The Final Cut

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-fl edged 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 signifi cant 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. ■

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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 that the sky’s the limit when it comes to helping partners succeed.

By Mark Haranas

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 infl uenced 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.

‘We Are Partner-Obsessed’

When Seattle-based AWS started to roll out its fi rst 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 fi nd 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

channel differentiate itself to increase profi tability 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.”

Selipsky Is Driving Co-Innovation

The ‘Fearless’ Borno

AWS partners are hailing the hiring of Borno as one of the biggest and most infl uential 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 confl ict 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.”

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, Snowfl ake and other cloud vendors.

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

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. During his fi rst 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 fi rst cloudnative partner network and fi rst 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 offi cially took the CEO reins in July 2021. He has been on a co-selling and co-innovation tear with partners ever since. Selipsky highlighted ‘I’ve worked with some of the biggest AWS’ move to team up IT vendors before—I’ve never seen this with Accenture to create level of interaction. Under Ruba [Borno] the Advanced Customer and Adam [Selipsky’s] watch, AWS’ ... Engagement contact program is now designed to be much more center solution, dubbed ACE+, where Accenture in uenced by the voice of the partner.’ and AWS create a joint — Justin Copie, CEO, Innovative Solutions 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 signifi cant 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

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.”

’Bold Ambition Is Not New To AWS’

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.

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 signifi cant 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 “signifi cant 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-qualifi ed. We’ve worked with and invested a lot ourselves alongside those partners to ensure that their staff are both trained and, in many

cases, certifi ed 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.” 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 benefi ted 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 certifi cation 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 ‘We made it mandatory that every eld new to AWS, and we’ve seller had to get cloud practitioner taken that same big mencerti cation. We put together the tality and applied it to the curriculum with AWS, and AWS fully skills gap,” said Borno. “This effort pays for itself supported doing small groups of classes within the fi rst six months for us.’ for our partners, so we —Chris Cagnazzi, SVP, GM, Cloud Solutions Group, Presidio 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 free workforce programs.

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-certifi ed over the span of about eight months. “We made it mandatory that every fi eld seller had to get cloud

practitioner certification,” said Chris Cagnazzi, senior vice president and general manager for Presidio’s Cloud Solutions Group. “We put together the curriculum with AWS, and AWS fully supported 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 transformation 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 consistent 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 themselves 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 projected 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 company 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 building 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.

Why should partners like MSPs, systems integrators and consultants invest and bet on AWS versus your cloud competitors? 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 signifi cant 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-qualifi ed. We’ve worked with and invested a lot ourselves alongside those partners to ensure that their staff are both trained and, in many cases, certifi ed on AWS. That makes a huge positive difference in customer success because we take the long-term view with customers and with partners.

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

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 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 fi rst cloud-native partner network and fi rst 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.

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 signifi cant investments to help create more customer demand, which benefi ts partners. We have a very signifi cant 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. ■

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.

WOTC 2022 WOTC 2022 WOTC 2022 WOTC 2022

Yvonne Massey

Director, Global Partner Experience & Platforms

Renee Kerns

Head, Global Partner Services

Tiffany Harris

Director, Global Marketplace & Cloud Partner Sales

Marianne Kantor

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

WOTC 2022 WOTC 2022

Katheryne Chester

Sr. Manager, Global Cybersecurity Partner Marketing

Sandy Stamler

Global Partner Programs Manager

Julie Blennis

Senior Partner Help Desk Specialist

Brianne Wunder

Project Manager, Global Demand Generation Programs

CHANNEL CHIEF 2022

Cynthia Loyd

VP, Global Partner, Enterprise and Commercial Sales

”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.”

CHANNEL CHIEF 2022 AND POWER 100

Laura McGregor Falko

Head, Global Partner Programs, Marketing & Enablement

2022

Products

of theYear

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 financial (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 significant enhancements, including expanded use of AI and predictive analytics in supply chain management and public sector applications, integration of SAP Analytics Cloud with financial reporting, and new capabilities in digital transformation, Industry 4.0 and sustainability. SAP S/4HANA Cloud was the overall winner in this product category, sweeping all subcategories.

Finalist: Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finalist: Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP Finalist: Oracle NetSuite Finalist: Salesforce Customer 360

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.

Subcategory Winner–Customer Need: AWS Outposts Finalist: Dell Apex Finalist: Lenovo TruScale Infrastructure Services Finalist: Microsoft Azure Stack HCI

DATA PROTECTION AND MANAGEMENT

ZERTO 9.5 WINNER: OVERALL

Zerto, acquired by HPE in 2021, develops data backup and recovery 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

HYPERCONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE

HPE GREENLAKE FOR HCI WINNER: OVERALL

The HPE GreenLake for HCI unified cloud service eliminates the complexity in virtual machine infrastructure orchestration, facilitating global unified management 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 revenue 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 encryption 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 cooling 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 unveiled 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 management. As networks become increasingly complex and distributed, solution providers use Aruba Central NetConductor to define network policies, centralize the management of far-flung networks, and automate network configurations in wired, wireless and WAN infrastructures—all without worrying about the underlying 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 Dragonfly G3 is an ultraportable, lightweight clamshell notebook. The 2.2-pound notebook 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 recycled 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 generation of its popular Versalink series of multifunction printers in June. The new C7100 offers color printing capabilities. Other features include copy/print/scan and optional fax functions, copying and printing 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 technology, 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

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 wireless, remote wireless, wired access, wired aggregation, wired core, SD-branch and user experience insight. HPE GreenLake for Aruba 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 Finalist: 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 security products. According to the company, the product line is especially popular in the SMB space because of its simplicity and ease of use, due in no small part to its single web-based dashboard. In June Cisco extended the Meraki dashboard’s abilities with a cloud management option, allowing it to be used to manage 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 Modular UPS protects high-end system components, corporate servers, backup equipment and sensitive electronics. Solution providers can customize the system for customers that have demanding redundancy 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 customer 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 Nvidia’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 Tensor 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

PUBLIC CLOUD

MICROSOFT AZURE WINNER: OVERALL

Microsoft Azure provides a slew of cloud services, including Infrastructure as a Service, managed database services, and services around analytics, application development, IoT and security. At Microsoft Build in May, Microsoft unveiled new Azure offerings including Azure OpenAI Service, AI dashboards 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.

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 service that implements application-defined autonomous SD-WAN and includes Instant-On Network edge appliances and orchestration. 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 Finalist: HPE Aruba EdgeConnect Microbranch Solution Finalist: Versa Networks SD-WAN

SECURITY: CLOUD

PALO ALTO NETWORKS PRISMA CLOUD WINNER: OVERALL

Security and DevOps teams can use Prisma Cloud to secure applications from the coding stage to deployment. Prisma Cloud, Palo Alto Networks’ Cloud Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP), works with cloud service companies and application platforms to provide code-to-cloud security. 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–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 learning 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 protections 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.

Discover more about ExaGrid security, reliability and redundancy at:

custom.crn.com/crn360/backup-and-disaster-recovery/

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, Singularity for Endpoint helps security operations centers and IT operations personnel protect against a wide range of cyberthreats. Among its features, Singularity for Endpoint delivers differentiated endpoint protection and response capabilities. It offers dynamic 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 SentinelOne 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 customer 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 management security capabilities in onpremises and multi-cloud environments and in hybrid scenarios for workers, customers, workflows, devices 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 support for Java extension points and a node for storing custom cookies. 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. Singularity 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 sophisticated 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 Generation Firewall can outperform traditional firewalls because of advanced functions such as deep-packet inspection, intrusion prevention, advanced malware detection, application 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 percent 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 by Seeing the Whole Story

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?”

Marc Malafronte

Director of Channels North America, VIPRE Security Group

”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.

Learn more about the VIPRE Partner Community

https://vipre.com/partners/

STORAGE: ENTERPRISE

HPE GREENLAKE FOR BLOCK STORAGE WINNER: OVERALL

HPE GreenLake for Block Storage 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 capability featuring self-service and a 100 percent availability guarantee for mission-critical environments. HPE GreenLake for Block Storage is a consumption-based service that allows users to dynamically 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.

Finalist: Asustor Lockerstor 2 Gen2 Finalist: iXsystems TrueNAS Scale Finalist: Qnap TS-410E Finalist: Western Digital SanDisk Professional Pro-Blade SSD Mag

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 company 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 centralize 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 storage 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 predecessor. The Surface Pro 8 offers several configurations, 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 webcam. 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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

Ryan Peka

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.

For product questions and inquiries, please reach out to our team at B2B@epius.com. To learn more about our products click here: http://usa.philips.com/monitors

TECH INNOVATORS Leading-Edge Products

Point The Way By Rick Whiting

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.

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

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 workfl ow 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.

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: Cycode Next Gen SCA Katalon Visual Testing Octopus Deploy Opsera SaaS DevOps 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, quality 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 platform for modern applications based on increasingly complex, distributed architectures and services. The platform was purpose-built to observe cloud-native applications at scale, accelerate detection and resolution of performance issues, and deliver actionable insight into application performance and security. AppDynamics Cloud enables collaboration across teams, including DevOps, site reliability engineers and other key business stakeholders, to achieve common benchmarks like service-level objectives and organizational KPIs. The platform focuses on simplicity, 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 provides 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 experiences, 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 organizations to find and unlock the value of their data wherever it resides, as well as mitigate 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

DATA PROTECTION SOFTWARE

Winner: Infinidat InfiniSafe

InfiniSafe delivers comprehensive cyber-resilience capabilities to help thwart and recover from cyberattacks across Infinidat’s entire enterprise storage platforms: InfiniBox, InfiniBox SSA II and InfiniGuard. The technology 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

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 consolidates 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

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

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 hyperconverged infrastructure offering jointly engineered 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 connectivity software powers a range of hardware modules developed by AWS partners such as Espressif, Infineon and U-blox. The connectivity modules include software that implements AWS-mandated security requirements, enabling OEMs to build secure IoT devices that connect 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 development 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 generation while incorporating a larger 14-inch, full-high-definition touch screen, a color-selectable backlit keyboard and other customizable features like hot-swappable batteries, 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

MSP RMM PLATFORMS

Winner: ConnectWise RMM

ConnectWise RMM is built on Asio, a modern cloud architecture designed to provide flexibility, performance, extensibility and security to meet the growing demands of the SMB market. The platform aggregates both software and human elements, 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 delivers 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 Multi Cloud 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 connectivity and enterprise security, enabling MSPs to eliminate VPNs and traditional firewalls, enforce zero trust and achieve compliance. ControlOne incorporates SD-WAN connectivity, zero trust networking, cloud connectors for seamless connections to AWS and Microsoft Azure, DNS and web content filtering, micro segmentation 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

TECHCRN INNOVATORS

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.

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 flexibility 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 network 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.

Finalist: Cradlepoint Cellular Intelligence

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, wireless 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 acceleration, built-in Ethernet, and support for Intel Time Coordinated Computing and Time Sensitive Networking.

POWER PROTECTION AND MANAGEMENT

Winner: Eaton 5PX G2 UPS

The Eaton 5PX G2 UPS is a flexible offering designed specifically for a complex range of distributed IT and edge environments, 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 infrastructure in real time through integration with Eaton’s Intelligent Power Manager disaster avoidance software and PredictPulse remote monitoring service.

Finalists: CyberPower CP1500PFCRM2U PFC Sinewave UPS System Janitza GridVis 8.0 Schneider Electric Smart UPS Ultra Vertiv Liebert GXT5 Lithium-Ion, Model GXT5LI-1500LVRT2UXL

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 control 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 security—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 delivers 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: EMAIL SECURITY

Winner: Check Point Harmony Email &

Collaboration (Avanan)

Check Point Harmony Email & Collaboration (Avanan) prevents malicious emails, including phishing, malware and ransomware 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: DATA SECURITY

Winner: Salt Security API Protection Platform

(summer 2022 release)

The Salt Security API Protection Platform identifies risks and vulnerabilities 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 prevents data exfiltration, account takeovers and service disruption.

Finalists: Deep Instinct Prevention for Applications Keeper Security One-Time Share

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 endpoint 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

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 massively scalable hardware architecture designed to fit in a single rack-mountable unit. The high port density of the NSa 5700 features 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 remediation 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 protects end-user activity within designated web applications, providing 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 remediation 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 Seeing the Whole Story

Growing Your MSP Business Requires Solutions Purpose-Built For MSPs

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

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.

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

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.

Adrien Gendre

Chief Technology And Product Officer And Cofounder, Vade

”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.

Learn how to grow your MSP with a scalable cybersecurity solution:

https://www.vadesecure.com/en/vade-for-msp

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 identity 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 workforce, 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

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 supports workloads across Windows, Linux and Mac operating systems.

Finalists: DataCore Bolt 1.0 Lightbits Nasuni File Data Platform

SECURITY: SMB NETWORK SECURITY

Winner: Sophos Firewall

Sophos Firewall provides network performance, protection, flexibility and resiliency for organizations, delivering zero-day threat protection, identifying and stopping ransomware and other advanced threats, all while accelerating important SaaS, SD-WAN and cloud application traffic. 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, dramatically 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: 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 innovative 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.

Christina 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/

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, targeting 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 compression, Active Directory support and data-at-rest encryption and comes with the Retrospect software for optional add-on services including data backup, cloud connector and ransomware anomaly detection.

Finalist: Dell PowerVault

UNIFIED COMMUNICATIONS AND COLLABORATION SOFTWARE

Winner: 8x8 Conversation IQ

8x8 Conversation IQ extends contact center capabilities such as voice interaction 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 contact 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’ communications effectiveness, process adherence and regulatory compliance.

Finalists: AWS Amazon Connect Cisco Webex Go GoTo Connect Zoom Whiteboard

UNIFIED COMMUNICATIONS AND COLLABORATION HARDWARE

Winner: Poly Studio X70

The Poly Studio X70 is a videoconference 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 technologies that prevent distracting noises and side conversations from interrupting meetings.

Finalists: DTEN ONboard Owl Labs Meeting Owl 3

VIRTUALIZATION/VIRTUAL DESKTOP INFRASTRUCTURE

Winner: IGEL OS

IGEL OS is a managed endpoint 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 videoconferencing—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 by Seeing the Whole Story

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.

Pete Olanday

Director of Consulting, Vertical Solutions

”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.

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