CRN December 2022 - Issue 1417

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December 2022

Columns

5 The Final Cut

By Steven Burke

42 On The Record

By Robert Faletra

Features

38 Next-Gen Solution

Provider Leaders

These individuals have brought their passion, new ideas and unique talents to the table and are shaking up how the companies they work for operate.

Corrections: In the Ingram Micro special issue cover story, Success Computer Consulting President Bruce Lach’s name was misspelled. In our 100 People You Don’t Know But Should list, we included the wrong photo for Rick LaCoume, director, Americas channels, at Keepit.

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

CRN (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).

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Partner Obsessed

From driving co-selling deals through the channel to upskilling thousands of partners via new training programs, AWS CEO Adam Selipsky and channel chief Ruba Borno are proving the sky’s the limit when it comes to helping partners succeed.

Products Of The Year

Solution providers on the front lines of delivering business outcomes for customers have chosen the products that are best up to the task. Here are the winners across 30 technology categories.

Tech Innovators

Leading-edge vendors are pointing the way in a complex technology landscape with new products that meet a range of critical business needs. Our 2022 CRN Tech Innovators awards showcase offerings that deliver innovation—and growth opportunities for solution providers.

HPE Is A Cloud Service Provider, Not A Hardware Company

By Steven Burke

THOSE PARTNERS CONTINUING to look at Hewlett Packard Enterprise as a hardware manufacturer with a broad and deep compute, storage and networking portfolio are missing the boat.

HPE President and CEO Antonio Neri made that crystal clear when he ended HPE’s fi scal year by fully integrating the GreenLake on-premises cloud service into the core operations of the company.

The move from what Neri calls the “incubation” of GreenLake as a separate commercial business unit into the heart of everything HPE does is a culmination of its remarkable cloud services transformation. Under Neri’s leadership, HPE has made the quantum leap from hardware provider to a full-fledged cloud services company with its own powerful cloud-native software services platform.

Neri and HPE do not get enough credit for bringing partners into the heart of the cloud services game. The HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud service, in fact, has forever changed the public cloud versus private cloud equation. Partners and customers are increasingly waking up to what Neri calls GreenLake’s “lowestcost-per-workload,” security and data sovereignty advantages.

GreenLake’s lowest-cost-per-workload advantage, Neri said, is “especially true when an application requires significant data egress and ingress, which is the majority of the cost—not the cost of compute—or in cases where workloads are largely predictable, which means you don’t have to scale up or down all the time or if data protection services are needed.” As for the security and data sovereignty advantages, more and more customers want to control their own data destiny and are simply not willing to throw caution to the wind and put all their data assets into the public cloud.

HPE’s on-premises cloud services revolution has been made possible by a robust cloud-native software stack, which includes HPE Aruba, HPE Private Cloud for Enterprise and HPE GreenLake for Data Fabric, a single data store for hybrid cloud.

All that said, even with 70-plus cloud services and more than 80 ISVs—including VMware, SAP, Nutanix and Veeam Software—HPE is still being viewed by too many partners as a hardware provider. “In the end, make no mistake, it’s going to be the entire company inside GreenLake,” Neri told solution providers at CRN parent The Channel Company’s XChange Best of Breed conference in October.

“For us, it’s not about just being able to consume as a service, it’s being able to run your entire business through HPE GreenLake,” he said.

While HPE has made solid inroads in bringing its partners into the on-premises pay-per-use cloud services game, it still represents a small fraction of the partner base. That’s because of the cultural shift partners have to make to go from selling hardware to selling cloud services.

That transformation is as big a shift as HPE itself made from hardware provider to cloud service provider. It means—just like HPE itself did—changing the go-to-market model, sales compensation and culture of the company. That edgeto-cloud services shift, given the customer demand for pay-per-use IT services, is not optional. Partners that make the move to an on-premises cloud services model will prosper. Those that don’t will fi nd themselves fi ghting for a smaller and smaller piece of the IT pie. ■

BACKTALK: Have you made the cloud services cultural shift? Please let me know at sburke@thechannelcompany.com.

Justin Copie couldn’t believe it: Amazon Web Services worldwide channel chief Ruba Borno was taking him, the head of an SMB-focused AWS partner, out to dinner to get a clear message across.

“She said, ‘Justin, I want you to break glass. I want you to challenge us where we could be doing things differently. Help us as a company get better,” said Copie, CEO of Innovative Solutions. “I’m just a small but fast-growing partner, with 115 people in western New York. … Here’s the crazy part. She listened and actually ended up making changes based off my feedback. So all summer we broke a lot of glass together.”

Based on Copie’s feedback, AWS created a funding assessment capability inside its Migration Acceleration Program that provides thousands of dollars to partners to assess a customer’s environment and then report back how the customer can most effectively migrate to AWS.

“It’s been a game-changer because now customers have a very clear and low-risk way to understand what their investment looks like before they migrate,” said Copie, adding that the assessment funding has accelerated customer wins for the West Henrietta, N.Y.-based AWS Premier Consulting partner.

“I’ve worked with some of the biggest IT vendors before— I’ve never seen this level of interaction,” Copie said. “Under Ruba and [CEO] Adam [Selipsky’s] watch, AWS’ ... program is now designed to be much more influenced by the voice of the partner.”

Because of the positive partner changes made over the past year under Selipsky and Borno—from driving co-selling deals through the channel to upskilling thousands of partners via new training programs—Innovative Solutions’ AWS sales have skyrocketed north of 300 percent in 2022 compared with 2021.

Partner Obsessed

By Mark Haranas

‘We Are Partner-Obsessed’

When Seattle-based AWS started to roll out its first major products like Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2 in 2006, Selipsky was playing an enormous role as AWS’ vice president of marketing, sales and support, which included responsibility for partner management.

Selipsky said the $82 billion market-leading cloud company has always been deeply focused on the partner ecosystem.

“We’ve always believed since the beginning that having a really strong partner ecosystem—across many different parts of that ecosystem—was an intrinsic and critical part of delivering what customers need from us,” said Selipsky.

Taking it a step further, solution providers said Borno has been driving that strategy at lightning speed into the channel ecosystem of systems integrators, MSPs, resellers and consultants over the past 12 months—with the AWS Partner Network now exceeding 100,000 partners.

With just one year under her belt as AWS’ vice president of worldwide channels and alliances, Borno has already led the charge in pursuing hundreds of thousands of opportunities with channel partners in 2022 alone. She has personally met with over 1,000 partners and customers across geographies, sizes and industries in order to truly understand their needs and find areas where AWS can improve.

“I joined AWS because of the incredible opportunity we have to innovate with our partners in service of our customers,” said Borno, who came to the company in November 2021 after a six-year stint at Cisco Systems. “I’m learning what they’re seeing from the AWS relationship and what they’re valuing with the AWS relationship.”

After injecting herself into the AWS partner ecosystem, Borno has a clear mission: simplify the AWS partner experience, help the

From driving co-selling deals through the channel to upskilling thousands of partners via new training programs, AWS CEO Adam Selipsky and channel chief Ruba Borno are proving that the sky’s the limit when it comes to helping partners succeed.

channel differentiate itself to increase profitability with programs such as Partner Paths, make training more easily accessible, and create new opportunities via co-selling and co-development with partners.

Her bullish goals are aligned with AWS’ longtime motto of being customer-obsessed.

“Speaking of customer obsession, many of our partners are our customers as well. So we are partner-obsessed. Our partner experience is key to providing our customers with a great experience,” said Borno. “We know that a superior partner experience will result in a superior customer experience.”

The ‘Fearless’ Borno

AWS partners are hailing the hiring of Borno as one of the biggest and most influential channel moves in the company’s history.

Doug Schneider, CEO of 2nd Watch, a longtime AWS Premier partner, said Borno has almost completely eradicated any channel conflict between AWS’ own services organization and his Seattlebased company.

“Ruba has been fearless in coming in and assessing the situation. I commend her for that. It’s not an easy task to assess the situation and be open to understanding the partners and then getting people to reorient themselves,” said Schneider. “What we’ve really seen manifesting is a change in demeanor. It shows me there’s a lot of goodness to come from our perspective.”

to create a new industry-oriented solution based on its Aptitive acquisition, with plans to co-sell the upcoming offering alongside AWS. “Our opportunities for growing with AWS are extending beyond just the Infrastructure-as-a-Service layer,” Schneider said.

Selipsky Is Driving Co-Innovation

During his first turn at AWS from 2005 to 2016, Selipsky took the company from pre-revenue to a $13 billion business while also launching the AWS Partner Network in 2012.

“This is the 10th anniversary year of the AWS Partner Network as well as the AWS Marketplace. These were the world’s first cloudnative partner network and first cloud software marketplace,” Selipsky told CRN. “We’ve grown to over 100,000 partners from over 150 countries.”

After five years as CEO of data analytics software vendor Tableau, Selipsky returned to AWS and officially took the CEO reins in July 2021. He has been on a co-selling and co-innovation tear with partners ever since.

‘I’ve worked with some of the biggest IT vendors before—I’ve never seen this level of interaction. Under Ruba [Borno] and Adam [Selipsky’s] watch, AWS’ ... program is now designed to be much more in uenced by the voice of the partner.’

Copie, CEO, Innovative Solutions

For example, 2nd Watch and AWS’ professional services team recently worked together to land a $100,000 services deal with a net-new customer, a large insurance company.

Not only did the two companies strategize and attack the deal as a team as part of the co-selling motion, but AWS also pushed the customer to leverage 2nd Watch for additional opportunities ahead.

“Now there’s another $300,000 project that’s coming from this as well, and it’s just us doing the $300,000 project,” said Schneider. “That’s what we want to see, and that’s what AWS wants to see. AWS is now about co-selling with their partners and then letting the partner take the ball and expand. … If they trust the partner, they’re giving more ownership of that account to the partner to really expand it.”

With 2nd Watch’s AWS sales in 2022 increasing “at a very, very healthy double-digit” rate and collaboration with AWS at an alltime high, the solution provider acquired Aptitive this year to further boost its AWS momentum. Chicago-based Aptitive was a fast-growing cloud data analytics consultancy that partnered with AWS, Snowflake and other cloud vendors.

Furthermore, 2nd Watch is currently co-innovating with AWS

Selipsky highlighted AWS’ move to team up with Accenture to create the Advanced Customer Engagement contact center solution, dubbed ACE+, where Accenture and AWS create a joint value proposition and bundle their solutions together. Another example includes AWS being a founding sponsor and cloud provider for Deloitte’s Smart Factory in Wichita, Kan.—a new immersive experience center that includes a fully operational production line and experiential labs for developing innovative smart factory capabilities.

“When we have partners who have innovated and created incredible solutions with us and on top of us, then it becomes an easy decision to put that in front of a customer because it drives customer value,” Selipsky said.

“We have a very significant go-to-market capability now across AWS—as you might imagine given the scale of our business—and we have many different ways that we bring partners along with that,” he said. “You can really see the result in individual partners and the success that they’re experiencing.”

Selipsky and Borno are pushing for the formation of new partnerships with ISVs, distributors and other technology vendors to help drive simplicity, co-selling and new customer opportunities.

In 2022, AWS unveiled blockbuster collaboration agreements with a slew of vendors and distributors—from IBM and CrowdStrike to MongoDB and Ingram Micro.

“We’re now working with Ingram [Micro] to accelerate the capabilities of their channel partners to support public sector

—Justin

customers,” said Borno. “We partnered with IBM in May to work with them to ‘SaaS-ify’ [their] software portfolio. Several months later, we’ve already made several of those solutions [generally available] on AWS.”

Innovative Solutions is leveraging the new IBM relationship to drive SMB customers to AWS—a move CEO Copie expects to boost sales and customer adoption. Copie said he was happily surprised when IBM reached out to his company asking for help in moving IBM’s SMB customers to AWS.

“I said, ‘Listen, the only way I’d be interested is if it helps my AWS customers or if it helps customers adopt more AWS.’ IBM said, ‘That’s precisely what we want to do,’” said Copie. “We’re going through this process right now of three companies—Innovative, IBM and AWS—going to market to help every SMB leverage IBM software and do it on AWS versus any other cloud partner. It’s a huge deal. It’s so big.”

Why Partners Are Picking AWS Over Cloud Competitors

AWS was a pioneer in cloud computing and has held the leading market-share position for well over a decade.

In the third quarter, the cloud giant won a 34 percent share of the $57.5 billion worldwide cloud services market, up from a 33 percent share in 2021, according to Synergy Research Group.

Microsoft has been the runner-up for several years now, winning 21 percent of the global cloud services market in the third quarter, followed by Google at 11 percent.

cases, certified on AWS,” he said. “That makes a huge positive difference in customer success because we take the long-term view with customers and with partners.”

’Bold Ambition Is Not New To AWS’

A new Forrester Total Economic Impact study found AWS partners that invest in transforming their workforce through reskilling, upskilling and retention programs have a 229 percent return on investment and 29 percent higher gross margins.

One partner that has benefited greatly from AWS’ training push is Atos, one of the largest solution providers in the world with 112,000 employees and over $11 billion in revenue.

Michael Liebow, global head of Atos’ OneCloud business for the French channel giant, said AWS has provided a slew of training and certification programs for Atos that drove down costs and increased customer opportunities.

“Their programs have helped defer some of the costs of training our people,” said Liebow. “We’ve been thrilled to have that investment in our people to get more Atos people trained on the Amazon platform.”

Selipsky and Borno are focused on training and upskilling as many partners as possible.

“Bold ambition is not new to AWS, and we’ve taken that same big mentality and applied it to the skills gap,” said Borno.

SVP, GM, Cloud Solutions Group, Presidio

Selipsky said one reason channel partners are choosing AWS versus its cloud competitors is because of Amazon’s massive customer base and market dominance across the globe.

“We are, by a significant amount, the largest cloud provider with the largest business and the broadest customer base across all geographies and industries and use cases,” Selipsky said. “And that provides tremendous opportunities for our partners—and a much larger set of opportunities for partners—than they could have with any other cloud provider.”

Other reasons why partners are choosing AWS versus the cloud competition is due to the company’s “significant investments” in its partner ecosystem from both a short- and long-term standpoint. Selipsky points to the amount of funding being pushed toward training partners, particularly systems integrators.

“Customers insist that when personnel from [systems integrators] show up they be really well-trained and really well-qualified. We’ve worked with and invested a lot ourselves alongside those partners to ensure that their staff are both trained and, in many

“This effort pays for itself within the first six months for our partners, so we want to help them with that.”

In 2022, AWS expanded its re/Start reskilling programs across the globe, opened an AWS Skills Center in Arlington, Va., to support in-person learning and launched its new AWS Training Partner Social Impact program, which allows partners to offer customers a broad set of AWS skill development options by accessing government and public funding.

In total, AWS has a goal of training 29 million people by 2025. As of October, the company said it has helped over 13 million people thus far gain access to cloud computing skills through its

Presidio’s Big Bet On AWS

AWS partners are leveraging these training investments to drive more customer wins and AWS sales.

New York-based Presidio, a $5.4 billion solution provider, expects its AWS sales to increase 45 percent this year after AWS helped train around 500 Presidio sales and technical employees to become cloud-practitioner-certified over the span of about eight months.

“We made it mandatory that every field seller had to get cloud

free workforce programs.

‘We made it mandatory that every eld seller had to get cloud practitioner certi cation. We put together the curriculum with AWS, and AWS fully supported doing small groups of classes for us.’

Chris Cagnazzi,

practitioner certification,” said Chris Cagnazzi, senior vice presi dent and general manager for Presidio’s Cloud Solutions Group. “We put together the curriculum with AWS, and AWS fully sup ported doing small groups of classes for us.”

Presidio now has over 1,000 AWS certifications around DevOps, solution architecture, big data, system operations and security.

Historically known as a top Cisco and Dell Technologies partner, Presidio is now also placing a huge bet on AWS. This year, it formed a strategic collaboration partnership with AWS to co-develop new services and products, as well as drive AWS adoption.

Cagnazzi said the move to invest heavily in AWS is due to the company’s channel push, as AWS now views “the channel as a way to truly scale the business.”

For example, Presidio had a customer, a large professional sports conglomerate, looking to add managed services and improve management of its cloud spending. Although AWS was already in the account and could have pushed the customer to use AWS’ own services support team, AWS fully supported Presidio taking the lead with the customer.

“[AWS] did not blink an eye when we went over a full overview of what our strategy was in the client and how we felt that if we worked together, then we could not only drive for great transfor mation within the client, but we could also increase consumption of the platform,” said Cagnazzi. “They really partnered with us and helped support us in this managed services offering.”

After Presidio won the services deal, the professional sports customer recently awarded Presidio a new $15 million managed and professional services deal this year to help migrate workloads and create new applications.

“We’re doing some really unique things around building an application for a certain device that they use. AWS was super supportive, and I don’t think three or four years ago we would have had that same experience,” said Cagnazzi.

Cagnazzi said the “interlock” between Presidio, its field sellers, AWS and AWS’ Professional Services Organization was “so tightly knit that the motions from the customer were that we were viewed as one company solving a bunch of problems and outcomes for them.”

Partners Witnessing ‘Evolution In Action’

Atos’ Liebow has been working with AWS for nearly a decade, having previously partnered with the cloud company during his time at consulting giants Accenture and McKinsey. He said AWS is embracing partners like never before.

“One of AWS’ first principles is customer obsession. With Ruba, and with Adam’s return, you’re seeing both customer obsession and partner obsession. It’s a great thing being a partner to see that evolution in action,” said Liebow.

Atos is placing such a large bet on AWS that it has acquired several companies recently, including CloudReach, which was AWS’ 2021 Consulting Partner of the Year for the United Kingdom and Ireland.

Atos and AWS are working together to increase customer opportunities and drive sales around cloud migration, digital transformation and mainframe modernization.

“This notion around partner obsession, I’ve never seen them embrace the channel in quite the same way,” Liebow said. “That’s a top-down focus with Ruba, Adam and the teams,” he added.

With a bold channel strategy and massive white-space market opportunities ahead for cloud computing, Liebow is bullish about Atos and AWS’ future together.

“Cloud migration is still [in its infancy]. The large enterprise space has yet to really embrace the public cloud in a bold way,” he said. “The support and alignment with [AWS] is significant in terms of how to bring the rest of the market—particularly large enterprises—into alignment with the investment, the services portfolio and the innovation. So how do you do that? Well, what you’re starting to see in terms of AWS’ partner obsession are programs where AWS is aligned to driving that next evolution.”

One new partner program driving that next evolution is AWS Partner Paths.

Launched this year, Partner Paths provides a simplified and tailored experience to help partners differentiate themselves. The program includes benefits and AWS resources designed for each partner’s strengths and goals.

“Profitable growth requires differentiation that’s tied to their business models. We don’t view our partners as a common con sistent group; we want to celebrate their differentiation,” said Borno. “With Partner Paths, we look at their business model and guide them on a simpler journey with AWS.”

As partners progress, there are opportunities to differentiate them selves via competencies around industry verticals, managed services, horizontal offerings and specializations. “We want to make sure that they have the ability to differentiate so that they can solve those innovative, unique challenges that our customers have,” Borno said.

Partner Commitment Will ‘Continue For Decades’

With the majority of customer workloads still on-premises, the revenue growth opportunity in cloud migration and services over the next few years is massive.

Worldwide end-user spending on public cloud services is pro jected to reach $592 billion in 2023, up 21 percent year over year, according to new data from IT research firm Gartner.

As part of that nearly $600 billion, Gartner estimates end users will spend approximately $195 billion on cloud software as a service, $150 billion on cloud system infrastructure services and $42 billion on cloud management and security services.

All signs point to AWS becoming an even more influential com pany with the strongest foothold in the global cloud market.

With AWS’ annual run rate now exceeding $80 billion, including sales climbing 27 percent to $20.5 billion in the third quarter, Selipsky promises channel partners will continue to be top of mind for years to come.

“We will keep on innovating. We will keep on figuring out how to build value for customers with partners. And we will keep on ensuring that partners have increasingly strong businesses build ing alongside and on top of AWS,” said Selipsky. “I expect [our partner] commitment to continue for decades to come,” he said.

Adam Selipsky: Why Partners Should Pick AWS Versus Cloud Rivals

With over 100,000 partners enrolled in the AWS Partner Network, CEO Adam Selipsky is bullish about his company’s partner mindshare compared with cloud computing rivals such as Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.

In an interview with CRN, Selipsky explains AWS’ partner differentiation versus the competition and how AWS’ channel co-innovation and co-selling strategy is second to none.

What is AWS’ channel di erentiation?

One is we are, by a signifi cant amount, the largest cloud provider with the largest business and the broadest customer base across all geographies and industries and use cases. And that provides tremendous opportunities for our partners, and a much larger set of opportunities for partners, than they could have with any other cloud provider. So that’s one: just the sheer opportunity.

Second is the significant investments we’re making in the partner ecosystem. It’s still day one on our journey with partners. In 10, 20, 30 years from now, we think that partners will still be foundational to the value that AWS provides to customers.

Then just to drill in a little more specifically, we have invested tremendously in ensuring that our partners are trained, particularly our systems integrator partners.

Customers insist that when that personnel from SIs show up, that they be really well-trained and really well-qualified. We’ve worked with and invested a lot ourselves alongside those partners to ensure that their staff are both trained and, in many cases, certified on AWS. That makes a huge positive difference in customer success because we take the long-term view with customers and with partners.

Connect. Companies like Vodafone are really rethinking contact center operations. We and Accenture are working together there under the auspices of the Accenture Advanced Customer Engagement to create that joint value proposition and bring that contact center solution to Vodafone.

How are you co-selling and co-innovating with your channel partners to drive successful business outcomes?

I’m really excited about the innovations that we’ve made with partners, both to serve our customers better as well as to help create better businesses for our partners.

This is the 10th anniversary year of the AWS Partner Network as well as the AWS Marketplace. These were the world’s first cloud-native partner network and first cloud software marketplace. We’ve grown to over 100,000 partners from over 150 countries. By the way, 70 percent of those partners are outside of the U.S., so it’s not just a U.S.-focused business.

There are a lot of examples of things we’re really excited about in terms of how we’re working with partners. One example is the ISV Accelerate Program, which really gives our ISVs a clear and obvious path to successfully co-selling with AWS. It’s a very clear set of go-to-market steps that we take together.

In many cases, our own salespeople will be selling our partner services—and not an AWS service—if that’s what’s best for the customer. That’s really all part of taking the longterm view but always doing the right thing for the customer.

We have very deep and long-standing partnerships with the global systems integrators—whether you’re talking to Accenture, Deloitte, Capgemini, etc., as well as many more regional SIs, for example, Slalom—really across every industry in every geography.

Accenture is a major global SI that we have a very close relationship with. We have the Advanced Customer Engagement Solution, ACE+, with Accenture where they bundle their own solutions along with AWS.

For example, our contact center solution is called Amazon

When we have partners who have innovated and created incredible solutions with us and on top of us, then it becomes an easy decision to put that in front of a customer because it drives customer value.

We’ve also made significant investments to help create more customer demand, which benefits partners. We have a very significant go-to-market capability now across AWS—as you might imagine given the scale of our business—and we have many different ways that we bring partners along with that. You can really see the result in individual partners and the success that they’re experiencing. ■

Why should partners like MSPs, systems integrators and consultants invest and bet on AWS versus your cloud competitors?

Can you highlight an example where AWS is showcasing its long-term dedication to partners?

Broadcom Celebrates Women Of The Channel Leaders Who Drive Success

Broadcom is proud to celebrate and honor our women who were selected as Women of the Channel for 2022. Their commitment to Broadcom’s partners and customers is recognized through their achievements and exemplifies their hard work and dedication. We’d also like to recognize our extended team members from Televerde, included and represented here by Julie Blennis and Brianne Wunder. The Televerde team women work tirelessly behind the scenes driving initiatives that impact and deliver better outcomes for customers and partners. Our strategic relationship exemplifies Broadcom’s culture and spirit of partnership and innovation and contribute to Televerde’s larger mission of lifting others and contributing to the greater whole.

” I am privileged to work with a diverse and inspiring team whose dedication, creative thinking and execution embody Broadcom’s culture and spirit. Their strong leadership and attention to the everevolving needs of our partner ecosystem, enable Broadcom to deliver innovative programs and superior outcomes for partners and customers.

Cynthia Loyd VP, Global Partner, Enterprise and Commercial Sales

CHANNEL CHIEF 2022

Katheryne Chester Sr. Manager,

Sandy Stamler Global

Programs Manager

Brianne Wunder Project Manager, Global Demand Generation Programs

Tiffany Harris Director, Global Marketplace & Cloud Partner Sales

Marianne Kantor Regional Lead, Partner Marketing & Enablement Programs for Europe & International

Yvonne Massey Director,

Renee Kerns Head,

Julie Blennis Senior Partner Help Desk Specialist

Laura McGregor Falko Head, Global Partner Programs, Marketing & Enablement

CHANNEL CHIEF 2022 AND POWER 100

WOTC 2022 WOTC 2022 WOTC 2022 WOTC 2022

of the Products

Year

And The Trophies Go To ...

By CRN Staff

Our 2022 Products of the Year awards honor the leading partner-friendly products that launched over the last year as selected by the solution providers who bring these products to customers.

CRN editors selected finalists in 30 technology categories from among products that were launched or updated from September 2021 to September 2022. The categories ranged from mainstay channel products like laptops and multifunction printers to products in newer technology areas such as AI, the Internet of Things, and hyperconverged and hybrid cloud infrastructure.

We then asked solution providers to rate the products based on three subcategories: technology, revenue and profit, and customer need. The survey received more than 5,000 product ratings from solution providers, and the product with the highest overall score in each category was named the winner. Notably, a number of companies received top prizes in multiple product categories this year, including Cisco Systems, Palo Alto Networks and SentinelOne (two each), Microsoft with three and Hewlett Packard Enterprise with an impressive seven wins (five from the GreenLake portfolio and one each from HPE’s Aruba and Zerto companies).

What follows are the winners, subcategory winners and finalists for 2022.

APPLICATION PERFORMANCE

CISCO APPDYNAMICS

WINNER: OVERALL Cisco Systems’ application performance monitoring software, AppDynamics, offers real-time monitoring, performance and analytics tools via its cloudbased observability platform. The software gives solution providers the resources they need to address application issues and scalability and help their customers make more informed operational decisions as IT environments become more complex. AppDynamics is part of Cisco’s full-stack observability offering, which the company has called a big opportunity for solution providers, and it is pushing to have 100 percent of AppDynamics sales go through the channel. In the solution provider survey, AppDynamics outscored the competition across the technology, revenue and profit, and customer need subcategories.

Finalist: Datadog APM

Finalist: Dynatrace Software Intelligence Platform

Finalist: New Relic APM

Finalist: Splunk Observability

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: ENTERPRISE

MICROSOFT AZURE AI

WINNER: OVERALL Microsoft’s Azure AI portfolio of artificial intelligence services brings vision, speech, language and decision-making AI models to developers and data scientists building AI solutions. Users can build machine learning models with Jupyter Notebooks, Visual Studio Code and other tools as well as TensorFlow, PyTorch and additional open-source frameworks. Recent updates to the portfolio include improved image classification, tagging and object detection in Azure Computer Vision image analysis, and the ability to generate automatic model training code and configure email notifications with Azure Machine Learning. Azure AI scored highest overall, highest in technology and tied in customer need.

Subcategory Winner–Revenue and Profit: IBM Watson

Subcategory Winner Customer Need: IBM Watson and Microsoft Azure AI (tie)

Finalist: Amazon SageMaker

Finalist: Google Vertex AI

BIG DATA

DATABRICKS LAKEHOUSE PLATFORM

WINNER: OVERALL Data lakehouses combine traditional analytical data warehouse capabilities with a data lake–the latter a store of raw data in its original format. The Databricks Lakehouse Platform unifies data, analytics and AI tasks with comprehensive data governance and security. Databricks updated its flagship product in June with improved data warehousing performance and functionality, expanded data governance, new data-sharing capabilities (including an analytics marketplace), machine learning life-cycle improvements, data clean rooms for secure collaboration, and automatic cost optimization for ETL operations. Databricks scored highest overall in the solution provider survey and highest in revenue and profit.

Subcategory Winner–Technology, Customer Need: HPE Ezmeral Data Fabric

Finalist: Cloudera CDP One

Finalist: MariaDB SkySQL

Finalist: Snowflake Data Cloud

BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE AND ANALYTICS

HPE GREENLAKE FOR DATA FABRIC

WINNER: OVERALL Unveiled at the HPE Discover conference in June, HPE Greenlake for Data Fabric is a fully managed service that combines a hybrid analyticsready data fabric with GreenLake hardware, software and services. HPE Greenlake for Data Fabric, based on technology from Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s 2019 acquisition of MapR Technologies, is powered by HPE Ezmeral Data Fabric. HPE Greenlake for Data Fabric was the overall winner in this category in the solution provider survey, scored highest in revenue and profit, and tied in customer need.

Subcategory Winner Technology: Tableau

Subcategory Winner–Customer Need: HPE Greenlake for Data Fabric and ThoughtSpot Modern Analytics Cloud (tie)

Finalist: Microsoft Power BI

Finalist: Qlik Sense

COLLABORATION: ENTERPRISE

INTERMEDIA UNITE

WINNER: OVERALL Unite is Intermedia’s all-in-one Unified Communicationsas-a-Service platform. The cloud-first product offers unlimited calling, messaging, HD videoconferencing, analytics and third-party integrations, among other capabilities— features that are accessible by users via the desktop, desk phone or a mobile application. In November 2021 Intermedia introduced a significant new release of Unite that includes the company’s Contact-Center-as-a-Service application for customer-experience-minded businesses, especially those embracing hybrid work. Intermedia Unite was the overall winner in this category and scored highest in technology and customer need and tied in revenue and profit.

Subcategory Winner–Revenue and Profit: Intermedia Unite and Webex by Cisco (tie)

Finalist: Microsoft Teams

Finalist: RingCentral MVP

COLLABORATION: SMB

GOOGLE WORKSPACE

WINNER: OVERALL Google Workspace, previously known as G Suite, is Google Cloud’s suite of cloud-based collaboration and productivity tools including Gmail, Calendar, Meet, Chat, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Forms, Sites and more. The portfolio is especially popular among SMBs because of its competitive pricing, according to the company. Google Cloud in February launched a new free but limited version of Google Workspace called Google Workspace Essential Starter Edition for teams of up to 25 people. Google Workspace was the overall winner in this category, according to survey respondents, who also scored it highest in customer need

Subcategory Winner–Technology, Revenue and Profit: Carousel Office Collaboration Room-as-a-Service

Finalist: Asana

Finalist: DTEN ONboard

Finalist: Nextiva Workhub

CRM/ERP

SAP S/4HANA CLOUD

WINNER: OVERALL SAP S/4HANA Cloud is SAP’s flagship suite of integrated ERP applications for managing core business operations, including fi nancial (accounting, procurement and order processing), human resources management, supply chain management, and manufacturing and related logistics. The 2022 release of S/4HANA Cloud featured a number of signifi cant enhancements, including expanded use of AI and predic tive analytics in supply chain management and public sector applications, integration of SAP Analytics Cloud with financial reporting, and new capabilities in digital transformation, Indus try 4.0 and sustainability. SAP S/4HANA Cloud was the overall winner in this product category, sweeping all subcategories.

HYBRID CLOUD INFRASTRUCTURE

HPE GREENLAKE FOR PRIVATE CLOUD ENTERPRISE

WINNER: OVERALL HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Enterprise, part of the HPE GreenLake as-aservice platform portfolio, reimagines the private cloud experience by providing an automated, flexible, scalable pay-as-you-go enterprise private cloud. Unveiled in June 2022, HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Enterprise is built for cloudnative and traditional applications, while including modular infrastructure and software to support the deployment of bare metal, virtual machines and container workloads. In addition to being the overall winner, HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Enterprise garnered the highest survey scores in technology as well as revenue and profit.

Finalist: Microsoft Dynamics 365

Finalist: Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP

Finalist: Oracle NetSuite

Finalist: Salesforce Customer 360

DATA PROTECTION AND MANAGEMENT

ZERTO 9.5

WINNER: OVERALL

Zerto, acquired by HPE in 2021, develops data backup and recov ery technology that works with workloads running on Microsoft Azure, IBM Cloud, AWS, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud, Kubernetes, VMware and others. Zerto 9.5 was updated several times in 2022, with the latest update including the ability to choose a recovery data source, select a point in time and virtual machine from which to restore, and browse files and folders to restore using a simple wizard. Zerto 9.5 was the overall winner and had the highest score in technology.

Subcategory Winner–Revenue and Profit,

Customer Need: Rubrik Security Cloud

Finalist: Acronis Advanced Data Loss Prevention (DLP)

Finalist: Veeam Backup & Recovery v12

Finalist: Veritas NetBackup 10 with Cloud Scale Technology

Subcategory Winner–Customer Need: AWS Outposts

Finalist: Dell Apex

Finalist: Lenovo TruScale Infrastructure Services

Finalist: Microsoft Azure Stack HCI

HYPERCONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE

HPE GREENLAKE FOR HCI

WINNER: OVERALL

The HPE GreenLake for HCI uni fied cloud service eliminates the complexity in virtual machine infrastructure orchestration, fa cilitating global unified manage ment and monitoring of virtual machines—including in the public cloud—through GreenLake’s Data Service Cloud Console. It combines compute, networking and storage with modern hypervisors, automation capabilities and data services to support mixed virtual machine workloads at scale. HPE GreenLake for HCI was the overall winner in this product category and received the highest survey score in rev enue and profit.

Subcategory Winner–Technology: Cisco Hyperflex with AMD EPYC

Subcategory Winner Customer Need: Nutanix HCI

Finalist: Dell Technologies VxRail VMware Tanzu

Finalist: Scale Computing SC//Platform

INDUSTRY-STANDARD SERVERS

IBM POWER S1024

WINNER: OVERALL IBM’s Power S1024 server is designed for business-critical workloads in a multi-cloud world where data must be secure and accessible from anywhere in the network. The two-socket 4U server, which runs IBM AIX, IBM i or Linux, features transparent memory encryp tion that secures data when in transit between storage and the processor, a capability built in at the silicon level. Because the Power10 processor at the heart of the Power S1024 has double the cores of its predecessor, workloads can be consolidated on fewer systems, reducing software licensing, electrical and cool ing costs. The IBM Power S1024 was the overall winner in this category and received the highest survey score in customer need.

Subcategory Winner–Technology: Supermicro X12 BigTwin

Subcategory Winner Revenue and Profit: Lenovo ThinkSystem ST650 V2

Finalist: Dell PowerEdge R750xa

Finalist: HPE ProLiant RL300 Gen11 Server

INTERNET OF THINGS/EDGE

ARUBA CENTRAL NETCONDUCTOR

WINNER: OVERALL Aruba, an HPE company, in March un veiled Aruba Central NetConductor, a new set of capabilities in Aruba Central that uses AI technology to simplify and automate network policy provisioning, including for specific use cases such as IoT device on-boarding and manage ment. As networks become increasingly complex and distributed, solution providers use Aruba Central NetConductor to define network policies, centralize the management of far-flung net works, and automate network configurations in wired, wireless and WAN infrastructures—all without worrying about the under lying network construct. Aruba Central NetConductor was the overall winner in this category and received the highest survey score in customer need.

Subcategory Winner Technology, Revenue and

Profit: Eaton 5PX Gen2

Finalist: HPE Edgeline

Finalist: Scale Computing SC//Platform

Finalist: Schneider Electric EcoStruxure Micro Data Center

LAPTOPS

HP ELITE DRAGONFLY

G3

WINNER: OVERALL HP Inc.’s Elite Dragon fly G3 is an ultraportable, lightweight clamshell note book. The 2.2-pound note book offers touch-screen and non-touch versions, with the top of the product line providing a 3,000 x 2,000-pixel OLED screen for best color and contrast. The base model is powered by an Intel Core i5-1235U processor with 16 GB of RAM and a 512-GB solid-state drive. The unit features re cycled materials in slate blue or natural silver. The Elite Dragonfly G3 swept all subcategories, including technology, revenue and profit, and customer need.

Finalist: Asus Zenbook Pro Duo 14

Finalist: Dell Precision 7670/7770

Finalist: Dynabook Portégé x301-k

Finalist: Lenovo ThinkPad X13s

Finalist: MacBook Air M2

MULTIFUNCTION PRINTERS

XEROX

VERSALINK C7100 SERIES

WINNER: OVERALL Xerox released the next genera tion of its popular Versalink series of multifunction printers in June. The new C7100 offers color print ing capabilities. Other features in clude copy/print/scan and optional fax functions, copying and print ing on up to 11 x 17-inch paper, a tablet-like user interface, 130-sheet single-pass automatic document feeder and printing resolution of 1,200 x 2,400 pixels. The C7100 can perform many functions as touchless with the Mobile Link App and is powered by Xerox’s ConnectKey technology that automates workflows. The Xerox VersaLink C7100 Series swept all subcategories, including tech nology, revenue and profit, and customer need.

Finalist: Brother MFC-J6940DW

Finalist: Canon PIXMA TR520

Finalist: HP Color LaserJet Pro M283fdw

Finalist: Lexmark MB3442i Mono MFP

PRODUCTS OF THE YEAR

NETWORKING: ENTERPRISE

HPE GREENLAKE FOR ARUBA

WINNER: OVERALL HPE GreenLake for Aruba, part of the HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud architecture, is a network-as-aservice offering that’s designed to help organizations quickly and efficiently procure and deploy network resources. A major HPE GreenLake release in March 2022 added new edge-connectivity-as-a-service offerings to HPE GreenLake for Aruba, including indoor wireless, outdoor wire less, remote wireless, wired access, wired aggregation, wired core, SD-branch and user experience insight. HPE GreenLake for Aru ba was the overall winner in this product category and received the highest survey score in customer need.

Subcategory Winner–Technology: Juniper Networks Secure Edge

Subcategory Winner–Revenue and Profit: Aruba

CX 10000 Switch Series

F inalist : Cisco Catalyst with Meraki management option

Finalist: Extreme Networks CoPilot

NETWORKING: SMB

CISCO MERAKI

WINNER: OVERALL Cisco Meraki is a portfolio of cloudcontrolled Wi-Fi, routing and secu rity products. According to the company, the product line is es pecially popular in the SMB space because of its simplicity and ease of use, due in no small part to its single web-based dash board. In June Cisco extended the Meraki dashboard’s abilities with a cloud management option, allowing it to be used to man age more of Cisco’s networking products, including its Catalyst line of access switches. Cisco Meraki was the overall winner in this product category and scored highest in customer need.

Subcategory Winner Technology: Cradlepoint NetCloud Exchange

Subcategory Winner–Revenue and Profit: EnGenius Technologies Wi-Fi 6E Access Point

Finalist: Aruba Instant On AP25

Finalist: Linksys/Belkin Hydra Pro 6

POWER PROTECTION AND MANAGEMENT

CYBERPOWER

3-PHASE

MODULAR WINNER: OVERALL

The CyberPower 3-Phase Modu lar UPS protects high-end system components, corporate servers, backup equipment and sensitive electronics. Solution providers can customize the system for custom ers that have demanding redun dancy power needs in data center and mission-critical workloads. At 2U high, the top-of-the-line system offers flexibility, space savings and efficiency. CyberPower was the overall winner in this product category and received the highest survey scores in cus tomer need, and revenue and profit and tied in technology.

Subcategory Winner Technology: CyberPower 3-Phase Modular and Vertiv Liebert GXT5 (tie)

Finalist: Eaton xModular Finalist: Schneider Electric 24V DC Easy Finalist : Tripp Lite SmartOnline 1U Rack-Mount UPS Systems

PROCESSORS

NVIDIA GEFORCE RTX WINNER: OVERALL Nvidia’s GeForce RTX line of GPUs is the foundation for Nvid ia’s visual computing platform, incorporated into graphics cards, laptops and desktop PCs. The GPUs are used to power a range of high-performance applications, including gaming, scientific visualization, product design, and film and video production. In June the company launched the GeForce RTX 3080 TI, powered by Nivida’s Ampere architecture. It features third-generation Ten sor Cores for DLSS performance boosts and second-generation RT Cores to accelerate ray tracing. Nvidia GeForce RTX was the overall winner in this category and received the highest survey scores in technology and customer need.

Subcategory Winner–Revenue and Profit: AMD Ryzen Pro 6000

Finalist: AMD Ryzen 5000 C-Series

Finalist: Apple M1 Ultra

Finalist: Intel 13th Gen Intel Core desktop processor

Finalist: Intel vPro platform, powered by 12th Gen Intel Core

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PRODUCTS OF THE YEAR

PUBLIC CLOUD

MICROSOFT AZURE

WINNER: OVERALL Microsoft Azure provides a slew of cloud services, including Infrastructure as a Service, managed data base services, and services around analytics, applica tion development, IoT and security. At Microsoft Build in May, Microsoft unveiled new Azure offerings including Azure OpenAI Service, AI dash boards for Azure Machine Learning, and a web application routing add-on for Azure Kubernetes Service. Microsoft Azure was the overall winner in this product category and received the top survey score in customer need.

SECURITY: CLOUD

PALO ALTO NETWORKS PRISMA CLOUD

WINNER: OVERALL Security and DevOps teams can use Prisma Cloud to secure applica tions from the coding stage to deployment. Pris ma Cloud, Palo Alto Net works’ Cloud Native Ap plication Protection Platform (CNAPP), works with cloud service companies and application platforms to provide code-to-cloud se curity. Recent updates include anomaly policies for AWS Domain Name System activity, identity and access management control, granular role-based access control, and unified policy and alerts for compute workloads. Prisma Cloud was the overall winner in this product category, receiving the highest scores in the technology and revenue and profit subcategories and tying in customer need.

Subcategory Winner Technology, Revenue and Profit: IBM Cloud

Finalist: Amazon Web Services Finalist: Google Cloud

SD-WAN

PALO ALTO NETWORKS PRISMA SD-WAN

WINNER: OVERALL Palo Alto Networks has been zeroing in on SD-WAN since its acquisition of CloudGenix in 2020, leading with its Prisma SD-WAN for connecting and securing data centers, branch offices and large campus sites. With Prisma SD-WAN, the company is focused on single-vendor secure access service edge and third-party integrations with secure service edge vendors. Prisma SD-WAN is a cloud-delivered ser vice that implements application-defined autonomous SD-WAN and includes Instant-On Network edge appliances and orchestra tion. Prisma SD-WAN was the overall winner in this category and garnered the highest scores in technology and customer need.

Subcategory Winner–Revenue and Profit: Fortinet

Secure SD-WAN

Finalist: Cisco SD-WAN

F inalist : HPE Aruba EdgeConnect Microbranch

Solution

Finalist: Versa Networks SD-WAN

Subcategory Winner–Customer Need: Palo Alto Networks Prisma Cloud and Cisco Umbrella (tie)

Finalist: Check Point CloudGuard

Finalist: CrowdStrike Falcon Horizon Finalist: Microsoft Defender Cloud Apps

SECURITY: EMAIL

MIMECAST

WINNER: OVERALL An analysis of more than 1.3 billion emails a day from 40,000 customers worldwide combined with the AI and machine learn ing models is the power behind Mimecast’s email protection tools. Mimecast provides protection from phishing, ransomware, social engineering, payment fraud, impersonation and other email-based attacks. Recent updates to the email security toolset include improvements to file attachment pro tections and new misaddressed email protection capabilities. Mimecast was the overall winner in this product category and received the highest score in the revenue and profit subcategory.

Subcategory Winner–Technology: Proofpoint Email Security and Protection

Subcategory Winner Customer Need: Microsoft Defender for Office 365

Finalist: Barracuda Network Email Protection Finalist: Cloudflare Area 1

How To Succeed by

Seeing the Whole Story

ExaGrid’s Intelligent Backup Storage Fosters Business Continuity

Q.How can the channel play a role with helping organizations with business continuity?

A. We hope to raise awareness in the channel with a deep look into business continuity as it relates to cybersecurity and disaster recovery through tiered backup storage. Planning for the unknown is vital and it begins and ends with company data and backup storage.

Q.What should you consider when securing your company data?

A. Data must be backed up quickly and reliably so that it’s ready for restore. ExaGrid offers the only tiered backup storage architecture which allows for backup and restore performance as fast as disk and deduplication without impact on performance. ExaGrid Tiered Backup Storage is the best of both worlds with a front-end disk-cache Landing Zone and a non-network-facing tier repository for storing all the data in a deduplicated format for storage savings. The other key feature of the tiered architecture is that it’s non-network-facing, which provides a tiered air gap with delayed deletes and immutable data objects and ensures that all backup data is available after a cyberattack such as a ransomware attack.

Q.What are some common business issues related to backup storage?

A. While backup applications are usually top of mind, backup storage can often be overlooked and leads to poor performance and overpaying for storage in the backup environment. In addition, the importance of utilizing backup storage as a key part of the recovery process after a ransomware attack. Preparing efficiently for disaster recovery is also a big part of the equation.

Q.How does reliability and redundancy impact a business?

A. ExaGrid’s architecture and implementation have multiple facets of reliability and redundancy protecting the customer’s data at every step, allowing organizations that are considering disk-based backup appliances to make informed vendor selections. Organizations using a disk-based backup appliance to hold their invaluable backup data should carefully consider how the appliance is designed for reliability and redundancy. Compromises in a product’s architecture or implementation may reduce product cost, but those savings are quickly dwarfed by the risk and real cost to an organization of a loss of some or all backup data

ExaGrid has an innovative reseller program and has a large focus on working with the channel. ExaGrid is also the only vendor completely focused on backup storage, so we make sure to offer the best features and offer flexibility, scalability, unrivaled customer support and high customer satisfaction.

Bill Andrews CEO and President

”Protection from cybersecurity and disaster recovery are primary concerns for organizations today. ExaGrid offers a unique Tiered Backup Storage approach to ensure that attackers cannot compromise the backup data, allowing organizations to be confident that they can restore the affected primary storage.

”

SECURITY: ENDPOINT PROTECTION

SENTINELONE SINGULARITY FOR ENDPOINT

WINNER: OVERALL

A product within the SentinelOne Singularity XDR platform, Singular ity for Endpoint helps security opera tions centers and IT operations per sonnel protect against a wide range of cyberthreats. Among its features, Singularity for Endpoint delivers dif ferentiated endpoint protection and response capabilities. It offers dy namic device discovery, greater visibility and actionability, rapid response and fast time to value. In June SentinelOne unveiled a new vulnerability mapping feature that uses multiple Senti nelOne technologies to automate threat hunting, detection and response. SentinelOne Singularity was the overall winner in this category and swept the technology, revenue and profit, and cus tomer need subcategories.

Finalist: CrowdStrike Falcon Insight XDR

Finalist: Microsoft Defender for Business

Finalist: Sophos Intercept X Endpoint

Finalist: VMware Carbon Black Endpoint

SECURITY: IDENTITY AND ACCESS MANAGEMENT

FORGEROCK

IDENTITY PLATFORM

WINNER: OVERALL

The ForgeRock Identity Platform provides identity and access man agement security capabilities in onpremises and multi-cloud environ ments and in hybrid scenarios for workers, customers, workflows, de vices and other entities. The platform delivers zero trust security, protects against account takeover and fraud, and provides identity governance and administration. Recent additions to the platform include improving how keys are published for remote consent, a configuration provider note, ReCaptcha v3 support, scripted sup port for Java extension points and a node for storing custom cook ies. The ForgeRock Identity Platform was the overall winner and had the highest score in revenue and profit.

Subcategory Winner Technology, Customer Need: Google Cloud Identity

Finalist: CyberArk Identity Security

Finalist: Microsoft Defender for Identity

Finalist: Okta Identity Cloud

SECURITY: MANAGED DETECTION AND RESPONSE

SENTINELONE SINGULARITY XDR

WINNER: OVERALL SentinelOne’s Singularity XDR has been described as an “outof-the-box” extended detection and response platform. Singu larity XDR assists enterprises in monitoring, tracking and contextualizing data across all enterprise endpoints, clouds and identities. SentinelOne recently unveiled product integrations with Mandiant (now part of Google) and its threat intelligence and incident response capabilities to improve threat detection, triage, hunting and response processes amid an increase in so phisticated cyberattacks. SentinelOne Singularity XDR swept all survey subcategories.

Finalist: Arctic Wolf Managed Detection and Response

Finalist: CrowdStrike Falcon Insight XDR Finalist: Cybereason Managed Detection and Response

Finalist: Sophos Managed Detection and Response

SECURITY: NETWORK

FORTINET

FORTIGATE NEXT GENERATION FIREWALL

WINNER: OVERALL Fortinet’s Fortigate Next Genera tion Firewall can outperform tradi tional firewalls because of advanced functions such as deep-packet in spection, intrusion prevention, advanced malware detection, ap plication control, and overall increased network visibility through inspection of encrypted traffic, according to the company. Earlier this year Fortinet introduced Fortigate 1000F, its latest series that has more than seven times faster firewall throughput. Fortinet said the offering also has lower power consumption, or 83 per cent fewer watts per Gbps of firewall throughput, compared with competitive offerings. Fortinet Fortigate Next Generation Firewall was the overall winner in this category and had the highest scores in technology and in revenue and profit.

Subcategory Winner Customer Need: SonicWall Next Generation Firewall

Finalist: Check Point Quantum

Finalist: Cisco Umbrella

Finalist: Palo Alto Next Generation Firewall

How To Succeed

New VIPRE Partner Community Solidifies Channel-First Strategy

Q.What can you tell us about VIPRE’s new partner program?

A. Our partner program is called the VIPRE Partner Community because we want to build more than just a network, but a community of happy, inspired partners that have no barriers in front of them to be successful with our teams and solutions. In our community, we got rid of the old metal-based, tiered approach and we want to collaborate with our partners in a way they feel comfortable. We have three levels: Onboarded, Ramped Up and Amplified. The partner has full control of their level depending how much they want to invest in us. Revenue is one leading indicator on a partner’s commitment, but not the only thing we look for. We are excited to incentivize partners with our highest rewards levels if they’re engaged and working well with us.

Q.How does VIPRE execute its channel-first strategy and why are you so invested in the channel?

A. Since July, we made an eight-figure investment into our channel business. We launched our new partner program, revamped our partner portal, doubled our channel sales team, restructured them regionally to better assist our partners, aligned our named/end user sales teams to our channel organization for co-selling and collaboration and opened our product portfolio to make it easier to sell the VIPRE solutions suite. By taking these steps, we will inject immediate revenue into our partner community with opportunities for massive future growth

Q.Can you tell us about your experiences with your partner base?

A. For the longest time, VIPRE was a channel friendly organization, and we did an excellent job of checking all the boxes. The channel has always been important, but we could have done better as a partner. In the second half of this year, we made the turn to a channel-first model, and with our reinvestment, we hope to convert and attract more engaged partners to our community. Following this shift to a channel-first strategy, the next phase in our evolution I call “partner fanatical.” I have noticed many companywide decisions now starting with the partner in mind. With all the minutiae of our day-to-day activities, we are asking ourselves “does this make sense to our partner community,” and “is what we are doing making it easier and fun for our partners to work with us?”

”Our partners are the best the industry has to offer, and we are committed to their growth by providing them business, technical and marketing support. Our channel community has been the roots of our business for years and we are humbled to provide the best growth environment.

”

Marc Malafronte Director of ChannelsNorth America, VIPRE Security Group

Seeing the Whole Story

PRODUCTS OF THE YEAR

STORAGE:

ENTERPRISE

HPE GREENLAKE FOR BLOCK STORAGE

WINNER: OVERALL HPE GreenLake for Block Stor age is part of the GreenLake asa-service platform. This year HPE expanded its GreenLake portfolio with HPE GreenLake for Block Storage, a Storage-as-a-Service ca pability featuring self-service and a 100 percent availability guar antee for mission-critical environments. HPE GreenLake for Block Storage is a consumption-based service that allows users to dynam ically scale capacity up or down as needed and lets businesses meet SLAs with mission-critical and general-purpose block storage tiers. HPE GreenLake for Block Storage was the overall winner, had the highest score in customer need and tied in revenue and profit.

Subcategory Winner Technology: IBM FlashSystem Cyber Vault

Subcategory Winner–Revenue And Profit: HPE GreenLake for Block Storage and NetApp AFF A900 (tie)

Finalist: Dell Apex Data Storage Services

Finalist: Pure Storage FlashBlade//S

STORAGE: SMB

SYNOLOGY RS822RP+

WINNER: OVERALL Synology manufactures a range of SAN and NAS storage systems for small businesses to enterprises in desktop to rackmount form factors. In June Synology introduced its RackStation RS822+ and RS822RP+ storage systems in its Plus line, targeting smaller deployments, edge storage and branch offices. These are 1U format systems with four drive bays to scale up to eight hard drives or SSDs using an optional external 1U JBOD. The DSM operating system offers built-in central management, high-availability clusters, security, and file management for managing, syncing and sharing files. The Synology RS822RP+ swept the scoring for all subcategories.

STORAGE: SOFTWARE-DEFINED

VMWARE VSAN+

WINNER: OVERALL Leveraging its virtualization expertise, VMware moved early into software-defined storage with its VSAN product and VMware HCI softwaredefined hyperconverged infrastructure technologies. The com pany took it a step further this year with its VMware vSAN+ hyperconverged infrastructure offering that extends vSAN to cloud-connected services to help IT administrators central ize management and improve vSAN environment efficiency. vSAN+ runs on standard x86 servers to pool SSDs and hard drives into a shared datastore with enterprise-grade security and scale. vSAN+ is managed via per-virtual-machine stor age policies and connects to external cloud services. VMware vSAN+ swept the scoring for all subcategories.

Finalist: DataCore Bolt

Finalist: OSNexus QuantaStor 5.12

Finalist: Panzura CloudFS Data Flex Release

Finalist: StorPool Storage v20

TABLETS

MICROSOFT SURFACE PRO 8

WINNER: OVERALL Microsoft Surface Pro 8, the newest model of Microsoft’s flagship Windows tablet, hit the market in September and offered significant updates over its prede cessor. The Surface Pro 8 offers several configu rations, including a 3GHz Intel Core i7-1185GY with quad core, 16 GB of LPDDR4x RAM, a 13-inch QHD screen at 2,800 x 1,920 resolution, 256 GB of SSD storage and a 1,080p IR web cam. The Surface Pro 8 is compatible with the Surface Slim Pen 2 and plugs directly into the Surface Pro Signature Keyboard. The Surface Pro 8 was the overall winner in this product category and had the highest scores in technology and customer need.

Finalist: Asustor Lockerstor 2 Gen2

Finalist: iXsystems TrueNAS Scale

Finalist: Qnap TS-410E

Finalist: Western Digital SanDisk Professional Pro-Blade SSD Mag

Subcategory Winner–Revenue and Profit: Lenovo

Yoga Tab 13

Finalist: Apple iPad Pro

Finalist: Dell Latitude 7220 Rugged Extreme Tablet

Finalist: Samsung Galaxy Tab S7

How To Succeed

by Seeing the Whole Story

Philips: Emerging Display Brand Offering A Strong Value Proposition For Partners

A. As the Director for North America, I oversee our B2B organization. Our team is comprised of five additional members: Jeff Poplawski, Distribution Channel Manager; Thomas Crean, CDW & Northeast TAM; Erica McCoy, Southeast TAM; Kyle Ledoux, Central TAM; and Elijah Johnson, West TAM. They support the IT channel from both the distribution and sales aspects of the business. The team manages and enhances the go-to-market process for our Philips products.

A. Our reseller customers can source our products through one of our distribution partners (D&H, Ingram, TD Synnex, ASI). Our sales team manages the reseller accounts within their assigned geographical territories, supporting the reseller community, from large DMR accounts to SMB customers. We work with all reseller types including DMR, VAR and SMB because our end-user demand varies greatly in B2B, so we maintain a healthy balance.

Q.What is Philips’ product focus and what verticals does it serve?

A. Our product offerings start with 15.6-inch portable monitors and scale up to 49-inch ultrawide monitors. We have a range of offerings that provide solutions for everyone from high-end content creators to organizations that require low power usage to mobile PCs for professionals on the go. Our models are built with features that protect the well-being and comfort of the user while providing cutting edge technology like Mini-LED and 4K. Our four-year advance replacement warranty is not only a year longer than our competitors’, but also reduces the total cost of ownership for customers. We also ship replacement units immediately to reduce downtime for mission-critical functions. Philips monitors have something for every end user, and we’ve found success supporting our government, education, commercial and enterprise customers.

Q.How does Philips support the channel through its programs?

A. Our go-to-market strategy offers a two-pronged approach as we dedicate resources to support both the distribution and reseller aspects of the channel. These programs and incentives benefit them in many ways including profitability, marketing and postsales care with our best-in-class warranty. We’re dedicated to developing partnerships to achieve growth together. Distribution is integral, so we have rebates, promotions and marketing and sales programs in place with these important channel providers that assist us in getting our Philips products in the hands of the end users. Resellers are an essential business component, so we’ve created a partner portal and a tiered Partner Loyalty Program to coincide with other promotions and incentives.

”

Director, North America

Philips Monitors Envision Peripherals, Inc.

”

These partnerships are extremely important to us, so we’re dedicated to developing our partners to achieve growth together.

Ryan Peka

Q.Can you tell us a bit about Philips Monitors, your organization’s structure and how the B2B team supports the IT channel?

Q.What types of customers and resellers does Philips work with?

By Rick Whiting

Leading-Edge Products Point The Way TECH INNOVATORS

The pace of technology innovation, driven by megatrends like cloud computing, automation and digital transformation, continues to accelerate. And the massive shift to hybrid work/ work-from-home practices brought about by the pandemic has spurred rapid IT development in such areas as communications and collaboration software, remote access to applications and data, and security that extends to employees working outside the office security perimeter.

Amid these rapid shifts, forward-thinking vendors have developed new and updated products that meet these needs. These span IT mainstay technologies like networking hardware, data storage, laptops and power management. But they also include offerings in newer areas such as automation, edge computing, the Internet of Things and hybrid cloud infrastructure. The 2022 CRN Tech Innovator Awards showcase offerings that provide significant advances in IT—and growth opportunities for solution providers—across 38 technology categories. The winners were chosen by CRN editors based on uniqueness, technological ingenuity and best fit with customer and solution provider needs.

APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT AND DEVOPS

Winner: GitLab 15

At a time when every company is a software company, organizations are increasingly looking to development teams to create more innovative products and drive business results. GitLab 15 is the latest iteration of GitLab’s One DevOps Platform, which shortens development cycle times, improves developer productivity and reduces costs. The platform provides AI, continuous security and compliance, visibility and observability, enterprise agile planning, and workflow automation for data science workloads. With security and compliance incorporated in every step, GitLab 15 allows developers and security professionals to collaborate around business-critical code, keeping security at the forefront of the software development life cycle.

Finalists :

Cycode Next Gen SCA

Katalon Visual Testing

Octopus Deploy

Opsera SaaS DevOps

Scan here to see the full 2022 Tech Innovators database on CRN.com.

AUTOMATION

Winner : Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2 introduces major features that allow customers to manage more consistent and reliable automation at massive scale across hybrid and multicloud environments and the edge. Fully restructured for a hybrid cloud world, Ansible Automation Platform 2 adds self-contained automation capabilities while shifting automation more deeply into the application development life cycle, making it easier for IT teams to address needs at scale across varied environments and systems in a standardized way. Ansible Automation Platform 2 offers a cloud-native architecture and new collaboration and developer tools for creating, testing, distributing and managing automation content.

Finalists :

Aisera AI Service Experience Platform

Gluware 4.3–Network RPA and Intelligent Network

Automation

Resolve Actions Express (SaaS version)

UiPath Platform 2022.4

BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE AND ANALYTICS

Winner: Domino Data Lab Domino 5.0

The Domino 5.0 MLOps platform helps teams improve the speed, qual ity and impact of data science at scale. Domino centralizes data science work and infrastructure for collaboratively building, training, deploying and managing models more efficiently. It accelerates model development and deployment, reduces data and infrastructure complexity and costs, and increases collaboration for code-first data science teams. With new capabilities such as autoscaling clusters, data connectors and automated insight, Domino 5.0 facilitates the end-to-end data science life cycle.

Finalists : Ahana Cloud for Presto Incorta Analytics Data Hub for Finance Tibco Spotfire

CLOUD TOOLS AND MANAGEMENT

Winner: Cisco AppDynamics Cloud

Cisco AppDynamics Cloud is a cloud-native observability plat form for modern applications based on increasingly com plex, distributed architectures and services. The platform was purpose-built to observe cloud-native applications at scale, accel erate detection and resolution of performance issues, and deliver actionable insight into application performance and security. AppDynamics Cloud enables collaboration across teams, includ ing DevOps, site reliability engineers and other key business stakeholders, to achieve common benchmarks like service-level objectives and organizational KPIs. The platform focuses on sim plicity, usability and intuitiveness to empower IT teams to deliver key digital experiences for application users.

Finalists :

Extreme Networks ExtremeCloud IQ CoPilot

Nerdio Manager for MSP

Nirmata Cloud Native Policy Management

Palo Alto Networks Prisma Cloud Infrastructure as Code

BUSINESS SOFTWARE

Winner : Intuit QuickBooks Payroll

QuickBooks Payroll helps small businesses hire, pay and support their employees by providing access to fullservice payroll capabilities, automated and streamlined workflows, and support for tax calculations and filings. QuickBooks Payroll also pro vides access to health benefits and gives small businesses the ability to efficiently manage and communicate with their workforce onthe-go via mobile experiences and a seamless integration of time data with QuickBooks Online. Recent enhancements include a redesigned Workforce employee portal to simplify employee expe riences, the addition of more controls for how and when automatic payroll is processed, upgraded reports for businesses working with contractors, and faster setup when changing payroll providers.

DATA AND INFORMATION MANAGEMENT

Winner : Aparavi Data Intelligence and Automation Platform 2.0

Aparavi empowers organiza tions to find and unlock the value of their data wherever it resides, as well as miti gate risks and reduce storage requirements and costs. The cloud-based Aparavi Data Intelligence and Automation Platform finds, automates, governs and consolidates distributed data using data intelligence and automation.Aparavi helps transform data into a competitive asset and make it more accessible for data analytics, machine learning and other tasks. The platform can clean data and archive it to off-site targets, such as public cloud or object storagecompatible targets, reducing a customer’s on-premises storage footprint by up to 40 percent and making data less vulnerable.

Finalists :

Aerospike Database 6

Cribl Edge

M-Files Smart Migration

SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer

YugabyteDB 2.15

TECH INNOVATORS

DATA PROTECTION SOFTWARE

Winner: Infinidat InfiniSafe

InfiniSafe delivers com prehensive cyber-resilience capabilities to help thwart and recover from cyberattacks across Infinidat’s entire enterprise storage platforms: InfiniBox, InfiniBox SSA II and InfiniGuard. The tech nology creates environments with the full features of immutable snapshots, logical air-gapping, a fenced forensic environment and near-instantaneous recovery. Providing a common cyberresilience system across primary and secondary storage makes it easier for partners to support, sell and service it, and allows storage to be part of a comprehensive corporate cybersecurity strategy, expanding partner margin and revenue opportunities.

Finalists :

Asigra Tigris Data Protection

HYCU Protégé for AWS

Veeam Backup & Replication v11a Veritas NetBackup 10 Zerto 9.5

DISPLAYS

Winner : Samsung The Wall All-in-One IAB

Samsung’s The Wall All-in-One IAB is an enormous high-definition, fully immersive modular display that aims to transform corporate and residential spaces. The Wall IAB has a display thickness of just 49mm and the slim, bezel-less infinity design allows the display to blend seamlessly into its surroundings without disrupting the desired vision within and beyond the screen. The product boasts a significantly improved installation process: The display features a direct input connection on the screen without a separate device, creating a clean and convenient setup and allowing the combination of two 4K 146-inch screens side by side to create a 32:9 form-factor model.

Finalist:

ViewSonic Omni VX1755 Portable Monitor

EDGE COMPUTING

Winner : Scale Computing SC//Fleet Manager

Available as part of the Scale Computing Platform, SC//Fleet Manager is a cloud-hosted monitoring and management offering built for hyperconverged edge computing infrastructure at scale. The technology consoli dates real-time conditions for a fleet of clusters running Scale Computing HyperCore, scaling from one to over 50,000 clusters, including storage and compute resources for edge computing deployments. SC//Fleet Manager allows IT administrators to quickly identify issues using a single pane of glass and drill down into a specific cluster to diagnose and fix any problem, making it easier to manage and monitor the health of distributed IT infrastructure.

Finalists :

F5 Distributed Cloud Platform

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 for Edge Computing Stratus Technologies Second Generation ztC Edge

HYBRID CLOUD INFRASTRUCTURE

Winner: Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus

Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus is designed as a single hybrid cloud platform that helps enterprises develop, deploy, run and manage applications more securely at scale. It builds on the capabilities of the Red Hat OpenShift enterprise Kubernetes platform to provide a consistent way to secure, protect, store and manage applications throughout the software life cycle across clusters and the complete hybrid cloud. With OpenShift Platform Plus, IT operations and security teams can minimize operational risk, improve developer productivity, and support applications spanning multiple infrastructures and clouds. And it provides everything organizations need for a DevSecOps approach to managing clusters across hybrid cloud systems.

Finalists :

Cisco Nexus 9800 Series Modular Switches

F5 Distributed Cloud Platform

HYPERCONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE

Winner : Dell VxRail Satellite and Dynamic Nodes

VxRail is a hypercon verged infrastructure offering jointly engi neered by Dell Technologies and VMware. At its heart is the VxRail HCI System Software, delivering full-stack integration, automated end-to-end life-cycle management and a consistent operational model for efficiency and simplicity. Dell introduced new VxRail Satellite Nodes and Dynamic Nodes to help IT teams address changing infrastructure needs. Satellite Node deployments give users the ability to expand VxRail offerings into small and remote locations while providing consistent operations across the IT landscape. Dynamic Nodes utilize VMware HCI Mesh or Dell storage arrays as primary storage, providing the ability to asymmetrically scale compute and storage as needed.

IT INFRASTRUCTURE MONITORING

Winner: Cisco ThousandEyes Internet Insights: Application Outages

Application Outages is the latest addition to Cisco ThousandEyes Internet Insights, providing an end-toend view of SaaS application performance on a global scale. IT teams gain real-time and historic views into the availability of SaaS applications such as Salesforce, Slack, Microsoft Teams and ServiceNow. When outages occur, Application Outages correlates data with the SaaS domain, instantly identifying the impact and scope, delivering a new layer of capabilities, and empowering proactive communication and remediation. Application Outages is powered by ThousandEyes Internet Insights collective intelligence and does not require deployment or instrumentation.

Finalists : GoTo Resolve

New Relic Infrastructure Monitoring

INTERNET OF THINGS

Winner: AWS IoT ExpressLink AWS IoT ExpressLink connectiv ity software powers a range of hardware modules developed by AWS partners such as Espressif, Infineon and U-blox. The connec tivity modules include software that implements AWS-mandated secu rity requirements, enabling OEMs to build secure IoT devices that con nect to the cloud and seamlessly integrate with a range of AWS services. AWS IoT ExpressLink modules are preconfigured with cloud connectivity and security technology and allow developers to focus their design efforts on building innovative applications, slash development times from years to weeks, reduce develop ment costs and accelerate time to market.

Finalists :

Forescout Continuum Platform

Ooma AirDial

Viakoo Action Platform

LAPTOPS AND MOBILE DEVICES

Winner: Panasonic Connect Toughbook 40

The Panasonic Connect Toughbook 40 combines the reliability and ruggedness of the Toughbook brand with more power, speed and connectivity for mission-critical industries. The Toughbook 40 is lighter than its previous genera tion while incorporating a larger 14-inch, full-high-definition touch screen, a color-selectable backlit keyboard and other customizable features like hot-swappable bat teries, expanded memory and user-replaceable storage. The new touchpad is 60 percent larger and more sensitive than previous models, enabling better functionality with gloves and in extreme conditions. The laptop’s advanced docking support includes quad pass-through connectors for faster speeds and stronger signals.

Finalists :

Acer Chromebook R753T

Zebra Technologies ET4x-HC Series Tablets

TECH INNOVATORS

MSP RMM PLATFORMS

Winner: ConnectWise RMM

ConnectWise RMM is built on Asio, a modern cloud architecture designed to provide flexibility, perfor mance, extensibility and security to meet the grow ing demands of the SMB market. The platform aggregates both software and human ele ments, covers the spectrum of do-it-yourself and do-it-for-you delivery options, and integrates an intelligent automation engine that provides out-of-the-box automation capabilities MSPs need to deliver customized services. Other product highlights include a single, intuitive interface that allows MSPs to manage their tech stack and a simple on-boarding and adoption process that enables them to adopt solutions more quickly.

NETWORKING: ENTERPRISE

Winner:

Aruba CX 10000 Series

The CX 10000 Series from Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, is a distributed services switch designed for the next generation of large-scale data centers, addressing the security compliance, performance, agility and scalability demands of the highly distributed, hybrid, multi-cloud application era. Utilizing the Aruba AOS-CX network operating system for data center, campus and edge networks, and the fully programmable Pensando data processing unit, the CX 10000 deliv ers stateful software-defined services with scale and performance improvements over traditional Level 2/3 switches at a fraction of the total cost of ownership. The CX 10000 makes the process of deploying distributed services in the enterprise simple and more cost-effective.

Finalists:

Cisco Cloud Monitoring for Catalyst

Fortinet LAN Edge Solution

Prosimo AXI Platform for Autonomous MultiCloud Networking

MULTIFUNCTION PRINTERS

Winner: HP LaserJet Managed E800/E700 Series

The HP LaserJet Managed E800/ E700 series is a new portfolio of multifunction, customizable and easily managed printers that support a collaborative, productivity-focused hybrid workforce and meet today’s digitization requirements. The printers offer comprehensive workflow solutions with new FLOW 2.0 features, including the ability to make edits directly to content on the control panel and create customized shortcuts. The printers provide up to 70-page-per-minute printing speed and 300-images-per-minute duplex scan speed, powered by HP’s custom-designed quadcore processor. With HP Wolf Enterprise Security 6, the new series protects, detects and self-recovers.

Finalists:

Epson

SureColor T7770D

Sharp BP Advanced and Essentials Color Multifunction Printer Series

NETWORKING: SMB

Winner: Cytracom ControlOne ControlOne is a powerful, cloud-native platform built exclusively for MSPs that seamlessly integrates network connec tivity and enterprise security, enabling MSPs to eliminate VPNs and traditional firewalls, enforce zero trust and achieve compliance. ControlOne incorporates SD-WAN connectivity, zero trust net working, cloud connectors for seamless connections to AWS and Microsoft Azure, DNS and web content filtering, micro segmen tation and SIEM reporting—all in one offering. Device Posture Check enables MSPs to control access to a network and monitor requirements such as patch deployment, disk encryption status and the installation of RMM and other required software. A powerful graphical user interface assists with system setup and management.

Finalists:

SonicWall SonicWave 600 Series Access Points

TP-Link ER605v2 Omada Gigabit VPN Router

TP-Link JetStream TL-SG3210XHP-M2 Ethernet 8-Port Switch

TECH INNOVATORS CRN

ZeroDwell Containment Powers Xcitium Partnership Program

Q. Xcitium was named winner in the Security: Endpoint Protection category, due to your product ZeroDwell Containment. How does it feel to earn this award and how does this recognition help partners?

A. On behalf of my Xcitium colleagues, I’d like to thank the wonderful partners who work with Xcitium every day to serve our customers. Developing revolutionary solutions that help partners differentiate in a crowded marketplace is core to our strategy, so being recognized by the channel community for our approach to endpoint security is an achievement we hold very dear! This recognition reaffirms our commitment to making ZeroDwell Containment the most powerful endpoint security on the market, so partners can expect even more value as we expand our suite of ZeroDwell Containment-powered products.

Q. How does ZeroDwell Containment protect end users without significantly affecting their day-to-day operations?

A. The cybersecurity industry has continuously walked a fine line between providing protection and maintaining as much end-user productivity as possible. End-users have typically suffered in the pursuit of greater security, which is why we’re especially proud of how well ZeroDwell Containment preserves end-user access while providing unyielding endpoint protection. Through our patented approach, all unknown files, applications and processes are locally virtualized at run-time speed, granting users full access to content in ZeroDwell Containment without risking damage from any vulnerabilities.

Q. Why is ZeroDwell Containment so effective in helping customers through improving detection and response?

A. Implementing and maintaining endpoint detection and response (EDR) and extended detection and response (XDR) tools against an exponentially growing volume of new and emerging threats is becoming unmanageable for most organizations. Alert volume increases aren’t the only problem. False positive alerts are also on the rise, with many experts claiming that more than 50 percent of alerts are false positives. Furthermore, detection and response analysts, inundated with real alerts hidden amongst a growing proportion of time-wasting false positives, are becoming more and more desensitized to alerts. This phenomenon, traditionally called alert fatigue, increases the likelihood of a breach and reduces the overall success of detection and response programs. For these reasons, we’ve observed a rapid transition to managed detection and response (MDR) and managed extended detection and response (MXDR), which have emerged as a capable, albeit expensive, solutions. ZeroDwell Containment automatically contains the unknown files, applications and processes that would often create false positive alerts, dramatically reducing the burden of alert triage. The result: MDR and MXDR that all organizations can afford.

Chris Sheridan SVP of Strategy

”Unfortunately, end-users have typically suffered in the pursuit of greater security, which is why we’re especially proud of how well ZeroDwell Containment preserves end-user access while providing unyielding protection for our partners and their customers.

To discover how Xcitium and ZeroDwell Containment can protect your customers, please visit: https://www.xcitium.com/partner-account-applications

TECH INNOVATORS

NETWORKING: WIRELESS

Winner: Cisco Catalyst Wi-Fi 6E

Access Points

The new Cisco Catalyst 9166, part of the Cisco Catalyst Wi-Fi 6E access point line, offers solution providers the flex ibility to manage a wireless network on-premises or in the cloud. It delivers reliability and performance and includes the choice of either Cisco DNA Center or Meraki Dashboard management tools. The 9166 joins Cisco’s portfolio of Wi-Fi 6E-compliant APs, which take advantage of the 6GHz band expansion for improved net work performance, reliability and security. It also offers built-in environmental sensors to help businesses streamline health and safety plans, power optimization to reduce energy consumption, and Fastlane+ to optimize applications on Apple devices.

PROCESSORS

Winner: Intel Xeon D-2700 and D-1700 Processors

Intel Xeon D-2700 and D-1700 processors are Intel’s first system-on-a-chip built for software-defined network and edge systems, extending compute with acceleration beyond the core data center and generating a better overall experience for key network and edge workloads. Xeon D processors are designed for demanding enterprise use cases such as security appliances, enterprise routers and switches, cloud storage, wire less networks, AI inference and edge servers while also providing a flexible, cost-effective foundation for the next-generation edge. The processors include integrated AI and crypto accelera tion, built-in Ethernet, and support for Intel Time Coordinated Computing and Time Sensitive Networking.

Finalist: Cradlepoint Cellular Intelligence

POWER PROTECTION AND MANAGEMENT

Winner: Eaton 5PX G2 UPS

The Eaton 5PX G2 UPS is a flexible offering designed spe cifically for a complex range of distributed IT and edge environ ments, including servers, switches and storage. With an increased standard runtime and enhanced surge protection, the new UPS technology delivers enhanced connectivity and cybersecurity protection for Eaton’s legacy 5PX UPS system such as enabling IT managers to conduct mass firmware updates while protecting connected equipment. With the enhanced connectivity of Eaton’s Gigabit Network Card, users can manage and monitor critical infra structure in real time through integration with Eaton’s Intelligent Power Manager disaster avoidance software and PredictPulse remote monitoring service. Finalists:

SD-WAN

Winner: Fortinet Secure SD-WAN

Fortinet Secure SD-WAN monitors and manages today’s complex connections, giving IT teams visibility into the entire network to anticipate and troubleshoot network issues, automate remediation, enforce policy, and centrally con trol access to applications and resources per user, device, session and application. A significant update of Fortinet Secure SD-WAN included enhancements led by Fortinet Universal ZTNA (zero trust network access), advanced routing and enterprise-grade secu rity—all integrated by a single operating system to support secure application access and application steering. Fortinet also integrated Secure SD-WAN with Microsoft Azure Virtual WAN, making it possible to apply advanced security policies to virtual WAN traffic.

Finalists:

Aryaka Unified SASE with SD-WAN

Palo Alto Networks Prisma SD-WAN

SECURITY: CLOUD

Winner: CrowdStrike Cloud Security (CNAPP)

CrowdStrike Cloud Security provides organizations with the flexibility to determine how best to secure cloud applications across the CI/CD pipeline and cloud infrastructure across AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform. CrowdStrike takes an adversary-focused approach and provides both agentbased and agentless offerings, delivered from the cloud-native CrowdStrike Falcon platform. CrowdStrike Cloud Security deliv ers a number of capabilities, including cloud security posture management, cloud workload protection, cloud infrastructure entitlement management, indicators of misconfiguration and indicators of attack.

Finalists:

Aviatrix ThreatIQ with ThreatGuard

Check Point CloudGuard CNAPP

Cisco Umbrella SIG Advantage

Fortinet FortiCNP

Illumio Cloud Secure Wiz Cloud Detection and Response

SECURITY: DATA SECURITY

Winner: Salt Security API Protection Platform (summer 2022 release)

The Salt Security API Protection Platform identifies risks and vul nerabilities in APIs across their entire build, deploy and runtime life cycle before they can be exploited by attackers. It combines data with AI and machine learning to baseline millions of users and APIs to detect the reconnaissance activity of bad actors and block them. Through its API Context Engine architecture, the Salt platform provides API design analysis in pre-production, discovers all APIs and the sensitive data they expose, pinpoints and stops attackers, and provides remediation insight learned during runtime that developers use to harden them. Salt’s runtime protection pre vents data exfiltration, account takeovers and service disruption.

Finalists:

Deep Instinct Prevention for Applications

Keeper Security One-Time Share

SECURITY: EMAIL SECURITY

Winner: Check Point Harmony Email & Collaboration (Avanan)

Check Point Harmony Email & Collaboration (Avanan) pre vents malicious emails, including phishing, malware and ransom ware attacks, from reaching users’ inboxes. Check Point Software Technologies acquired Avanan in August 2021. Connecting via API, the technology catches evasive attacks that other products miss, reducing phishing emails reaching the inbox by 99.2 percent, according to the company. It also secures all lines of business communication including Slack and Teams. Check Point Harmony Email & Collaboration is backed by Threat Cloud, Check Point’s AI-powered threat intelligence database, and integrates information from network, cloud and user security.

Finalists: INKY Advanced Attachment Analysis

Trustifi “Smart Indexing” Archiving Solution

SECURITY: ENDPOINT PROTECTION

Winner: Xcitium ZeroDwell Containment

ZeroDwell Containment is a patented endpoint security technology that can reside on top of third-party security stacks and proactively protects against ransomware and other malware. The software prevents damage from potential threats by isolating them using kernellevel API virtualization and rendering them harmless until their intent can be determined, eliminating dwell time and providing complete end point protection. The system also reduces false positive alerts by 98 percent, the company said, allowing security professionals to focus on legitimate threats. ZeroDwell Containment is the cornerstone of a new suite of products that includes Advanced Endpoint Detection and Response and Extended Managed Detection and Response.

Finalists:

BeachheadSecure for MSPs

Cisco Secure Client

Ivanti Neurons for Patch Management

Sophos Intercept X

TECH INNOVATORS

SECURITY: ENTERPRISE NETWORK SECURITY

Winner: SonicWall NSa 5700 Next Generation Firewall

The SonicWall NSa 5700 is a high-speed, next-generation firewall that utilizes a mas sively scalable hardware architecture designed to fit in a single rack-mountable unit. The high port density of the NSa 5700 fea tures multiple 10-Gigabit Ethernet and 1-Gigabit Ethernet fiber and copper interfaces, enabling fast, scalable security with support for inspecting TLS 1.3 encrypted traffic. The appliance leverages cloud-based and on-premises sandboxing with SonicWall’s realtime, deep-memory inspection technology to deliver high-speed threat prevention. The NSa 5700 provides centralized management and includes advanced networking features such as high availability, SD-WAN, dynamic routing, and virtual routing and forwarding.

Finalists: Check Point Quantum Lightspeed Security Gateways

Fortinet Work-From-Anywhere Security Infoblox 3.0

Netenrich Resolution Intelligence Cloud

SECURITY: MANAGED DETECTION AND RESPONSE

Winner: eSentire MDR for Microsoft 365 Defender Rounding out its support for Microsoft 365 Defender, Microsoft’s security toolset, eSentire expanded its MDR for Microsoft Services offering with new coverage across Microsoft Defender for Identity and Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps. These additions provide visibility and response capabilities around Microsoft 365 Defender (endpoint, email, identity and cloud application security), helping customers unlock the full value of their Microsoft investment. The eSentire offering now delivers cyber investigation, response and reme diation capabilities that cover endpoints, users, and critical cloud applications and workloads, adding user identity-level response to eSentire’s comprehensive counterthreat arsenal.

Finalists: Barracuda XDR Cynet 360 AutoXDR Fortinet FortiXDR Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 Managed Detection and Response SentinelOne XDR Agent

SECURITY: IDENTITY AND ACCESS MANAGEMENT

Winner: CyberArk Identity Secure Web Sessions

CyberArk Identity Secure Web Sessions records, audits and pro tects end-user activity within designated web applications, pro viding security and compliance professionals with the means to efficiently identify anomalous activity, investigate issues and support audits. The service is designed for companies with a variety of web-based business applications that contain sensitive data such as financial records, customer information or intellectual property. Secure Web Sessions allows organizations to develop in-depth insight by recording end-user actions down to every mouse click without impairing the end-user experience. Any web application accessible through CyberArk Identity Single Sign-On can be protected.

Finalists:

Keeper Connection Manager

Saviynt Healthcare Identity Cloud

SECURITY: MANAGEMENT

Winner: Tenable.asm

The Tenable.asm external attack surface management technology continuously maps the entire internet and discovers connections to an organization’s internet-facing assets, whether internal or external to its networks. That provides organizations with a 360-degree view of their full attack surface, helping them assess their security posture and prioritize reme diation actions. A key innovation of Tenable.asm is its ability to discover domain names that organizations may not realize they own, automatically discovering domains related to assets in an organization’s inventory and alerting security teams. Tenable.asm includes a vulnerability management platform that provides a single view of internal and external risks.

Finalists:

Hunters SOC Platform

ThreatQuotient ThreatQ Platform

Tufin Orchestration Suite

Vulcan Cyber Risk Management Platform

How To Succeed by

Growing Your MSP Business Requires Solutions Purpose-Built For MSPs

A. Choosing cybersecurity solutions that are overly complex to deploy and manage is one of the top pitfalls for MSPs. Cybersecurity is complex, yes, but software complexity is the enemy of cybersecurity, especially for MSPs. They need to move fast if a threat is detected and have a solid understanding of how to mitigate the threat before damage occurs. That can be hard to do when working with highly complex software, and because MSPs are managing multiple environments for any number of clients, that complexity can cost precious time, money and potentially, business. Another pitfall is to select one vendor for multiple solutions, or, as we call it: “putting all your eggs in one basket.” Few vendors are experts in everything, but they offer solutions across the board, from email security, to backup, to SIEM—the list goes on and on. This can lead to less efficiency and more maintenance. It’s better to find a vendor that offers the precise solution that you need and which has the integrations and standards that will integrate with your stack.

A. Microsoft 365 is the #1 productivity suite on the market, and cybersecurity is the #1 revenue opportunity for MSPs. We don’t see this changing anytime soon. MSPs understand this and are already offering managed services around Microsoft 365. Vade has built a solution that not only catches the threats that Microsoft misses but also is built to reduce the complexity associated with cybersecurity, helping MSPs detect and respond faster, yet with fewer resources.

Q.How does Vade for M365 maximize ROI while not skimping on features that MSPs need?

A. There are a lot of vendors out there that offer a tiered model that makes MSPs pay a steep price for complete protection. Vade takes a different approach. Email threats come in different varieties and techniques. Vade for M365 offers full protection from all varieties and methods—at one price. That simplifies things for MSPs and is also more cost-effective.

We also offer advanced features that MSPs can use to create additional services on top of standard email security, including incident response and user awareness training. Often with other vendors, these features come at additional cost—with Vade, they’re standard. Finally, the simplicity of the product is what Vade partners love and what really maximizes the ROI of cybersecurity for MSPs. The average Vade partner saves eight hours per week on email security management. Time is money for MSPs. Getting that time back and investing it in revenue-generating activities is where the ROI of using Vade for M365 is a major factor for MSPs.

”The average Vade partner is saving eight hours per week on email security management. Time is money for MSPs. Getting that time back and investing it in revenue-generating activities, rather than incident and ticket response, is where the ROI of using Vade for M365 is a major factor for MSPs.

Adrien Gendre Chief Technology And Product Officer And Cofounder, Vade

Q.What are the pitfalls MSPs need to avoid when considering cybersecurity solutions?

Q.Why is integrating Vade for M365 into the security stack so critical for MSPs?

Seeing the Whole Story

SECURITY: SECURE SERVICE EDGE

Winner: Axis Atmos Security Service Edge Platform

Short for “Atmosphere,” Atmos is a security service edge platform, a set of integrated, clouddelivered services that use iden tity and policy to broker secure connections between authorized users and business resources. Atmos helps IT avoid the need to connect users to the corporate network, reduces exposure to ransomware threats and provides an improved level of visibility. Using a zero trust architecture, Atmos extends secure connectivity to users’ locations through 350 Atmos edge locations running on the global backbone of AWS Global Accelerator, Google Cloud Platform and Oracle—syncing authentication, authorization and connectivity across the work force, ecosystem partners and hybrid cloud infrastructure.

Finalists:

Barracuda CloudGen WAN

Cisco+ Secure Connect

Lookout Cloud Security Platform

Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) from Windstream Enterprise

SECURITY: SMB NETWORK SECURITY

Winner: Sophos Firewall

Sophos Firewall provides net work performance, protection, flexibility and resiliency for orga nizations, delivering zero-day threat protection, identifying and stopping ransomware and other advanced threats, all while accelerating important SaaS, SD-WAN and cloud application traf fic. A new version of Sophos Firewall launched in April 2022 with Xstream SD-WAN capabilities and best-in-class VPN enhancements. Capability expansions dynamically process and route traffic, dramati cally improving network performance and protection by freeing up resources for TLS and deep-packet inspection. Sophos Firewall is a pillar of Sophos’ SASE strategy, providing a simplified and scalable offering over traditional remote-access VPNs.

Finalists:

Check Point Quantum Spark Timus Networks

WatchGuard Firebox M290, M390, M590 and M690

STORAGE: CLOUD

Winner: Qumulo on Azure

Qumulo on Azure is a petabyte-scale data platform delivered as a managed service in the cloud. Qumulo significantly enhanced its cloud capabilities on Microsoft Azure in June, utilizing its patented serverless storage technology, improving efficiency and providing cloud file storage it said costs 44 percent less than competitive file storage offerings on Azure. Qumulo on Azure scales to multiple petabytes and billions of files in a single namespace, offering 25 percent faster performance than competitive alternatives for data-intensive cloud applications and high-performance workloads, according to the company. Customers can scale from 3 GB to 20 GB, and the multiprotocol file system sup ports workloads across Windows, Linux and Mac operating systems.

Finalists:

DataCore Bolt 1.0

Lightbits

Nasuni File Data Platform

STORAGE:

ENTERPRISE

Winner: Pure Storage FlashBlade//S FlashBlade//S is the next generation of the FlashBlade storage platform, designed to support exabyte-scale data storage and application needs. Building on the simplicity, reliability and scalability of the first-generation FlashBlade, FlashBlade//S leverages Pure’s all-flash hardware and innova tive software and is built using all-QLC (quad-level cell) flash architecture and DirectFlash modules. FlashBlade//S is designed to support data-heavy, unstructured workloads efficiently and delivers more than twice the performance, density and power efficiency of the first FlashBlade generation. FlashBlade//S runs on Purity//FB 4.0 software and can store almost 2 PB of raw data in a single 5U chassis.

Finalists: Dell PowerMax

Infinidat InfiniBox SSA II NetApp FAS9500

Storcentric Nexsana Unity NV10000

How To Succeed

by Seeing the Whole Story

Lansweeper Maximizes Partner Offerings

Q. How is Lansweeper increasing channel engagement, and how does it go beyond providing great products?

A. At Lansweeper, it’s important for us to offer more than just a product to our partners. We nurture partner relationships so we can become valued and trusted partners in their growth. Those relationships rely on us investing in getting to know their business and their customers’ challenges so we can enable great outcomes for them. We both listen and act on our partners’ input so we can co-create innovative new offerings that meet needs our customers didn’t know they had. Put simply, we are business partners excited about our channel’s success.

Q. What improvements are being made to the Lansweeper partner program, and how will it help MSP partners succeed?

A. We always find new ways to support our partners and their customers. We’ve doubled our channel-dedicated internal resources and are releasing our first-ever partner relationship management platform. Live in January, it will provide partners with everything from sales and technical training to localized marketing materials, pipeline management and more. This year, we designed a world-class MSP program, spending more time learning from MSPs about their priorities and reviewed over a dozen other MSP programs to ensure best practices were incorporated. This includes key updates like flexible licensing that allows MSPs to align their Lansweeper spending with how they manage their customer business and MDF incentives so we can programmatically invest back in our partners’ growth.

Q. How have you become a thought leader in the channel space, and why does it set Lansweeper up for success?

A. I have been working with channel partners for close to 20 years across a variety of industries and with some of the largest technology companies in the world, beginning with the constantly evolving Microsoft ecosystem. Over the years I’ve had the opportunity to witness the impact and importance of listening to partners—and using that to evolve with their needs. At Lansweeper, I’ve established a servant leadership approach to partnering, where we put the needs of our customers and the relationship with our partners first, and this has grown our business 350 percent in 11 quarters. When our partners grow, our business grows as a result.

Klein Vice President, Global Channel Partners

”Our philosophy is relationships first, transactions second. Listening to the needs of our partners and evolving how we work to better support their success is a priority. We work diligently to meet the needs of our partner community to ensure its health and success will last for decades to come .

”

Learn more: https://www.lansweeper.com/solution/it-service-provider/

Christina

TECH INNOVATORS

STORAGE: SMB

Winner : StorCentric Nexsan EZ-NAS

The Nexsan EZ-NAS network-attached storage system delivers Nexsan’s enterprise storage technology in a form factor and at a price point for SMBs and large enterprise edge applications, tar geting such use cases as edge repositories, digital video and media workflows, and video surveillance deployments. EZ-NAS features an easy-to-configure 1U form factor and four drives with up to 72 TB of raw capacity and 1.5 GBps of throughput. It delivers enterprise-class features such as in-line compres sion, Active Directory support and data-at-rest encryption and comes with the Retrospect software for optional add-on ser vices including data backup, cloud connector and ransomware anomaly detection.

Finalist: Dell PowerVault

UNIFIED COMMUNICATIONS AND COLLABORATION HARDWARE

Winner: Poly Studio X70

The Poly Studio X70 is a video conference bar that is designed to provide large conference rooms with premium sound and video quality. The system combines dual 4K, 20-megapixel cameras with two-way stereo speakers (with aluminum cone tweeters and advanced bass ports) and boasts an all-in-one plug-and-play design that eliminates tangled cables and IT headaches. The system has built-in cloud video applications that do not require a PC or separate gateway and features Poly DirectorAI automatic framing technologies. Also included are Poly NoiseBlockAI and Acoustic Fence technolo gies that prevent distracting noises and side conversations from interrupting meetings.

Finalists :

DTEN ONboard

Owl Labs Meeting Owl 3

UNIFIED COMMUNICATIONS AND COLLABORATION SOFTWARE

Winner: 8x8 Conversation IQ

8x8 Conversation IQ extends contact center capabilities such as voice inter action quality management and speech analytics to any employee, enabling team leaders and supervisors to oversee, evaluate, score and analyze employee voice interactions. Delivered via the 8x8 XCaaS cloud communications and con tact center offering, 8x8 Conversation IQ applies conversational AI to foster coaching and ensure that professional engagements deliver consistent experiences for all user roles, from the contact center to the front desk and the back office.The system’s AI-infused reporting and analytics capabilities reveal employees’ communica tions effectiveness, process adherence and regulatory compliance.

Finalists : AWS Amazon Connect Cisco Webex Go

GoTo Connect Zoom Whiteboard

VIRTUALIZATION/VIRTUAL DESKTOP INFRASTRUCTURE

Winner: IGEL OS

IGEL OS is a managed end point operating system for providing secure access to any digital workspace. The company released IGEL OS 11 in July 2022 with native support for Microsoft Teams—the result of a collaboration between IGEL and Microsoft begun in November 2019. Teams now runs on IGEL OS-powered endpoint devices connecting to Microsoft Azure Virtual Desktop, delivering Teams capabilities—including collaboration and video conferencing—that are on par with Windows-powered endpoints. In October IGEL further simplified the adoption of Microsoft Azuredelivered cloud workspaces with a new IGEL OS for Windows 365.

Finalists :

ATSG Hosted Virtual Desktop

Stratodesk NoTouch OS

How To Succeed

Tax’s Role In Frictionless Commerce

Q. How has friction accelerated over the past few years, and what does it means for IT professionals today?

A. The number of possible sources of friction has exploded due to the pandemic and the resulting accelerated digitization of commerce and cross-channel selling. Additionally, the number of sales channels that retailers can sell on is mindboggling, exposing new areas for friction that can adversely affect the customer experience. IT professionals need to account for all these potential areas of friction. One often missed, but critical, source of friction is tax calculation.

Q. What should IT professionals know about tax calculation and how it affects their tax department colleagues?

A. With the acceleration of omnichannel, retailers are faced with increased compliance challenges. For example, new environmental fees like the recent Colorado Delivery Fee, and product-specific taxes on goods delivered electronically, pose new complexities that may not be handled by heavily manual business processes. The sheer number of tax rules and rates, coupled with the ever-growing number of jurisdictions across the country and across the globe, mean that gone are the days of staying on top of this manually. As a result, tax departments are looking to their IT counterparts to help find a solution.

Q. How can IT professionals help their organizations manage tax?

A. One of the only ways to tame these complexities, be scalable for future growth and be agile enough to weather the next disruptor, is to automate. And to find an automated solution that is function-specific, e.g., implementing a sales tax solution from a partner than specializes in tax compliance. This will not only provide accuracy and best practices for that particular function, but also provides scalability to expand into new channels and geographies and new product offerings. A specialized solution brings efficiency, freeing up your resources to focus on more value-added activities.

by Seeing the Whole Story

Pete Olanday Director of Consulting, Vertical Solutions

Learn more about achieving frictionless commerce with Vertex, Inc.: www.vertexinc.com/achieving-frictionless-commerce-podcast-series

”Friction is defined as any unnecessary steps in the shopping journey. And those steps don’t have to be visible to the customer to cause friction. Behind-thescenes processes like order management, payment processing and sales tax calculation can actually lead to the most impactful friction points.

2022 NEXT-GEN SOLUTION PROVIDER LEADERS

Bringing Unique Talents To The Table

By Rick Whiting and Jennifer Follett

Just as the IT channel needs a steady stream of new, innovative technologies to be successful, it also needs a continuous infusion of people with new skills and new ideas—and the drive and the passion—to champion new ways of doing business to develop and deliver next-generation IT solutions for their customers.

For the third year we present CRN’s Next-Gen Solution Provider Leaders project, spotlighting the up-and-coming solution provider executives, directors and managers who are poised to be tomorrow’s channel leaders.

The list recognizes solution provider employees 40 years of age or younger who have made significant contributions in driving growth and strategic direction in the channel over the past year. Among our honorees are people who have started their own solution provider companies and people who began where they work today as interns and have risen to positions of influence. These individuals have brought their unique talents to the table and are shaking up how the companies they work for operate, whether it be streamlining internal business processes, stepping up new product and service innovation, reimagining go-to-market strategies, and taking the way they work with customers and IT vendors to new levels.

These new ideas and new ways of doing business are all the more important as rapid technology change and economic uncertainty are altering the way many businesses operate— including solution providers themselves and their customers. With their new problem-solving ways, the people on this year’s list have helped their companies not just survive but thrive.

Here’s a look at 62 up-and-coming leaders in the channel, including a brief overview of what they consider some of their key accomplishments and most innovative ideas during the past year.

Kim Abrams Director, Inside Sales Davenport Group

When the going gets tough, Abrams steps up. When a growth spurt left Davenport Group’s sales team short-handed, she stepped into a management role, helped hire new team members and revamped the on-boarding process to pave the way for new hires to make an immediate impact.

BJ Bradley VP, Engineering Services Davenport Group

One of Bradley’s key areas of focus has been developing and launching Davenport Group’s managed services practices, working with engineers to create a three-tier model for customers. He also boosted the solution provider’s PowerStore technical capabilities as it strives to be a leader in Dell storage solutions.

Allison Brown Professional Services Program Manager Atlantic Data Security

Brown zeroed in on the need for a project management office and built one from scratch over the past year, resulting in more organization and delivery success for the company. She also developed a program to grow a new line of business around security assessments that is paying big dividends.

Wes Brown VP, Architecture

DynTek Services

Brown has been key to improving the customer experience at DynTek by stepping up communication to ensure a higher level of professionalism and responsiveness. He also helped expand the company’s Las Vegas data center, which provides national testing, solution integration and staging capabilities.

In addition to leading special projects aimed at helping Insight sellers be more effective, Church has worked with leaders to provide feedback on the company’s sales strategy and execution. He also established Veteran Connection, a resource group that supports teammates who are military veterans.

Scott Church Sales Director Insight Enterprises

Brandon Cole VP, Sales Davenport Group

Under Cole’s leadership, Davenport Group’s sales team hit all of its goals and achieved its big gest year to date. That effort was helped by his work with directors to form tight-knit relationships with technology partners, creat ing more visibility and trust that puts the company top of mind when opportunities arise.

Melissa Curtis VP, Sales Administration Bluum

After a merger and the result ing rebranding of Bluum in January, Curtis has played a key role in restructuring the sales opera tions department, eliminating duplicate efforts. The support structure she developed for North American account executives has had a substantial impact on the customer experience.

Patrick Fagen Director, Presales Engineering Sterling

Fagen’s efforts to define tech nical areas of expertise, promote from within, gain advanced vendor certifications and build a new workflow within Sterling’s sales organization transformed the engineering teams, resulting in a higher level of solution delivery.

Cheryl Hearne

Director, Information Security, vCISO Edafio

Hearne built an informa tion security program for one of Edafio’s largest customers. She has also incorporated offerings that provide more than one facet of security and enable data-driven decision-making. Her “escape room” concept tasks teams with overcoming a cyberattack using Edafio’s core cyber methodology.

Emily Cook VP, Education Services Bluum

Cook spear heads the education services depart ment at Bluum, launched in 2021 to focus on presales advisory offerings and post-sales professional devel opment offerings for schools. In that role she rolled out many new services to help K-12 customers make the right tech nology decisions.

Adam Dickerson CTO Clutch Solutions

As Clutch Solutions expands into the telecom munications space, Dickerson is cultivat ing new relationships that are bringing 5G and other essential technologies into the fold. He has also built up a new technical pre sales model that is measurable and aligned with the company’s technology vision.

Jason Fisch President Fisch Solutions

Fisch took the advice he had gleaned through peer networking to develop a sales and operations overhaul that led to rapid growth. That included integrating new operational processes with SaaS and hardware platforms to meet the needs of the public safety market the company serves.

Bryan Heraty Director, Services Insight Enterprises

As pandemicrelated supply con straints delayed deployments, Heraty jumped into action by leading initiatives that expanded Insight’s distribution footprint, increasing square footage by over 50 percent in under eight months to meet the company’s growing customer inventory needs.

Paul Cooke Director, Sales Advanced Network Management

Cooke rearchi tected ANM’s sales support structure, giv ing more air cover to account managers so they have time to go wider in each account and also secure new logos. That, plus his efforts to streamline go-to-market efforts by consolidating two sales teams into one, led to year-overyear growth of over 40 percent.

Tyler Dulmage SVP, Operations DynTek Services

Dulmage led the charge over the past year to boost DynTek’s recurring rev enue model through growth, development and expansion of its cloud-based managed ser vices offerings. At the same time, he and his team implemented a closed-loop sales and delivery model aimed at driving customer satisfaction and economic value.

Brittany Cruz

Sr. Manager, Revenue Operations, Asset Life-Cycle Management ZAG Technical Services

Cruz created a vendor management program, implementing new processes for certifications and partner pro gram tracking. Other changes she introduced have led to improve ments in response time in her department, bringing the quot ing process down from as much as two weeks to under 48 hours.

Ana Curreya

National Service Manager, Unified Communications All Covered , IT Services Division of Konica Minolta

When Foster identified the need for a more consis tent process for bringing new customers into UC services, he didn’t hesitate to roll up his sleeves to find a better way. The end result improves the customer experience and creates clear accountability for project tasks.

Aaron Hilley VP, Engineering Heartland Business Systems

Hilley is help ing Heartland fulfill its goal of becoming a pre mier partner for every product it sells and services. He has spearheaded the drive to bulk up on master specializations and focus on increasing employee engagement, all while develop ing personal relationships with technology vendors to support future growth.

Dustin Edwards Director, Infrastructure Services

Davenport Group Edwards helped Davenport Group’s engi neering team amp up its tech nical knowledge around Dell’s PowerStore storage portfolio. He also was instrumental in design ing the company’s managed services portfolio and launched an internal workflow that ensures the right engineers are working with the right customers.

Matthew

Fusaro Manager, Security Services Vancord

Described as having a dis cerning eye for security and business enablement, Fusaro brings a bevy of skills to bear—systems programmer, OS forensics expert and log aggregation evangelist, to name a few—as he helps Vancord develop new security services.

Laleh Honar Director, Partnerships GTS Technology Solutions

With GTS’ goal of diversifying its partner eco system in mind, Honar nego tiated a large, multiyear investment from a new OEM partner. At the same time, she drove the company’s digital marketing strategy and devel oped programs with technology partners to drive awareness both internally and with customers.

Director,

Channel, Field Marketing DigitalEra Group

Curreya helped on-board new vendors and was the driving force behind a number of marketing cam paigns that contributed directly to DigitalEra’s annual growth. She also developed a hybrid format to phase into live events while still ensuring traction with customers not yet ready to meet in person.

Paul Erhart VP, Cloud, Insight Solutions Insight Enterprises

Erhart led Insight’s acquisition of Hanu Software Solutions, a cloud MSP with a presence in India and North America. He also led the daily fight to keep Insight top of mind with vendor partners and executed on a strategy that resulted in triple-digit growth for the company’s Microsoft Azure cloud consumption business.

JR Garcia

Director, Solutions Engineering Advanced Network Management

Garcia devel oped the ANM Certified Expert internal certifi cation program, which combines industry certi fications, internal and external training, and technical sales motions to put solution engineers on the right path. The program led to stronger vendor partner ships and growth.

Huber CTO CDI

Playing a key role in CDI’s growth, Huber leads an expanded Office of the CTO that includes divisional roles responsible for strategy, go-to-market and evangelism, bringing together executives who previously were founders or CTOs of companies CDI acquired.

Jacob Foster

Will

Kurt Huegin VP, Sales, Marketing Advanced Network Management

With ANM’s focus on grow ing its position in security and data center, Huegin helped build out the go-to-market strategy among practice leads, sellers and the marketing team. He also played an active role in customer engagements while driving campaigns that spotlight ANM’s engineering strength.

Kim CMO

Iron Bow Technologies

Kim was on a mission to bring a data-driven focus to Iron Bow’s market ing efforts. She worked to refresh the communication strategy, restructure the marketing organi zation by key functional areas and develop a new lead generation strategy designed to demonstrate the marketing department’s con tribution to revenue.

Logan McCoy President

CCB Technology

McCoy joined CCB’s sales team in 2007 and served as vice president of sales and vice president of services before becoming presi dent. He has strengthened CCB’s IT service offerings in managed and project services, signifi cantly grown service revenue and tripled the service depart ment’s size.

Rob Parsons

Director, Network, Security Practice, Portfolio Insight Enterprises

Parsons plays a key role in cre ating custom solutions for large-scale and high-profile customers. His focus is on automation, flexibility and scalability while ensuring archi tectural security in an executable fashion. He began his career as a technical consultant and achieved a Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert certification in wireless.

Michael Johnson Director, SAP Solutions American Digital

Johnson joined American Digital threeplus years ago laser-focused on building its SAP MSP practice from scratch. He has built a team of over 20 people to support over a dozen customers across a number of industries. He’s also a thought leader, sits on multiple industry councils and has a pod cast to help increase mindshare.

Kailynn Lambert

Director, Sales Operations, Marketing Davenport Group Lambert is responsible for Davenport Group’s marketing strategy, including overseeing marketing events and cam paigns, executing corporate communications, upholding the corporate brand and creating a number of digital marketing activities.

Ledda Kerr Director, Partner Management, Alliances Insight Enterprises

Kerr and her team hit record-high revenue gen eration and profitability for key strategic partners, with double-digit— and even in some cases triple-digit—year-over-year growth in support of key part ners like Acer, AMD, Google, Logitech, Poly and Samsung.

Keshian COO Coretelligent

Keshian led Coretelligent through two acquisitions, making cus tomer support improvements and expanding the company’s technical capabilities. He also spearheaded an effort to upgrade its call center telephony platform and move IT service manage ment operations to ServiceNow and integrate the two.

Javid Khan CTO IT By Design

Khan expanded IT By Design’s partner roster by adding new security and RMM providers while also help ing expand its geographic reach to the Philippines. He has helped the company reduce operating expenses, improve efficiency and stave off the impacts of the “Great Resignation” with cultural enhancement initiatives.

Chris Leiker President More Power Technology Group

With a com puter science degree, Leiker spent his early career in soft ware development and database design and administration. He has since broadened his experi ence to include sales, marketing, engineering, integration of sys tems and product development. He also helped oversee MPTG’s first strategic acquisition.

Lorena Loeffelholz Business Strategist, Microsoft Azure Zones

Loeffelholz helped develop Zones’ 2022 marketing vision and strategy around Microsoft and is responsible for driving the go-tomarket strategy for Azure. She is leading Zones’ efforts to achieve an Azure Advanced Specialization for Azure Virtual Desktop and the Microsoft Cloud Security Advanced Specialization.

Paul Mansur CEO NXT Gen Technologies

Mansur started in the IT space as an accounts payable and receivables clerk and worked his way up through various operations man agement posts before launching his own company in 2017. Mansur’s passion for starting NXT Gen Technologies stems from an entrepreneurial spirit he inherited at a young age from his father.

Megan Moore Director, Strategic Programs, Partner Alliances Sterling

Since join ing Sterling’s marketing department in 2013, Moore has managed strategic part nerships with Oracle, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Aruba and Lenovo, and helping Sterling develop and launch a cloud practice around AWS, Microsoft, Google, VMware and Oracle.

Tyler Pfeifer Director, Partner Alliances Insight Enterprises

Pfeifer’s cur rent focus is on driving crossfunctional workstreams to create programs that enable co-workers to provide value to customers by managing their endpoints. He also ensures that Insight’s OEM partner products deliver a consistent end-to-end support experience for customers.

Kyle Mullin VP, Solutions Architecture CDI

Mullin began his profes sional IT career at CDI in 2009 and was pro moted to his current position in March. He manages a data center presales engineering team that spans multiple dis ciplines, including hybrid cloud infrastructure, software-defined networking, business continuity and data protection.

Anthony Santacaterina

Director, Technical

Operations

Huntington Technology

Santacaterina manages many of Huntington Technology’s day-to-day operations and business pro cesses, including working with the MSP’s help desk and network teams, and has been responsible for growing the company’s Northeast division for more than five years.

Laura Muysenberg Director, Marketing, Alliances

People Driven Technology Muysenberg has played a significant role in build ing People Driven Technology’s culture, brand recognition and customer interactions. She has overseen a number of major projects at the startup solution provider, includ ing website design and internal programs and processes, and has recruited over 50 new employees.

Casey Savatski Director, Finance Insight Enterprises

As Insight’s finance direc tor, Savatski’s responsi bilities include managing product revenue stream accounting, leading strategic initiatives like system implementations and acquisi tion integration, and coordinating with sales and operations on deal structure to best meet customer needs and drive business.

Matthew Nikravesh Co-Founder, President Solarus Technologies

Nikravesh co-founded Solarus after realizing the opportunity to provide technology services to SMBs. He has 20-plus years of experience with MSPs and cloud service providers, including building managed services infra structure to help service providers evolve from a time and materials model to an MSP model.

Sam Shrefler

EVP,

CDI

Digital Services

Shrefler joined CDI in 2021 through its acquisition of Candoris, where his most recent position was CTO. In his role now he is responsible for all digital service delivery. This year he has integrated the Salesforce department into CDI’s digital business unit and assumed leadership of existing depart ments focused on ServiceNow.

Timothy

Sarah

Michael Shuster

CEO

Ferroque Systems

Shuster began his IT career in high school when he sold hardware for a local VAR through eBay. As Ferroque Systems CEO since 2007, he has expanded the business, which has consistently recorded double-digit growth. He has focused the company on going deep in digital workspaces and secure remote access.

William Vigne Sr. Director, North Sales NWN Carousel

Vigne has been in the solution provider space for 15 years with an emphasis on selling cloud communications and contact center solutions and services that optimize the customer experience. His adoption of a value-based selling approach that’s focused on customer business outcomes was a factor in his promotion this year.

Alexis Williams Digital Marketing Manager

The 20

Williams started out at The 20 as an intern and now serves as digital marketing manager, where she is responsible for boosting the digital presence of The 20 and its MSP members through content creation and coordination, social media campaigns and strategic marketing initiatives.

Chris Zadrima Sr. Director, Managed Services

Align

Zadrima has over 15 years of experience architecting and leading successful managed services businesses. He oversees all aspects of Align’s global managed services practice, including customer support, cloud architecture and strategy, project management, the network operations center and the IT service desk.

Lizette Silva-Nuñez Project Management Office Manager

ZAG Technical Services

Silva-Nuñez manages the Project Management Office for ZAG Technical Services, overseeing daily project management activities and the effective delivery of all internal and customer-facing projects across the organization. She also provides direction for PMO processes and procedures.

Branden Voegerl Director, IBM Practice CleanSlate Technology Group

Voegerl has 16 years of experience as an IT sales professional and cites as strengths his ability to build relationships and sales pipelines, implement cost-savings programs and improve communications. He recently took over CleanSlate’s IBM software resale division, where he has increased revenue by 6 percent.

Alecia Wilson VP, Strategy, Programs Managed Solution

Wilson cites her ability to create process out of chaos as a key skill. She has led initiatives to automate business processes, including taking a commissioning process that once took 40 hours to now be done with more accuracy in four hours. She also created an internship program in collaboration with a local high school.

Jason Zeng Sr. Director, Solution Architects Redapt

Zeng came to the U.S. at a young age and grew up in Texas. He helped pay for his college tuition by acquiring virtual goods in early cyberspace and selling them on eBay. In the past year at Redapt, Zeng was a primary contributor to the design and implementation of hyperscale data centers for two strategic customers.

Nolan Smith CEO Tego

With a technical background in IT operations and a focus on business continuity, Smith has served in technical advisory roles for major companies across a range of industries before joining Tego in 2011. His biggest accomplishment in the past year was closing a solution-plus-services deal valued at nearly eight figures.

Jennifer Vosburgh VP, Marketing Tego

Tego had no marketing strategy when Vosburgh joined in May 2021. She has since built relationships with vendor partners to boost joint marketing efforts and enable Tego’s sales teams. A key focus has been developing joint events with vendor partners, including “Tego Talks,” to illustrate the value of Tego solutions.

Mark Thornberry VP, Vendor Relations Management

GuidePoint Security

Thornberry heads up GuidePoint’s collaboration with vendors and efforts to accelerate go-tomarket partnerships. A key part of his job is educating employees about vendor partners and their products. Prior to joining GuidePoint, Thornberry worked at Cisco and WatchGuard and at solution provider giant CDW.

Emma Waschbusch Purchasing Solutions Manager Bluum

Waschbusch was Tierney’s first intern prior to the 2021 merger with Trox that created Bluum and joined the company full-time in 2017. She was promoted to her current position in September and in the past year has trained a new purchasing team of five. She also created a best-practices purchasing system.

Michael Tierney Chief Solutions Officer Bluum

Tierney joined the education technology space in 2010 at solution provider Tierney and was named chief solutions officer in 2017. He is passionate about creating a service-oriented company with a great culture. Tierney played a key role in the merger and integration of Tierney and Trox in 2021 to form Bluum.

Kristy Wilke Director, Sales Davenport Group

Wilke started with Davenport Group in 2015 as an account executive serving the Midwest. As sales director she now manages a growing sales team serving customers across the country, including hiring and mentoring new employees who provide the sales and technical foundations to deliver successful solutions.

Corey

Wisdom VP, Engineering, MITS N.A All Covered , IT Services Division of Konica Minolta

Wisdom leads

All Covered’s service desk, network operations center and advanced engineering teams. This year he oversaw a number of key initiatives, including deploying asset management, change management and project management capabilities within All Covered’s multitenant ServiceNow instance.

David Wright

Founder, CEO Disruptive Innovations

Wright is the founder and CEO of Disruptive Innovations, a digital business and tech consulting firm that has expanded into the health-care vertical. While he has worked in IT for more than 12 years, his passion for technology goes back to his early teens when he was building computers and setting up LANs.

Phil Wright

Founder,

CEO Accent Consulting

Wright describes himself as a “serial Indiana tech entrepreneur” with a passion for solving complex business problems. He founded Accent Consulting to provide managed services and IT consulting, cloud, cybersecurity and software development services for businesses.

Can We Get To Everything As A Service?

By Robert Faletra

FOR ALMOST TWO DECADES, we have been discussing the value of recurring revenue in the strategic service provider model.

The advantage for the strategic service pro vider is clearly knowing what much of the year looks like on Jan. 1 rather than coming into it with a need to begin sales from dollar one year in and year out. For the customer, there is the ease of budgeting and an ability to focus on new projects rather than not understanding what maintaining the current infrastructure will cost.

But now as the buzz around Everything as a Service grows, the question becomes can we get there and what are the benefits if we do? Is it worth chasing for the strategic service provider, and will customers be more and more receptive as the months and years unfold?

From the strategic service provider ownership perspective, there are real benefits and challenges to getting to the model. It’s not always easy getting buy-in from the sales team unless the commission structure is attractive. I still have yet to meet many sales-driven individuals who don’t prefer the big commis sion check up front and all at once rather than smaller chunks over a longer period.

There is good reason for the push-back. How many people who win sizable lotteries go for the stretched-out payment over decades rather than a smaller but substantial payout? Somewhat smaller but all up-front payouts are generally better for individuals than those that may be larger and spread out. They can be immediately invested or used in other ways that are preferred by the salesperson.

But for the strategic service provider business, the real value in delivering Everything as a Service is far more than knowing what is already booked as the business enters the new year. In this type of current economic environment where inflation is running high and an economic recession is a real possibil ity, Everything as a Service has the potential to keep many

businesses in stronger positions to weather the challenges a downturn can bring.

This may even be true for the sales team if the compensation program is structured in a way that it not only reduces the risk for the business, but cushions and motivates the sales team as well. Losing top sales drivers is always a danger to a business, and downturns can see sales mercenaries jump ship quickly if they don’t see a route to a respectable year.

Customers, of course, see benefit in the service model as it allows them to budget easily and understand what they can expect to spend in a given year. However, will IT organizations ever completely buy into this model? It seems to me that the politics inside the technical teams will fight against complete adoption as the model in theory reduces the number of internal people dedicated to technical support.

In business you can never discount the power of politics inside the customer. The best salespeople understand this and figure out a way to maximize relationships and delivery excel lence to get the most out of the account. But it can often be an insurmountable problem to completely change a customer’s approach to IT strategy.

If we go back 10 years and look at the predictions of how the cloud was going to change the world, there were plenty of pundits predicting a complete and total shift to purchasing everything through the public cloud. That hasn’t materialized and shows no sign of getting there anytime soon.

Are we moving more toward an Everything-as-a-Service model? The trend certainly would say yes, and there is little doubt more of our computing needs will be solved in that model in years to come.

But will we ever purchase it all as a service? n

BACKTALK: Make something happen. Robert Faletra is a Founding Partner of The Channel Company. You can contact him via email at rfaletra@thechannelcompany.com.