Channel People of the Week at Broadcom, Snowflake, Telarus

Cloud communications and channel veteran Geoff Works decided to join CCaaS provider UJET as its newly appointed vice president of global channel sales. Works served for five years as Cisco's head of channel sales to bring its Webex UCaaS and CCaaS offerings into the agent model.

"UJET is a well-known CCaaS player in the industry, which hasn’t quite been able to figure out and truly tap into the potential of leveraging the power and scale of the technology advisor community," he said. "All I see is tremendous upside to really providing focus and an overall strategy on tapping into the tech services distributor (TSD) and technology advisor (TA) community."

Learn more about Works and his transition to UJET.

Fortinet said it's buying Lacework to add the company's AI-powered cloud security platform to the Fortinet Security Fabric. This will help implement all critical cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP) services into its larger products.

"We see this as a significant opportunity for our partners because it will enable them to engage more deeply in their customers’ digital innovation journey – from code to cloud," said Ken McCray, Fortinet’s vice president of channel sales. "From Fortinet’s perspective, we will be even better positioned to deliver consistent security across on-premises and cloud environments. This only strengthens our partners’ role as trusted advisors to customers and helps them continue to deliver real solutions that help plan and implement security for both data center and cloud initiatives."

Read more about Fortinet's deal here.

TruMethods recently expanded into EMEA, which has required many new clients to adapt in order to work with the company in the region. The company's founder, Gary Pica, spoke with Channel Futures about best practices there when using its products.

“Our peer members spend less time figuring things out, because we already have a proven process for the basic the framework. So they spend more time implementing and executing on those improvements in their business. And that’s why they go further faster,” said Pica. “If we can help remove their self-limiting beliefs, I’ve seen it change people’s lives — not just their businesses, which is amazing. This is a business about people and leaders and their teams. It’s not really about the MSP stuff.”

Learn more from Pica here.

Microsoft has officially joined the contact-as-a-service (CCaaS) market through its Dynamics 365 Contact Center. This will tap into Microsoft's Copilot tool and help integrate the product into contact centers. Some believe that the product's release will disrupt the CCaaS market, particularly for partners.

"Microsoft appears to be integrating a large language model interface trained on proprietary data, similar to offerings from other providers," said Sam Nelson, vice president of CX at Telarus. "Their road map likely includes AI-powered assistants and chatbots, which could position them as a formidable player given their resources and market presence. However, they seem to be entering this domain relatively late compared to existing solutions, so they may initially be playing catch-up rather than setting new benchmarks."

Cisco and Splunk have begun rolling out their technology interactions after the former acquired the observability provider. The Unified Observability Experience will offer joint customer integrations between Splunk Log Observer Connect and Cisco AppDynamics, and is scheduled to go live in the third quarter of 2024.

"What Splunk was missing is all of that depth and detail all the way down through the network to really understand what's happening across a broad customer environment," Splunk CEO Gary Steele said at Splunk Conf24, the company's annual conference. "And what I'm particularly excited about is our ability to bring and enrich our environment with all of that network data [and] ThousandEyes data to give customers a fundamentally different perspective on what's really up and running and why. And I think no one better than Cisco can deliver all that together."

Learn more about the UOE here.

Snowflake hosted its Data Cloud Summit last week, where it unveiled a number of new products and features. The company also emphasized its eagerness to work with its partner ecosystem in hopes of attracting new customers and doing more with them along the way. That's why it is building the "No. 1 ecosystem for AI apps and expertise."

"Every enterprise in the world is focusing on generative AI," Snowflake SVP of worldwide alliances Tyler Prince told Channel Futures at the San Francisco event. "It's a change across our industry, for every size of business in every country. I feel we are well-positioned because we are the leading and most trusted AI delivering on our promises for all of our customers. ... We have an ecosystem full of solution providers and experts to help our customers transform their business on the Snowflake platform."

Learn more about Snowflake and its partners here.

Broadcom and Dell have reconciled their differences after a short fallout between the two companies. The pair have agreed to a new original equipment manufacturer deal. This includes a new VMware-related OEM deal with Dell, HPE and Lenovo.

“Broadcom recognizes that [these] partners play a critical role in developing and delivering co-engineered offerings, integrating VMware software with their differentiated capabilities, and delivering a seamless, unified solution and experience to our shared customers,” Ricky Cooper, vice president of OEM sales at Broadcom, wrote in a blog.

Learn more about Broadcom and Dell's OEM deal and what it means for partners here.

Broadcom and Dell have reconciled their differences after a short fallout between the two companies. The pair have agreed to a new original equipment manufacturer deal. This includes a new VMware-related OEM deal with Dell, HPE and Lenovo.

“Broadcom recognizes that [these] partners play a critical role in developing and delivering co-engineered offerings, integrating VMware software with their differentiated capabilities, and delivering a seamless, unified solution and experience to our shared customers,” Ricky Cooper, vice president of OEM sales at Broadcom, wrote in a blog.

Learn more about Broadcom and Dell's OEM deal and what it means for partners here.