their building blocks and apps available in Monday.com’s marketplace. Work OS allows organizations to improve their productivity and agility with purpose-built apps that meet specific team needs.

Winner: Cisco Catalyst 8000 Edge Platform

Finalists: Ciena 5168 xHaul Router Extreme Networks: ExtremeSwitching 5520 Series Fortinet FortiGate Rugged 60F Pluribus Adaptive Cloud Fabric WiteSand

Winner: Monday.com Work OS

Finalists: Citrix Workspace Dropbox Enterprise Sage Intelligent Time Snow Software: Snow Spend Optimizer

POWER PROTECTION AND MANAGEMENT

NETWORKING: WIRELESS

Winner: Eaton 9PX Lithium-Ion Uninterruptible Power Supply

Aruba has brought forward the market’s first enterprise-grade Wi-Fi 6E access point—making use of the massive amount of additional spectrum now available through the opening up of the 6GHz band. Offering Wi-Fi 6E provides customers with faster connections, lower congestion and broader channels. The Aruba 635 Campus Access Point offers speeds of up 3.9 Mbps—using three dedicated radios, which cover the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands in addition to 6GHz—enabling high bandwidth and low latency even for demanding services such as IoT, video and AR/VR. A part of the Aruba Edge Services Platform, the access point also benefits from the prediction and resolution of device issues before they become a problem.

With the recent debut of the Eaton 9PX lithium-ion UPS, Eaton has added a number of enhancements to its UPS technology. They include improved battery life span and a smaller form factor—with an eye toward serving the needs of edge and light industrial environments. Eaton’s 9PX UPS offers a battery life span of up to eight to 10 years compared with an average of three to five years for a comparable UPS that uses lead-acid batteries. The 9PX also offers a more-compact footprint, with a 1U form factor rather than 2U—as well as a 20 percent lighter rackmount model or 40 percent lighter extended battery module versus counterpart UPS models with lead-acid. The UPS also benefits from use with Eaton’s PredictPulse remote monitoring service, with predictive analytics about potential component failures and remote diagnosis of issues.

Winner: HPE Aruba 635 Campus Access Point

Finalists: Cradlepoint E3000 Series Enterprise Router TP-Link EAP660HD AX3600 Wireless Ceiling Mount Access Point

DECEMBER 2021

Finalists: CyberPower: PowerPanel Cloud and Cloud Cards Schneider Electric Square D Easy UPS 3S

PROCESSORS

SECURITY MANAGEMENT

With Intel’s latest line of third-generation Xeon Scalable Processors, code-named Ice Lake, the chipmaker has brought forward major advancements around enabling artificial intelligence, cryptography, high-performance computing (HPC) and other workloads. The first server processor line to use Intel’s 10-nanometer manufacturing process, the Ice Lake Xeon Scalable Processors bring an increase of Xeon’s maximum core count to 40 from the previous generation’s 28. Key advancements include 74 percent faster AI performance over the prior generation—through deploying Intel’s DL Boost instruction set and software optimizations—as well as significantly enhanced performance for cryptographic algorithms. For HPC workloads, Intel promises up to 18 percent faster performance than competing processors on the Linpack benchmark used to measure the world’s top supercomputers.

With the Mandiant Advantage platform, Mandiant is focused on providing discovery, monitoring and management of security risk across a customer’s attack surface—including with recently added capabilities such as Automated Defense. The addition of the Mandiant Automated Defense module enables triaging of alerts at rapid speed, even at a large scale, while preserving consistency. The module leverages machine learning and data science technologies to bring automation to the triage process, allowing security teams to focus on the most critical threats. Along with Automated Defense, the Mandiant Advantage platform includes modules that cover threat intelligence, security validation and attack surface management.

Winner: Intel Xeon Scalable Processors, 3rd Gen

Finalists: AMD EPYC 7003 Series Processors Fungible DPU

SD-WAN

Winner: VMware SD-WAN A part of VMware’s clouddelivered secure access service edge (SASE) platform, the VMware SD-WAN offering brings together capabilities including WAN edge, edge compute and cloud-based security. With optimizations for mission-critical apps—as well as its positioning between the app overlay and service provider—the platform enables high performance and availability for applications. The VMware SD-WAN offering has received a number of recent enhancements, including in the realm of security—with the platform seeing the addition of capabilities such as Secure Web Gateway and Zero Trust Network Access, aimed at meeting the security needs of distributed workforces. Other key functionality includes automation and zero-touch provisioning for simplified operations.

Finalists: Aryaka SmartSecure Private Access Cisco SD-WAN powered by Meraki Masergy SD-WAN Secure Versa SASE Services

Winner: Mandiant Automated Defense

Finalists: Arctic Wolf Managed Security Awareness CyCognito Platform FireMon Agile NSPM Hunters XDR Tenable.ad

SMARTPHONES/MOBILE COMPUTERS Winner: Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra

The flagship model in Samsung’s Galaxy S21 series, the Galaxy S21 Ultra offers a number of improvements including expansion to a quad-camera system (from three cameras on the predecessor model) and support for Samsung’s S Pen stylus—the first time that a Galaxy S series device has featured S Pen support. Other key features include improved resolution of 515 pixels per inch on the 6.8-inch AMOLED display with up to 1,500 nits of brightness; automatic adjustment for the display refresh rate (between 10Hz and 120Hz) to optimize both viewing quality and battery life; up to 100X zoom on the camera along with a new zoom lock feature for clearer photos; and support for both types of 5G connectivity—sub-6GHz and higher-speed mmWave 5G.

Finalist: Zebra Technologies EC50/EC55

DECEMBER 2021

T E C H I N N O VAT O R S STORAGE: CLOUD

STORAGE: MIDRANGE

With Object Lock, cloud storage company Wasabi Technologies is providing enhanced data protection by enabling the designation of certain data objects as immutable—and thus unalterable and undeletable. This data protection addresses accidental actions or intentional actions such as those that occur in a cyberattack. Once the data is stored in Wasabi’s system, the data is guaranteed to stay there until the expiration of the lock—with users able to set a time frame for the immutability of the object. Wasabi Object Lock ultimately prevents both malicious and accidental operations that could lead to data alteration or loss, with a simplified immutability process for storage administrators.

Dell Technologies recently expanded its Dell EMC PowerStore portfolio with the launch of a new entry model, the PowerStore 500. Billed as a lower-priced all-flash storage array, the PowerStore 500 nonetheless brings enterprise-level performance and storage services for businesses of any size—including for use in remote or branch locations, edge environments or larger IT deployments. The array, which is also available through Dell’s Flex On Demand service, comes in a 2U form-factor chassis with capacity of up to 1.2 petabytes. It supports up to 2.4 million SQL transactions per minute and 1,500 virtual desktops per appliance. Dell also unveiled its PowerStoreOS 2.0 software that provides enhanced performance and the ability to run applications directly on the system via the AppsON capability.

Winner: Wasabi Object Lock

Finalists: CTERA 7.0 Nasuni UniFS Panzura CloudFS

STORAGE: ENTERPRISE

Winner: Hewlett Packard Enterprise: HPE Alletra With its new HPE Alletra storage systems, Hewlett Packard Enterprise offers a cloud-native data infrastructure that brings a cloud-like experience for operations and consumption. The two all-NVMe Alletra systems—the HPE Alletra 9000 and 6000—are managed by the company’s Data Services Cloud Console for unified data management across hybrid cloud deployments along with automated infrastructure management. Alletra offers more than 99.9999 percent guaranteed availability and provides the architectural flexibility needed to run any application with strong performance, efficiency and resiliency. HPE Alletra can also be managed from any location and can be delivered as a service via HPE’s GreenLake pay-as-you-go consumption offering.

Finalists: Dell EMC PowerMax IBM Elastic Storage System 3200 Infinidat InfiniBox SSA Pure Storage: Pure as-a-Service SoftIron HyperDrive Performance+

DECEMBER 2021

Winner: Dell EMC PowerStore

Finalists: Quantum H4000 Tintri IntelliFlash H-Series

STORAGE: SMB

Winner: IBM FlashSystem 5200 A part of the second generation of IBM’s entry-level, all-flash storage series, the IBM FlashSystem 5200 provides up to 1.7 petabytes of capacity in a 1U chassis and supports 21-GBps throughput, 40 percent greater than its predecessor. The IBM FlashSystem 5200 also offers 99.9999 percent uptime; IBM’s HyperSwap capability, providing 100 percent availability with as few as three flash modules; and support for migration of data from multiple older IBM and non-IBM arrays, via the the included IBM Spectrum Virtualize software. The FlashSystem 5200 also supports Red Hat OpenShift, Container Storage Interface for Kubernetes, Ansible automation, Kubernetes and VMware and bare-metal environments. The system also includes IBM Storage Insights to provide visibility across complex storage environments and IBM Spectrum Virtualize for virtualization and consolidation of multivendor storage technologies.

Finalist: DataCore SANsymphony BZ

STORAGE: SOFTWARE-DEFINED

UNIFIED COMMUNICATIONS

With the aim of solving the biggest data challenges currently facing organizations, Qumulo has rewritten the file system to offer a 100 percent software-defined approach—bringing flexibility, simplified management and dynamic scalability. The company’s first-inthe-industry NvME-hybrid open architecture enables strong performance at a low cost. Capabilities include machine learning-driven intelligent caching that keeps the hottest data on the fastest media, while data that is not in use can be stored on lower-cost HDDs—providing both robust performance when needed as well as cost-effectiveness. All of this functionality is available without the need for human intervention.

With its Experience Communications as a Service (XCaaS) offering, 8x8 converges Unified Communications as a Service and Contact Center as a Service. It integrates cloud-native contact center, voice, meetings, team chat and Communications Platform as a Service. Key new benefits include high reliability and availability—featuring the only UCaaS and CCaaS platformwide 99.99 percent uptime servicelevel agreement in the industry—as well as a unified provisioning and configuration console, integration with Microsoft Teams and more than 50 other third-party apps, and cross-platform analytics providing insight from interactions in real time.

Winner: Qumulo NvME-hybrid Architecture

Finalists: DataCore Swarm Fungible Storage Cluster Lightbits Labs: LightOS VAST Data Gemini

Winner: 8x8 XCaaS

Finalists: Avaya Cloud Office Rooms Dialpad Fuze Ribbon Connect Zoom Phone

TABLETS

VIRTUALIZATION: APPS/DESKTOPS

Samsung’s Galaxy Tab Active3 is a rugged Android tablet for businesses featuring a number of enhancements for users and IT administrators. The 8-inch tablet gets a boost on display resolution to 1,920 x 1,200 (from 1,280 x 800 previously), a larger battery (enabling up to 11 hours of battery life) and new features such as a programmable key that can be configured to open commonly used apps. Samsung also makes it simpler to manage a fleet of Galaxy Tab Active3 devices. The Tab Active3 is the first U.S. tablet that’s available out of the box with Samsung’s Enterprise Edition, which features a year of access to the Knox Suite, providing tools for mobile enrollment, setup and endpoint management.

Citrix’s Virtual Apps and Desktops Service is a virtual desktop infrastructure/ Desktop-as-a-Service offering that enables delivery of cloud apps and desktops to users wherever they’re located. Recent enhancements have included the debut of Service Continuity, which offers significantly improved reliability for users—ultimately providing a level of fault tolerance that stands out in the industry. Service Continuity enables continued access for users to active virtual apps and desktops in the event of an outage, allowing a connection directly to the resource location or via the Citrix Gateway service—supporting continued productivity no matter what the health status is for their cloud services.

Winner: Samsung Galaxy Tab Active3

Finalist: Panasonic Toughbook G2

Winner: Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops Service

Finalists: Cameyo Virtual Application Delivery IGEL UD Pocket2 Parallels Desktop for Chrome OS

DECEMBER 2021

T E C H I N N O VAT O R S

EDITOR’S CHOICE Winner: Pillir EdgeReady Cloud

Winner: SAP Extension Suite

For customers seeking to modernize ERP systems from SAP and other vendors, Pillir EdgeReady Cloud is a low-code app platform that accelerates development and dramatically reduces cost. For customers of SAP, for instance, Pillir eliminates the need for high-cost, proprietary SAP Advanced Business Application Programming code— transforming the economics of moving complex SAP ERP systems to the cloud. The Pillir platform also speeds up SAP application development by 20X using a drag-anddrop approach, opening the door for non-developers to add business processes to SAP. Pillir’s EdgeReady Cloud low-code platform is also available for users of Oracle, Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics systems.

With the goal of simp l i f y i n g ap p l i c at i o n d eve l o p m e n t , S A P ’s Extension Suite offerings provide a rapid method for building new applications, processes and experiences. The SAP Extension Suite offerings provide ready-to-use content—such as user interface cards, templates and bots—as well as integrations, connectors and other capabilities to accelerate app development. Recent updates include the introduction of no-code app development capabilities via SAP AppGyver, the composer used by the Extension Suite. Other enhancements for the Extension Suite—which is a layer in SAP’s Business Technology Platform—have included capabilities for helping businesses better configure and automate enterprise workflows using a low-code approach. ■

2021

T E C H I N N O VAT O R S Scan here to see the full 2021 Tech Innovators database on CRN.com

DECEMBER 2021

A New Podcast for IoT Newbies and Pros Alike Check out our new podcast series, IoT in Focus, where we delve into the technology side of the Internet of Things and explore topics such as: An introduction to IoT and its latest developments

How technology barriers are breaking down between OT and IT

What it means for solution providers to develop and implement IoT

Using IoT data to analyze and improve work processes

How IoT works within the channel ecosystem

And so much more!

Listen now with the links below or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

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2021 NEXT-GEN SOLUTION PROVIDER LEADERS

New Generation, New Ideas By Rick Whiting With their passion and new problem-solving skills, this year’s Next-Gen Solution Provider Leaders have helped their companies not just survive but thrive during these turbulent times. For the second year we recognize today’s rising-star solution provider executives, directors and managers who are poised to be tomorrow’s channel leaders. The list honors employees 40 years of age or younger who have made significant contributions in driving growth and strategic direction over the past year. It includes those who have spearheaded changes to their company’s business models and processes to improve how they operate and those who have designed and implemented new systems to support and automate those changes. These executives also have devised more productive ways to work with vendor partners and have found new ways to better serve their customers and deliver value through ever-more-innovative IT products and services. These achievements are all the more important as the global pandemic has caused major economic disruptions and changed the way many businesses operate–including solution providers themselves and their customers. Here’s a look at 30 rising stars in the channel, including a brief overview of what they consider some of their key accomplishments and most innovative ideas from the past year.

Atul Bhagat President, CEO

BASE Solutions

Scan here to see the full 2021 Next-Gen Solution Provider database on CRN.com

Faisal Bhutto

Jay Bouche

BJ Bradley

Wes Brown

Computex

Trapp Technology— ArmorPoint

Davenport Group

DynTek Services

President, Cloud, Cybersecurity

Chief Revenue Oﬃcer

VP, Engineering Services

VP, Architecture

Bhagat is the founder of BASE Solutions, which has evolved into an MSP providing customized IT solutions. More recently he has made cybersecurity a core focus with the goal of maintaining the company’s 15 percent to 20 percent growth trajectory.

Bhutto has been with Computex for nearly eight years and has accelerated growth of the company’s cybersecurity business, including launching Computex’s first cybersecurity operations center and providing managed SOC services with detection and response capabilities.

Bouche oversaw the launch of the ArmorPoint security management solution and development of its go-to-market strategy, driving ArmorPoint revenue growth to a $4 million annual run rate and expanding sales through other channel partners.

Bradley has been with Davenport Group since 2013 and now leads the company’s engineering teams. Over the past year, he has helped build Davenport’s enduser computing practice, refined the company’s approach to the security market and developed its managed services strategy.

Brown joined DynTek in 2016 as an implementation engineer and has moved up to his current role leading presales architecture and engineering support operations. A key part of his job is building scalable, repeatable solutions for customers in SDN, networkdefined security and IoT.

Ken Celenza

Raul Cepeda

Brandon Cole

Tom Cole

Liz Costerisan

VP, Professional Services

Network to Code

VP, Product Management, Strategic Alliances

In his five years at Network to Code, Celenza has helped grow the company and its professional services organization. He works with customers to adopt and utilize Agile development practices and developed a code reuse process based on best practices and key use cases.

Cepeda has held a number of posts at Barcodes including business development manager, inside sales manager, solutions team manager and product management director. In his new role, he is now focused on building sales and marketing engagement plans with strategic partners.

DECEMBER 2021

Barcodes

VP, Sales

Davenport Group

Cole, who has been with Davenport Group for more than 11 years, was promoted to vice president of sales in January and charged with coaching and leading the company’s sales team. In the past year he has played a key role in working more closely with manufacturing partners.

Managing Director, U.K., Europe

Abacus Group

Cole leads strategy, customer service, technology infrastructure and business development in the U.K. and Europe for the Abacus Group. He brings to the job expertise in critical areas such as cybersecurity, managed cloud and regulatory compliance for hedge funds and investment management firms.

Director, Strategy, Services

ConRes

Costerisan leads marketing, managed services, strategic partner alliances and customer success efforts at ConRes. She has overseen the establishment of new technology vendor partnerships in cloud and cybersecurity and pivoted the company to focus on recurring revenue models in managed services, cloud and SaaS.

2021 Next-Gen Solution Provider

LEADERS

Tyler Dulmage

Chris Emery

Director, Channel, Field Marketing

DynTek Services

Clearpath Solutions Group

Since joining DigitalEra Group in 2018, Curreya has managed the shift of all marketing efforts from in-person to virtual during the pandemic, launched a revenue growth accelerator program, and improved customer relationship management performance through a lead-scoring program.

Dulmage leads professional services and operations at DynTek where he has turned a segmented professional services organization into a nationally managed organization and implemented new ERP and CRM systems to standardize every process in operational services.

Emery has been pivotal in expanding C l e a r p a t h ’s market footprint with a number of marketing initiatives and campaigns. He is focused on generating goto-market content through employees, which allows the company to expand its reach and improve customer engagement.

Filingeri leads a team that’s responsible for developing and cultivating global business opportunities for Cybersafe Solutions. She has leveraged the company’s training program and led an initiative to always approach an account as a strategic adviser.

Franz oversees the sales team at SADA and its efforts to s o u rce n e t new business in enterprise accounts. He is now laserfocused on implementing a sales automation system that increases sales reach and drives revenue growth.

Malinda Gagnon

Cole Halpin

Nikki Harley

Colin Henry

Laleh Honar

Uprise Partners

Cosentus Technology Services

SADA

Pomeroy Technologies

GTS

G a g n o n founded Uprise to help SMBs m a n a g e I T, product engineering and digital marketing operations. She is now recruiting partners to offer their customers managed services in infrastructure management, help desk support, backup and disaster recovery, and cybersecurity.

Halpin played a key role i n n av i g at ing Cosentus’ acquisition of his prior company, Avitus Technology Services, including changing and integrating the companies’ service offerings and road map planning while increasing profitability and improving customer retention.

Harley helped create a firstof-its kind program at SADA for ISVs and SaaS companies that empowers them to grow and scale their business faster on Google Cloud. The SaaS Alliance program launched in January has more than a dozen partners enrolled so far.

As Pomeroy Technologies relaunched itself following its separation from Getronics in 2020, Henry was the driver of the team leading that effort. He has created initiatives to develop processes for identifying new partners and technologies that Pomeroy uses to build out its services portfolio.

Honar is responsible for managing relationships with OEMs and also oversees partner programs and marketing initiatives. She has pivoted GTS’ marketing strategy from in-person to virtual-hybrid during the pandemic while driving the digital marketing strategy.

William Huber

Parker Leavitt

Steven Lettery

Austin Madsen

Terra Norine

Computer Design & Integration

vCORE Technology Partners

Cinch I.T.

Trox + Tierney

Huber spends time with customers, partners and a n a l y s t s to understand the opportunities that can lead to new product and service development. He spearheaded CDI’s pursuit of achieving all seven VMware Master Service Competencies and VMware’s Cloud Verified credential.

Earlier this year Leavitt moved into the role o f d i re c to r of strategic partnerships where he manages vendor and distributor alliances. He has created a road map for strengthening relationships with strategic vendors and OEMs and a new department devoted to alliances and business development.

Lettery developed the “Cinch University” sales training class that has graduated three franchisees. He has tailored business development methods to win new business in the SMB market and by the end of the third quarter had already grown revenue fivefold over 2020.

With the April merger of solution providers Tierney and Trox, Madsen has focused on aligning IT resources for the combined companies, including developing a service platform to connect communications and collaboration systems that allow all employees to work together.

Norine oversees sales strategies, account growth and new customer acquisition. She recently managed the implementation of a new CRM and sales portal, developed a sales training program and created a customer engagement team.

Kelly Nuckolls

Zac Paulson

Danny Valdez

Felix Vargas

Kristy Wilke

InfoSystems

TrueIT

Clearpath Solutions Group

Davenport Group

Nuckolls helped transform InfoSystems’ sales and marketing approach, updating the narrative from traditional infrastructure and storage to a focus on SaaS-based product and sales strategies. That proved timely as the need for a remote workforce, cloud and edge computing accelerated.

Paulson, who founded solution provider TrueIT in 2012, has led the company and its 50 employees through the acquisition of a software consulting firm and the launch of a new brand, TruNorth Dynamics, that provides MSPs with resources around Microsoft Dynamics 365 applications.

Ana Curreya

DigitalEra Group

CEO

CTO

VP, Marketing, Alliances

Chief of Staff, VP, Services

SVP, Technology

Director, Strategic Partnerships

CEO

VP, Marketing

Director, Strategic Alliance

Director, Business Development

VP, Operations, North America

Clutch Solutions

Va l d e z h a s overseen the development of new, automated internal operating systems and processes that have helped Clutch Solutions manage its rapid growth. One example is a streamlined system for processing purchase orders much more quickly, which has improved cash flow.

Rosana Filingeri

VP, Business Development

Cybersafe Solutions

Head of Partner Sales, Strategy

Director, Enterprise Infrastructure

Field CTO

Va r g a s h a s been focused on setting C l e a r p a t h ’s strategic product road map across data center, cloud, cloud management, automation and security. For the latter he formulated an approach to help the sales team position the company’s security solutions.

Billy Franz

Director, Inside Sales, Channel

SADA

Director, Partnerships

SVP, Sales

Trox + Tierney

Director, Sales

Wilke’s duties include hiring and coaching new employees. She also manages the sales relationship with Dell Technologies and developed a presentation for Dell sales teams outlining how Davenport Group can help it increase sales through collaborative pipeline generation.

DECEMBER 2021

ON THE RECORD

Is Dell Technologies’ Channel At Risk?

By Robert Faletra

OLITICIANS ARE OFTEN against something before they are for it. Or they are for it until they are against it. Or they are against it and for it, depending on which audience they happen to be addressing. Dell Technologies, which for years was against the channel before it went all in and became very channel-focused, seems to be slipping into the third category. It’s troubling and confusing and, frankly, not good for either the company or the channel. A few weeks ago, CRN reported on Dell taking more of its client business direct and cutting partners out of some deals. Some partners have told CRN they believe Dell is offering discounts of 1 percent to 2 percent for customers that move the business. That may not seem like a lot, but in a significant deal it can quickly add up to tens of thousands of dollars. So what are Michael Dell and company up to? Well, when CRN interviewed John Byrne, Dell’s president of North America sales, and asked about the well-reported channel conflict, it didn’t really get an answer. “Here’s our channel strategy for client systems: We want both routes of market to grow—both direct and channel,” Byrne said. He evaded questions about whether there is a directive inside the company to preferably take the business direct. That’s not like Byrne, who historically has been a straight shooter and generally more than willing to answer directly. Byrne is also a hard-driving executive who executes on a directive. In short, you want him on your side. So, what’s really going on with Dell Technologies and the channel? Which side of direct versus indirect is Byrne on? Would he rather see the direct side grow more or the channel grow more and, if all things were equal, which way might he nudge it? We don’t really know. The actions as reported seem to show the company prefers business go direct rather than through partners at the client level. 46

DECEMBER 2021

To really know what the company wants, you have to go up the food chain. Byrne has a big job but above him sits Bill Scannell, president of global sales and customer operations. Above Scannell is Jeff Clarke, vice chairman and co-chief operating officer. Clarke is a longtime Dell executive who has been a force in the company for many years. Scannell came into the organization via the acquisition of EMC, where he was a very successful sales executive back when EMC had arguably one of the best direct sales organizations in the industry. Then there is Michael Dell who, of course, needs no introduction. He’s brilliant and has done an amazing job shepherding the company through untold changes in the industry since its founding in 1984. He was direct before he was indirect but once he decided the channel was important, he was focused on making it a great partner. So where are we now? What’s the strategy and is it coming from Byrne, Scannell, Clarke or Michael Dell? Is what’s going on a short-term aberration or is it a longer redirect? Is this apparent direct push on the client side of the business going to move upstream? Will it ultimately entail the complete Dell product line? Is a world where IT is increasingly being sold as a subscription driving Dell to move toward a different model? Should strategic service providers that banked on a Dell business relationship defensively push business to its competitors? Should they be concerned Dell might completely pull out of its channel partnership? These and many more questions come to mind, and someone higher up the food chain at Dell than Byrne ought to step forward and answer them. Otherwise the company is in danger of unnecessarily putting its channel relationship at risk, and that’s not good for anyone in this equation. n

B A C K T A L K : Make something happen. Robert Faletra is Founding Partner of The Channel Company. You can contact him via email at rfaletra@thechannelcompany.com.

2022 EVENTS CALENDAR MARCH

AUGUST

2/27-3/1

XChange March Gaylord Texan • Dallas, TX

2/28-3/1

XChange SLED Gaylord Texan • Dallas, TX

3/21-22

Midsize Enterprise Summit: IT Security Grand Hyatt • Tampa, FL

APRIL 4/24-26

8/20

Women of the Channel Workshop Gaylord Rockies Resort & Convention Center • Denver, CO

8/21-23

XChange August Gaylord Rockies Resort & Convention Center • Denver, CO

SEPTEMBER 9/18-20

Midsize Enterprise Summit: Spring Omni Orlando Resort at ChampionsGate • Orlando, FL

OCTOBER 10/10-11

Best of Breed Conference Loews Atlanta Hotel • Atlanta, GA

10/23-25

NexGen Conference TBD

MAY 5/16-17

Women of the Channel Leadership Summit WEST Omni La Costa Resort & Spa • Carlsbad, CA

7/11-12

DECEMBER 12/5-6

JULY XChange Security Hyatt Regency Reston • Reston, VA

508.416.1175 | thechannelcompany.com

Midsize Enterprise Summit: Fall Red Rock Casino, Resort & Spa • Las Vegas, NV

Women of the Channel Leadership Summit EAST Hilton Midtown • New York, NY

For more information visit www.thechannelco.com/events

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