CRN_June2023_Issue_1420

CRN Jun 2023 Issue #1420 - Rise Of The Builders - Women Of The Channel - Security Spotlight - Solution Provider 500 - The Power Of The Ever-Changing Solution Provider

ISSUE 1420 • JUNE 2023 crn.com

WOMEN OF THE CHANNEL Setting the bar high PAGE 14 SECURITY SPOTLIGHT Partnering might be the best path to MSSP success PAGE 63 SOLUTION PROVIDER Breaking new records PAGE 72

NEWS, ANALYSIS AND PERSPECTIVE FOR VARs AND TECHNOLOGY INTEGRATORS

Rise Of The AI Builders Some forward-thinking solution providers have spent years building artificial intelligence practices, and today their bets are paying off as businesses rush to figure out how to take advantage of generative AI. PAGE 6

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Computer Reseller News June 2023

Rise Of The AI Builders Some forward-thinking solution providers have spent years building artificial intelligence practices, and today their bets are paying off as businesses are going full speed

Columns 5 The Final Cut By Steven Burke 74 The Channel Factor By Jennifer Follett Feature 72 Solution Provider 500 These solution

ahead in their drive to figure out how to take advantage of generative AI.

providers are going above and beyond in providing IT and technical services to their customers— proving the value of being a trusted adviser. Here is our annual ranking of the largest solution providers by revenue with operations in North America.

CRN honors those who have set the bar high. They are leading by example, forging tight bonds with their teams, mentoring others and effecting change within the technology landscape across vendors, distributors and solution providers. Women Of The Channel

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Security Spotlight Our special section shows that since becoming an MSSP is hard, partnering with one could be the answer. We also explore what it means to fully deliver MDR, delve into how to navigate cyber insurance pitfalls, and look at hot new products and what’s ahead at the XChange Security conference.

CRN (ISSN 1539-7343), Computer Reseller News, Copyright ©2023 by The Channel Company is published 8 times a year (February, April, June, July, August, October, November, December and Special Issues) by The Channel Company,One Research Drive,Suite 410A,Westborough,MA 01581.Periodi- cals postage paid at Worcester, MA, (and additional offices, if applicable). POSTMASTER: Send address changes to The Channel Company, Dept: CRN Subscriptions, 100 Crossways Park Dr W, Suite 300,Woodbury, NY 11797. FOR SUBSCRIPTION SERVICES go to crn.com/subscribe Registered for GST as The Channel Company, GST No. R13288078, Customer No. 2116057, Agreement No. 40011901. Return undeliverable Canadian addresses to: APC Postal Logistics, LLC PO Box 503 RPO W Beaver Cre, Rich-Hill ON L4B 4R6. CRN is free to qualified management personnel at companies involved in the reselling/distribution of computers/networking systems, software and services. One-year subscription rates for all others in the United States are $209.00; Canada $234.00. Overseas air mail rates are: Europe $380.00; Mexico/South America $380.00; Africa $380.00; Asia/ Australia $480.00. Please mail all subscription inquiries along with checks or money orders to The Channel Company, Dept: CRN Subscriptions, 100 Crossways Park Dr W, Suite 300, Woodbury, NY 11797. For renewals or change of address, please include the mailing address label appearing on the front cover of the publication.

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JUNE

THE FINAL CUT The Power Of The Ever-Changing Solution Provider SOFTWARE TO GO IS CELEBRATING ITS 40TH ANNIVERSARY

By Steven Burke

WHEN JOE BALSAROTTI WAS 16 YEARS OLD and hanging out at a computer store, he ended up advising a business owner on what system to buy: a $4,000 Apple II. The computer store manager hired him on the spot. “A guy had questions the manager couldn’t answer, and I told him what he needed for his business,” said Balsarotti. “I told the manager, ‘You mean you’re going to pay me to play with this stuff?’”

Elevate your people, organization, and solutions through high-visibility recognition across the entire channel.

Today, Balsarotti—who has that rare combination of technology and business savvy that is at the very heart of the solution provider model—is owner and president of Software To Go, a St. Peters, Mo., solution provider that is celebrat- ing its 40th anniversary this year. The reason the business has survived and thrived is a testament to the entre- preneurial drive and razor-sharp customer-for-life focus of Balsarotti and his team. Software To Go has navigated the treacherous twists and turns of the IT solution business for four decades by consistently solving business problems for its customers—no matter the obstacles and technology pitfalls. Of course, this sometimes means taking on thorny business problems that others would pass on. Like the time Balsarotti was asked by a business associa- tion colleague to fix a glass-cutting machine that was no longer working and had shut down a manufacturing line. That machine—which included an embedded 286 computer—was out of date and could not be upgraded. “This is one of those jobs none of my staff could take on,” Balsarotti recalled. “They call it a ‘Joe project.’” Balsarotti took some old parts and his soldering wire and ended up working from noon until midnight on the system before it was fixed. Needless to say, that plant owner was more than happy to write out the check for the job and even buy Balsarotti a meal at the local Denny’s restaurant as a thank you. “If you didn’t fix this, we were out of business,” Balsarotti recalls the business owner saying. “I had called the manufacturer of that system, who told me that they could sell me a new one for $150,000 but they wouldn’t have it to me for five months. Tomorrow we’ll be back at work because of you.” Balsarotti also makes sure he and his team pick up the phone and respond to customers. “I know the question that will win me the deal: When is the last time someone sat down with you and discussed your business plan and where you want to go in the future?” he said. “That’s when I often get a blank look from the prospective customer, and I know we are going to win that deal.” At the end of the day, Balsarotti and Software To Go do what it takes to get the job done for customers. It’s why solution providers exist and why they will forever be the lifeline for customers looking for advice on how to solve a business problem with technology solutions. For its 40th anniversary, Software To Go is giving out commemorative yard- sticks—the problem is there is no yardstick that will measure just how tall Balsarotti and his team stand. Congratulations to Software To Go, and here’s to measuring how far the company goes over the next 40 years. 

BACKTALK: How are you going above and beyond to service your customers? Let me know at sburke@thechannelcompany.com.

JUNE 2023

COVER STORY

By Dylan Martin

W hen Asif Hasan and his colleagues ditched well-paying jobs in 2013 to start a new company that builds artificial intelligence solutions for enterprises, they assumed fast growth would quickly follow. They had seen the promise ofAI in research that demonstrated the real-world feasibility of deep learning, a complex but pow- erful machine learning method that mimics the way the brain absorbs information and now serves as the foundation for many AI applications today. Hasan also knew that there was “space in the market for a new type of solution provider that brings these capabilities to the enterprise” from challenges he experienced trying to find outsourced data science talent when he was director of business analytics at Philips Healthcare. The problem was the market wasn’t quite ready when Hasan and his three co-founders started Quantiphi. Business was slower than expected in the first few years, and the Marlborough, Mass.-based company mostly got by onAI proofs of concept while doing larger work around advanced analytics and data science. “We were obviously, in hindsight, quite early because the first three years for us were very, very difficult,” said Hasan. But instead

of second-guessing themselves, Hasan and his team stayed patient. They believed the time would come when Quantiphi’s AI services would surge in demand, and in due time they were right. Ten years after its founding, Quantiphi boasts a workforce of nearly 4,000 people, and the “AI-first digital engineering com- pany” has racked up 2,500 projects with 350 customers in nine industries, including a handful of large-scaleAI engagements each worth around $10 million a year.This has helped fuel a compound annual growth rate of 85 percent for the past three years. “Eventually the momentum kicked in, and then we were off to the races,” Hasan said. While AI technologies are fueling new features in myriad software applications and cloud services for the channel to resell, manage and provide services around, solution providers like Quantiphi are seizing on a profit-rich opportunity at the literal ground floor: the fast-growing need for infrastructure and services underpinning AI applications and features. This group of solution providers, which ranges from newer companies like Quantiphi to storied companies likeWorldWide Technology, have spent the past several years building AI prac- tices. Now they stand to benefit from what IDC estimates could be a $154 billion market for AI-centric systems this year. The

JUNE 2023

market, which includes hardware, software and services, has the potential to grow, on average, 27 percent for the next three years, according to the research firm. “We do feel that this is going to accelerate, and it’s going to accelerate in a significant way,” Hasan said. For Quantiphi, most of its growth came before ChatGPT, a chatbot powered by a large language AI model, entered the pic- ture last fall. ChatGPT sent shockwaves through the tech industry with its ability to understand complex prompts and respond with an array of detailed answers—from blog posts on a variety of subjects to software code for web browsers and other kinds of applications—all offered with the caveat that it could potentially impart inaccurate or biased information. Nevertheless, enterprises are now rushing to figure out how to take advantage of generative AI, a broad category of AI models

tive AI strategies and what they need to build custom applications that leverage proprietary information since there are risks in sharing data with consumer-facing applications like ChatGPT. “If you don’t control that model, how would that information be leveraged to provide an answer to another party when they make a prompt into an outsourced model because that’s an API call?That’s a concern that has come up time and again with CIOs and CISOs that we’ve spoken to,” Brooks said. The issue with building a large language model from scratch that is like ChatGPT but protects proprietary data is that develop- ment can cost up to $100 million, according to Brooks. Fortunately, a middle ground has already emerged for enter- prises: Large vendors like AmazonWeb Services, Google Cloud, MicrosoftAzure and Nvidia are now offering pretrained models, among other kinds of building blocks, that solution providers can

that includes ChatGPT and renders new con- tent of different forms, including text, images and video, using large data sets.The trend has already invaded new features of major software staples like Microsoft 365 and a bevy of cybersecurity offerings. “What ChatGPT has done is given a lot of

use to develop custom generative AI solutions for customers. To Brooks, it’s a major opportunity that will require a diverse range of skills to ensure custom applications are pulling from the right data sets and providing the right kind of responses.

‘What ChatGPT has done is given a lot of people in a lot of dierent scenarios the rst glimpse of what a generative AI system could look like. It’s impressed a lot of people. It’s left a lot of people unsettled.

… But everyone is intrigued by it.’ — Asif Hasan, Co-Founder, Quantiphi

“It is something where we’ve had to really use our experience in security, data governance and data science as well as leverage our relationships with OEMs,” he said. But the generative AI opportunities in the channel don’t have to end with the development and management of applications. For NewYork-based global consulting giant Deloitte, there is also an opportunity to advise customers on best practices for ensuring their employees can take advantage of these disruptive tools. “How do they relearn that new way of doing things and ensure that they are working with the technology?A lot of the benefit of generativeAI is about augmenting human capability and advanc- ing it. So that also requires humans to relearn the way they do things,” said Gopal Srinivasan, a longtime Deloitte executive who leads the firm’s generative AI efforts with Google Cloud (see Q&A with Srinivasan on p. 11). Meanwhile, one solution provider that has already seen the promise of generativeAI in action for enterprises is LosAngeles- based SADA Systems. The situation: A 3-D manufacturing company was dealing with low utilization of its laser-cutting product among customers, so it wanted to use a text-to-image model to kickstart the creative process for users and give them a quick way to make designs. MilesWard, CTO at SADA, said the company provided guidance and, after the design generation tool went live, the laser-cutter vendor saw a 50-fold increase in usage the following week.

people in a lot of different scenarios the first glimpse of what a generative AI system could look like. It’s impressed a lot of people. It’s left a lot of people unsettled. … But everyone is intrigued by it,” Hasan said. Now Hasan is trying to keep up with the new interest sparked by generative AI. For the past few months, he’s been holding up to three executive briefings a day to answer a surge of customer questions and discuss new projects around the technology. “We are seeing at the top of the funnel interest levels at a scale we have never ever seen before in the last 10 years,” Hasan said. Generative AI: A Wild West Of Services And Products Tim Brooks, managing director of data strategy and AI solutions at St. Louis, Mo.-based WWT, said enterprises used to spend much of their time thinking about what kind of infrastructure they needed to power AI applications. But now thatAI infrastructure has become ubiquitous, Brooks has noticed that customers of the solution provider juggernaut have turned their focus to much finer details of AI projects, such as data governance, model risk management and other issues that can play a role in a project’s success. “I would say five years ago that rarely came up. Now that comes up in every conversation,” said Brooks.This is especially important now that many enterprises are trying to figure out their own genera-

JUNE 2023

COVER STORY

“This stuff can become easy enough and magical enough that you’re unlocking a very different behavior from customers where they’re doing it because it’s awesome, not because they have to or they think it’s the most efficient thing to do,” he said. It’s emblematic of the large opportunityWard sees in generative AI: allowing companies to unlock productivity and new experi- ences. But he also sees a challenge: Innovation is happening so fast in the generative AI space that it may take some time for customers to settle on a solution. “I think it’s difficult for customers to say, ‘Yeah, totally. I defi- nitely want to pay for you to have a team full of people doing exactly this one thing, which I can write the [statement of work contract] for now and commit to the outcomes for now,’ when the whole tool platform is in upheaval, and there may very likely be a more efficient approach available in the next weeks,” he said. Building On The Shoulders Of Cloud Giants For Hasan, what helped boost Quantiphi’s business in the mid- 2010s after its slow start are two things that have benefited the broader AI market. Around the time the TensorFlow and PyTorch open-source frameworks were released to make it easier for devel- opers to build machine learning models, cloud service providers such as AWS, Google Cloud and MicrosoftAzure made big expansions with compute instances powered by graphics processing units (GPUs) that were fine- tuned to train models—a key aspect of developingAI applications—much faster than cen- tral processing units (CPUs). Over time, these cloud service providers have added a variety of offerings that aid with the development and management of AI applications, such as AWS’ SageMaker Studio integrated development environment and Google Cloud’sVertexAI machine learning platform, which Hasan said serve as crucial building blocks for Quantiphi’s proprietary solutions. “What we’ve done is on top of some of the cloud platform solutions that exist, we have built our own layer of IP that enables customers to seamlessly on-board to a cloud technology,” he said. Quantiphi offers these solutions under the banner of “platform- enabled technology services,” with revenue typically split between application development and the integration of the underlying infrastructure, including cloud instances, data lakes and a machine learning operations platform. But before any development begins, Quantiphi starts by help- ing customers understand how AI can help them solve problems and what resources are needed.

“What we’re able to do is we’re able to go into organizations, help them envision what their value chain can look like if they look at it with an AI-first lens, and from there we can help them understand what are the interesting use cases,” Hasan said. With one customer, a large health-care organization, Quantiphi got started by developing a proof of concept for an AI-assisted radiology application that detects a rare lung disease. After impressing the customer with the pilot’s results, the rela- tionship evolved into Quantiphi developing what Hasan called a “head-to-toe AI-assisted radiology platform.” This platform allowed the organization to introduce a new digital diagnostics platform. In turn, Quantiphi is now making somewhere in the range of $10 million annually from the customer. “The pattern that we’ve seen is if you’re helping organizations grow their business and add new lines to their revenue, this is scaled well or there’s a meaningful reduction in costs,” Hasan said. ‘We All Revolve Around Nvidia’ For solution providers excelling in theAI space, there’s one ven- dor that is often at the center of the infrastructure and services that make applications possible: Nvidia. “Whatever Nvidia wants to do is essen- tially going to be the rules, no matter who you are in the ecosys- tem: OEMs, networking partners, storage part- ners, MLOps software partners,” said Andy Lin, CTO at Houston- based Mark III Systems. “We all revolve around Nvidia, and I think if you get that and you figure out where you fit, you can do very well.” For years, Nvidia was mainly known for designing GPUs used to accelerate graphics in computer games and 3-D applications. But in the late 2000s, the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company began to develop GPUs with multiple processing cores and intro- duced the CUDA parallel programming platform, which allowed those chips to run high-performance computing (HPC) workloads faster than CPUs by breaking them down into smaller tasks and processing those tasks simultaneously. In the 16 years since its launch, CUDA has dominated the landscape of software that benefits from accelerated computing, which has made Nvidia GPUs the top choice for such workloads. Over the past several years, Nvidia has used that foundation to evolve from a component vendor to a “full-stack comput- ing company” that provides the critical hardware and software components for accelerated workloads like AI. This new framing is best represented by Nvidia’s DGX plat- form, which consists of servers, workstations and, starting this

‘Whatever Nvidia wants to do is essentially going to be the rules, no matter who you are in the ecosystem: OEMs, networking partners, storage partners, MLOps software partners.’ — Andy Lin, CTO, Mark III Systems

JUNE 2023

year, a cloud service that tightly integrates GPUs and other hardware components with a growing suite of Nvidia software to develop and manage AI applications. For many of Nvidia’s top channel partners, DGX systems have become one of the main ways these solution providers fulfill the AI infrastructure needs of customers. Nvidia also steers partners to sell GPU systems it has certified from vendors like Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Dell Technologies. To Brett Newman, an executive at Plymouth, Mass.-based Micro- way, selling GPU-equipped systems can be lucrative because they carry a much higher average selling price than standard servers. But what makes the DGX systems even more appealing for the HPC systems integrator is that they are preconfigured and the software is highly optimized. This means that Microway doesn’t have to spend time sourcing components, testing them for compatibility and dealing with integration challenges. It also means less time is spent on the software side.As a result, DGX systems can have better margins than white-box GPU systems. “One of the blessings of the DGX systems is that they come with a certain level of hardware and solution-style integration. Yes, we have to deploy the software stack on top of it. But the time required in doing the deployment of the software stack is less time than is required on a vanilla GPU-accelerated cluster,” said Newman, who is Microway’s vice president of marketing and customer engagement for HPC and AI. Selling white-box GPU systems can come with its own margin benefits too if Microway can source components efficiently. “Both are good and healthy for companies like us,” Newman said. Nevertheless, Microway’s investment in Nvidia’s DGX systems has paid off, accounting for around one-third of its annual revenue since 2020, four years after the systems integrator first started selling the systems. “AI is a smaller base of our business, but it has this explosive growth of 50 percent or 100 percent annually and even stronger in those first days when DGX started to debut,” Newman said. Microway has grown its AI business not just with Nvidia’s hardware but its software too.The GPU designer’s growing suite of software now includes libraries, software development kits, toolkits, containers and orchestration and management platforms. This means there is a lot for customers to navigate. For Microway, this translates into training services revenue, though Newman said making money isn’t the goal. “We don’t treat it necessarily as the area where we want to make a huge profit center.We treat it as how do we do the right thing for the customer and their deployments and ensure they get the best value out of what they’re buying?” Newman said. From DGX systems and other GPU systems, Microway also has an opportunity to make money by consulting on what else a customer may need to achieve its AI goals, and this can involve other potential sources of compensation, such as recommending extra software for reselling.

“That’s been value that helps us differentiate ourselves,” he said. While Nvidia has dominated the AI computing space with its GPUs for years, the chip designer is now facing challenges on mul- tiple fronts, including large rivals like Intel andAMD and also cloud service providers like AWS designing their own chips. Even newer generations of CPUs, including Intel’s fourth-generation Xeon Scalable chips, are starting to come with built-in AI capabilities. “If you look at the last generation of CPUs, [Intel] added [Advanced Matrix Extensions] that make them useful for training. They’re not as great of a training device as an Nvidia GPU. How- ever, they’re always there in the deployment that you’re buying, so all of a sudden you can get a percentage of an Nvidia GPU worth of training with very little extra effort,” Newman said. From App Maker To Systems Integrator To AWS Rival In the realm of AI-focused systems integrators, none has had quite the journey as Lambda. Founded in 2012, the San Francisco-based startup spent its first few years developing AI software with an initial focus on facial recognition. But Lambda started down a different path when it released an AI-based image editor app called Dreamscope. The smartphone app got millions of downloads, but running all that GPU comput- ing in the cloud was getting expensive. “What we realized was we were paying AWS almost $60,000 a month in our cloud compute costs for it,” said MiteshAgarwal, Lambda’s COO. So Lambda’s team decided to build its own GPU cluster, which only cost around two months of AWS bills to assemble the collec- tion of systems, allowing the company to save significant money. This led to a realization: There was a growing number of deep learning research teams just like Lambda that could benefit from having their own on-premises GPU systems, so the company decided to pivot and start a systems integration business. But as Lambda started selling GPU systems, the company noticed a common issue among customers. It was difficult to maintain all the necessary software components. “If you upgraded CUDA, your PyTorch would break. Then if you upgraded PyTorch, some other dependencies would break. It was just a nightmare,” Agarwal said. This prompted Lambda to create a free repository of open- source AI software called Lambda Stack, which uses a one-line Linux command to install all the latest packages and manage all the dependencies. The repository’s inclusion in every GPU system gave Lambda a reputation for making products that are easy to use. “It just really helped make us stand out as a niche product,” Agarwal said. Soon enough, Lambda was racking up big names as custom- ers: Apple,Amazon, Microsoft and Sony, to name a few.This was boosted by moves to provide clusters of GPU systems and partner with ISVs to provide extra value. As a result, Lambda’s system revenue grew 60 times between 2017 and 2022.

JUNE 2023

COVER STORY

While Lambda’s system business was profitable, the company had been working on a more ambitious project: a GPU cloud service.After initially building out a service using its own cash, the company went into expansion mode in 2021 and started raising tens of millions of dollars from venture capital firms to compete with AWS and other cloud providers on price. Now that the generativeAI craze has kicked into full gear,Agar- wal said Lambda has been struggling to keep up with demand for cloud instances powered by Nvidia’s A100 and H100 GPUs due to a broader shortage of components in the industry. “I think there is going to be massive growth, especially within the AI infrastructure offering layer. I think everyone today is underestimating the amount of compute needed,” he said. Building The Teams To Seize The Services Dream Mark III’s Lin said there was no grand vision behind the com- pany’s decision to start an AI practice. Instead, it started with a

What has also made Mark III stand out are the hackathons and education sessions held by the company to help customers understand what they can achieve with AI systems. “Hackathons are great because we can assemble self-forming teams from all across that [customer’s] community, whether it be a large enterprise, a large university, a large academic medical center, and work specifically together on different challenges,” Lin said. For Insight Enterprises, acquisitions have been one way the Chandler, Ariz.-based solution provider powerhouse has been able to build teams with AI and data expertise, according to Carmen Taglienti, a principal cloud and AI architect at the com- pany. Acquisitions that have strengthened Insight’s talent in this area include PCM, BlueMetal and Cardinal Solutions. This has helped Insight build a fast-growingAI business, which includes selling and integrating systems like Nvidia’s DGX plat- form with software as well as building custom solutions.

young employee who had tinkered with a project over a weekend. “What happened is a 23-year-old developer had walked in one day and built a computer vision model in 2015 using TensorFlow and was like, ‘Is this pretty cool?’ We’re like, ‘Yeah, it’s pretty cool,’” said Lin.

While Nvidia has been a key partner for Insight, the company has also relied on partnerships with specialist ISVs to win large AI customer deals in areas like retail. “It really helps to sim- plify this problem of how am I going to effectively leverage AI techniques and the models that allow

‘[Partnering with specialist ISVs] really helps to simplify the problem of how am I going to eectively leverage AI techniques and the models that allow us

to do something practical with it.’ — Carmen Taglienti, Principal Cloud, AI Architect, Insight Enterprises

From there, Mark III knew it had to start an AI practice, and that individual act of creation went on to become a core tenet— build something every day—which Lin said has resulted in high revenue growth, largely driven by health-care and life sciences customers. This builder mentality means that the company’sAI team—which now includes systems engineers, developers, DevOps professionals and data scientists—is intimately familiar with all the software and hardware underpinnings to make AI applications work. “The reason why we’re successful essentially is that since we built every day for the last seven, eight years, we really under- stand how these stacks are constructed,” he said. For Mark III and other solution providers, the hiring of special- ists who know their way around AI software and hardware has been key to opening new services opportunities. The company’s biggest profit centers are rollout services, which involve setting up systems and on-boarding users onto the sys- tem, and what it calls “co-pilot” services, which give a customer direct access to Mark III’s team in case they need assistance with the software. “There are thousands of combinations in ways you can build this right, and it can break in lots and lots and lots of different ways,” Lin said.

us to do something practical with it,” Taglienti said. But the tradeoff in using ISV solutions to accelerate deployments is that margins for reselling software are usually in the single digits. On the other hand, Insight can make a much greater profit on devel- oping custom solutions with margins in the range of 40 percent. This is why Insight had made custom AI solutions a high priority. But to get the work done, the company has not only built out a team of data scientists, it has also a developed a team of business domain experts who can work with customers to understand what outcomes they’re looking for. “We really need to understand how to measure the effective- ness, and that’s where the true impact comes,” Taglienti said. As generative AI fuels a new wave of demand for services, the outlook held by Hasan, the co-founder at Quantiphi, is that the category of disruptive technologies will have a large influ- ence on the way people work soon, even if the targeted goals are small at first. “I think the belief is that it will help organizations move for- ward,” he said. “It will revolutionize the knowledge work category, especially starting with places where knowledge work is being done within the guardrails of a very tight set of specifications.”

MARK HARANAS contributed to this story.

JUNE 2023

COVER STORY

Deloitte Exec On AI’s ‘Inflection Point’ And The Importance Of Its Partnership With Google Cloud Consulting and IT services giant Deloitte is now building new generative AI solutions with Google Cloud to drive opportunities for enterprises around the world. “Clearly, we are at an inflection point in terms of technology evolution and AI in general,” said Deloitte’s Gopal Srinivasan, who helps lead the company’s new Generative AI practice. In an interview with CRN , Srinivasan explains Deloitte’s strategy of workforce transformation with generative AI, its Google Cloud partnership and the company’s AI goals.—By Mark Haranas

What are some generative AI use cases with Google Cloud that are driving enterprise sales? After a long time, enterprises are looking across the entire business to say, ‘Where can we drive productivity and optimize how we run our business?Where can we capture new revenue and growth through hyper-personalization and better customer engagement?’ While all of that encompasses many specific use cases, where the power of the Deloitte-Google partnership is unique is that generative AI is not going to exist in isolation. You still need to plug it into the workflows of the enterprise, you still need to harness the private data that the enterprise has and train those models. This is going to require that workforces within businesses are reskilled and reallocated to areas where currently we’ve been going through a period of labor shortage in several areas.And these technologies allow you to drive more productivity, but it’s also going to require proactive workforce transformation. TrustworthyAI is one of Deloitte’s offerings in theAI domain. This allows us to combine what Google is introducing from a technology standpoint to enable compliance, privacy, data security, etc. with our principles, policies and processes to allow a company to use AI responsibly. So customers can have trust in what is being delivered. That’s something our partnership delivers. How is Deloitte helping customers around workforce transformation in regard to generative AI? There are three aspects when it comes to workforce trans- formation. One is as we apply these technologies to rapidly rethink our business processes, what does it mean for the people who are performing these processes today? How do they relearn that new way of doing things and ensure that they are working with the technology?A lot of the benefit of generativeAI is about augmenting human capability and advancing it. So that also requires humans to relearn the way they do things. So how you get your workforce to learn to work withAI and take advantage ofAI capabilities is No. 1. The second is this is going to lead to things that you’ve never done before in an organization. For instance, today, there are

several silos of data across the organization. Enterprises, in a sense, have given up trying on even getting a unified view of that data. But with generative AI and Google’s new enterprise search solutions, now we have the possibility of being able to look into all of these stores of data, look at patterns across them, and be able to retrieve insights that previously had been a huge challenge, both in terms of costs and also just the sheer feasibility of doing it.You need people that are applyingAI to do all of these things and making that insight available. What’s the third important aspect of workforce transformation around generative AI? As you get more into deploying these technologies, drivingAI fluency and skill sets in your workforce is going to be critical. ... We are helping our clients, along with Google, to start from the top and look across the organization at how their operat- ing model changes, how the workforce needs to be reskilled, and ensure that—as they apply this technology—they can do it rapidly and continue to run the business by managing the transition in an effective manner. In terms of generative AI market dierentiation, what is Google Cloud doing better than others? This question comes up a lot when we speak to our enterprise clients, ‘How can I be sure that these models are not training themselves on my data and those capabilities become available to our competitors?’ Right out of the gate, what Google is saying is, ‘Our models will not do that.Without your consent or explicit permission, your data will stay within your walls. Whatever private data the model gets trained on is applied only on your use cases and within your organization.’ That is a strong market differentiation that has seen a lot of interest and more confidence in moving forward with deploy- ing generative AI in the enterprise.

Also, Google’s model is not just one model that can do a lot of things generally OK, but several models that can do specific things really well.  Scan here to read the full interview.

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Dell Technologies Recognizes Our Accomplished Women Of The Channel Winners We’re thrilled to highlight the inspiring and talented women of Dell Technologies, who have put our partner community first. These photos show the faces of our most influential women channel leaders who help partners maximize and strengthen their relationships with Dell Technologies. We’re so excited and happy for all these Women of the Channel to be deservingly recognized on the 2023 list. Congratulations to each of our winners!

POWER 100

Cheryl Cook Senior Vice President, Global Partner Marketing

Christina Crowley Senior Vice President,

Rola Dagher Global Channel Chief

Denise Millard Senior Vice President, Global Alliances

Global Partner Services Sales

Kristina Austin Senior Director, Global Partner Ecosystem and Partner Program Marketing

Chrissy Beckman Sales Director, North America Channel

Diane Brode Senior Director, Global Partner Marketing

Madeyline Brown Vice President, North America Channel Inside Sales

Nikkia Despertt Director, Global Product Line Management of Services Center of Competence

www.delltechnologies.com/partner/en-us/partner/womens-network.htm

Karin Doppelbauer Director, EMEA SB & MB Marketing

Maureen Gaumer Senior Director, Global Alliances and Industries Marketing

Sarah Griffin Director, GTM & Programs, Global Alliances

Tina Hanson Director, Global Partner and OEM Marketing

Tamara Keane Director, North America Sales

Tina Mentschik Director, Channel Services

Kathleen Meza Senior Director, Global Partner Program Operations

Maheen Mirza Senior Director, North America Channel Sales

Julie Olson Director, Global Partner Marketing Communications and Paid Media

Lisa Ortiz Director, Federal Channel Sales

Dina Overina Senior Director, Global Partner Marketing Digital Experience, Capabilities and Operations

Florence Ropion Vice-President and France General Manager Channel

Susanne Schuetz Director, Partner and Distribution Marketing EMEA

Patty Scire Senior Director, North America Channel Programs and Strategy

Caroline Scott Director, North America Channel Marketing

Nicola Sheppard Senior Director, Global Partner Operations, Business Transformation & Partner Success

Cindy Spring Director, Global Specialty Channels Strategy & Programs

Clarissa Urena Director, Channel Sales

Beth Villalpando Director, North America Channel Marketing

Kara Wooten Director, Global Partner Events and Engagements

Dell Technologies Partner Program. Together, we stop at nothing.

Setting A High Bar

By Jane O'Brien & Jennifer Follett

Our 2023 Women of the Channel list shines a light on over 1,600 of the industry’s top achievers across a variety of tech companies.A sampling of this year’s honorees is included here, including two elite subsets of the overall list: the Power 100, which honors the most influential executives from technology vendors and distributors, and the Power 80 Solution Providers, which spotlights key leaders from channel companies. Scan here to view the full list.

of the 2023 Women Channel

POWER 100

Kim Abrams Director, Inside Sales Davenport Group

Amanda Adams VP, Americas Alliances CrowdStrike Adams is a strong advo- cate for partners, fostering and developing key rela- tionships that positively impact the profitability of partners and CrowdStrike. She drove investments in significant partnerships, delivering double-digit revenue growth sourced by partners across the Americas.

Kaitki Agarwal Founder, President, CTO A5G Networks Agarwal has been building A5G's partner ecosys- tem and establishing the relationships needed to help grow the business. The company is a startup in the 5G arena and is looking to establish new channels for private net- works as well as mobile operator engagements.

Denise Akeroyd- Scanlin Executive Sales Director, Integrated, Partner Solutions AT&T Akeroyd-Scanlin has built a high-performing team that delivered year-over- year revenue growth. The team increased partner engagement, achieved production improvement, drove operational excel- lence and met key cus- tomer service goals.

Heather Allen Channel Director Tintri

Abrams oversees a rap- idly growing inside sales team. She redesigned the new-hire on-boarding process and helped with coverage gaps. Abrams also hired and on-boarded eight new people, ensuring that they started their new roles successfully.

Allen oversaw a team of channel managers, enabling the channel community to promote Tintri with education, mar- keting and cross-sales opportunities. She also led the growth of Tintri’s distribution business with executive leadership, align- ing its technologies with key alliance partnerships.

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of the 2023 Women Channel

POWER 100

POWER 80 SP

Jane Allen Sr. Partner Program Manager Automation Anywhere Allen designed and launched Automation Anywhere’s new global partner program—called Pinnacle—which is focused on driving par- ticipation, performance and profitability. She also launched a new reseller track known as Authorized Sales Partner.

Ana Lucia Amaral Sr. Regional, Channel Marketing Manager, Americas Checkmarx Amaral designed and man- aged Checkmarx’s first Partner Summit, launched the company’s first MSSP program and managed an MDF program for North America. She also devel- oped a showcase for the channel called Checkmarx Partner Hub.

Megan Amdahl SVP, Partner Alliances, North America Transformation Insight Enterprises Amdahl leads Insight’s partner alliance and pro- curement team, ensuring it is the partner of choice for strategic technology part- ners. She also leads the North American Ambition Program, guiding transfor- mation efforts to optimize Insight’s solution portfolio and sales organization.

Abi Aminu Sr. Manager, Global Channel Programs, Strategy, Americas Thales Aminu drove a distribu- tion consolidation project and designed a consis- tent discount structure for resellers and distrib- utors worldwide, creating savings for Thales and increasing profitability and tier differentiation for partners.

Jennifer Anaya SVP, Global Marketing Ingram Micro

Anaya was integral to the launch of Ingram Micro Xvantage, which gives partners and their staff a personalized experience managing technology solutions. She also built a team supporting content development for partners, as well as digital, social and experience marketing.

POWER 100

POWER 80 SP

Jana Anderson Director, Sales AT&T

Sandra Antoun Director, Sales, Marketing Vintage IT Services Antoun has generated three times the expected quota for the past three years. She also expanded marketing efforts at Vintage IT Services with a limited budget and grew the company’s database for leads from 10,000 to 30,000.

Tabassum Anwar Founder, COO XenTegra Canada

Marie Ashway Director, Marketing Mainline Information Systems

Ghazal Asif VP, Global Partners, Alliances Rubrik

Anderson recently started on the Partner Solutions side of AT&T and quickly developed relationships with solution providers. She also helped partners identify new revenue opportunities with mobility solutions as a backup to AT&T’s wire- line services to fill gaps where connectivity was not available.

Anwar started the com- pany in 2016, providing different LARs with deliv- ery services until she realized that she couldn’t provide quality service white-gloving to them. She merged with XenTegra in 2019 and went direct to customers and has grown XenTegra Canada 100 per- cent year over year.

Asif has transformed the Rubrik partner ecosystem by creating tailored invest- ment plans for strategic partners and aligning inter- nal resources accordingly. This enabled Rubrik to drive deeper engagement and more strategic relationships between partners and end customers.

Ashway built deeper rela- tionships with strategic partners and worked with them to build and exe- cute marketing plans that drove pipeline. She also fostered relationships with new partners and collaborated to deliver training and enablement to the sales teams.

POWER 100

Tricia Atchison VP, Global Partner, Americas Marketing Equinix

Gina Avila Group Sales Manager, Strategic Partnerships Intuit QuickBooks

Jennifer Axt VP, U.S. State, Local Government, Education Tanium Axt cultivated a monthly call for SLED partners, providing communication around Tanium activities, product updates, cam- paigns and sales tools. She also spearheaded inclusion of a public sec- tor innovation category as part of Tanium’s annual Partner Awards program.

Mira Ayad Sr. Manager, AWS Marketplace Channel Growth, Scale Amazon Web Services Ayad’s team is focused on building programs that will help increase the number of sellers and professional services available on the AWS Marketplace. The key focus for her team is ensur- ing that these initiatives are able to scale effectively.

Beth Bacon Regional VP, Channel, North America Talkdesk

Atchison has been focused on delivering marketing and enable- ment programs to drive deeper engagement with partners. By creating a global framework with consistent deliverables, she drove consistency for the partner experience around the world.

Avila launched four vertical- focused co-sell teams, connecting partners to customers who need industry expertise and advanced QuickBooks products and services. She also helped redesign com- pensation and benefits to drive QuickBooks Online adoption.

Bacon rolled out a men- toring program between peers and developed a next-level training pro- gram to educate partners, resellers and alliances globally. It is designed to foster better alignment between those channels on Talkdesk’s products and services.

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of the 2023 Women Channel

POWER 80 SP

Sharon Baechtle VP, Channel Sales Binary Defense

Josée Baillargeon MSP Help Desk, Telco Support Director Sherweb

Ashley Baird-Gaare President, North America SoftwareOne Baird-Gaare led the opti- mization of sales and channel structures and delivery teams support- ing the execution of SoftwareOne’s solutions and vendor relationships. She was key to shaping the strategy for SoftwareOne’s recent rebrand to more holistically serve custom- ers and partners.

Erin Banks Sr. Director, Product Marketing, Partners, Alliances Lacework As the new leader for part- ners and alliances, Banks is committed to develop- ing content and webinars based on the “Power of Four.” These four include channel partners, cloud service providers, tech- nology partners and Lacework.

Cindy Baptiste Sr. Director, Global Partnerships, Channel Sales CyberArk Baptiste led the charge for new MSP processes to be developed and imple- mented and executed global Partner Advisory Council meetings. She also championed a redesign of the part- ner community and participated in new prod- uct introduction efforts.

Baechtle enhanced Binary Defense’s channel pro- gram to align more with its mission statement of “Making the World a Safer Place.” The program is designed to leverage security partners, and its go-to-market strategy is well received by those that focus on growing their cybersecurity revenue.

Baillargeon grew and solidified strong leader- ship and frontline teams following Sherweb’s acquisition of Global Mentoring Solutions. She worked toward gaining synergies and maintain- ing high-quality standards and enhanced reporting capabilities.

POWER 100

POWER 80 SP

Rachel Barger SVP, Americas Sales Leader Cisco Systems Barger and her team focused on driving improved alignment on service delivery and profitability with strate- gic partners and creating pathways for newer part- ners that align with growth areas such as managed services, secu- rity and collaboration.

Christine Barr CEO, Business Process Outsourcing Services Division NTT Barr worked with her team to launch compos- able services in support of customer demands for offering pay-as-you-go, cloud-based Contact- Center-as-a-Service models, real-time ana- lytics and AI capabilities for hyper-personalization services.

Rita Barry Director, Public Cloud

Heather Bell Group VP, Partner Sales Nuspire Bell has spent over 20 years working in software sales and has had the chance to sell into every single market globally. She has worked closely with Nuspire’s long- time partners to ensure their success and is now expanding on that strategy to align with more partners in this same manner.

Kristen Bell Director, Application Security GuidePoint Security

Alliances Ensono

Under Barry’s leadership, Ensono was on-boarded as a Google Partner Advantage partner and became one of six in the AWS ecosystem to receive the mainframe migration technology competency. She managed the submis- sion , writing and strategic plans around the entry.

Bell started GuidePoint’s AppSec-as-a-Service prac- tice to provide managed services around multiple application security tech- nologies. The offering lets customers select the best AppSec tools for them and overlay expertise from her team to manage these technologies.

POWER 80 SP

Julie Benefiel Director, Global Channel Programs, Strategy Secureworks Secureworks reached a significant milestone this past year by unveiling its “partner-first” strategy. Benefiel worked closely with the executive team to define the strategy and was responsible for delivering program enhancements and driv- ing the execution plan.

Chantelle Benesh Sr. Director, Head of Global Field Marketing Ironscales Ironscales recently became 100 percent channel and launched a new comprehensive part- ner program. To support this, Benesh ramped up building out programs and processes and built a global channel marketing team.

Lori Berry Director, Strategic Technology GreatAmerica Financial Services Berry joined GreatAmerica with the goal of simplify- ing financing for customers using technology. Since 2009, she has brought six financing integrations into the unified communica- tions and MSP markets.

Gunjan Bhardwaj COO Vista IT Solutions

Michelle Biase GM, D&H Canada D&H Distributing

Bhardwaj has spear- headed 18 percent sales revenue growth with channel partnerships during the past year at the managed services and software solution provider. She is passionate about and adept with technol- ogies and transforming ideas into innovative solutions.

In her first year at D&H, Biase executed the com- pany’s “Built for Growth, Generations and Giving” initiative across all departments, resulting in new investments like an expanded Vancouver warehouse, new Canadian management, and growth that outpaced the general distribution market.

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