7 Channel People Making Waves This Week at HPE, IBM, Telarus, Google Cloud, More
Two components of IBM’s watsonx.ai and data platform are now available.
July 14, 2023
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For many women who lead careers as tech advisors, their biggest regret is not starting sooner.
The indirect technology sales channel is undergoing a shift in demographics, as many partner leaders are retiring or selling their businesses. The technology advisor (agent) landscape in particular is witnessing a changing of the guard, with people entering and exiting the space. And some of the partner community’s most influential women are encouraging their female peers to try their hand at running an agency.
Lorie Burkemper, managing partner at Bluewave Technology group, talks about her rise in leadership. She founded iSymplify, which was acquired by Bluewave in November 2022.
“As if starting an agency isn’t challenging enough, I left my day job 30 days before the biggest financial meltdown in recent history. 2008/2009 wound up being a completely dark period for technology sales,” Burkemper said. “The projects that I had lined up literally got put in a drawer for 9-12 months unless it could show an immediate savings/ROI. That was a tough period and I had to continue the sales discipline, attend continuous training/learning and rely closely on my faith and family to get me through. I’m not sure that being a woman created any challenges but it did help our family by taking the risk to open the firm. Luckily, my husband’s position allowed us to weather that period. Although a financial adjustment, it did afford me the space to press on and even spend more time with my children during the building phase than if I was still working on the direct side.”
Learn more about what women leaders had to say about their careers as tech advisors in our Faces of the Partner series.
HPE recently launched its AI strategy for MSPs, GreenLake for Large Language Models (LLMs), a cloud computing platform that provides on-demand AI modeling in a supercomputing cloud environment. The platform is part of HPE’s $2.6 billion investment in artificial intelligence, including its purchase of Cray supercomputers; Determined AI, a machine learning software development environment for engineers and data scientists; Pachyderm, software that automates data versioning and reproducibility in AI models, and the in-house development of inference software.
“Pachyderm couples with a pipeline system so that we can track transformations that were made to train data over time. That gives us confidence in where our applications came from,” said Evan Sparks, chief product officer for AI at HPE.
If a customer wants to delete certain information from a data set, he added, the software can track the lineage and confirm the change.
Determined AI and Pachyderm are about building, training and tuning AI models. To round out the AI solution, HPE has developed the “inference” software used to run and manage AI models from the edge, servers or cloud. The software also identifies performance characteristics, such as a change in data patterns that could be associated with fraud.
“That becomes a really critical point for customers who are worried about deploying those models,” Sparks said.
Read more about how HPE can provide MSPs with critical infrastructure.
Two components of IBM’s watsonx.ai and data platform are now available, and the third is on the way. IBM on Tuesday announced the release of watson.ai and watson.data. The company also confirmed that watsonx.governance is on pace to arrive in October.
Furthermore, IBM revealed that 150 enterprise clients – including Citibank, NASA, Samsung and Wimbledon – have participated in the company’s beta and tech previews.
According to Kareem Yusuf, senior VP of product management growth for IBM Software, partners can customize and deploy pre-built foundation models provided by IBM or use their own models. Also, IBM has partnered with Hugging Face, which offers tools for building, training and deploying machine learning models using open-source code.
“The models are pre-trained to support a range of natural language processing (NLP) type tasks including question answering, content generation and summarization, text classification and extraction,” wrote Kareem Yusuf, senior VP of product management growth for IBM Software. “Future releases will provide access to a greater variety of IBM-trained proprietary foundation models for efficient domain and task specialization.”
Learn more about watson.ai’s potential.
Increased scale will help Telarus meet the diverse needs of the partner community, Telarus CEO Adam Edwards tells Channel Futures.
Telarus, the Utah-based technology solutions brokerage, has grown drastically in the last three years, stemming part from the investment Columbia Capital has poured into the company. That funding has allowed Telarus to buy companies such as Chorus Communications, TelAdvocate and TCG. The company has risen both in terms of its employee count – going over 400 people – and in vendor recognition – having recently topped AT&T’s list of Alliance Channel partners.
“Partners are savvy businesspeople. They want value and they’re going to go to where they get value. The question to be answered is, what is it they value most? And my belief is, they want a healthy pass-through, and they want the added value. It’s not a question of either-or,” Edwards said.
He fielded questions about vendor negotiation, commission pass-through, and the TSD value proposition.
Find out how Edwards makes waves in this wide-ranging interview with Channel Futures.
Google Cloud is making good on its long-touted plans to propel Partner Advantage to new heights.
Bronwyn Hastings, vice president, ISV ecosystem and channels at Google Cloud, discusses those changes to Partner Advantage.
As for what’s spurring the company’s partner program evolution, consider all that’s happening for organizations that need technology.
“We’re seeing a lot of digital transformation in customers, as you would expect, and the key element that they keep telling us is, they don’t want someone to just buy from, they want someone that is their strategic counsel,” Hastings told Channel Futures. “That’s a really interesting way of thinking about it — as strategic counsel that helps them understand first and foremost what they’re looking at, and what transformations they’re looking to do. But then they’re also looking for that follow-through, which is the expert implementation services. … It’s not so much about just buying the product. It’s about buying something that ends up as a value to the customer.”
Learn more about what partners are saying about Partner Advantage.
A Cisco security alert warns of a high-severity vulnerability in its Nexus 9000 series switches that could allow unauthenticated attackers to intercept and modify traffic.
Tracked as CVE-2023-20185, this vulnerability is due to an issue with the implementation of the ciphers that are used by the CloudSec encryption feature on affected switches. An attacker with an on-path position between the application centric infrastructure (ACI) sites could exploit this vulnerability by intercepting intersite encrypted traffic and using cryptanalytic techniques to break the encryption.
Phil Neray, vice president of cyber defense strategy at CardinalOps, said Cisco’s advisory about the vulnerability is “deliberately vague” about the weakness in Cisco’s encryption algorithm that would allow an adversary to read or modify the traffic.
“It is a serious issue because it enables adversaries to access sensitive data as well as move laterally across the network,” he said. “Cisco recommends disabling the feature and contacting support to evaluate alternative options, which are also not described in order to prevent adversaries from exploiting them as well.”
Read Cisco’s statement here.
Trellix layoffs are impacting an undisclosed number of employees while at least two high-level executives, including chief revenue officer Adam Philpott, have left the company.
In addition to Philpott, Amol Mathur, senior vice president of product management and marketing, and at least one other top executive have departed. According to their LinkedIn pages, Philpott and Mathur left Trellix last month.
Eric Parizo, managing principal analyst at Omdia, which shares a parent company with Channel Futures (Informa), said “to put it plainly, Trellix is in trouble.” The company was founded last year when Symphony Technology Group combined its newly acquired assets, McAfee Enterprise and FireEye, into a new company.
“We’re seeing uneven performance across numerous market segments in enterprise cybersecurity, and extended detection and response (XDR), where Trellix has doubled down, is no exception,” Parizo said. “Omdia’s latest data indicates the global XDR market will reach $2.284 billion in 2027, but that’s down slightly from our previous five-year forecast. We think economic headwinds, plus the ongoing effort vendors are making to position XDR’s niche versus endpoint detection and response (EDR), security information and event management (SIEM), security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR), etc., will continue to pose challenges.”
Find out why the company’s CEO wanted a “fresh start” with Trellix.
Trellix layoffs are impacting an undisclosed number of employees while at least two high-level executives, including chief revenue officer Adam Philpott, have left the company.
In addition to Philpott, Amol Mathur, senior vice president of product management and marketing, and at least one other top executive have departed. According to their LinkedIn pages, Philpott and Mathur left Trellix last month.
Eric Parizo, managing principal analyst at Omdia, which shares a parent company with Channel Futures (Informa), said “to put it plainly, Trellix is in trouble.” The company was founded last year when Symphony Technology Group combined its newly acquired assets, McAfee Enterprise and FireEye, into a new company.
“We’re seeing uneven performance across numerous market segments in enterprise cybersecurity, and extended detection and response (XDR), where Trellix has doubled down, is no exception,” Parizo said. “Omdia’s latest data indicates the global XDR market will reach $2.284 billion in 2027, but that’s down slightly from our previous five-year forecast. We think economic headwinds, plus the ongoing effort vendors are making to position XDR’s niche versus endpoint detection and response (EDR), security information and event management (SIEM), security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR), etc., will continue to pose challenges.”
Find out why the company’s CEO wanted a “fresh start” with Trellix.
Channel People Making Waves is a review of the individuals behind the most-read stories of the week at Channel Futures. The people we’re highlighting this week are leaders at HPE, IBM, Telarus, Google Cloud and more.
When it came to layoffs, Trellix made waves for more than just the dismissal of its employees. Around the same time, two executives departed, including its chief revenue officer. One analyst said the company, which was founded last year, is “in trouble” because of uneven performance across several market segments in enterprise cybersecurity.
Speaking of cybersecurity, a Cisco security alert warns of a high-severity vulnerability in its Nexus 9000 series switches that could allow unauthenticated attackers to intercept and modify traffic. One analyst we interviewed said the issue was serious because it enables adversaries to access sensitive data as well as move laterally across the network.
However, cybersecurity wasn’t the only news of the day making waves. Google Cloud is executing its plans to bolster Partner Advantage, and partly because officials are seeing a lot of digital transformation in customers who seek a “strategic counsel” to help them understand the process.
There’s obviously more to the week’s top-ranked news (see slideshow above). And, if you didn’t catch the last edition of Channel People Making Waves, you can find it here.
Want to contact the author directly about this story? Have ideas for a follow-up article? Email Claudia Adrien or connect with her on LinkedIn. |
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