7 Channel People of the Week at Dell, TD Synnex, T-Mobile

A bankruptcy court approved IT service provider C1's plan to restructure, a key step in its court-supervised debt-clearing process. This will allow the company to finalize its restructuring and emerge from Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the next few weeks.

“We are pleased to have reached this critical milestone, bringing us one step closer to completing this process and moving forward focused as ever on delivering continued excellence for customers and partners,” C1 CEO Jeffrey Russell said. “We are deeply grateful for the strong support from our financial stakeholders, which has enabled us to achieve this outcome on an expedited basis.”

Learn more about C1's restructuring and what it means for other partners and stakeholders here.

TD Synnex partners have reported struggling with AI-powered cyberattacks aimed at their and their customers' organizations. According to at least one company executive, bad-faith actors are using this technology and partners' lack of understanding to get past their security and attack them directly.

“The bad actors are leveraging AI so you've got to be able to defend against those threats,” said Ed Morales, TD Synnex’s global vice president of security and high-growth business development. “We’ve also seen implementation of AI pervasively through a lot of the technologies that some of our vendors are deploying. It’s pretty impressive. It’s trying to stay one step ahead.”

Learn more about this AI-powered cybersecurity threat to TD Synnex partners here.

Vendors that want to shift their operations toward the ecosystem model will have to embrace a new approach, according to at least one analyst.

According to a new blog from Canalys chief analyst Jay McBain, these clients will have to adopt top-down and bottom-up changes to their interactions with partners. They'll also have to consider changes to how a company understands the role that channel and partner-oriented executives hold within their operation. (Canalys and Channel Futures are both owned by Informa Tech.)

"This is not just a promotion for the channel chief to the boardroom. It is a new job role with expanded KPIs and broader platform objectives. Companies are making these appointments to coincide with their platform ambitions," McBain wrote.

Read more of McBain's analysis here.

Dell announced that it intends to create an "easy button" that will help customers use generative AI daily.

CEO Michael Dell spoke about his intent for AI during an appearance at Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas on Monday. The conference was considered the "AI Edition" for the company, noting the company's shift toward embracing the new technology. Michael Dell appeared excited about the technology and even described it as a "generational opportunity for productivity, innovation and growth."

“We’re moving from computation toward cognition into the age of AI,” said Dell. “I’m more excited and more confident than ever in the opportunity than any other time in my life. We are unleashing technology that will accelerate scientific discovery and development with the power to transform our organizations, our lives and our world.”

Learn more about Dell's plans and the conference here.

Nutanix is attempting to court partners away from its competitor, VMware. The hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) vendor believes that VMware's policies are confusing and creating uncertainty among partners, which is why the company has made strides toward winning them over to its company.

“We certainly have seen a lot more interest from partners wanting to sign up to become Nutanix partners,” Rajiv Ramaswami, Nutanix's CEO said, commenting on Broadcom's acquisition of VMware and the subsequent fallout. “Things are starting to become clearer for them. Broadcom is taking the top 2,000 VMware customers direct, so that’s definitely not good for the channel partners who are involved with those customers. From a channel partner perspective, we have reacted to that. We have a Surge Program (launched Feb. 5) with increased reward levels for partners bringing in new customers to us. We've also increased the profitability on the front end and the back end through our Elevate program.”

Learn more about Nutanix's plans to win partners over here.

Selling cybersecurity tools remains a difficult prospect for many partners. The ever-changing tactics of cybercriminals, the shifting of customer preference and the large number of products available on the market make the decision process difficult.

Thankfully there are more educated buyers on the market.

“Now you have a buyer that is probably in a CISO, CIO or CTO seat in an organization, and they're asking a lot more educated questions, but they also have a lot of opinions about what tools they want,” Deniz Sagnaklar, Entara’s chief growth officer, said. “You used to have to explain, ‘Hey, you should have this solution or you should have multifactor authentication (MFA) in place,’ fundamental things. Now you're having to have a conversation about why you don't think a certain tool is nuanced enough, why putting all your eggs in the same basket is maybe not the best strategy. ‘We've got this, we know what we're doing’ doesn't cut it anymore. You have to explain a lot more of the decisions and services that you're having to put forward.”

Learn more about Sagnaklar and other executives' thoughts on cybersecurity sales here.

T-Mobile confirmed reports that it will buy "substantially all" wireless operations from UScellular. This will allow the company to expand its network for $4.4 billion. The transaction will help customers in rural areas and will expand the company's network.

“As customers from both companies will get more coverage and more capacity from our combined footprint, our competitors will be forced to keep up — and even more consumers will benefit," T-Mobile CEO Mike Sievert said. "The 'un-carrier' is all about shaking up wireless for the good of consumers and this deal is another way for us to continue doing even more of that.”

Learn more about T-Mobile's deal here.

T-Mobile confirmed reports that it will buy "substantially all" wireless operations from UScellular. This will allow the company to expand its network for $4.4 billion. The transaction will help customers in rural areas and will expand the company's network.

“As customers from both companies will get more coverage and more capacity from our combined footprint, our competitors will be forced to keep up — and even more consumers will benefit," T-Mobile CEO Mike Sievert said. "The 'un-carrier' is all about shaking up wireless for the good of consumers and this deal is another way for us to continue doing even more of that.”

Learn more about T-Mobile's deal here.