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John Kalvin is bullish that the new Intel 13th Gen Core desktop processors will create opportunities for its partner ecosystem. Kalvin, who became the company’s global channel chief two years ago, is optimistic about demand despite the heavy headwinds facing Intel.

This year’s economic downturn doesn’t bode well for PC makers in 2023. After missing forecast revenues for two consecutive quarters, CEO Pat Gelsinger announced a $10 billion cost reduction plan last month. According to Gartner, PC shipments declined nearly 20% during the third quarter of this year.

The current economic climate notwithstanding, Kalvin said Intel’s 13th Gen processor, code-named Raptor Lake, will fuel new high-end systems. Intel started shipping the first 13th Gen Core processors last month for desktop systems.

Available with up to 24 cores, Intel claims they offer up to 40% higher multi-threaded performance over the Gen line. Intel hasn’t launched the mobile versions of 13th Gen, but the company tends to preview its newest wares in January at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES).

Intel’s John Kalvin

In an interview with Channel Futures, Kalvin explained how Intel provides readiness to its broad partner ecosystem. Except for the top OEMs, Kalvin’s organization supports system builders, ISVs, global systems integrators, MSPs, solution providers and ODMs.

“We look after those broad scaling motions for all of those commercial partners,” he said. Kalvin, a 24-year company veteran, also shared how Intel is navigating the current downturn from a go-to-market perspective.

We broke down outtakes from that interview in the slideshow above.

AWS RE:INVENT — IBM, Infosys and Orca Security were among numerous Amazon Web Services (AWS) partners recognized by the cloud giant’s 2022 Partner Awards.

The AWS partner awards were handed out during this week’s AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas. The awards recognize a wide range of AWS partners that have embraced specialization, innovation and collaboration over the past year. Their business models “continue to evolve and thrive on AWS as they work with customers,” the cloud giant said.

For the first time, the AWS partner awards included a self-nomination process across a number of award categories and specialization areas awarded at both the regional and global level. All AWS partners were invited to participate and submit a nomination. And all winners have been validated and selected by a third party.

The AWS partner awards are as follows:

Innovation Partners of the Year:

• Global— IBM
• North America Region — Caylent
• LATAM — Nextios
• EMEA — Integra Technologies
• APJ — Spark Business Group

Design Partners of the Year:

• Global — Informatica
• North America Region — Infosys
• LATAM — Fortinet
• EMEA — A2D24
• APJ — CloudCover

Social Impact Partners of the Year:

• Global — DNX Solutions
• North America Region — Mission Cloud Services
• LATAM — Morris & Opazo
• EMEA — Capgemini
• APJ — Cevo

Sustainability Partners of the Year:

• North America Region — TensorIoT
• EMEA — Infosys
• APJ — Deloitte

Industry Partners of the Year:

• Global — Virtusa
• North America Region —  Quantiphi
• LATAM — Nextios
• EMEA — A2D24
• APJ — DNX Solutions

Collaboration Partners of the Year:

• Global — Larsen and Toubro Infotech
• North America Region — Infosys
• LATAM — Darede Servicos de TI
• EMEA — PA Consulting
• APJ — Cloud Comrade

Security Partners of the Year:

• Global — Orca Security
• North America Region — HashiCorp
• LATAM — Deloitte
• EMEA — Reply
• APJ — Tata Consultancy Services

Migration Partners of the Year:

• Global —  Incredibuild
• North America Region — Larsen and Toubro Infotech
• LATAM — Escala24x7
• EMEA — Version 1
• APJ — Tata Consultancy Services

Data and Analytics Partners of the Year:

• Global — Virtusa
• North America Region — Informatica
• LATAM — Databricks
• EMEA — Schuberg Philis
• APJ — Umbrella Infocare

Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning (AI/ML) Partners of the Year:

• Global — AllCloud
• North America Region — Quantiphi
• LATAM — BRLink
• EMEA — Deloitte

SI Partners of the Year:

• Global — Classmethod
• North America Region — Slalom
• LATAM — Compass UOL
• EMEA — Reply
• APJ — iret

ISV Partners of the Year:

• Global — Salesforce
• North America Region — Splunk
• Greater China — Zenlayer
• LATAM — VTEX
• EMEA — Micro Focus
• APJ — Freshworks
• Industry Vertical — Siemens DI Software

GSI Partners of the Year:

• Global — Accenture
• North America Region — Deloitte
• Great China — Capgemini
• LATAM — IBM
• EMEA — Atos/Cloudreach
• APJ — Wipro

AWS Marketplace Partners of the Year:

• Global — Trend Micro
• North America Region — Snowflake
• Startup — Wiz
• Greater China — Zenlayer
• EMEA — MongoDB
• APJ — Cyber Security Cloud

Rising Star Partners of the Year (SI):

• North America Region — Triumph Technology Solutions
• Greater China — CloudX Technologies
• LATAM — Nubity
• EMEA — Cloudvisor
• APJ — Aeonx Digital Solutions

Rising Star Partners of the Year (ISV):

• North America Region — PagerDuty
• Greater China — Bestsign
• LATAM — Sensedia
• EMEA — Sysaid
• APJ — Sendbird

Training Partners of the Year:

• Global — Trainocate
• North America Region — SkillSoft
• Greater China — ECS Technology
• LATAM — Netec
• EMEA — QA
• APJ — Koenig Solutions

Distributor Partners of the Year:

• North America Region — Ingram Micro
• EMEA — TDS
• APJ — Redington

Rising Star Distributor Partners of the Year:

• North America Region — Carahsoft
• LATAM — Intcomex
• EMEA — Redington Gulf
• APJ — Daiwabo Information System

Public Sector Partner of the Year:

Federal Government Partner of the Year:

State or Local Government Partner of the Year:

• Global — Elixir Lab USA as Cardinality.ai

Education Partner of the Year:

Aerospace and Satellite Partner of the Year:

Health Care Partner of the Year:

Non-Profit Organization (NPO) Partner of the Year:

Public Sector Startup Partner of the Year:

• Global — CropIn Technology Solutions

AWS RE:INVENT — Calling sustainability “the issue of our generation,” Amazon Web Services CEO Adam Selipsky (pictured above) took the stage on Tuesday to deliver his second AWS re:Invent keynote speech.

The topics of water, and energy production and consumption, took up a significant portion of Selipsky’s focus. His comments came as the cloud computing sector has raised eyebrows for the excessive use of natural resources required to deliver services.

Selipsky’s Nov. 29 AWS re:Invent keynote also featured an unmissable emphasis on data. As organizations stand to produce more data than ever over the next five years, AWS unveiled integrations and other capabilities to make extraction and analysis easier.

Of course, the Selipsky-led two-hour AWS re:Invent address to partners and end users included presentations from customers. Energy company Engie, for example, shared how it’s producing green power with the help of AWS. And Siemens talked up its many cloud-reliant efforts as it works in health care, manufacturing and other large industries. Lyell reviewed how it’s using AWS to improve cancer treatments.

See our slideshow above for the main takeaways from Selipsky’s AWS re:Invent keynote.

Riya Shanmugam

Twelve months ago, I took on a new role as group vice president of global alliances and channels at New Relic. I faced a challenge familiar to many leaders who have built channel organizations in Silicon Valley: take a company that thrives in product-led growth and chart the next phase of sales success at scale with a new and redefined partner organization.Building a partner organization is a marathon, not a sprint. I’m proud of what we achieved during this first year. New Relic established the foundation for long-term growth in its channel organization, and we made it easier for our partners to grow and succeed. But these successes didn’t come without hard work, healthy tension and the ability to learn from our mistakes.

Here’s what I learned over the past 12 months, and what other channel leaders can take away as they grow and develop their own partner organizations.

Build the foundation with feedback

Feedback is a gift. It offers insight to help guide thinking, planning and execution, and I knew from my first days at New Relic that we would need to use feedback to guide our first steps. We collected feedback directly from our partners to better understand where we were, where we needed to be and how to get there. We also invited our partners to participate in internal sales kickoff events, partner advisory boards and all-day sessions at our annual company conference, aiming to establish as much in-person contact as possible.

While I came into New Relic with clear ideas on how to build and scale a successful channel organization, the feedback we got from our partners was invaluable. We recognized the need to invest across the board, particularly with enhancements to the resources our partners use daily to learn about and promote our products. Most importantly, we launched new feedback mechanisms to ensure that we always know what’s going on in the field.

Make partners part of the company DNA

When we think about the most successful product companies, many of them achieved success using a product-led growth model. These organizations prioritized launching incredible products and solutions, then using steady improvements to those products to start the sales engine and achieve grassroots growth.

Product-led organizations don’t naturally have the partner DNA that we see at tech behemoths like Oracle, IBM, Microsoft or SAP. One of the biggest challenges during my first year at New Relic was making the channel part of our overall DNA. New Relic will never look or operate like IBM or SAP, but we sell to the same companies and we need to be able to speak a common language with enterprise customers.

For product-led companies to effectively integrate channels and partners, we need to have leaders evangelizing for the importance of a partner ecosystem and the potential cost of not evolving. Of course, advocating for a new sales model and new priorities will always lead to healthy tension or constructive friction. We undoubtedly experienced some well-meaning pushback within the company as we set to expand our channel organization, but we took the time to educate others and make the case for why partners would be indispensable for the next stage of the company’s growth.

Move forward with conviction and grit

Partnerships succeed based on three factors: people working directly with people; mutual trust; and a deep commitment to winning together. Over the last year, I’ve found a tremendous level of conviction both among our alliances and channels team here at New Relic, as well as among our network of partners around the world. We know that an indirect sales ecosystem is essential to reach our long-term goals, and I’m awed by the commitment I see throughout the organization to making that happen.

But for channel leaders at high-growth tech companies, commitment and conviction aren’t quite enough. In order to establish a seat at the table and make the case for an ambitious partner strategy, channel leaders need grit. We need to be persistent and tenacious as we advocate for our role in an organization’s overall growth strategy. I’ve found that grit is contagious in channel organizations and setting that example can make the difference in getting an organization over the goal line.

Success is hard. Change is even harder. I’m grateful for everyone at New Relic and in our partner ecosystem who committed to change and grow during my first year, and I look forward to many more years working together on a foundation of conviction, grit and trust.

Riya Shanmugam is group vice president of global alliances and channels at New Relic. She joined New Relic from Adobe, where she was the global head of cloud adoption and customer success. Prior to Adobe, she served as a customer engineering leader at Google Cloud. She also held technical and strategic advisory roles for IBM, AMD, Infosys and several hyper-growth startups.

Open Systems is boosting its automation capabilities with the acquisition of UK-based MSSP Tiberium.

The 2022 Microsoft Security MSSP Partner of the Year award winner said it will leverage Tiberium’s advanced automation and collaboration capabilities.

Open Systems’ Geoff Haydon

“Tiberium’s experience in automating security will allow us to detect and respond to threats faster and more impactfully,” said Open Systems CEO Geoff Haydon.

Haydon added that Tiberium will expand OpenSystems’ advantage over competitive MDR [managed detection and response] solutions.

“Quickly containing detected cyberthreats is certainly important. Preventing them altogether, however, is our ultimate goal,” he said.

Microsoft Gold Partner

Like Open Systems, Tiberium is a Microsoft Gold Partner and a member of the Microsoft Intelligent Security Association (MISA). It is the first UK-based Microsoft Sentinel next-gen XDR provider. Its service offerings, which include XDR/Managed SOC, are based on Microsoft security solutions.

CEO Drew Perry founded Tiberium. He wanted to use automation to provide superior services than traditional MDR providers. From its headquarters in London, the company serves a growing number of customers, predominantly in the financial and legal industries.

Tiberium’s Drew Perry

“We are excited to join forces with Open Systems, [which] shares our vision of automation and real-time collaboration to dramatically improve customers security maturity,” said Perry. “We both have deep expertise in Microsoft security and are now taking our game changing SecOps model to a global audience.”

Automation for Threat Detection and Investigation

Often affiliated with response actions, businesses can apply automation to many parts of the cybersecurity life cycle. This includes threat detection and investigation. Tiberium uses automation to expedite Tier 1 alert triage and investigation, freeing up security analysts to focus on more complex threats.

Tiberium’s collaboration model will also allow Open Systems security analysts to interact with customers in real time on any device at any time. Using Microsoft Teams, it leverages Power Platform and OpenAI to give customers faster access to their designated SOC resources and information to quickly making informed decisions.

In May, Open Systems said it was collaborating with Microsoft to develop Microsoft Security Experts. This is a new set of managed threat hunting and response security service offerings.

Renee Ritter

To say that it’s an exciting time at our company is truly an understatement. HelpSystems has rebranded to Fortra in our relentless pursuit of solving our customers’ toughest security problems.

This rebrand follows a deliberate shift in our company during the past few years to focus on cybersecurity and automation. This focus was driven by the acquisition of several best-in-class solutions and significant industry expertise.

During this time, we’ve grown to a business with more than 3,000 team members and over 30,000 customers globally. There’s no question that we’re a different company today than we were even five years ago, tackling security challenges head-on with a unique value proposition.

As one of the top cybersecurity providers in the world, we wanted our name and branding to match that position. We are now united under one brand and one vision, driving positive change every day because we recognize and embrace that we are stronger together.

The Fortra Channel Program

But wait — didn’t we just launch a brand-new channel program this past January? And now we’re rebranding to Fortra? Isn’t that too much change for partners to deal with in one year?

I say it’s not.

Our partners embrace change if it’s happening for the right reasons, and there’s no question that is the case here. Our new channel program expands our partners’ ability to sell meaningful solutions as they look to solve their customers’ unprecedented security challenges.

Tackling Cybersecurity Head On

Organizations everywhere are facing challenges that include the pressures of digital transformation and the journey to the cloud, with all the complexity that comes with it. Given the increase in cyberthreat levels, keeping data accessible yet highly secure is paramount, and companies must accomplish this with limited budgets and a shortage of IT and security talent.

Cybersecurity professionals everywhere are looking for help, and we’re rolling up our sleeves to provide it. Fortra’s mission is to solve their toughest security problems — the challenges they think are unsolvable — through best-in-class solutions and services paired with a collaborative approach.

A Powerful Position

The new channel program paired with the rebrand positions our partners to provide a stronger line of defense so they can help their customers face these challenges with confidence. This means enabling customers to increase security maturity while lowering operational burdens. And all of this can be done via a single provider: Fortra. That’s powerful. And we’re proud to have our partners join us on this mission.

As Fortra, we offer the same great service and products our partners have come to expect from HelpSystems, except now we have a new name. Our partners can offer their customers strong, clear messaging on what it means to work with Fortra: powerful protection from a wide range of cyberthreats and challenges, all from one vendor. We want to make it easy to sell Fortra solutions and have created comprehensive suites to simplify our offerings and bundle related solutions.

What’s Next for Fortra?

Our partners are key to our worldwide success. We’re working alongside them to provide support and guidance during this change, as well as enhanced onboarding, development and enablement.

As an organization, we’ll also continue to adapt to what’s happening in the market to ensure we grow in the right direction for our partners and customers. This means ongoing collaboration with our partners and customers to find ever-smarter ways to solve the toughest cybersecurity challenges.

Click here to learn more about the rebrand and about becoming a Fortra channel partner.

Renee Ritter is vice president, Channel, Fortra. This guest blog is part of a Channel Futures sponsorship.

Granite Telecommunications and Viasat are partnering to deliver satellite-based internet service over Viasat’s global satellite network to markets across the U.S. Founded 20 years ago, Granite has grown to a $1.8 billion company. It provides advanced communications solutions to more than 650,000 locations, including more than two-thirds of Fortune 100 companies.

Granite’s Rob Hale

Rob Hale is Granite president and CEO.

“We are excited to work with Viasat to deliver secure, reliable satellite internet service to locations throughout the country, including underserved communities where access and cost barriers have put high-speed internet out of reach,” Hale said. “Viasat’s expansive coverage footprint supports Granite in bridging the coverage gap for those customers virtually anywhere in the U.S.”

Customizing Plans

Through its arrangement with Viasat, Granite offers satellite internet service at broadband speeds to 99% of the country. This includes even in the most difficult to reach rural areas. This allows Granite to provide coverage for all customer locations, ensuring no site is without reliable, affordable internet access. In addition, Granite offers flexibility with a month-to-month option. This gives Granite customers the opportunity to customize plans to meet the unique demands of their businesses. It offers a seamless, single-source solution, the company said.

Viasat installs its satellite internet typically in three to five days. Consequently, high-speed internet is up and running almost immediately for Granite customers. Suitable for both primary and secondary connections, Viasat’s satellites deliver fast internet to power an array of critical business applications. For customers in need of an affordable and truly diverse secondary connection, Viasat says its satellite network ensures businesses stay connected to critical operations when primary connections are disconnected by outages, disasters or local infrastructure issues.

Viasat’s Wayne Parrish

Wayne Parrish is head of U.S. sales at Viasat.

“We’re proud to collaborate with Granite to provide satellite-based high-speed internet to businesses across the country, including hard-to-reach regions,” Parrish said. “Our relationship with Granite provides businesses an opportunity to take advantage of the benefits of broadband internet.” 

The VMware Americas Partner Organization has a new leader. The multicloud provider recently named Tara Fine as vice president of the division, succeeding Bill Swales, who moved to Lenovo.

VMware’s Tara Fine

Fine, who moves up from VMware Canada, now holds responsibility for the entire partner ecosystem within that group. Those partner types include system integrators, distributors, value-added resellers, alliances and OEMs.

Before taking on the new VMware Americas partner role, Fine served for six years as senior director for channels for VMware Canada. Prior to that, she spent more than 19 years at Dell Technologies, where she rounded out her career there as director of global commercial channels for North America.

As the new head of VMware Americas Partner Organization, Fine also brings to the position her continued efforts on VMware’s diversity council. We go into that a bit in this interview. We also ask her about the pending, $61 billion Broadcom acquisition and how she’s talking with partners about the impact of that deal. Here’s a preview: “I do believe that partners will be even more important as we move forward.”

See the slideshow above to read Channel Futures’ conversation with Fine. We have lightly edited the transcript for clarity.

The Lenovo 360 unified partner program has already resulted in higher attach rates, according to a top company official. Lenovo partners who have traditionally focused on selling PCs and devices increasingly are also offering the company’s servers and services.

Lenovo 360, launched earlier this year, builds on the company’s new organizational structure, which it created in April 2021. The reorganization created Lenovo’s Intelligent Devices Group (IDG), Infrastructure Solutions Group (ISG) and Solutions and Services Group (SSG).

One of the critical goals of the new organization was to enable the groups to work more effectively together. And that culminated in the launch of Lenovo 360, which aimed to make it more appealing for PC partners to provide offerings from the other groups.

Lenovo’s Vlad Rozanovich

In the quarters since launching the program, Lenovo officials believe that it has achieved its intended results. Vlad Rozanovich, president of Lenovo’s North America international sales organization, explained how Lenovo 360 has accelerated cross-organizational sales.

Lenovo Channel Sales Growth

During its fiscal quarter ending Sept. 30, non-PC products accounted for 37% of revenues. Data center product revenues in North America grew 67% year-on-year, Rozanovich said. He emphasized that customers made the bulk of those transactions through the channel.

“We’ve seen really good results through the channel around our server compute and server storage offerings,” he said.

The Lenovo 360 program played a significant role in that growth, Rozanovich added.

“As part of the Lenovo 360 ‘Better Together’ program that we ran for the channel, one of the things we saw is that one plus one plus one doesn’t necessarily equal three. It could equal 3.3,” he said. “What that means is when we give our channel partners targets of ISG, product, IDG product and SSG products; if they hit all of their metrics, they get accelerators on the overall total amount.”

Other observations from Rozanovich are in the slideshow above.

Facebook has been hit with a fine totaling 265 million euro (US $277 million) in Ireland related to personal data that was made available online.

Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) imposed the fine. In addition, the Commission is requiring a range of corrective measures.

According to CNBC, DPC in all has fined Facebook parent Meta nearly 1 billion euros. DPC has 13 more pending inquiries with Meta.

The DPC began its investigation in April, after media reports into the discovery of a collated data set of Facebook personal data became available on the internet. The scope of the inquiry concerned an examination and assessment of Facebook Search, Facebook Messenger Contact Importer and Instagram Contact Importer tools in relation to processing carried out by Meta Platforms Ireland Limited (MPIL) between May 2018 and September 2019.

GDPR Compliance

The material issues in this inquiry concerned questions of compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) requirement for data protection. The DPC examined the implementation of technical and organizational measures pursuant to GDPR.

The investigation included the cooperation of all other data protection supervisory authorities within the European Union. Those supervisory authorities agreed with DPC’s decision.

The decision imposed a reprimand. It also requires MPIL to bring its processing into compliance within a particular time frame.

Meta sent us the following statement:

“Protecting the privacy and security of people’s data is fundamental to how our business works. That’s why we have cooperated fully with the DPC on this important issue. We made changes to our systems during the time in question, including removing the ability to scrape our features in this way using phone numbers. Unauthorized data scraping is unacceptable and against our rules. And we will continue working with our peers on this industry challenge. We are reviewing this decision carefully.”

In September, DPC imposed a record fine of 405 million euros (US $420 million) on Facebook subsidiary Instagram after investigating its handling of children’s data. Meta plans to appeal that fine.