ChannelBuzz.ca – Détails, épisodes et analyse

This is the final episode in our Knowledge 2026 coverage series, recorded live in Las Vegas. If you haven’t caught the earlier episodes, we’d suggest starting with our conversations with ServiceNow SVP of global partnerships and channels Michael Park and ServiceNow AVP of Canada Cristin Gooderham – both published last week.

Steven Kiss is a partner at EY Canada and leads the firm’s ServiceNow practice nationally. His path to EY is worth knowing: in 2013 he co-founded SuMO IT Solutions, which grew into Canada’s largest ServiceNow boutique and became the country’s first gold and first elite ServiceNow partner. EY acquired SuMO in May 2021, making this conversation’s recording date – almost exactly five years later – a quietly meaningful one.

EY is a global elite ServiceNow partner and the reigning worldwide partner of the year for banking, risk, and security. Steven’s strength in this conversation is that he speaks as a practitioner, not a spokesperson. He describes EY using ServiceNow internally as client zero – targeting eighty-five to ninety percent deflection of HR interactions, with employees getting instant answers to questions that used to require a chain of emails. He’s watching the agentic AI transition from the inside of a four-hundred-thousand-person organization.

On the practice-building side, his advice is consistent and direct: configuration over customization, accelerators over custom builds, and outcomes over deliverables. The partners who survive the AI transition, he argues, are the ones who learn to translate technology capability into business value – not the ones who can deploy the most modules the fastest.

His closing advice to Canadian MSPs and solution providers is worth the listen on its own: before you talk about what you can build, stop and ask what the client is actually trying to accomplish. It’s the philosophy that built SuMO – and it’s the one he’d hand to any partner trying to figure out where they fit in the agentic business era.

Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last sixteen years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca, and your host for the show.

This episode wraps up our coverage from last week’s ServiceNow Knowledge 2026 conference in Las Vegas. If you’ve been following along, you’ve heard from ServiceNow’s global channel chief on how the partner model is evolving around the Agentic Business, and from ServiceNow’s Canadian leader on what all the big announcements mean for Canadian enterprises and partners specifically. This conversation is a different angle altogether – what does this moment look like from someone who’s actually been building a ServiceNow practice in Canada for over a decade?

My guest is Steven Kiss, partner and national ServiceNow practice leader at EY Canada. What makes this conversation different from a lot of partner-perspective interviews is his backstory. Steven didn’t arrive at EY through the traditional consulting path. In 2013, he co-founded SuMO IT Solutions, which became Canada’s largest ServiceNow boutique – the first gold and first elite partner in the country. EY acquired SuMO in May 2021, and Steven has been running the national ServiceNow practice from inside one of the world’s largest professional services firms ever since. EY is a global elite ServiceNow partner and the reigning worldwide partner of the year in banking, risk, and security.

That combination – born in a boutique, operating at GSI scale, winning in regulated verticals – gives him a perspective on where the channel is headed that’s worth hearing whether you’re running a five-person shop or a fifty-person one.

Let’s get right into it – my chat with Steven Kiss.

Steven, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it.

Steven Kiss: My pleasure, Rob. Good to be here.

Robert Dutt: I want to start off with a little bit of the background. You didn’t arrive at EY through the traditional consulting angle. It’s neat that you built out a ServiceNow specialist in SuMO IT, which was then acquired. For listeners who don’t know the backstory, can you give us the elevator pitch version of what happened? And also, what does the EY ServiceNow footprint in Canada look like today?

Steven Kiss: Yeah, absolutely. I’d love to tell you that story. It goes back to 2013, where we saw an obvious opening in the market. ServiceNow was coming on strong, really starting its momentum. We had a lot of legacy HP folks and HP Service Manager, et cetera. With ServiceNow, I think there was a real opportunity to see the market redefine and reshape itself. We launched in October 2013 with just a handful of employees, and really being focused on the goal of building the best service management partner organization in the country – that was the fuel that allowed us to grow. It wasn’t about how do we grow the quickest, have the most people, have the most certifications, be the most profitable. We really just wanted to be the place that people would come to when they wanted to modernize and accelerate their transformation. And then it grew into, I would say, Canada’s largest ServiceNow boutique. We were the first gold partner in the country, and then we became the first elite partner in the country. Then up to the point in May 2021 – which is our fifth anniversary coming up in a couple of days – we completed the acquisition by EY, where we brought 85 professionals into the EY Canada organization. That’s just the high-level story.

Robert Dutt: That’s the backstory. Where’s that business at now? What does it look like in terms of scope and scale?

Steven Kiss: It’s been an incredible ride. We brought in the things that made the boutique partner super successful, which meant very deep technical skills, then expanding as the ServiceNow platform expanded. But there’s a true opportunity within an organization like EY to leverage that front-end consulting engine. EY as a legacy consulting organization is in the market every day talking about HR, cyber risk, supply chain optimization, any part of the business. What that offered them was the ability to operationalize consulting – in the real world, solve the problem for the customer by using technology. We’ve been able to grow with that through activation and integration within the firm. It’s been an incredible ride and it still continues to grow and expand today. Significant growth over the past five years.

Robert Dutt: The big theme here was obviously the Agentic Business – the argument that the pilot era is over and we’re moving towards autonomous AI deployment that shows real value. From where you sit, working with Canadian enterprises day to day, how does that land with what you’re seeing, with where people are? Are your clients there yet, or is this still aspirational for most?

Steven Kiss: Well, I think let’s put it this way. I think people have a sense of what they’d like to accomplish when we talk about the agentic enterprise – the vision of the future, the aspirational vision of tomorrow. I think that’s somewhat clear in people’s minds. It may not be fully aligned from executive to executive across the board, but I think they have an aspirational thought of what it is. A couple of years ago, Gartner put out a quote – and I hate to misquote it – but something along the lines of the vast adoption of AI in an enterprise will come from the platforms people are already using. And of course, we’ve seen that: ServiceNow, who’s been in the AI space for years and years, and other platforms that enterprises trust are obviously incorporating AI capabilities. You’ve got departmental efficiencies in a lot of cases, but I don’t think you have the end-to-end benefit of AI all the way through. You’ve got pockets of it, but the enterprise benefits are not yet being realized.

A hundred percent, like everybody says, we’re in the pilots and the kicking of the tires phase. But I think we have to think broader. This is not about how do I get my department to operate better, faster, stronger, cheaper – it’s really about the execution from request all the way through to fulfillment across the enterprise. We have the same actual goals as what we’ve had for years: breaking down silos, creating efficiencies across the enterprise, now with an expectation of accelerating all that. The good news is it’s at least a familiar challenge – a familiar motion – to break down those silos and get everyone rowing in the same direction.

Robert Dutt: A hundred percent. And I think that’s exactly it. How do you see your role, or the role of other partners, in helping organizations get that alignment across executives and get everyone prioritizing and identifying the steps?

Steven Kiss: Yeah, this is very interesting. This is where I look back on the earlier question about boutique versus the Big Four mindset now. I think of us very much along these lines. I’ve seen from the inside what organizations like EY have done. We’re a global operation – four hundred thousand people. Yes, we look at it from the Canadian lens because of being in Canada, but we’ve seen firsthand how these pockets of AI innovation turn into more enterprise workflows. Again, we’re four hundred thousand people, so any time we can see even single-digit efficiencies, that adds up to real dollars – and more importantly, less frustration for the people inside these workflows. We’re able to take these case studies and things that we’ve seen as client zero to our clients. We go, “Look, we are also a global operation. We have global employees. We understand the frictions from the inside.”

And I think being able to tap into that front-end consulting engine I mentioned a few moments ago – we are already in the market talking to the people who own that business problem, the person who feels the pain of it, potentially the budget to solve it. We’re able to bring our expertise to that story and explain how we would solve that problem. I think the adoption of platforms like ServiceNow reduces the obstacles to get there, simply because we can leverage the “using technology you already own” mindset. You don’t have to buy yet again another tool, another platform, train more people. It’s already been security vetted. You already know how to support it. Your people are used to using it. Why not simply extend it into these areas? That’s been a huge benefit of the conversations we’re having.

Robert Dutt: A big theme here – and whether you want to call it eating your own dog food or drinking your own champagne, ServiceNow tends to call it “Now on Now,” running the business on the product – I’m curious how you guys use ServiceNow internally, and especially as some of the new agentic capabilities roll in, how you’re thinking about it from an internal lens as a way to both learn and to add value to the organization.

Steven Kiss: Yeah, absolutely. It continues the thought from before – AI, obviously, is going into every department. There isn’t a department that’s not looking at it. We’re doing the exact same thing internally. We are a client of ServiceNow in addition to being a global elite partner, and we have the luxury of being able to look at it from the point of view of scale. Initially people are looking at it from the departments that are – I don’t want to necessarily say early adopters, but potentially early adopters – and IT would be one. If you think about what happened a generation ago with IT service management moving into enterprise service management, it’s the exact same thing. IT is one of the most framework-driven departments in an organization. We ourselves have deployed ServiceNow in IT for request management, traditional help desk support, ticketing, case summarization – things of that nature have been huge. HR has also been a huge accelerated adoption area with ServiceNow – onboarding new employees and things of that nature.

We also see ourselves moving very aggressively toward the target outcome of deflecting eighty-five to ninety percent of HR interactions. Things as basic as “What is the value of my flex benefit account?” or “How many days of vacation do I have?” – these are all things that the human in us wants to know nearly every day, but getting to that answer is not as easy as it should be. I have to send an email and I have to hope I get an answer. Now I can just simply ask and get the answer back. Looking at the employee from the human nature element is guiding where we’re taking it next. It’s really exciting where I’ve seen EY go from five years ago to today, and I think we’re going to see further acceleration in these areas.

Robert Dutt: You guys just won Worldwide Partner of the Year for banking and risk. Very specific distinction – not just great implementation partner, but specifically in high-stakes, regulated space. Take your victory lap. What does that actually mean in terms of what you think you’re doing that more generalist partners aren’t?

Steven Kiss: It’s incredible. And Rob, I hate to point it out – you also missed security in there. So it’s risk, security, and banking, which means we’re on the resilience side. If I take risk and security together, it’s not functional deployments of these things – it’s understanding the mindset of what resilience means to organizations, especially regulated industries like banking. This is a perfect example where these things actually come together.

I think what separates us, in addition to the obvious large footprint in the banking and financial services sector to begin with, is again leveraging that front-end consulting engine. It’s one of our largest sectors. It’s where we’ve got a ton of innovation going, especially internally at EY with our AI innovation centers, et cetera. There’s a lot of horsepower and investment directed at these. I think they’re also the sectors that are investing the most themselves. So there’s a very strong partnership. It’s truly amazing for us. We work with very large financial institutions to help them get to success in these areas.

I think it’s also not about deployment of modules. It’s not about people at hours. It’s really about outcomes and value – being able to really understand our clients, understand their business, understand their greatest challenges, connecting those issues across levels in the organization so we can understand what success looks like for them. We also have banking innovation departments with people who spend all day, every day just thinking about what the future of banking looks like. Being able to apply the value proposition of the ServiceNow alliance as part of those conversations is a huge differentiator. And this is the third year that we are the banking partner of the year, so we see continued success there.

Robert Dutt: Close to home – I keep thinking about regulated industries in Canada, data sovereignty, public sector sensitivity, OSFI E-21, all of these things. Given that you guys have practice strength in exactly those regulated environments, where do you see the biggest near-term deployment opportunities for ServiceNow in Canada specifically? And what do you see as the blockers that are still there?

Steven Kiss: Yeah, absolutely. I’ll start with blockers. I think organizations need to realize that they’ve got to get their data in order. This is the foundational element that’s going to stop rapid deployment if they don’t have it in place. They’re just going to be behind – and I don’t think the market is going to tolerate falling behind. The people who are proactive at investing in what tomorrow is going to look like will be the winners from a business perspective. That’s foundationally it.

When you start talking about OSFI E-21 and regulation, they’re very defined on what the needs are, but I don’t think those needs are defined fully – we can’t see so many years out. They will constantly evolve, because we ourselves don’t ultimately know what AI is going to look like. So how would the regulations? They’re going to constantly evolve and mature. And I think the benefit of what I’ve seen in platforms like ServiceNow is the endless ability to evolve with the times without ripping and replacing. The investments will be leveraged and built upon and refined. I haven’t seen any other organization plow as much R&D into their platform as ServiceNow has. It’s not build your own house. They’ve defined it and created the frameworks, and configuration – not customization – is going to get us where we need to go. That’s a huge differentiator. But again, it’s ultimately going to come down to navigating the endless evolution of these regulatory needs.

Robert Dutt: One of the big announcements this week – Action Fabric and the MCP integration layer – opens the door for partners to build proprietary IP on top of the platform and bring it to market as their own. Curious how you’re thinking about that. Is that something you’re doing – building reusable accelerators or industry-specific agents that you’re bringing to clients? And how do you think about the build-versus-configure question as that evolves?

Steven Kiss: Yeah. I’ll start at the end and you can keep me on the straight and narrow with the rest of the question. With clients, it’s very much about having a framework of success as you start to deploy. And as I said previously – configuration, not customization. Leveraging as much out of the box as possible, and industry-leading practices are going to drive how we deploy things. This is not about individual whims. There is a well-worn path in front of you – follow it, adapt around it, and then you are going to be running, not walking. The organizations that adapt and create that framework of success are going to be the very successful ones.

As it relates to building blocks to create IP at the partner level on top of the platform – I think we’ve seen this for years with different degrees of success – because you’re essentially thinking about it from a productizing perspective. You have to accept the fact that if you are in the productized business, you are a product organization. You need size, scale, ongoing investment. You have to have that commitment internally.

I’m a big fan of innovation where it doesn’t ratchet down the foundational capabilities of the platform. I’m a big supporter of accelerators that allow clients to get to the finish line faster – and these don’t necessarily mean we’re creating a product that locks clients into certain capabilities, because we’ve seen the negative side of that over the past five, seven, ten years. Accelerators that provide an industry-leading process to the conversation, that allow us to move the client toward the outcome of what this thing should look like – those are very positive. And once again, if you think about EY, the brand is very strong in risk, security, the resilience story. Partnering with an organization known for that just accelerates the path to the finish line.

Robert Dutt: Outside of what we’ve already talked about – or even within it – what have been your big takeaways from the event? What caught your ear the most and changed the way you think about something, or that you think is going to lead you to do something new or different in the practice once you get back home?

Steven Kiss: The show, a hundred percent. A couple of things. First of all, the way ServiceNow is actually driving the market forward. In some ways it’s very Apple-esque – the old Steve Jobs quote, “our customers don’t tell us what they need, we’re there to help guide them.” I’ve seen that with things like AI Control Tower. Everybody’s excited about the possibilities of AI, but we can’t just let it loose. It has to be governed. And we have to be able to, over our Monday morning lattes, look at a single system and understand where our position of risk is.

Number two – the areas of regulated industries and having a recommended path forward for clients operating in those sectors, being able to guide them through that in an accelerated way so we’re not waiting years to get there. Organizations are looking at this like an arms race – everyone’s running. So let’s make sure they don’t trip and get them there. Those are probably the areas where I’m the most excited about continuing to see the innovation and investment from ServiceNow. It’s something that I don’t think has ever been seen at that level. The way they’ve adapted to the AI story has been incredibly impressive – not following, very much leading. And I think it’s just very exciting.

Robert Dutt: Last one for me. Our audience is primarily VARs, MSPs, smaller solution providers – not GSIs, but folks who are watching what you guys at the big integrators are doing because it tells them something about where the market’s going. Especially given your former life leading SuMO and being in that boutique partner role – if you were advising a mid-sized MSP or other partner right now, who’s trying to figure out their AI strategy and where ServiceNow might fit within it, what would be the most important thing you’d tell them?

Steven Kiss: I think at the end of the day, a laser focus on the client and what success looks like for them. This is not about the technology – the technology is the enabler to get to success. Our secret sauce as we were building our boutique was really to say: yes, you come to us and ask us, “Hey, we want to deploy a module, we want to do this thing, we need a couple of people that are skilled at this.” I would always stop and say that’s great, we would love to have that conversation – but before we get there, what is it you’re trying to accomplish? Who in your organization benefits – customers, employees, vendors, partners? Tell me how it’s done today and tell me what you think it’s going to look like tomorrow. That’s going to be the best way we can advise you and get you there, because we want to be part of your success and create a long-term partnership.

This is not about having more certifications than you do as a differentiator. This is not about being able to code quicker. It’s really about understanding what success looks like. Yes, you make yourself successful because you understand how to deploy – and the functional component of that is selling a deliverable, people, hours. But unless you’re able to translate that into outcomes and value, and articulate the problem that this solves, there’s no way you’re going to justify budget for the next thing you’re trying to do. If you simply focus on the functional execution part and not the business side of it, you will be left behind. You have to constantly think about that. It can be exhausting sometimes, especially for partners that are more technology-driven and not business or consulting-driven. That is a comfort zone you have to get out of. And I think if you do that, you’ll find it’s a very refreshing way to guide your organization through these next steps.

Robert Dutt: That’s great advice. And I think we’re seeing a lot of momentum towards partners being encouraged to think that way. So I appreciate it being amplified. Steven, thanks for taking the time once again. Hope the rest of the show goes well for you.

Steven Kiss: Thank you very much. I appreciate it. Thank you for the time as well.

Robert Dutt: There you have it – Steven Kiss, partner and national ServiceNow practice leader at EY Canada, recorded live at Knowledge 2026 in Las Vegas.

I’d like to thank Steven for his time – and for being one of the more candid guests we’ve had on this show about what it actually takes to build and sustain a practice in this market.

And thank you for listening. Three things from this conversation worth sitting with.

First – EY as its own test lab. The detail that stuck with me most wasn’t about client work. It was Steven describing what EY is doing internally with ServiceNow – targeting eighty-five to ninety percent deflection of HR interactions, so that a question like “what’s the value of my flex benefit account?” or “how many vacation days do I have?” gets answered instantly rather than through a chain of emails. That’s a four-hundred-thousand-person organization using itself as client zero. When he talks about AI adoption in enterprises, he’s talking about something he’s watching from the inside. That credibility comes through.

Second – configuration, not customization. Steven returned to this idea more than once, and it’s worth repeating. His argument is that the partners who try to build elaborate custom solutions on top of the ServiceNow platform are going to get left behind by the partners who master what’s already there, build accelerators that help clients move faster, and focus relentlessly on business outcomes rather than technical deliverables. It’s a discipline that’s easier to say than to build into a practice culture.

And third – the advice he’d give any mid-sized MSP or solution provider right now. It comes straight from the SuMO playbook. Before you talk about what you can build or deploy, stop and ask the client what they’re actually trying to accomplish. Who benefits? How does it work today? What does tomorrow look like? That’s not a sales technique – it’s an operating philosophy. And it’s the thing he says separates partners who justify the next engagement from partners who get left behind.

That wraps up our Knowledge 2026 coverage series. Thanks for spending the week with us in Las Vegas.

If you’re finding In The Channel useful, we’d love for you to follow or subscribe wherever you’re listening. We’re on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and most major directories. Ratings and reviews are always appreciated and always read.

Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.

This week’s In The Channel episodes have been coming live from ServiceNow’s Knowledge 2026 conference in Las Vegas, where the company made its most aggressive platform repositioning in years – moving from workflow automation into what it’s calling the Agentic Business: autonomous AI agents doing real enterprise work, governed by a platform layer that sits above everything else running in your organization.

The big announcements – AI Control Tower, Action Fabric, the Go Live AI guarantee – were covered extensively earlier this week. This conversation is a different question: what does all of that actually mean if your customers are Canadian?

Cristin Gooderham is area vice president of Canada enterprise sales at ServiceNow. In this conversation, she makes a case worth sitting with: the traits that have historically made Canadian enterprises slower adopters – governance-first thinking, regulatory sensitivity, preference for proven approaches – are actually an advantage in this specific moment. When the lead pitch for enterprise AI is governance and control, Canada is ahead of the curve, not behind it.

She also touches on the partner ecosystem dynamic, describing a market that saw boutique ServiceNow specialists absorbed by larger integrators over the past few years, and is now seeing a new generation of AI-first specialists starting to emerge and fill that gap. For Canadian solution providers trying to figure out where they fit in the ServiceNow ecosystem, that’s an encouraging signal.

And on the security side, the completed acquisitions of Armis and Veza aren’t just product additions – they’re an active attempt to bring a new category of security-domain partners into an ecosystem that hasn’t historically included them.

This episode is part of our Knowledge 2026 coverage series. Also in the series: our conversation with ServiceNow SVP of global partnerships and channels Michael Park, and on Monday, EY Canada partner and national ServiceNow practice leader Steven Kiss.

Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last sixteen years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca, and your host for the show.

This week I’ve been at ServiceNow’s Knowledge 2026 conference in Las Vegas, where the company spent the week making the case for what it’s calling the Agentic Business – the argument that the AI pilot era is over and autonomous agents doing real enterprise work, governed by a platform layer, is the new reality.

Yesterday, you heard from ServiceNow’s global channel chief on what it means for the partner model. This episode is a different question: what does it actually mean if you’re a Canadian enterprise or a Canadian partner?

My guest is Cristin Gooderham, area vice president for Canada enterprise sales at ServiceNow. She’s leading the company’s go-to-market motion in Canada at what is genuinely a pivotal moment – a week where the platform her team sells just repositioned itself as the governance layer for all enterprise AI, not just workflow automation. We talked about where Canadian organizations actually are on this journey, what makes this market different from the US, and where she sees the near-term opportunity for Canadian partners.

Let’s get right into it – my chat with Cristin Gooderham.

Cristin, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it.

Cristin Gooderham: I’m very excited to be here. Thank you so much for taking the time with me.

Robert Dutt: Well, and thanks for having me out to Knowledge to get a sense of what’s going on here. When you look at where Canadian enterprises are right now on AI adoption – a big theme obviously this week is moving from proof of concepts to proving actual value – where do you see the Canadian market in that regard? Are we ahead, behind, or is it more complicated than that?

Cristin Gooderham: I wouldn’t say we’re behind. I would say we’re right on pace with what I’ve seen from my US counterparts. We have some organizations that are driving full force ahead, and then we do have some that are still stuck in that POC landscape where they’re really still struggling to define what they want AI to be for them – which is probably the biggest thing. Where we’ve seen organizations really do a tremendous job is where they’ve come with a very strong point of view of what their business challenge was and tried to look at it from an AI perspective, versus “I wonder what AI could solve for me.”

Robert Dutt: The more concrete the approach, the better it sounds like.

Cristin Gooderham: Absolutely. Tying everything to a business outcome that can actually, particularly if it can support revenue, is where we see organizations find not just the energy but the funding to put towards it.

Robert Dutt: Bill McDermott’s framing this morning was the AI blind spot – organizations running agents without governance visibility, which has kind of been the state of play up until now. Given what you know about Canadian enterprises – whether it’s regulatory caution, public sector sensitivity, or just Canadian conservatism in terms of not wanting to be first out on that limb – do you think that message lands differently in Canada than it does in the US or other markets?

Cristin Gooderham: I think for ServiceNow it lands even stronger in the Canadian market because of that conservatism. The reality is platforms like ServiceNow are really bringing to the market true visibility into your AI asset estate and the ability to actually govern and audit what is going on with your AI agents. No one is going to win the AI race by having all the agents – that’s just not a realistic expectation. But having visibility into what all those agents are doing, particularly once they start talking to each other – I think Canadian organizations are going to be very interested to have a view of that estate before they make massive investments in AI. We’ve already had those discussions with a lot of clients who really want to understand: of course we want to get AI, of course we want to find efficiency gains, but we need to do it in a way that we can govern it. That’s been a very key message, and it’s great to hear Bill reiterating it here because that’s really what ServiceNow can bring to the table.

Robert Dutt: How live has that governance discussion been with clients to date?

Cristin Gooderham: I would say the discussion has been very live. The implementation and action of it – we are working diligently on that piece. Where we’ve seen success is with clients in particular verticals that are far more mature with ServiceNow than others. Our banks in Canada, for example, have been invested in ServiceNow and really viewing us as a strategic platform since as early as 2010 in some cases. They’ve made investments not just from an IT point of view but have expanded into the security and risk areas of our platform. Those are the ones where we’re having the most productive discussions and are really moving quickly beyond proof of value into true value.

Robert Dutt: I’m curious to what degree you see the regulatory environment as backfilling that as well – how often is it being driven by existing or coming regulation, especially in regulated industries?

Cristin Gooderham: As always, the laws are typically behind the technology. What I’ve seen is that our own customers are taking a very forward-facing look at it because they know that regulation will be something to consider. We’ve had tremendous discussions on AI processing data, data at rest, Canadian sovereignty of the data. That has been a really hot topic. There’s no strong directive coming from the federal government to say all data must reside in Canada at all times. But the AI component has made it very interesting, and it’s a discussion we’re having constantly with customers.

Robert Dutt: A stat that came up yesterday was that ninety percent of ServiceNow implementations globally are partner-involved or partner-delivered. What does that mix look like in Canada? What can you tell me about GSIs versus smaller partners? Are you seeing a new breed of more specialized, AI-focused partners emerging that are punching above their weight?

Cristin Gooderham: The partner ecosystem in Canada is absolutely a complete mix – everything from global GSIs down to extremely unique niche partners. Over the last few years, we did see a tremendous amount of our really strong boutique partners actually get acquired by global GSIs. When I got to ServiceNow six years ago, we had a tremendous amount of point partners – ServiceNow-specialized and very focused on a particular part of our platform. That went away for a bit because so many GSIs were excited about the opportunity to expand their ServiceNow practices. Now we’re seeing the resurgence of those smaller point solution partners coming back with a ServiceNow-only, AI-first view, which has been really exciting to see.

Robert Dutt: I wonder if this becomes a cycle that repeats itself as those folks grow up and we see another wave of consolidation down the road.

Cristin Gooderham: Potentially, absolutely. But the opportunity for partners in Canada to focus on ServiceNow is tremendous. We’re really excited to see some of these up-and-coming partners. We had two recently launched in Western Canada – both Ardent Labs and Skymark – taking a ServiceNow-only focus, which is a very different approach than the GSIs. The GSIs are fantastic, but they look holistically. A ServiceNow-dedicated partner can really make an impact in ways a GSI won’t necessarily prioritize.

Robert Dutt: One trend we’re seeing across the channel is multi-partner engagement becoming more common. You’re nodding as I say that. I’m curious what you’re seeing in terms of situations where a big GSI tags in more specialized partners to fill the bench and meet customer needs.

Cristin Gooderham: It is absolutely critical and something we at ServiceNow fully support. We do it ourselves – we have our own expert services, and a lot of times we will engage niche partners to fill particular gaps. One of the areas where I see our partner ecosystem doing that a tremendous amount is in the security and risk space, because some partners are phenomenal on the overall platform but security and risk is a different skill set – it’s even a different vocabulary. I love seeing partners collaborate because it’s usually the best option for the customer. It’s the best outcome for everybody: the partners are successful, the customer is successful, and therefore ServiceNow is successful.

Robert Dutt: I realize this is not how one builds out a business model, but I’m curious – as you said, there’s a rising generation of ServiceNow-focused partners. If you were to point to the greenfield, the underserviced opportunity in the Canadian market today, what would it be?

Cristin Gooderham: So I’ve touched on it already – security and risk. With our acquisitions of both Armis and Veza, that is an area where we’re going to continue to invest. If ServiceNow partners are looking to expand their skill set, that is where we need additional help. When we started having the AI Control Tower discussion late last year, it was at every executive briefing the thing that made every CIO sit up and pay attention. So anything in that space is really where we’re going to need to see continued partner enablement and adoption, and hopefully new partners coming in to pick it up.

Beyond that, as we continue to make moves into the CRM space, those are also going to be areas where we need additional partners. We have phenomenal partners from the US that come up and do work here, but as an opportunity for more Canadian jobs, that’s definitely an area I would point Canadian partners toward.

Robert Dutt: The AI Factory and NVIDIA partnership that came up – how do you see that through a Canadian lens?

Cristin Gooderham: I think the key piece is that NVIDIA and ServiceNow together have a great story. We know most of our customers are investing in NVIDIA – a number of the telcos, we’ve already had discussions with them. So it’s really an opportunity for us to continue to expand our AI footprint and help create really positive three-way relationships. As NVIDIA becomes more and more critical in every market, it’s fantastic to see that they see the value in ServiceNow – and our customers are seeing the same thing.

Robert Dutt: Data sovereignty – big issue in the Canadian market. It sounded from your earlier comments like it’s not quite a hard regulatory concern yet, but how do you see it playing out? What are customers asking you about?

Cristin Gooderham: Data sovereignty is a hot topic in every customer engagement we have. In the public sector space it has a tremendous amount of weight. We’ve seen a real shift from the federal government in terms of their position on sovereignty – they haven’t come out and defined very strongly what data sovereignty looks like, but it’s absolutely something we’re focused on. We announced earlier last year a large investment in Canada to build out our own isolated full stack to host all of our public sector clients, ensuring Canadians on Canadian soil are managing the data.

But it does stop somewhat short of true sovereignty. The benefit of SaaS is the ability to push upgrades to customers at any given time – as soon as you move to true data sovereignty, that piece closes off. It doesn’t make it a negative, it’s just something clients need to make decisions on.

Robert Dutt: With AI Control Tower coming online and the way Bill was repositioning the company around that governance layer – as almost the orchestrator of the ecosystem – how does that change the partner role?

Cristin Gooderham: I don’t think it changes the partner role tremendously. As you heard in the keynote this morning, we’ve always been the platform of platforms, and we’re still advocating that message. It’s just refined itself to really focus on securing and governing the AI estate, as opposed to a more open approach. Partners are still going to be critical to help us get customers to success. But it does mean that retraining and focus into those areas – understanding the security and governance piece – is going to be critical moving forward.

Robert Dutt: The security piece is so big in the channel writ large. Do you see it as another entry point for new partners to come into the ServiceNow ecosystem and add what you’re doing to what they’re doing with other vendors and their own managed services?

Cristin Gooderham: Absolutely. Where I think there’s a really interesting opportunity is for more security-focused partners that perhaps haven’t focused on ServiceNow before – they’re focused on multiple different point solutions – to actually start looking at ServiceNow as another tool to put in their bag. We are having expanded security conversations all the time. I think it’s very clear through our acquisitions that this is going to be a continued focus.

A security partner like Arctiq, for example – they’re already engaged a lot with us, and I believe they’re already engaged with Armis. This could be a really interesting push for them to take on more of ServiceNow. The good part is that there’s no shortage of security tools out there to take on. The challenge as a partner is the same thing – there’s no shortage of security tools to take on.

Robert Dutt: Is that mindshare conversation with security-focused partners already happening, or is there a strategy to identify the right partners and get on their radar?

Cristin Gooderham: Those conversations are already happening – not necessarily with the more niche individual security partners yet, but a number of the GSIs have very strong security and risk practices. We’ve had a lot of reach out from Canadian partners at organizations like KPMG, where they run a security and risk practice and are very excited about these acquisitions and wanting to discuss how this folds into their practice. So there’s definitely opportunity at every level of partner.

Robert Dutt: We talked a little bit about governance, and I noticed that Bell Canada is presenting tomorrow on the subject of their governance guardrails implementation. What can you tell me about that relationship and what they’ve done? Are we starting to see a cluster of organizations moving toward that space, or is Bell still more of a bellwether?

Cristin Gooderham: When we talk about Bell, we have to talk about two different angles. We have Bell as a customer – Bell Business, who are a phenomenal customer we’ve engaged with in a very long-term relationship and who have made a huge investment to innovate on the ServiceNow platform. And then underneath Bell we also have their partner, Acteamo, which is a fully Bell-backed organization that is a services partner in the Canadian ecosystem. So there’s Bell as the customer and Bell as the partner. We have phenomenal relationships with both, and we’re very excited to see what Acteamo is doing in the ecosystem. I know they’re looking to expand not only across Canada but even into the US to bring some of the learnings from working with Bell Canada to other telcos.

Robert Dutt: When you’re talking to Canadian solution providers who’ve seen the announcements this week and are trying to figure out where they fit in the whole Agentic Business picture – what’s your advice on where to focus, where to build practice, where the opportunity is richest and most accessible right now in the Canadian market?

Cristin Gooderham: I’ll go back to what I said at the very beginning – focus on business outcomes. Nobody is interested in a discussion on agentic AI to modernize your CMDB. It’s truly about finding problems in the organization where AI can lead to either revenue generation or true cost savings. Where partners will be successful is if they can quickly identify – whether it’s verticalized opportunities across oil and gas, telco, or retail – areas where they’ve had success before and can bring that to customers. I don’t know that there’s a single point of entry. The challenge with AI is that it can do so many things. But Canadians like to start small. They like to be able to prove something out quickly, and then they like to move fast. So I would always caution partners: look for opportunities to do just that. Start small, move quickly, and then progress to the next step.

Robert Dutt: That’s great advice. I appreciate your time, especially given how busy things are. You really helped put a Canadian lens on a lot of what we’ve heard this week.

Cristin Gooderham: Thank you so much.

Robert Dutt: There you have it – Cristin Gooderham, area vice president for Canada enterprise sales at ServiceNow, recorded live at Knowledge 2026 in Las Vegas.

I’d like to thank Cristin for her time during what was clearly a very busy week for the ServiceNow team.

And thank you for listening. A few things worth pulling out of this one.

First – the Canadian conservatism point. Cristin made the case that the traits that have historically made Canadian enterprises slower adopters – caution around governance, preference for proven approaches, regulatory sensitivity – are actually an advantage in this specific moment. The agentic AI conversation leads with governance. That’s a message that lands here before it lands anywhere else, and that’s an opening for partners.

Second – the partner ecosystem observation. What she described is a market that went through a consolidation phase where boutique ServiceNow specialists got absorbed by larger integrators, and is now seeing a new generation of AI-first specialists starting to emerge and fill that gap again. If you’re a mid-sized Canadian solution provider trying to figure out where you fit, that’s encouraging news.

And third – security as the door. The Armis and Veza acquisitions she referenced aren’t just product additions. They’re a signal that ServiceNow is actively trying to pull in a new category of security-domain partners who haven’t historically been in the ServiceNow ecosystem. If your practice is in that space, it’s worth paying attention.

More from Knowledge 2026 on Monday, when I’ll have my conversation with Steven Kiss, partner and national ServiceNow practice leader at EY Canada – a conversation about what the boutique-to-big-four journey actually teaches you about where the channel is headed next.

If you’re finding In The Channel useful, we’d love for you to follow or subscribe wherever you’re listening. We’re on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and most major directories. Ratings and reviews are always appreciated and always read.

Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.

In the final episode of In The Channel’s three-part series from SAS Innovate 2026 in Grapevine, Texas, we sit down with Nat D’Ercole of Deloitte Canada for the practitioner perspective on enterprise AI transformation – what it looks like from inside the organizations actually doing the migration and governance work.

The conversation opens on the reality of Viya migrations at enterprise scale. Deloitte’s approach starts with a scan of the client’s current environment – understanding which workloads are actually running the business versus which haven’t been touched in years – before building a roadmap that addresses cost structure, change management, and what a future-state architecture actually needs to look like.

A central theme is data governance maturity as the key determinant of AI readiness. Nat introduces the concept of human hallucination – multiple versions of the truth produced when ungoverned data is accessed and wrangled without standards across an organization. His point is that the organizations that have already done the hard work of data governance are the ones genuinely positioned to move fast on AI. Those that haven’t are still stuck solving the foundation problem first.

On OSFI E-21, Nat echoes what SAS Canada’s Ryan MacDonald described earlier in the series – regulation as a useful catalyst rather than a burden – and addresses the risk and fraud use cases where the Deloitte-SAS partnership is seeing the most active investment, including procurement integrity and financial scenario modeling.

The episode closes on SAS AI Navigator as a complement to Deloitte’s own trusted AI framework, the use of AI-augmented engineering to accelerate migration timelines, and a thirty-year observation about the 80/20 problem – and why this might finally be the moment it gets flipped.

Robert Dutt: Hello, and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca, and your host for the show.

This is our third and final episode from last week’s SAS Innovate 2026 in Grapevine, Texas. And if you’ve been following along, you’ve heard the view from SAS Canada leadership – the AI maturity story, the governance urgency, what the mid-market channel opportunity looks like – and then the global channel strategy conversation with John Carey, the build-out of the indirect motion, the TD SYNNEX partnership, and where the channel goes from here. What we haven’t heard yet is what it actually looks like from inside a real enterprise engagement. That’s what this episode is.

My guest is Nat D’Ercole, data transformation leader for AI and data at Deloitte Canada. Deloitte is one of SAS’s major global systems integrator partners, and Nat works with the kind of large Canadian enterprises that are right in the middle of the AI transformation conversation – Viya migrations, data governance strategy, OSFI E-21 readiness, risk and fraud modernization. The practitioner reality, not the roadmap.

We talk about what it actually looks like to walk into a client and untangle 20 or 30 years of SAS implementation. We get into data governance maturity as the thing that most determines whether an organization is ready for AI. We talk about what Nat calls human hallucination, and why it’s not as different from the AI kind as you might think. And we close on a concept that Nat has been waiting 30 years to see become real – the 80/20 flip.

Let’s get right into it. My chat with Nat D’Ercole.

Nat, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it.

Nat D’Ercole: Pleasure to be here.

Robert Dutt: Obviously, you guys are one of SAS’s major global partners, but for an audience that’s primarily VARs and MSPs – that kind of partner – the Deloitte AI and data practice might be a bit of a black box. Can you tell us a bit about what it looks like day to day? Who are your clients? What are they typically asking you to solve today?

Nat D’Ercole: Of course. Our clients are facing complex issues in terms of how to manage their data, manage their models, and obviously working in an age of AI and sorting all that out in terms of where they are today, what are they using today, the cost of running all that today, to where they need to get to – both from a data, tech, people, and process perspective. So being a professional services firm focused on helping our clients with both advisory, implementation, and supporting our clients’ systems are key areas that our clients look to us for support.

Robert Dutt: A little earlier, I talked with Ryan Macdonald, who leads SAS Canada. The subject of hidden SAS came up – in so much as a lot of customers end up finding they’re running SAS software, running key business functions on SAS software, and not necessarily even aware of it, because it’s just become such a part of the underpinnings. It’s just there. It’s invisible even to themselves. When you walk into a client that engages Deloitte on, say, a Viya migration, is that something that you often see? And what does that journey kind of look like?

Nat D’Ercole: Great question, Robert. And that comment from Ryan really makes sense to me. Our clients have been using SAS for many, many years – some 20, 30 years, and maybe even longer. And so SAS is used for everything from data management, modeling, analytics, reporting, data wrangling, and so on and so forth. And it’s a web of solutions that organizations across departments have implemented. And so understanding what they currently have in place is a challenge. And so we do help them with that in terms of providing them with a scan of their current environment and helping them understand what workloads are actually running their business versus workloads that haven’t been touched in years. And with that, we’re able to help them with a roadmap to address those workloads and determine what is fit for purpose in terms of moving to a future state.

Robert Dutt: You guys are dealing with big projects and pretty high-stakes stuff, and not the simplest thing – like a Viya migration at enterprise scale is clearly not a simple concept. What do you see as the real cost and complexity pressure points for customers? And how do you help clients navigate those without the project stalling out?

Nat D’Ercole: You know, I think what’s really important is to understand – just building on my previous answer – understanding what is running their business and the cost structure associated to that. So obviously there’s technology licensing, there’s training on existing solutions, target solutions, change management, upskilling, etc. in terms of some of the key cost drivers. And let’s also refer to storage as well as another area of cost. So analyzing our clients’ environments and really taking a closer look at each of those buckets to help them figure out where are they now, and what are the opportunities, what are the options for them moving forward.

Robert Dutt: Governance – obviously a big topic here – and the idea of governance and trust becoming inseparable from the AI conversation has been a big theme here and elsewhere. Curiously, what are you seeing in that, and is it changing what you’re being hired to do? Are clients coming to you with a technology problem, or are they coming to you with a governance and risk problem that has a technology component to it?

Nat D’Ercole: Yeah, so clients are hiring us to solve a business problem that is enabled by technology, enabled by change. And to address your specific question around governance – governance comes in the form of data governance, AI governance, model governance, etc. We do find that the level of preparedness in organizations around data absolutely varies from immature to mature. So those organizations that have addressed data governance are those that are most prepared for the AI age and being able to take the next step.

Now, not everything requires structured data and highly clean data. So depending on the use cases, it is quite possible to apply AI and begin to see benefit. However, more and more I do see organizations invest in things like master data management, invest in data governance, and invest in operating models. And those operating models are also AI-ready. So we’re starting to see the need for roles such as prompt engineers, AI engineers that are interrogating results of models, ensuring that there’s a continuous feedback loop – and where models are drifting or hallucinating or so on and so forth, that there’s a human loop catching that. So these are new roles that are being created and need to be part of an overall governance strategy.

Robert Dutt: What role do you see yourselves playing in leveling up those organizations who haven’t gone far enough in governance thus far to get the most out of the AI future?

Nat D’Ercole: I’m actually working with a client right now where they haven’t addressed data governance and they’re stuck with legacy solutions where very much it’s been the wild wild west – if I could use that term – in terms of accessing data, enabling analysts across the organization to wrangle that data and develop outputs that their leaders consume. And so when that happens without governance, you get things like what I refer to sometimes as human hallucination, where there’s multiple versions of the truth. Organizations do see that today. And to me, that’s the human side of these hallucinations that we’re seeing with AI.

So for those organizations, in terms of leveling up, it is certainly approaching it from a people perspective first – ensuring leadership is in place, necessary roles around domain ownership, necessary standards and policies are in place. And really, what is the motivation for elevating data governance in the organization, ensuring that that messaging is clear from the executive level down.

Robert Dutt: So if human-in-the-loop is the solution to AI hallucinations, is AI-in-the-loop the solution to human hallucinations? Just kidding. Moving on to the regulatory environment – first thing that comes to mind, especially because SAS is so big in regulated industries, is finance and OSFI E-21 in particular. When you’re working with organizations that have to meet that bar, do you see it creating real urgency in the conversations you’re having? Or are clients still finding ways to buy time or building out how they respond to some of the regulations that we see?

Nat D’Ercole: Well, there’s nothing like having a catalyst in place to motivate – exactly. So yeah, I think that’s where regulation provides guidance, direction, standards. These are areas that organizations can look to in order to inform how they need to move forward as well. So that’s very much welcome, I would say, in terms of helping organizations steer their investments so that obviously they comply – and no one wants to be facing penalties.

Robert Dutt: Sticking with financial services – risk and fraud is highlighted as an area of strength for the Deloitte/SAS partnership. Where are you seeing the most active investment and I guess the most interesting use cases right now?

Nat D’Ercole: I would say in terms of risk and fraud, procurement integrity are areas that are horizontal across organizations. You can go from a fraud perspective – not just procurement, but other types of fraud within organizations. And then from a risk perspective, there are areas around financial risk where organizations need to ensure that they have proper scenario modeling in place to understand what stresses they need to address from an organization and modeling perspective. So I would say those are common use cases – asset liability management, treasury – just being more versatile, more accelerated in terms of running these scenarios. So solutions like SAS do provide capabilities to address that speed of process.

Robert Dutt: In general terms, as you’ve been here this week at the event – whether it’s a specific announcement, whether it’s an area of conversation, whether it’s what the leadership at SAS is thinking about – what’s caught your eye, caught your ear, and made you think, “Oh, I need to learn more about that”? What’s been your headline of the event?

Nat D’Ercole: The keynote – the interview that Jen Chase did with Mel Robins really hit home for me, and how she applied it to AI. And for me, ensuring that leaders are leaning in and providing the change that they want – or being the change that they want to see in the organization, living the change – and also helping organizations from a leadership perspective, executive perspective, to be comfortable. Many employees, I would say, across industries and organizations – some as Mel referred to – are afraid of what AI’s potential can do to their jobs. That’s a real human reaction. And so from a leadership perspective, creating the right environment for people to begin to lean in. I’ve said many times that, “Will your job be replaced?” – and oftentimes the answer to that is, “Yes, it’ll be replaced by those folks that are embracing AI.” So now is the time to lean in and begin to learn how to use it. So Mel’s comments definitely resonated. I looked around a large room – over probably 300 tables – and many people nodded with some of those remarks. So for me, that really resonated.

Robert Dutt: Pulling on that leadership thread a little bit – from where you’re sitting, what does good leadership look like in terms of guiding that AI discussion? Because that can be everything from really understanding it, making the case for it, making clear communications – not pushing, but being behind the organization’s efforts – to the kind of stereotypical thou-shalt-from-on-high, “The board tells me I have to do AI. Everyone’s talking about AI, make it happen.”

Nat D’Ercole: I think from an executive perspective, beginning to make investments in AI and ensuring that there’s a path forward for the organization – as individuals, departments, and then the enterprise. So that path forward, typically when we work with clients, we look to understand where the low-hanging fruit might be, both from an efficiency perspective and effectiveness. By effectiveness, being able to get insights faster, being able to run through processes faster, but at the same time ensuring – back to our previous comment – ensuring that the human is in the loop. Executives are also looking for ROI in use cases. And I would say that ROI should be looked at most definitely, but be somewhat lenient in terms of the payback timeframe. Some may be one year, some may be two years. The important thing is to start and begin to learn from the experiences, and have a set of – or journey roadmap of – use cases that will enable the organization to be more efficiently effective as a whole.

Robert Dutt: One of the bigger announcements here – and certainly the ones that got a lot of the attention and a lot of stage time – was SAS AI Navigator, built around governing AI use cases, models, and agents all at scale. Does a tool like that change what you guys deliver, or does it slot into something you’ve already been building? Does it kind of augment manual processes for you?

Nat D’Ercole: Yes, I would say it complements our trusted AI framework. I really like the visuals around the AI Navigator, and it really showed how AI could be green, could be yellow, and then could be red – and then ensuring that there’s a human loop addressing those red drift areas. So it certainly complements. And knowing how to bring the two together is, I would say, areas where clients will need help, and certainly what to prioritize first.

Robert Dutt: In talking to Ryan, the idea of clients increasingly looking at engagements that involve the scale of a GSI such as yourselves alongside niche industry-specific partners in the same engagement – and kind of creating that ecosystem approach. Curious if that’s something that you’re seeing and building for, or still more of an exception than rule in Canada.

Nat D’Ercole: I would say, going back to a previous question, we do lead from a business perspective and clients are coming to us to ensure that the technology investments that they are making make sense from an overall business perspective. And so how those investments are realized, we will often be an orchestrator of our alliances – both technology alliances and potentially industry-specific – where there’s expertise that we need to pull in as part of solutioning for our clients. So not abnormal, I would say. Where it’s justified, certainly our ecosystems and alliances are a key value driver for our success.

Robert Dutt: What’s the common genesis of that? I’m curious how often it’s you guys pulling in another party because they add something to the engagement, versus customers having an incumbent or someone they want to work with alongside you. How does that start, basically?

Nat D’Ercole: It really starts with having the conversation with the client – what are they thinking, and how can we help them best, bringing the best resources and capabilities to their problems. Clients may also have biases in terms of what they’re comfortable with. So it’s understanding that and advising them on whether that makes sense or doesn’t, and why.

Robert Dutt: Let’s get meta with AI a little bit here. There’s a lot of conversation in consulting about using AI to deliver AI projects faster. Is that something that you guys are doing in this practice? And what does it look like if it is?

Nat D’Ercole: Oh, absolutely, Rob. These are demands that our clients are requesting – that whenever there’s any engineering in place, whether it’s custom engineering or custom build solutions, custom build models, what have you, or migrations for that matter – migrating from legacy code, legacy reporting solutions, legacy SAS to SAS Viya, etc. – leveraging AI to accelerate time to value, lower the cost of delivering. And so to that end, we have developed accelerators. We do leverage AI and AI-assisted development engineering – AI-augmented engineering, if you will – to deliver overall lower total cost of implementation.

Robert Dutt: What does the team that you’re building to do this work in Canada look like? I’m curious especially what the skills you’re most looking for are, and what are the skills that are hardest to find or most need to be developed because they’re brand new.

Nat D’Ercole: Certainly data scientists, engineers, domain expertise in an industry that understands the business problems, understands the business language, change management – these are core consulting skills. I would say it just gets further augmented in the area of AI, and ensuring that resources have or are building experience or getting upskilled in the areas of AI to solution our clients’ problems. So I would say those are the key areas. And the last one is that trusted AI area as well – where our risk practice is focused on that. So from overall servicing a client, being able to pull from all facets of our multidisciplinary capabilities across the firm are key aspects in terms of why clients are coming to us to support them, because it’s not a technology problem.

Robert Dutt: Last one for me – what does success look like for a Canadian organization that’s, let’s say, 18 months into this kind of a transformation? And what’s the one thing that most often determines whether they get to success or not with an AI project?

Nat D’Ercole: I would say having clearly defined upfront business rationale – what does the future state look like from a business economics perspective? I’m not just talking about financial return. I’m talking about what does it mean for their people, and being able to sell that. Having that vision in place and actively working to chip away at building that out with the organization, within the organization – upskilling them so that they have the necessary skill sets to move forward, take on more themselves, et cetera.

So you definitely need to have the persistence, the top-level leadership to continue to drive, and I would say celebrate successes, advocate for better ways of working, and the benefits that it’s driving for the organization. So just continuing to sell the benefits, continuing to provide that vision for employees so that they understand what this means for them as they move forward. Those use cases where AI is replacing just the redundant tasks that employees are working on to get a report out – these are all areas where AI can improve the efficiencies, improve the quality, improve the trust, so that employees can focus on those higher-order, higher-value areas, strategic thinking – things that they’ve been hired to do.

I’ve been in this business for over 30 years and there’s always been that 80% of the time people are pushing data around, preparing data, and 20% is being spent on value-added activities. So AI really provides now the opportunity to flip that – finally. But obviously it does require safeguards, it does require executive support and leadership. So yeah, it’s a great time to be in, to be consulting, and to be working with clients to help them realize better ways of working.

Robert Dutt: All right. Well, good luck in making that flip. It is a long time coming, as you say. I hope Innovate finishes strong for you, and thanks again for taking the time.

Nat D’Ercole: Thank you, Robert.

Robert Dutt: There you have it – Nat D’Ercole from Deloitte Canada. I’d like to thank Nat for his time, and that wraps up our three-episode run from SAS Innovate 2026. Thanks for listening.

Few things I’m taking away from this one. First, the human hallucination concept. When organizations haven’t addressed data governance, you end up with multiple versions of the truth – different teams, different numbers, different answers to the same question. Nat’s point is that this is the human-side equivalent of what we’re trying to prevent with AI governance, and that the organizations that have already solved the data governance problem are the ones that are actually ready for AI. Not the ones with the best AI strategy – the ones with the cleanest data foundation.

Second, the 80/20 flip. Nat’s been in this business for over 30 years. For most of that time, people have spent 80% of their time pushing data around and 20% actually doing value-added work. AI has the potential to flip that. That’s not a new observation, but hearing it from someone who’s been watching it not happen for three decades really gives it some weight.

And third, Deloitte positioning as the orchestrator. They’re not just the big GSI anchor in these deals. They’re the ones pulling in niche specialists, aligning technology alliances, and making sure the business case holds together across all of it. That ecosystem John Carey described from the vendor side – this is what it looks like from the delivery side.

Hope you enjoyed this special coverage from SAS Innovate 2026. As fate would have it, we’ll have a new series starting later this week – more on that to come, but safe to say I’m currently on my way to Las Vegas.

If you found this one useful, follow or subscribe to the ChannelBuzz.ca podcast. We’re on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and most of the major directories. Ratings and reviews are greatly appreciated and really help others in the channel find the show.

Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.

Recorded on site at SAS Innovate 2026 in Grapevine, Texas, this week’s In The Channel features John Carey, senior vice president of global channels at SAS Institute, in a conversation that covers the full arc of his four years building SAS’s channel program from the ground up.

When Carey joined in 2022, SAS had a history with partners – advisory engagement, project delivery – but limited co-sell and no resell motion. His mandate was to change that. The conversation traces that journey: the introduction of a clear market segmentation (enterprise above the line, channel below the line), the decision to route transactions through partners while keeping end-user contracts with SAS intact, and the live project underway right now to migrate direct customers to indirect.

A central theme is the distribution partnership with TD SYNNEX, which Carey frames as a leverage mechanism – moving from thousands of customers to hundreds of partners to one distributor – giving SAS the financial and operational flexibility it needs while giving partners financing terms, invoicing support, and credit options a software vendor is not built to provide.

On the competitive landscape, Carey draws a sharp line between SAS and the AI tools crowding the market. Others turn up with an easy button and a black box. SAS turns up with a transparent box and a governance framework – and with SAS AI Navigator now tracking agent behaviour across the Viya platform, that framework is getting sharper.

The episode closes with a candid look at the partner economics model – an inverted approach that makes it easy to start selling and lets services investment follow the book of business – and a direct invitation to Canadian solution providers with data, security, and infrastructure skills to get into the conversation now.

Robert Dutt: Hello, and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca, and your host for the show.

Still coming to you this week from Grapevine, Texas, from SAS Innovate 2026. If you caught our last episode with Ryan Macdonald, leader of SAS Canada, you heard the view from the Canadian perspective: the AI maturity story, OSFI E-21, and the mid-market channel opportunity. This time I’m going a level up.

My guest today is John Carey, senior vice president of global channels at SAS Institute. John’s about four years into the role, and he came in with a specific mandate: to rethink what partnering looks like for a company with a long history of advisory and delivery through partners, but limited co-sell and essentially no resale motion. Four years later, the picture looks pretty different. There’s a clear market segmentation model, a distribution partnership with TD SYNNEX, an active project underway right now to migrate direct customers to indirect, and a 30% channel revenue target that’s already evolving into something even more ambitious.

We talk about all of it: what he found when he arrived, how the direct-to-indirect transition is actually landing with customers, what the partner economics look like for a new SAS partner in 2026, how this week’s AI Navigator and agentic AI announcements change the channel opportunity, and what he thinks the SAS channel looks like in three years if things go well.

Let’s get right into it. My chat with John Carey.

John, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it.

John Carey: Appreciate it. Good to be here, Robert.

Robert Dutt: You’re about four years into leading channels for SAS if memory serves and I’m able to do the math—both of which are somewhat suspect. Can you tell me a little bit about what you found when you got here and the quick version of the journey in building the channel from your point of view?

John Carey: Got it. Well, first of all, you absolutely did get it right. It is, come June, four years since I joined SAS. Now, the first thing—I was brought in by the ELT, with an ELT remit to rethink partnering for SAS’s future. So we had a history of partnering. If you think about where SAS came from, a lot of advisory engagement, a lot of delivery through partners, but not necessarily a lot of co-sell and certainly no resell.

So one of the remits coming in was to assess the business, understand what the opportunities were, and build a program that allows us to create a growing business that is driven by partners and owned by partners. And we get the acceleration and the leverage of the partner community that all software vendors are seeking and hope to take advantage of.

When I came in, I would say we lacked maturity in our partnering in some areas. We were definitely mercurial in a way that wasn’t helpful. Partners didn’t have consistency, and we weren’t persistent in holding ourselves and our partners accountable. There was a lot of, “If only… it’s not me, it’s them.”

So phase one: get to a single source of truth. So we introduced undisputed channel revenue. Let’s agree and measure together the value of the channel in our business. The other thing we did is we segmented, for the first time, our market. We had historically looked at our install base as a quadrant, an ABCD, thinking about propensity for growth and saturation. And we moved to the more traditional pyramid, but with a binary segmentation. So above the line: enterprise; below the line: channel.

And that allowed us to prioritize routes to market. So in the enterprise, it’s very much a co-sell partner delivery model. GSIs are a very strong focus. Technology partners are a very strong focus up there. And then certain regional boutique consulting partners continue to be high value, particularly in our vertical industries—FSI, public sector, life sciences.

Below the line, the story was: how do we give this business to the partners, give partners autonomy, and allow them to determine their own future? So that was really about taking business that was historically direct and making it indirect. Actually, this year, we have a whole project where we are moving our channel direct install base to indirect. So, communicating with the customer about why it’s good for them, communicating to the partner of what they need to do to be ready, and then putting that fuel into an engine that we’ve been building over the last few years with partners with strong SAS skills, but who were traditionally services partners and have had to build something of a resale muscle.

We’re also starting to recruit some more traditional high-powered solution providers, as well as really focusing on managed service provider opportunities with partners who not only can sell the solution, but they host and operate the solution for the customer. And the nexus of this was finding ways to bring the enterprise value of SAS to the non-enterprise client base, and to do that through our local superpower, which is our partner community who understand those customers and their pain points in a way that we just don’t have the resources to do, and to make sure they’re empowered with the kind of tools and the right cost structure to be able to give that enterprise value at a non-enterprise price point.

Robert Dutt: How has that direct-to-indirect transition gone? How does that land with customers? It’s got to be a bit of a communication challenge because you want to make sure you’re not positioning it as “we’re stepping away from you,” even if you’re introducing a partner into the mix.

John Carey: Yeah. So this is what we’re going through right now. So first of all, there’s the angst as a vendor of saying, “I’m about to go to a customer and say our transactional relationship is going to change.” But really, our contractual relationship remains intact. The contract between the end user and the vendor stays in place. We are responsible for delivering on the value of the platform or the solution provided.

What we’re doing is we’re rerouting the transaction through a partner, which means we can support more currencies. We can support different pricing conditions and payment terms that, as an enterprise, we’re just not able to entertain for anyone but the largest customers. And so our positioning is: it gives our customers far more flexibility and more intimate engagement than being part of a long tail of customers for a large enterprise that end up in this pool that you call “programmatic”—which we all use the words, but none of us like those words. And a way of avoiding that is to say, “This isn’t programmatic. This is channel-managed,” because this is where the partners are stepping in to make sure that that customer feels like the most important customer of that partner, rather than the not-most-important customer of a large vendor.

Robert Dutt: Can you tell me a little bit more about the managed services motion and how you see that evolving, especially as SAS overall has become much more open in terms of the whole structure there—getting into MCP and acknowledging that a lot of times customers are going to be consuming SAS’s insights and abilities through the chatbots and other channels, for want of a better word?

John Carey: Well, look, first of all, I’ve certainly lived through enough inflection points to recognize one as it comes along. And this is an inflection point where there’s opportunity and risk. When I think about the philosophy from the channel, certainly with channel customers, I want those customers hosted by partners. Why? Because a big part of their TCO challenge is just giving them access to software doesn’t mean they can afford the resources to operate and maximize return on that software.

If they can be supported by a managed service provider, by a solution provider who’s hosting on their behalf, now they have access to actual educated, certified SAS resources who are dedicated to making sure they maximize the return on that investment. And so with that underpinning, you then think about the integration of the chatbots—the Anthropic’s, Copilot, Gemini integration. It’s pretty scary for mid-sized customers to be thinking about this. I mean, do most people know that if you put your data up on those things that it’s no longer privileged? Do most people know that there’s an element here which feels like social media, that we’ve since learned who’s being monetized here? This feels free, but actually I’m feeding this model all of my proprietary data to get a presumed efficiency which may or may not turn up, in the hope that it doesn’t hallucinate.

Well, when I look at that and I think about SAS making data ready for the AI lifecycle, SAS having a governance infrastructure that allows us to identify bias, to make sure—now, as you heard announced yesterday, the AI Navigator that allows us to track these agents and ensure that we understand whether agents are behaving in a way that is copacetic with the intention of the business user. And if one fails or starts to behave in a way that is not aligned with the organization, you’re able to flag that. You’re able to communicate that to other connected agents so that you can source the problem and solve the problem.

I think when we think of it in that way, this is a real opportunity for the channel to step in. These moments of “How do I bridge the technology into value?” is the perfect space for resellers, service providers, solution providers to step in, navigate that complexity for the customer, give the customer confidence with the technology choices that they’re making—that they are safe and secure with SAS.

As I frame it, we’re a 50-year-old vendor who’s been in the most regulated industries. Others out there turn up with an easy button and a black box. We turn up with a transparent box and a governance framework that means we acknowledge nothing’s easy, but once you engage in this, you will survive audit. You will be able to understand where problems occurred and why, and you will be able to remediate.

Robert Dutt: A few years ago, maybe about three, you guys signed on TD SYNNEX. I think that’s the first major global distribution partner for you guys. What was the hypothesis behind that move, and how has it worked out?

John Carey: So the general hypothesis was—and again, I’ve been in the industry a long time. I think every year we hear the headline, “This is the year distribution is no longer relevant.” I actually did a column on that not too long ago.

Robert Dutt: There you go.

John Carey: And meanwhile, they continue to provide new and incremental value. One of the hypotheses was as we moved to indirect, there is obviously—from going from thousands of customers to hundreds of partners, going from hundreds of partners to one distributor allows us to get that leverage effect through quotes, transactions, credit. Something that provides a security to us as a vendor that allows us to lean in, but also provides structure and options at the partner level that they need, but are not a priority for us as a vendor.

So TD SYNNEX offers financing terms. They will invoice on behalf of the partner. They will put together creative fiscal options that allow customers to stretch. They’ll even offer to assess credit based on the end user’s credit rather than the partner’s credit. Those are fantastic services that just, frankly, as a vendor, aren’t our core business. So what we’re able to do is to address more customers through more partners and do the thing that we’re really good at: solve their data and AI problems through Viya and our solution stack and bring value to those businesses.

Robert Dutt: Given all that, a while ago the goal was set for 30%, I think, of revenues through channels. Where does that sit today? What’s the momentum looking like? And what do you see as sort of remaining obstacles along the way to that goal?

John Carey: Yeah, so great progress. So if I think about segments—the channel segment, which is 100% indirect, is between 10% and 15% of our business. In the enterprise, there’s a lot of channel fulfillment and engagement. And so overall, we are very close to that 30% of the total business being with or through a partner. But we want to—the new goal is, as all goals change: I want to be 30% of the overall business with that channel segment. With that segment of customers that are exclusively partner, and therefore be a strong contributor into the enterprise accounts with partner co-sell, partner fulfillment, and partner delivery. So future’s bright. All goals, as they need to, change over time and the bar increases. And we are doing a great job of forcing that bar up every year so that we have to ask more of ourselves and our partners so that we make sure we focus on delivering value to our customers.

Robert Dutt: Let’s talk about what it looks like to be a SAS partner today in terms of the economics and all that kind of good stuff. What does success look like economically for a partner today? And how is that story changing as the product portfolio and the goal shifts?

John Carey: As you say, goals are made for changing. And especially in this industry, things change fast. So maybe a good way of thinking about this is: what’s the conversation with a new partner that we’re onboarding? And one of the things we’ve tried to do is to say, “Hey, look, we will have the packaging so that you can focus on sales readiness first and build a book of business with us.” So that’s where we leverage package service offerings from our SAS consulting organization that are resellable by partners.

We are rationalizing our product portfolio for the SMB market to be far more prescriptive. We know what works, but we still have the full enterprise list of offers, and frankly, it doesn’t add value. It adds something of a confusing layer of options that aren’t really relevant for many of the use cases and customers that we and our partners specifically deal with.

So phase one: build an annuity business on the resale model. As you become—and as it makes sense in your business—to invest in services headcount, then those package service offerings get replaced by your own services. And it is a services-rich business. The great thing about a data and AI platform is once you start answering questions and you’ve built that trust with the client, more and more questions occur. And models need to be refined; models need to be promoted. And as a partner, if you are doing this in a regular cadence, you are building a scenario where that customer trusts you as their trusted advisor and comes to you for those service elements.

So the baseline is—and we pay more on New than we do on Renew. There’s an annuity business build out there that is driven by sales enablement and sales focus and strong investment in demand generation on our channel marketing center platform, where you can run co-branded campaigns and drive real top-of-the-funnel demand. We’ll work with you on getting that down into closed business, and we know how to do that very well.

As it becomes reasonable for you to make investments in technical resources where you know you have a book of business, you can apply those resources too. That’s where we ask partners to lean in. And at that point, they are now attaching services, and that grows their—and we know that services are more profitable than the resale. So it’s table stakes: build a book of business that’s got an annuity associated, and then use that to catalyze investment in more profitable services over time, which is something of a sea change. When I came in, there was a lot of investment required before a partner was allowed to sell. And we’ve inverted that to say, “I want it to be easy for you to sell and we’ll support you.” And when you’ve got the right amount of business behind you, then it makes logical sense for you to invest. And that investment is the outsized return for you as a partner.

Now, for our existing partners, it’s the inverse, right? They were already doing a lot of delivery. They know how to do the services. This now gives them a vehicle to attach those services to that’s more autonomous and less dependent on a SAS seller to pull them in after. And so with that, they’ve made great investments in sales functions within their organizations for product sale and attaching their own services straight out of the gate.

Robert Dutt: Big announcement week this week with AI Navigator on governance, the new agentic AI capabilities across the board, the industry accelerators. From a channel strategy standpoint, do these announcements change who you’re looking for in terms of partners, or is it an opportunity to do more and different things with the base?

John Carey: I think the honest answer is both. If I think about our GSIs, the accelerators, the models, the agentic capabilities are incredibly attractive to our global systems integrator partners. And it gives them a reason to lean in even more with us around account telemetry, account planning, and moving out of that advisory engagement into delivery engagement with them. And we are now a very modern platform that has been very considerate of where our customers are.

We’re a company who reflects the personality of our founder. I think of that Teddy Roosevelt quote: “Walk quietly, but carry a big stick.” Well, we walk quietly, but with our platform and our solutions, that’s a very big stick. It makes a lot of noise. And I think what you saw at this Innovate was kind of something we’ve known for a while, but now the market is starting to recognize is that there’s a lot of significant growth value there for existing customers as they move to Viya and the Viya solutions with the agentic AI integrations, with the accelerators.

So that’s happening, I think, on the other side. We are now at a point of inflection where enterprise capabilities are expected at non-enterprise accounts. And how we execute on that is through partners and through prescription and optimization, so that when we engage, we give those customers a very clear message of what they can do and what they can achieve and what it’s going to cost them. And that is all within their budgetary expectation, and we execute on that relentlessly and consistently with our partners.

Robert Dutt: When I chatted with Ryan Macdonald, who heads up the Canadian operations, a bit earlier, he talked about—especially in competitive situations—what he called a “hidden SAS situation,” where organizations will find that they’re running business-critical decisions on stuff, on SAS, that they’ve almost forgotten about. It just kind of sits there, it just works. And the conversation becomes about: how do you upgrade and grow from that foundation? How do you find that conversation showing up in the partner community? And if it is, in fact, a partner conversation, how are you equipping partners to realize that opportunity?

John Carey: Yeah, so I think that’s very much a conversation with our established enterprise industry accounts. And so how I think that shows up is our conversations with our global systems integrator partners. They’ve made investments in assessment tools and accelerators and migration pathways that help a customer understand how they are currently using their SAS estate and what critical functions are being run on that estate, so they can help a customer understand the actual relevance.

It’s like, I live in Florida, right? I only notice the air conditioning when it doesn’t work. But you don’t switch off the air conditioning unless you’ve got an alternative ready to go. And their job is to make sure customers, when making strategic decisions, understand the impact of decisions they may make. And that, I think, creates an opportunity for how we’re talking about: “We’re going to actually upgrade you so that you have better climate control, right? You have new options. It can be more cost-effective as it scales and it can meet more of your needs. And you don’t lose the critical foundation that you’ve been building your business on.”

I think there’s some of that recognition that we’re a relatively humble organization, but I’m starting to hear more of our customers acknowledge, more of our partners talk about, “Hey, let’s not shy away from the fact you’re running your business on SAS.” This is critical functionality. We hear billions being managed. When we think about our price book, we talk about billions of assets under management. I mean, that’s the order of magnitude of what we’re managing from a risk or a fraud perspective. And we want to make sure that we can meet customers where they are and make sure they make decisions that are good and solid for their business.

Robert Dutt: Another one that came up with Ryan was the idea of increasingly seeing GSI plus niche specialist partner and kind of the ecosystem play. I’m curious if that’s a deliberate strategy. Is it something you’ve observing and adopting to?

John Carey: For me, I think it’s always been there. I think GSIs have always really effectively subcontracted in specific expertise and niche value as needed when doing delivery. I think what’s happening now, again, with disruptive inflection points—what I believe we see happening is things that were already happening become very visible. So I think what we’re seeing right now is, rather than that being a subcontract relationship, it’s a more explicit contract with GSI, contract with boutique partner with very specialized expertise. And it’ll settle over time, and it may even go back to more of a subcontract model. But I think that’s great. We’re all acknowledging that there is value in industry expertise, and even within industry expertise, there is real value in some very niche expertise that requires that level of investment. And you should be paying to make sure you get the right value resource working on your project.

Robert Dutt: If I’m a Canadian reseller or a system integrator who hasn’t worked with SAS to date listening to this and thinking, “All right, they have an interesting story, they’re in an interesting place.” What’s the right profile for a partner for you right now? What are you looking for? What do you actually need more of in the market?

John Carey: I would say I’m looking for solution providers. So I’m looking for partners who can address mid-market organizations’ needs across data and AI. With a strong relationship with TD SYNNEX, great credit, skills in infrastructure, security, data, who are looking to an adjacent expansion where bringing in SAS as a way to modernize that data for the AI lifecycle and turn that data now into insight and from insight into workflow integrated with agentic capabilities. If that’s your bag, don’t just knock on the door, knock our door down. We want to talk to you.

Robert Dutt: Fair enough. Final question: what does the SAS channel look like in three years if things go well and there aren’t additional changes along the way? What would you point to and say, “That’s the thing we’re building towards”?

John Carey: I think the service provider in the mid-market and below will become a far more dominant motion. I think in the enterprise, we’ll see even more integration of partners from a fulfillment perspective as customers start to push vendors to engage with them through the advisors who have guided them through this transformative period.

And I think as a vendor, you just have to acknowledge that the customer is going to tell you who they want to buy from. The customer is going to tell you who they want to work with. And as a vendor, what you want to say is, “Well, if they have the skills, we should lean in. If they don’t have the skills, we should be really honest about the fact that we think you could be better served by a partner that looks with this profile and skills, and here are some we would recommend.” But again, the customer is ultimately going to make the trade-offs.

But I would say managed service providers are increasing, and partners building their own value on top of the Viya platform in industries where we have yet to unlock use cases are becoming more and more the norm.

Robert Dutt: Especially since so much of the audience is in that MSP space, I think that’s going to be one that hits home. Well, John, I appreciate you taking the time on what I’m sure has been a very busy week.

John Carey: I appreciate it, Robert. Thank you for the time.

Robert Dutt: There you have it—John Carey from SAS Institute. I’d like to thank John for his time and thank you for listening.

Few things I’m taking away from this one. First, the framing I kept coming back to is the transparent box versus the black box. Others turn up with the easy button and a black box. SAS turns up and says nothing is easy, but when you engage with us, you’ll understand where problems occurred and why, and you’ll be able to remediate. In an environment where AI governance is moving from a theoretical concern to an operational requirement, that’s a differentiated position and for channel partners, it means the conversation is not just about selling software. It’s about being the guide that helps the customer make confident technology choices.

Second, the direct-to-indirect migration is live right now. The contract between the end user and SAS doesn’t change. What changes is the transaction route, and the pitch to customers is that instead of being part of a long tail at a large enterprise, you become the most important customer of a partner who’s dedicated to your success. It’s a strong repositioning and the kind of opening that partners who have not been in the SAS conversation before should be paying attention to.

Third, John was pretty clear about where the next three years go. Managed service providers building up their own value on top of the Viya platform in industries where use cases are still being unlocked. If you’re an MSP with deep vertical expertise and data, security, or infrastructure skills, this episode makes the case for why you should be knocking on SAS’s door.

We’ll be back on Monday with more from SAS Innovate as we hear the practitioner side of the story: my conversation with Nat D’Ercole from Deloitte Canada on what AI transformation actually looks like from inside a major Canadian enterprise engagement.

If you found this one useful, follow or subscribe to the ChannelBuzz.ca podcast. We’re on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and most of the major directories. Ratings and reviews are greatly appreciated, especially when they have five stars.

Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.

Today’s headline news for Canadian IT solution providers:

• Integris, a managed AI and IT services firm backed by OMERS Private Equity, has announced its intent to acquireFirst Focus, the largest managed service provider serving small and midsize businesses across Australia, New Zealand, and the Philippines. The deal, subject to regulatory approval, is designed to extend Integris’ geographic reach while accelerating delivery of AI-enabled managed services across regions. For the channel, the transaction is a clear expression of the platform MSP consolidation trend playing out globally through private equity – and for Canadian observers, the OMERS connection is notable: the Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System is the PE backer driving this international build-out.
• Cybersecurity vendor NeuShield has announced a partnership with Ontario-based MSP Data Guards to deliver instant ransomware recovery services to clients. In a documented real-world use case, the companies reported restoring more than 6.2 terabytes of encrypted data in just fifteen minutes – a recovery window NeuShield says would have taken more than five days using traditional backup methods. By integrating NeuShield Data Sentinel into its managed security stack, Data Guards can offer one-click recovery of corrupted data and storage-layer protection against ransomware and file tampering, reflecting a broader market shift as solution providers move beyond prevention and detection to guarantee client data remains continuously recoverable without system rebuilds.
• ThreatLabs Europe, the research arm of ThreatDown, has discovered threat actors weaponizing AI agent skills to deliver the GachiLoader infostealer. Attackers are using a fake OpenClaw AI agent skill as a lure to inject the Rhadamanthys infostealer directly into memory, leveraging the Polygon blockchain for command and control to bypass traditional perimeter defenses. The malware harvests cryptocurrency wallets, browser credentials, Telegram messages, and password manager contents. The discovery is a direct warning for the channel: as non-human identities proliferate in client environments, identity and access management practices must now account for the vulnerabilities introduced by AI agents – not just human users.

In brief:

• Sublime Security has launched its first formal channel partner program and announced a move to a 100 percent channel sales model, with dedicated reseller and MSSP tracks. The agentic email security platform uses a rules-plus-AI approach it says catches attacks that signature-based tools and generic AI products miss.
• Konica Minolta has announced the spring 2026 launch of the AccurioPress C5080 Series, a new line of digital production presses designed for high-volume commercial printing environments.
• Forescout has launched Mission:Possible, the company’s biggest channel partner tour in 25 years, spanning more than 90 cities globally between May and September. The immersive events are built around hands-on IT, OT, IoT, and industrial security challenges, with the goal of sharpening partner positioning around zero trust and continuous threat exposure management.
• Microsoft 365 E7 goes generally available today at $99 per user per month, bundling Microsoft 365 Copilot, the Entra Suite, and advanced compliance capabilities in a single commercial tier. Microsoft’s Q3 earnings this week confirmed Copilot has crossed 20 million paid seats – E7’s launch signals the next phase of the AI licensing conversation for solution providers.

Welcome to The Buzz from ChannelBuzz.ca, I’m Robert Dutt, today is Friday, May 1, 2026, and here’s what’s happening in the channel today.

Integris, a managed AI and IT services firm backed by OMERS Private Equity, has announced its intent to acquire First Focus, the largest managed service provider serving small and midsize businesses across Australia, New Zealand, and the Philippines. The deal is subject to regulatory approval and is designed to extend Integris’ geographic footprint while accelerating delivery of secure, scalable AI capabilities across regions. For the channel, it’s a clear example of the platform MSP consolidation trend playing out globally – and for Canadian observers specifically, it’s worth noting that OMERS, the Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System, is the private equity backer driving this international build-out.

Cybersecurity vendor NeuShield has announced a partnership with Canadian MSP Data Guards to deliver instant ransomware recovery services to clients. In a real-world use case that highlights the collaboration, the companies reported successfully restoring more than 6.2 terabytes of encrypted data in just fifteen minutes. According to NeuShield, this compares to more than five days that would have been required using traditional backup methods. By integrating NeuShield Data Sentinel into its managed security stack, Data Guards can offer one-click recovery of corrupted data and protection at the storage layer against ransomware and file tampering. The partnership underscores a broader trend in the market, as solution providers increasingly move beyond prevention and detection to ensure client data remains continuously recoverable without the need to rebuild systems from scratch.

ThreatLabs Europe, the research arm of ThreatDown, has discovered that threat actors are now weaponizing AI agent skills to deliver the GachiLoader infostealer. According to the company, attackers are using a fake OpenClaw AI agent skill as a lure to inject the Rhadamanthys infostealer directly into memory. The attack utilizes the Polygon blockchain for command and control instructions, allowing it to bypass many traditional perimeter defenses to harvest cryptocurrency wallets, browser credentials, Telegram messages, and password managers. As malicious actors increasingly exploit the expanding footprint of non-human identities, the discovery serves as a clear warning to the channel. IT professionals must ensure comprehensive identity and access management practices account for the vulnerabilities introduced by AI agents operating within client environments.

In Brief – 

Sublime Security plans to go 100 percent channel

Konica Minolta has announced the spring 2026 launch of its AccurioPress C5080 Series for digital production environments. 

Forescout goes on Mission:Possible partner tour

And finally, today’s the day for the launch of Microsoft 365 E7 

Full details and links in the show notes or the blog post.

Later today on In The Channel, we continue our coverage from SAS Innovate 2026, as we talk to SAS global channel chief John Carey about four years building out the channel program for the analytics company, the increasing role of MSPs, and how his own goals for the partner portion of the company’s revenues are evolving.

And if you haven’t heard it yet, yesterday’s episode featured my chat with SAS Canada leader Ryan MacDonald on the state of the AI opportunity in Canada, the role of partners, and why the value of SAS may be hidden to some customers.

That’s how we’re seeing the headlines today. I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, thanks for listening. Have a great day.

Recorded on site at SAS Innovate 2026 in Grapevine, Texas, today’s In The Channel features Ryan MacDonald, country leader at SAS Canada, in a wide-ranging conversation about what the week’s major announcements mean for Canadian organizations – and where SAS sees its channel and partner opportunity growing.

The conversation opens on the energy at SAS Innovate, which marks the company’s fiftieth anniversary, and what the announcement lineup – including the new SAS AI Navigator for AI governance and the expansion of agentic AI capabilities across the Viya platform – means for the Canadian market specifically.

MacDonald describes Canadian enterprise AI maturity as strong in intellectual capital but still building toward consistent economic output, with the governance and trust framework a necessary foundation before organizations can scale. He draws a direct line between Canada’s regulatory environment – OSFI E-21 in particular – and the practical operational pressure organizations are feeling as model validation volumes have grown from two a week to multiple per day.

On the competitive landscape, MacDonald addresses the challenge from Microsoft Fabric and Databricks with an argument about SAS’s existing footprint in business-critical decisioning layers – often invisible infrastructure organizations don’t always realize they’re sitting on, and an upgrade path through Viya designed to deliver incremental value rather than a rip-and-replace.

The conversation also covers the evolution of SAS’s channel strategy, the managed services opportunity in a data sovereignty environment, and the MCP-based openness that is letting external AI agents call SAS analytics directly.

Robert Dutt: Hello, and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca, and your host for the show.

This week, I’m coming to you from Grapevine, Texas, where I’ve been on the ground at SAS Innovate 2026. It’s a significant week for SAS Institute on a couple of fronts. The company is marking its 50th anniversary this year, and the announcement lineup has been one of the more substantive in recent memory, with major moves in AI governance, agentic AI across the Viya platform, and a meaningful shift in how the platform opens up to external AI agents and frameworks.

My guest today is Ryan Macdonald, country manager [CHECK: title recorded as “country manager” – should be “managing director” if you want to punch in] for SAS Canada. Ryan’s been with SAS Canada for about a decade, and has just stepped into a role leading the country this year. He has a front row seat to some significant strategic changes – the move to Viya, the expansion of the partner and channel program, and now what I think is a genuinely important moment as AI governance moves from theoretical concern to practical operational requirement, particularly in Canada’s regulated industries.

We cover a lot of ground – what this week’s announcements mean for Canadian organizations, where Canadian enterprise stands on AI maturity right now, the OSFI E-21 story, how SAS is thinking about its channel ecosystem and the mid-market opportunity, and a candid conversation about managed services and data sovereignty.

Let’s get right into it. My chat with Ryan Macdonald.

[MUSIC]

Robert Dutt: Ryan, thanks for taking the time, and what I’m sure is a busy week for you.

Ryan MacDonald: Yes, of course. Thanks for having me, Robert.

Robert Dutt: You guys turned 50 this year, and it feels like one of the bigger product lineup announcements at Innovate in a while. Curious what you felt from the room. What’s the energy, what’s the vibe that you’re getting from this year at Innovate, especially given that 50 years of SAS framing?

Ryan MacDonald: I agree with the energy you’re feeling. Certainly a ton of energy around our 50th and just what we’re seeing in terms of AI tooling and where we fit into that ecosystem. So lots of conversations about the data estate, how that’s evolving, and then just really looking for the reality check on where practical value lives in the new AI ecosystem that’s being framed around, especially for enterprise technology stacks.

Robert Dutt: Look at the announcement stack this week. You’ve got Navigator for AI governance. You’ve got the agentic AI expansion in Viya, the various industry solutions. Curious – and I’m sure you’ve seen some of these before they were announced to the public and been following their development – what is kind of activating your Spidey senses in terms of, “ooh, that’s going to play well at home right now.” What are we seeing as sort of the big early day opportunities out of those innovations?

Ryan MacDonald: Certainly in Canada, the regulatory domain around model risk management and model management and lineage and explainability is front of mind for everybody. I think that’s the major limiting factor in terms of proliferating cost of AI, in terms of actually calculating a per unit cost of running a model or introducing intelligence to something that was maybe traditionally rules-based. And so I think not only is there a regulatory driver, but people are seeing that as a practical constraint. So a lot in the governance and trust domain is certainly a hot topic.

Robert Dutt: And that kind of speaks to where I wanted to go next, actually, which is you guys have been in Canada across verticals for a long time, obviously. Curious how you would describe the overall kind of AI maturity of the Canadian market right now. Are we kind of leading, lagging? Or is there something distinctly Canadian to it?

Ryan MacDonald: Yeah, great question. This is close to home. We have the benefit of working with thought leaders in AI, folks like Ajay Agrawal. And just knowing the pedigree of intellectual property around this conversation in Canada, we have so much there. Of course, Geoffrey Hinton and Ilya Sutskever and the folks at U of T have just delivered so much to this community. I think that said, enterprise adoption and converting this into economic output is still something that we’re figuring out. So I think our investments generally, relative to peer groups around the world, we’re still a little behind. I think we’re doing some advanced things. There are some exceptions to this, where use cases are at the forefront of what’s being delivered globally. But generally, I think the data estate and this trust dynamic and the need for establishing a scalable framework for trust and governance – it’s a responsible thing to do. But relative to other geographies, it’s setting a foundation before we really run away with some use cases and deliver.

Robert Dutt: One thing we’re tracking – I’m sure a lot of people are – is the idea of AI initiatives that get a start and a lot of fanfare and then fizzle out before hitting production or certainly proving their worth. I’ve heard a lot of the framing of the idea of trust and governance as kind of the growth driver, rather than the compliance tax. How is that hitting in Canada? And is that any different than what you’ve seen in terms of reactions and feeling and overall motion in the states or elsewhere?

Ryan MacDonald: I think there are certainly differences in the tone of this conversation. For me, the purview is mostly north and south of the border – the US and Canada. But I think in Canada, we have a regulatory domain that is really prioritizing these things. So it’s not optional for a lot of – especially in a regulated market, this isn’t really a luxury you’d have to say, do I comply with this or not? But I think it’s also putting a per unit cost parameter on this for folks that is important. We’re seeing a huge proliferation of AI. Everything – your microwave, your lawnmower, everything has some sort of AI enablement component to it. Is it necessary? Are you getting the appropriate uplift? And these teams that are validating and pushing these models through the organization – what we’re hearing from them – this went from two a week, to a month, to two a day, five a day, ten a day. And so the systems – it’s not just a luxury or a question really of the ethics. Are we doing the right thing? Is this responsible? It’s a framework that’s required for the validation process, even just table stakes, to really scale through the organization.

Robert Dutt: To that point, in Canada we’ve got financial services, and particularly we’ve got OSFI E-21 coming up. That’s pretty scary – things attached to it if you’re not hitting the bar. Are you seeing that create urgency? Or are customers still in a wait and see kind of space around that?

Ryan MacDonald: I think the regulatory conversations there are interesting. There’s a lot of assessment of what peers are doing. And I think OSFI, to their credit, really listens to the community. Rather than setting a standard blind lead, just based on their intellectual property and what they see as being a requirement, they really listen to the community and measure from where everybody is, taking stock of that. So I don’t believe there’s a lot of fear and panic. I think organizations – as we did a lot of work around E-21 [CHECK: transcript rendered as “E23” – confirm on playback] specifically in this space – they were really well prepared. They had some ideas on how to make this more efficient, really focus on the materiality of where the risk lives and develop a framework that’s consistent with the risk posture in other domains. And I think that’s really – nobody was suggesting, “hey, this isn’t a good idea. This is too much pressure. This is putting a cost burden on us.” That wasn’t really the dialogue.

Robert Dutt: Beyond financial services and other regulated industries especially, what are you seeing in terms of how customers are wrestling with AI governance right now?

Ryan MacDonald: I think the scale of maturity across industries just varies so greatly. You have some organizations that are really just getting started, and they’re acknowledging that. In some of the roundtables we’ve had the benefit of participating in, some folks are trying to find their first step in AI. What does this even mean? They’re trying to find the right resources that can guide them. They’re still building their technology estate. And then, conversely, you have folks that are, as we spoke about earlier, leading the world – the global community – in terms of things like automated decisioning frameworks and integrating what were previously siloed processes. We see this in risk and fraud domains merging together. So I think we’re seeing both ends of that spectrum in Canada, certainly.

Robert Dutt: Analytics has become a crowded space lately – with Databricks, with Snowflake, with Microsoft Fabric getting in there, all in territory that you guys have been in for a long time. How do you make the case to Canadian organizations that have been told, especially by Microsoft, “hey, you can just have analytics as part of what you already have?” What’s the competitive message there?

Ryan MacDonald: Yeah, that’s a regular conversation for us, of course. I think what we really offer institutions, especially given the scale of the organizations we support – and we work in almost every major industry, every major enterprise in Canada – we offer a very different risk posture in moving through this process. So they may have what were traditional analytics with SAS. Maybe we had dabbled in what was previously BI, something like that. But for a lot of institutions, we support business-critical payload. There is a core application to their business that’s being delivered with a component of SAS. And oftentimes, as our relationships diversify across the organization, maybe we have a specific technology sponsor that helped build this alongside their business counterpart. Maybe they’ve moved on. And that decisioning layer is sort of obfuscated. So we spend a lot of time identifying – hey, is this what looks like ETL work potentially, in a report or an assessment that’s performed? Is this really a decisioning layer in your organization? And that’s what we’re really finding is there. And what folks are really interested in is taking that framework – what was previously identified as legacy SAS – and seeing what we offer in terms of Viya. It’s scaling far beyond what the competition can offer in terms of decisioning frameworks and automating process and delivering core value. A lot of the AI discussion is focused now on where are you seeing ROI? How long do we have to wait? What is the roadmap to finally get something out of this? And I think that’s really the core difference. Yes, there’s a lot of tools. It’s a crowded space. The competition is fierce and they can do some very exciting things. I think what we offer organizations is really the opportunity to do those same things and more, and to take your current investments, your current intellectual property, through that framework – which delivers value incrementally rather than a build within a complete new paradigm.

Robert Dutt: One of the announcements that really caught my eye this week was the addition of the MCP – in that essentially you guys are opening up the analytics engine to external AI agents like Claude to call it directly. It seems like a pretty significant shift in terms of thinking about openness, thinking about consuming SAS from wherever folks want to consume it. What does that motion mean for the Canadian organization and for your Canadian customers?

Ryan MacDonald: I think this is an extrapolation of what we spoke about earlier, in the sense of we are providing these deterministic decision frameworks to these organizations today. And so we talk about this almost in the sense of the Apple/Android paradigm. This was a previously closed ecosystem. The SAS code base was proprietary. The compute infrastructure was proprietary. And the open source motion was the first move here – running Python and R and other code frameworks natively within SAS is something that we’ve supported now for years within Viya. And it’s an extrapolation of this – meeting our customers where they are. SAS did not endeavor to compete directly with the frontier labs and build LLM models. But we certainly see the benefit – this is providing the market the productivity increase, the creativity of use cases, and what this adds to decisioning frameworks. I think the shortcoming is still the deterministic component, where something can be built in a hard and trusted capacity, presented to a regulator with the appropriate lineage. That’s really where we see these worlds coming together. So I don’t think it’s a great strategic decision if SAS were to impose, “we have one specific framework, one partner in this space.” We’re seeing, in addition to the frontier labs, a lot of custom work in this space as well – enterprises that are building more small language models around their data sets. So imposing this integration framework, I think, allows us to really meet customers where they are.

Robert Dutt: A few years ago there was a flurry of things going on on the channel side for you guys. You brought on TD SYNNEX as a distributor. I believe it was a worldwide, not Canadian-specific figure that you were going for – 30% of contribution through partners. Where’s the channel scene at for you today? How would you characterize where you’re at against those goals and others?

Ryan MacDonald: I think we’re still making progress in that domain. The channel business is still growing very aggressively. It’s a big shift to turn, frankly, in terms of getting the allotment of customers we had when we segmented what work was going to the channel, how that was going to be developed. And we compare ourselves to our peers in the industry – they’ve been at this for a lot longer. So just the maturity continues to develop. I think we’re seeing great progress, great feedback from customers in terms of the way that the channel is able to support them. And we see proliferation of niche players here that have come out of the woodwork that are very industry-specific. So I think that’s really the opportunity – where we had a general technology-based approach for certain industry segments, what we’re seeing is these channel partners can really tie together these business outcome-driven discussions in a way that was much more expensive and difficult for SAS to scale to.

Robert Dutt: What does the community look like today in terms of scale, profile of partners, what they’re doing, and where do you see that evolving over the near future?

Ryan MacDonald: I think we’re seeing this change very quickly with the advent of AI in terms of what use cases are being prioritized. I think in Canada, a lot of organizations have hit a wall in terms of understanding their data foundations – they’re not necessarily ready to scale them towards all the outcomes they’re seeking to deliver. And so channel partners are that domain. What are our peers doing? And this is GSIs and niche consulting firms and everybody in between. So we’re really seeing those conversations take shape of almost a reset of the roadmap, a reprioritization of how they’re building out their target state ecosystem. And that industry expertise is, I believe, the real differentiator. There’s a lot of competition. It’s a crowded space in that sense. So having an outcomes-focused point of view, whether that’s from SAS directly or a channel partner, is really important.

Robert Dutt: Is the changing nature of what you guys are focused on in terms of AI governance and all those kinds of things that we’ve been talking about changing the definition of who you’re working with as a partner? Or is that something that’s likely to happen in the near future?

Ryan MacDonald: I don’t think it’ll necessarily change. We might add some things to it, but they’re really part of the same conversation. I don’t think you can have a conversation about scaling AI without a discussion about the governance framework. And in a lot of cases, model inventory work, and just being the core platform of delivering models in this decisioning layer, is something that SAS had a lot of experience and an existing footprint within. So I think it’s really germane to the way we’ve been working with these customers today.

Robert Dutt: How does the service mix – how they actually bring this all to market as partners – change as kind of what you’re going after changes?

Ryan MacDonald: I think there’s a lot more consultative work right now around these outcome-focused and prioritization discussions. So I think it certainly is changing. And if you’re seeing this sort of increased competition in the technology domain and more commoditization of certain tool sets, it just puts more weight on – how do I really navigate? It crowds the pathway and creates more obstacles in terms of delivering outcomes. And so I think just refocusing on outcome-oriented discussion – and a lot of times these are deep partnerships between a niche consulting vendor, or somebody that now is a channel partner to SAS, and these firms in sectors across Canada. So it’s not necessarily changing the way we’re working with them. It’s changing the prioritization of the discussion, putting consulting maybe ahead of technology.

Robert Dutt: Before we sat down to record, just as we were getting to know each other, you mentioned that part of your path through SAS Canada was you had managed services, at least for a while – and I believe that to be internally. How has that shaped, and how does this moment shape, how you think about working with partners who are in that managed services kind of motion?

Ryan MacDonald: Yeah, that conversation is changing everywhere in the world. The political landscape, of course, is relevant here – in terms of we’re seeing some location dictate where customers are willing to send or host data. We’re seeing geo-repatriation in that sense. We’re seeing movement to the cloud change the dynamics of the cost model, what folks are seeing in terms of stable applications that don’t necessarily need the scalability or proximity to data. We’re seeing them pull some things back on premises and build clouds internally with OpenShift and other technologies. So I think it’s a cycle like most things in technology, where we’ve had the gold rush of moving everything to the cloud. And I think especially enterprise customers are now deciding not only how do they divide that workload amongst hyperscaler partners, but what is appropriate for internal clouds, which are now growing in popularity. And I think in Canada, we’re not seeing a huge disruption in this space, but we’re seeing a lot more of our business grow in terms of managed services. And as we talk about more outcome-driven engagements – less just providing raw access to the technology – the managed service really bridges the gap in terms of the various integration points that need to be managed along the way. And so it’s not just simply providing the infrastructure and application support. We’re seeing the managed service domain, especially around SAS – where this is not a one-size-fits-all approach – really extrapolate into “can we help you really derive your outcome” with expertise in either transformations of data, or we’re providing models now in terms of a service offering, in addition to consulting work of building models custom to each application. So that’s really evolving quickly.

Robert Dutt: One of the trends that we follow a lot is this move across the industry to look at partners less as a direct, straight-through channel and more as an ecosystem – a lot more multi-partner engagements, especially given where you guys sit in the complexity and custom nature of a lot of what customers are asking of you. How are you guys thinking about that ecosystem, multi-partner play?

Ryan MacDonald: I think the list of partners is generally growing as we talk about extrapolating into channel and SAS’s ambition to have, as you stated, 30% of our revenue flowing through the channel in Canada. I think the customer really dictates the specific mix. And so customers in large enterprise have a preference of GSI and specific domains. And what we’re seeing more is the introduction of niche players alongside GSIs, where typically that was binary previously. They would typically – let’s say they work with Deloitte or EY, for example – that would be their preference to continue in that direction. And now we’re seeing them want to leverage the scale those organizations offer, but really like the thought leadership and expertise delivered by a niche partner, and want to bring us all together. So we’re seeing a lot more partners enter the conversation, which I think is very healthy for the competitive domain and just in terms of getting to specific outcomes very quickly.

Robert Dutt: The traditional sweet spot for SAS has been clearly enterprise, and Canada’s a very SMB-heavy nation, obviously. But a lot of the stuff that’s going on right now between the Viya SaaS model and the stuff going up on GitHub and the move towards managed services suggests that there might be even more of a mid-market play than before. I’m curious what you see in terms of what a Canadian reseller can realistically and credibly pursue right now.

Ryan MacDonald: That has been the way the economy has been structured in Canada for decades, of course, and something that I think our channel strategy really celebrates and prioritizes. SAS – it’s hard to work both ends of the spectrum. And so our legacy of working with enterprise customers, to explore some of the topics we’ve covered in the regulatory domain and how that takes shape, the reach to SMB customers has been something that we’ve candidly struggled with at times. The channel is really the resolution to that. So we’re seeing, as we talk about more entities in this space, the mix of consulting partners or partners in general proliferating – that’s really where we’re seeing it, down more towards the SMB segments, less on the enterprise side.

Robert Dutt: Acknowledging that there’s going to be a wide range of things here, and it may even depend partner to partner, but looking at the channel as an aggregate – what do you need more of from your partners right now in terms of areas of focus, in terms of opportunities to be going at, in terms of skillsets?

Ryan MacDonald: I think because we are trying to aggressively pursue this market in Canada and service this customer base – which, again, the channel is just better suited for, all around – to me, it’s the feedback loop. That’s something that we challenge, of course, our frontline in an enterprise setting. You have a consistent flow of communication that’s bidirectional. We’re getting feedback on what’s important to them, what they are doing with the platform at times in our tool sets. And having that flow through an additional intermediary is an additional step in the process in the channel segment. But I think that’s really important – just to make sure we’re collecting feedback not just from channel partners, but direct from customers – their experience with SAS, how our channel partners feel in terms of support and enablement, pricing and mechanics and the rest of it as well.

Robert Dutt: Curious what you see success at SAS Canada looking like over the next 12 to 18 months. What are the conversations you want to be having that you aren’t yet? What are the measurements that you’re looking at?

Ryan MacDonald: We have been growing the business – in terms of revenue, of course, is always important to us – but influence in the market, I think, is something else. SAS, having such a – as we celebrate 50 years – our legacy is something we’re incredibly proud of. It’s afforded us the opportunity to build these great partnerships in Canada, all across the country, various enterprises. I think at times the double-edged sword there is they may equate us to the way they had built with SAS previously and don’t necessarily take stock of some of the things you’re seeing us bring to market today and announcing here at Innovate. So I think that is really what we look for – not just in terms of revenue growth and are we delivering more outcomes and scaling the progress with these customers. Are we really – are they delivering within the new framework? Are we changing the narrative in terms of what they see from SAS and who we are to them?

Robert Dutt: My last and definitely most important question – how many dinners did you have last night?

Ryan MacDonald: I had one dinner.

Robert Dutt: One? One dinner. Oh, that’s an accomplishment. I appreciate you taking the time, Ryan. Thanks.

Ryan MacDonald: Thank you, Robert. Really, really nice to meet you here today. Thank you, I appreciate your time.

Robert Dutt: There you have it – Ryan Macdonald from SAS Canada.

I’d like to thank Ryan for his time. This was our first in-person recording with the new setup, and I think you can hear the difference.

And thank you for listening. A few things I’m taking away from this one.

First – the AI governance story in Canada is moving faster than it might look from the outside. Ryan’s framing stuck with me: the volume of models organizations are pushing through validation has gone from two a week to five to ten a day. The governance framework isn’t a compliance tax – it’s the operational infrastructure that makes any of this scalable. And for Canadian financial services firms, OSFI E-21 isn’t on the horizon anymore – it’s here.

Second – SAS’s competitive argument is more interesting than the standard “we’ve been around longer” play. The pitch is that there’s already a business-critical decisioning layer in your organization that’s been built on SAS. And the real question is whether you’re going to upgrade and grow from that investment, or build something new from scratch alongside it. For a lot of Canadian enterprises, that’s a conversation worth having.

And third – Ryan was candid that the direct sales model doesn’t reach the SMB, and the channel is the answer. What’s interesting is where the growth is coming from – niche, industry-specific partners alongside the big GSIs, with customers already wanting both in the room. If you’re a Canadian reseller or systems integrator with deep vertical expertise, SAS is worth a conversation.

We’ll be back tomorrow with more from on the ground here at SAS Innovate 2026, as we chat with the global channel chief at SAS Institute, John Carey [CHECK: transcript rendered as “John Kerry” – confirm on playback before publishing].

If you found this one useful, follow or subscribe to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca. We’re on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and most of the major directories. Ratings and reviews are always appreciated and genuinely help other people in the channel find the show.

Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.

Today’s headline news for Canadian IT solution providers.

ChannelBuzz.ca is on site at this week’s SAS Innovate 2026 in Grapevine, Texas. Here’s some of the major news from the event.

• SAS announced a Viya MCP (Model Context Protocol) server at Innovate 2026, enabling external AI agents to invoke SAS capabilities – fraud detection models, statistical engines, forecasting tools – without being inside the Viya platform. Integrations with Microsoft Copilot and Anthropic’s Claude are live now, with additional LLMs coming later this year. It’s a significant architectural shift: SAS Viya becomes a callable intelligence layer inside any enterprise AI workflow, rather than a destination platform customers have to enter directly.
• SAS AI Navigator is the company’s new AI governance tool, a SaaS solution designed to help organizations compile a complete AI inventory and govern AI use cases, including the models and agents that power them. Navigator is coming to Azure Marketplace in both public and private configurations – lowering the entry point for governance conversations to well below a full Viya deployment. SAS’s vice president of AI ethics, governance and social impact Reggie Townsend frames the shift plainly: governance is no longer a compliance checkbox, it’s a competitive differentiator.
• SAS Studio is being rebranded as SAS Data and AI Studio, arriving later in 2026, alongside expanded native support for open table formats and the governed orchestration for building, deploying, and scaling trusted analytics and AI across the enterprise. A free, open-source Agentic AI Accelerator for is available now on GitHub, along with a free course to learn how to build Agents in SAS Viya.
• In conversation at the show, SAS chief operating officer Gavin Day offered the most candid enterprise AI market read of the week: productivity gains are real – SAS internally cut its own development lifecycle by roughly 60% using AI techniques – but for high-stakes use cases the precision problem remains unsolved. “If I ask an LLM the same question ten times, I don’t get the same answer ten times. If I’m working on anti-money laundering, that’s never gonna be okay.” Day also confirmed that as of Q3 2025, SAS automated inbound partner lead routing to go directly to qualified partners without SAS in the middle – and said the partner board acknowledged it at their meeting this week. Full interviews with SAS senior vice president of global channels John Carey and SAS Canada’s Ryan MacDonald are coming to the In The Channel feed.

Elsewhere in the news:

• Microsoft reported fiscal Q3 2026 results after the bell on Wednesday, beating expectations on both revenue and earnings. Azure grew 40% year-over-year, ahead of the 39% consensus, and the company’s AI business crossed a $37 billion annualized revenue run rate, up 123%. Microsoft 365 Copilot now has over 20 million paid commercial seats, up from 15 million in January, with Satya Nadella noting weekly engagement is now at the same level as Outlook. For solution providers, the more immediate data point: M365 E7 at $99 per user per month goes generally available today, bundling Copilot, Entra Suite, and advanced compliance capabilities into a single commercial tier – and Microsoft is guiding for Azure growth of 39 to 40 percent next quarter at constant currency.
• Lenovo has acquired the firmware BIOS business, intellectual property, and engineering team of Phoenix Technologies, the company whose firmware runs on over one billion devices globally, in a deal that ends a 20-plus year vendor relationship by converting it into vertical ownership. The acquisition covers four Phoenix product lines – FirmCare, SecureCore, ServerBMC, and OmniCore – and Lenovo is framing the deal around faster security patch delivery, tighter firmware integration across its ThinkPad and commercial PC lines, and cost efficiencies. For Lenovo resellers, the practical implication is a more consistent firmware and security update story across the full portfolio, without the coordination lag that comes with a third-party BIOS vendor relationship.
• Canadian network management platform Auvik launched Auvik Aurora, a suite of AI agents embedded directly into its platform for MSPs and IT teams. Drawing on Auvik’s network data lake of real-world device topology, relationships, and vulnerability insights, the agents proactively flag issues, prioritize alerts, and surface device-specific command recommendations before problems escalate. CEO Doug Murray frames Aurora as the “Do” layer of Auvik’s “See, Tell, Do” framework – and notably, the agents are designed to identify devices in need of patching or replacement, surfacing revenue opportunities MSPs can bring to clients proactively rather than reactively.
• Cloud networking vendor Aviatrix launched AgentGuard, positioning it as the first agentic AI security platform built around containment rather than detection and remediation. The premise: most enterprises have no architectural constraints on where a compromised AI agent can move, making the blast radius of an AI agent breach effectively the entire environment. AgentGuard discovers agents across VMs, Kubernetes clusters, and serverless functions – including shadow agents – maps their connections, and enforces communication governance. CEO Doug Merritt was direct about the channel opportunity: “There’s a significant services revenue stream about to be unleashed for channel partners who understand AI containment.” Aviatrix operates 100 percent through the channel.

Welcome to The Buzz from ChannelBuzz.ca, I’m Robert Dutt, today is Thursday, April 30th, and here’s what’s happening in the channel today.

A special edition today. I’ve spent the last couple of days at SAS Innovate 2026 in Washington, and there’s enough here to warrant its own episode before we get to the rest of the week’s news. Product announcements, some candid conversations with SAS leadership, and an honest read on where the enterprise AI market actually stands right now.

Let’s get into it.

The headline from the show floor is that SAS is opening up the Viya platform in a way it hasn’t before. They’ve launched a Viya MCP server – Model Context Protocol – which means SAS capabilities, whether that’s a fraud detection model, a forecasting engine, or a statistical analysis tool, can now be called directly by external AI agents. If your client is running Claude or Microsoft Teams as their AI interface, they can now reach into a SAS Viya model and invoke it as a tool, without being inside Viya at all. Microsoft and Anthropic integrations are live now, with more LLM support coming later this year.

Alongside that, SAS Studio is being rebranded as SAS Workbench, arriving later this year, and SAS is also expanding native support for open table formats – which they’re framing as finally making cloud migration financially viable rather than painful.

And for partners and developers interested in building on top of all this: an Agent AI with SAS Viya certification is available now, and a free open-source Agent AI Accelerator framework is up on GitHub.

SAS has been making governance noise for a few years. This week, the company introduced AI Navigator, a SaaS solution designed to help organizations compile a complete AI inventory and govern AI use cases, including the models and agents that power them. Agent sprawl is real, and this is a direct response to it. Navigator is coming to Azure Marketplace in both public and private configurations – meaning you don’t need to be a Viya customer to have a governance conversation.

I sat down with Reggie Townsend, SAS’s vice president of AI ethics, governance and social impact. His framing is worth repeating: governance is no longer a compliance checkbox – it’s a competitive differentiator. In his words, the AI debate is no longer innovation versus trust. He also told us that the Navigator product grew directly out of an internal SAS problem – they discovered five different business units were using five different AI models to respond to RFPs. They consolidated to one champion model, one challenger. That specific use case became a product feature.

The most useful conversation of the week was with Gavin Day, SAS’s chief operating officer, who oversees all revenue-generating functions including channel. He gave the most honest market read I heard at the show.

On AI ROI: productivity gains are real. SAS internally cut their development lifecycle by roughly 60% using AI techniques. But for high-stakes, mission-critical use cases, the precision problem remains unsolved. His line: if you ask an LLM the same question ten times, you don’t get the same answer ten times – and if you’re working on anti-money laundering, that’s never going to be okay. That’s the gap.

He also confirmed what a lot of people in this industry are probably already sensing: behind closed doors, CIOs are telling him that IT budgets are being quietly redirected to AI experimentation. Nobody says it out loud. But the investment is real, and the ROI conversation is still very much open.

Day confirmed that as of last summer, SAS automated their inbound partner lead routing – leads that fit a partner profile now go directly to that partner without SAS in the middle. Small operational detail, real signal about where their head is at on the partner motion.

He also flagged something worth watching on pricing: his prediction is the industry is moving toward outcome-based models, where customers start paying when the technology is implemented and actually delivering value – not on a multi-year implementation runway. That’s a shift worth tracking.

In addition to this episode of the Buzz, tune in later today for an In The Channel episode where I sit down with Ryan MacDonald, country manager for SAS Canada to find out about top opportunities for the company’s partners back home, and tomorrow I’ll bring you an interview with John Carey, who has signficantly ramped up the company’s partnering efforts over the last four years.

Of course, there’s plenty going on beyond SAS Innovate this week. Here are a few headlines that caught our eye – and for more detail on any of them, check the show notes or blog post for this episode.

“Microsoft beat Q3 expectations last night – Azure up 40%, Copilot crosses 20 million paid commercial seats – and M365 E7 launches tomorrow.”

“Lenovo has acquired Phoenix Technologies’ firmware business, bringing in-house the firmware running on over a billion devices worldwide.”

“Auvik has launched Aurora AI agents, embedded directly into its platform for proactive MSP network management.”

“And Aviatrix is out with AgentGuard – an agentic AI security platform built around containment, delivered entirely through the channel.”

That’s how we’re seeing the headlines today. I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, thanks for listening. Have a great day.

SonicWall published its 2026 Cyber Protect Report in March with a deliberate reframe: rather than threat intelligence for its own sake, the report is built around actionable content for solution providers. The centrepiece is the seven deadly sins of SMB cybersecurity – seven predictable, preventable failure patterns drawn from real breach data.

The headline numbers are sobering: 88 percent of SMB breaches involve ransomware, more than double the enterprise rate, average dwell time sits at 181 days, and 85 percent of actionable alerts trace back to identity and credential compromise.

Michael Crean, senior vice president and general manager of managed security services at SonicWall, came to the company through the acquisition of Solutions Granted, the MSSP he built – one of the early pioneers of SOC-as-a-service for the MSP market. He’s direct about what the data means for partners: the seven sins aren’t just an SMB customer problem. They’re an MSP problem too.

His core argument is that mastering fundamentals – MFA, patching, privilege management – is non-negotiable, and owning the right tools doesn’t change that. You can have the same toolbox as your mechanic; that doesn’t make you a mechanic. On the MSP-to-MSSP question, his answer channels Yoda: do or do not, there is no try.

A month after the report’s release, Crean says partners have already been using the sins framework directly in customer conversations – which he describes as the whole point.
One postscript: his personal favourite of the seven sins is number five, cost-driven security decisions. His test – ask a room of MSPs how many bought the cheapest car on the lot. Nobody raises their hand. But too many of their customers are doing exactly that with cybersecurity.

Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last sixteen years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca and your host for the show.

SonicWall has published annual threat research for years, but this year they did something different. They stopped calling it a threat report. The 2026 Cyber Protect Report reframes the conversation away from data for its own sake towards something MSPs can actually use – a set of tools and talking points for strategic conversations with customers. The hook they chose? The seven deadly sins of SMB cybersecurity. Seven predictable, preventable failures that show up in breach after breach.

My guest is Michael Crean, senior vice president and general manager of managed security services at SonicWall. Michael came to SonicWall through the acquisition of Solutions Granted, the MSSP he built and one of the early pioneers of SOC-as-a-service for the MSP market. Before that, nine years in the military. So when he talks about what MSPs are getting wrong on security, he’s speaking from a fairly unusual vantage point – inside the SOC, inside the vendor, inside the partner community itself.

The report had been out about a month when we sat down and I was curious what the actual conversation had looked like since launch. We got into that, the sins themselves, the 181-day dwell time that should make many MSPs uncomfortable, and what it really means to be or partner with a true MSSP.

Let’s get right into it. My chat with Michael Crean.

Michael, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it.

Michael Crean: Absolutely, sir.

Robert Dutt: You called this report the Cyber Protect Report, not the threat report that you guys have been publishing for years. That seems like a deliberate choice. What are you trying to signal with that shift and who are you really talking to with this report?

Michael Crean: I think every other threat report just looks the same. It’s got some different colors, it’s got some different logos, but everybody talks about the same exact thing and it felt boring. It felt like, “Why do we have to fit into the same role as everyone else? Why can’t we do something different that’s purposeful and should be meaningful to people?” It actually gives them something to talk about – not just with themselves internally, but also to their customers. That was the reason we went down this path and decided to call it the Protect Report.

Robert Dutt: I’m guessing that also sets up why you went with the framing of those seven deadly sins – the seven predictable, preventable failures. I thought that was a really neat hook for it. When you look at that list, which one do you think most MSPs would be surprised to see themselves in? Not so much their customers, but themselves as MSPs?

Michael Crean: Number one – ignoring the fundamentals. I mean, it’s incredible the amount of times – because of the work that we do at the SonicWall Security Operations Centers and the amount of compromises that we’re brought in to participate in, investigate, help people with – that you just find it’s this overwhelming amount of: you had the right tools, you had the right tech, and you didn’t know what to do with it. Or you did and you just didn’t take the time to really learn how to ride the bike well. We had a compromise today where a customer of ours got hit with Akira [verify], a ransomware, and we thought we probably knew that the penetration point was the firewall, but we had to do some more investigation. And when we did the investigation, the amount of misconfiguration was staggering [verify]. You pay for all these security services, and they weren’t even enabled – IPS, IDS disabled – and they paid for them. So it’s just unfortunate. These are just, again, what we call ignoring the fundamentals.

Robert Dutt: Do you have any thoughts on what’s driving that? Is it a matter of, this is up and running, moving on to the next shiny thing, moving on to the next opportunity? What’s behind that?

Michael Crean: I think some of it is that MSPs have found themselves in this place of challenge where they have so much responsibility and customers are looking at them. And I heard this a long time ago when I was a child – the smart person is the person that says what they don’t know. I think a lot of people are fearful to show that side of, “I don’t know something.” But saying “I don’t know” doesn’t mean you don’t know and you’ll never know. It just means, “Hey, I don’t know that, but I’m going to go here and ask this person, or I’m going to go to this vendor and get more information, or I’m going to do some more research and come back to you with a really solid answer.” Instead, there’s this constant – I hate to use the word – but it feels like there’s this constant necessity of yes that we have to keep giving our customers. I prefer somebody to tell me, “Nope, I don’t know how to do that, but I’m going to give you a great contact so that you can get it done right.”

So I think that’s part of it. And then we, as manufacturers, we keep telling people all along the way, “Hey, buy my stuff, it fixes your problems. Just buy my stuff.” Well, I can go buy the same box of tools that my mechanic has, but that doesn’t mean I’m a mechanic and it obviously does not mean that my car is going to get fixed just because I’ve got the tools.

Robert Dutt: Can attest to that. Fortunately, not with great experience, but there’s a reason I do take my car to someone else to get looked at.

Michael Crean: Oh my goodness, you and me both. I want it done right. And as hard as I tend to drive my cars – because I have a thing for speed and adrenaline – I would actually like them to be as proper as they can be.

Robert Dutt: Well, especially given that it’s important, when you’re testing the limits shall we say, that the thing stays together while you’re doing so.

Michael Crean: Absolutely.

Robert Dutt: And back to that point, I think there’s also the factor of when you are presenting yourself – and most MSPs do – as the trusted advisor, the expert on this, who’s going to take care of all this, that creates an even greater disincentive to admitting, “You know what? I need to check on that. Let me find out more,” rather than saying, “Yeah, I got this.”

Michael Crean: I think it’s human nature, just in general. Because the moment you admit you don’t know something or you’re not certain, at that very moment in time, we just assume that to be a point of weakness. I believe through the military – I served for nine years – and being a CEO and founder for 22 years, what I really realized, and even when it came to my kids, sometimes when you just don’t know, it’s okay to say you don’t know, but I’m going to find out, or I’m going to figure it out, or we’re going to do it together and we’re both going to be better for it than we were when we started with the question.

Robert Dutt: Funny, that came up early in my journalism career too. My editor at the time would say, “Your job is not to know. Your job is to find the person who does.” Along the same lines, a little bit of a different lens. You said something that I quoted in the news piece we did on the release of the report: that the danger isn’t that AI isn’t working – it’s that we’re using it as an excuse not to do the things we already know we should. That’s a remarkably direct thing for a security vendor to say, and it touches on that eating-your-vegetables kind of advice. What are you seeing that made you include that line?

Michael Crean: It’s not what I’m seeing today. It’s what I’ve seen for the last 20 years in this industry. I mean, we went from deep packet inspection firewalls to next-generation firewalls. We got all of these extra added capabilities in the firewall, but then we got lazy on doing proper firewalling – controlling ports both inbound and outbound the way we used to do it – because we felt that we were overcompensating because we had so much power and capabilities. Then we went from signature-based AV to next-gen AV where we had these mathematical algorithms doing predictive analysis to understand whether a file is good or bad. Then we got EDR technologies helping us with the behaviour behind it. We just keep adding and adding and adding.

I see AI as nothing more than just another tool. But how good can a tool be when you’re not performing the fundamentals? It helps, but it just can’t – I don’t know if you’re a sports guy or not, but think about it. When you look at the best of the best, whoever that may be – I’m a hockey guy – I’ll call Alex Ovechkin today. The best of the best, the all-time goal scorer. He beat Wayne Gretzky, he took that last year. That man works hard and he works on the fundamentals. I love what AI can do for us – to help get rid of some of the tasks that we don’t want to do, that we hate to do, that we can use for automation and make things faster, help us find bugs in our code, and in a security operations center, get through just mounds of data quicker. But you still have to do the fundamentals and you have to do the right things. Because when you do the right things and then you add something like AI to it, the world becomes a much different place.

Robert Dutt: 88% of the SMB breaches you’re reporting on involved ransomware. That’s more than double the enterprise rate, if I’m remembering correctly. That’s a striking gap. What’s causing that? Do you see it as primarily resources, primarily end-user training, or something structural about how SMBs get attacked that’s different from enterprise?

Michael Crean: I think it’s a little bit of everything that you mentioned, but mostly what it is, is this perception of, “I’m too little. I don’t have anything valuable. Why would somebody want to attack me?” When these large threat actors are going after huge enterprises – Colonial Pipeline, JBS, some massive organization – those organizations have better tools, better resources, better people, and they probably have more maturity to respond when they start to notice an attack taking place.

When you think nobody’s ever going to break into your house, you may not lock your doors. You may not care about having the 70-pound German shepherd on watch when you’re not there. Because, I don’t have anything in my house of perceived value. But when you take that shotgun approach and you can knock down a hundred SMBs and get $10,000 out of each one, that’s a hell of a payday. It’s logical what we’re seeing right now. What it requires is that we all understand we have responsibility for the data that’s been entrusted to us – whether it’s customer data or supply chain data you’re responsible for because you’re supporting another vendor. The data we have is far more valuable than we give it credit for.

Robert Dutt: And I guess there might also be an element of the ability to fly under the radar – the opposite of security through obscurity – in that you make that hit on Colonial Pipeline and it’s front-page news everywhere. You hit a bunch of small businesses for ten grand each, it gets a lot less attention from media.

Michael Crean: I mean – I’m sure you’ve heard this, you’ve been doing this long enough – the idea around news and media: if it bleeds, it leads. And it’s not really sexy when you talk about a two-chair dental practice that gets hit with ransomware. And the two-chair dental practice doesn’t really want to talk about it either, because they’re a small community-based organization and it’s really damaging to how people potentially look at them. Whereas a Target, a Home Depot, a Lowe’s, whoever gets hit with ransomware – they’ve got the marketing machine, the attorneys, the dollars, the insurance. And at the end of the day, they’ll be as profitable, if not more profitable, a few quarters later.

Robert Dutt: The report surfaces the number of 181 days of dwell time. For an MSP who’s running monthly security reports, quarterly reviews, thinks they have things in order – that number has to sting. What does it require of an MSP’s operating model to address that?

Michael Crean: One, making sure that the investments you’ve made and the technologies you’ve decided to procure – the tools you’re going to use – make sure you’re well-trained on them and well-versed on the best practices so that you can get optimal outcomes. Patch management, man – I can’t tell you the amount of times we’ve seen… you talk about this 181 days, it comes down so many times to pure patch management. And the vast majority of manufacturers give you the patches for free. But we don’t think about it, we get distracted, we don’t see it as valuable as it really is. And it’s the really simple things. Again, it’s that number one – ignoring the fundamentals. Patching has been a fundamental thing we’ve talked about for so long.

And I also think that for an MSP that just magically adds the additional S and starts calling themselves an MSSP – don’t dabble in security. Either do or do not. Do not try. We’re going to throw a little Yoda in here for the day. And if you’re not going to be a real MSSP, partner with one. There are so many great organizations out there – I’ll say we’re a great organization to partner with, that’s how we go to market – but there are lots of others out there who are purpose-built for this. It’s like being the best doctor in the world but you’re not a surgeon. So you refer somebody to a surgeon to get that surgery done.

Robert Dutt: Your own background includes Solutions Granted – building out one of the first SOC-as-a-service models for MSPs before SonicWall acquired you. I’m curious, when you look back at your time on the other side, when you were the MSP – are there any of those sins you look at and go, “Hmm, that sounds awfully familiar”?

Michael Crean: Oh, absolutely. I will say I went through that transition – 22 years of being a VAR, to being a government contractor, to being an MSP – realizing I was a really crappy MSP. Not going to lie. My bedside manner wasn’t great. I wasn’t passionate about what I was doing. And I think that’s something that gets lost sometimes. I was super passionate about security – getting out of the military, transitioning away from that, getting into IT and the tech space. And when I found my way into this SOC-as-a-service MSP space, it’s where I found my passion and love again. And I think that means a lot. Don’t do it for the sake of doing it. I think we all have to keep the lights on and put food on the table and clothe our kids and find a way to retirement one day, but find some happiness in that too and be really passionate about what you’re doing. And you’ll probably find a lot of these seven deadly sins aren’t as deadly for you.

Robert Dutt: That’s one way of mitigating it, that’s for sure. The report is framed around protection outcomes and it’s explicitly aimed at giving MSPs the language to have strategic conversations with SMB decision-makers. But there’s a responsibility question underneath that. If the MSP is the last line of defense for most SMBs – and I think we’ve talked about this a little bit already – what does good actually look like? What’s the bar you have to reach before you either back off from security and/or partner with someone else who’s much more committed?

Michael Crean: I think, one, it’s a team effort. It isn’t just the MSP’s responsibility. The business owners, the decision-makers, the board, whoever you’re dealing with that’s making these decisions – they have to buy in. And if they don’t, well, then you’re at a disconnect. You’re bringing in a subject matter expert – the MSP – to help make them more secure, for survivability, for all the things they’re asking for to make sure they can operate at the highest levels possible, and then you don’t allow them to do their job. That’s a huge risk.

What I will say – and this is a hard lesson to learn, but one of the most valuable lessons to learn – is when you fire your first customer. Not get fired, but you actually fire your first customer because it wasn’t the right fit and the financial impact was going to hurt. It didn’t feel good. Nobody ever really wants to get fired or be fired. But when you do that, you start to mature. And inevitably, you also help that customer mature – because if they hear the same message from multiple people: “We’ve got to do patch management. Don’t tell me we can’t. We’re going to use MFA. We’re going to have a SOC monitoring this 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. We’re going to take away administrative privileges. We’re going to do the fundamentals. We’re going to make investments in tools and put the right people, process, and technology in place.” The outcomes really start to matter.

But it is a team sport. I can’t tell you – and I’m sure you’ve heard this – MSPs talking about, “I can’t get my customer to use MFA, so I got them to sign this indemnification clause.” How many MSPs are getting sued, and these indemnification clauses aren’t holding up? Because you’re the expert. If you believe it’s 100% the right thing to do, then if they don’t follow – you fire them.

Robert Dutt: It’s funny how often it comes down to that. I’ve heard that same sentiment from MSPs in the move towards, “This is what you have to take. It is not negotiable. It is the cost, as it were, of doing business with us.” I think that’s sage advice.

Michael Crean: We accept it from our surgeons, right? If I’ve got a bum knee and I need it fixed and I’m a little overweight and he knows I’m drinking a little too much bourbon or eating a little too much red meat and he wants me to lose ten pounds so that he can be successful – if I’m not doing my part, well, why does he want to do surgery on me?

Robert Dutt: Point taken. The report’s been out for a few weeks now. Curious – what’s the question you’re getting most from partners that you didn’t expect as they sit with this? What’s hit differently than you thought it might?

Michael Crean: I thought we were going to get more pushback on why we called it a Protect Report instead of a Threat Report. That really isn’t the question we’ve been getting. What’s been surprising to me is the commentary. The unsolicited emails, the LinkedIn requests, the comments – people have really enjoyed receiving a report that just wasn’t like everything else. There’s been a lot of commentary along the lines of, “I’m going to have this discussion and use these analogies and use these seven deadly sins to have conversations with my customers.” That’s what we were hoping for, but you never know when you go against the grain how well it’s going to hit. I think we got lucky.

Robert Dutt: It sounds very much like mission accomplished. I know it’s something that caught my attention and that I’ve heard out there as well. I look forward to seeing what comes next as you continue to reinvent what these kinds of reports do and what they look like. Michael, I thank you for taking the time to talk through this and to offer some advice.

Michael Crean: I appreciate your time as well, sir. Thanks a lot.

Robert Dutt: There you have it – Michael Crean from SonicWall.

I’d like to thank Michael for his time, and for a conversation that felt a little different from the usual vendor security briefing. His background – building Solutions Granted from scratch, running a real MSSP, operating inside a SOC, and now sitting on the vendor side – gives him a perspective that’s harder to find than you’d think among people who are now in vendor roles.

A few things will stay with me. The mechanic analogy – you can own the same box of tools, but that doesn’t make you a mechanic, and it doesn’t mean your car is going to get fixed. The surgeon line – if the patient won’t follow the pre-op advice, why are you doing the surgery? His answer on when an MSP reaches maturity – it’s the moment you fire your first customer who won’t implement MFA or basic patch management, even when it hurts. And the Ovechkin riff – even the greatest goal scorer in NHL history never stopped working on the fundamentals.

Now, after we stopped recording, Michael mentioned something he wished he’d worked into the interview, and I promised I’d pass it along. Of the seven deadly sins in the report, I asked which one is most personally interesting to him and he landed on sin number five – cost-driven security decisions. He illustrated it this way: he’d been speaking at a conference recently and asked how many in the room had bought a car in the last eighteen months. A lot of hands. Then he asked how many of them had bought the cheapest car on the lot. Not one hand went down. Because we think about safety ratings, about the features, about whether the thing will hold together when we need it to. But when it comes to cybersecurity, too many businesses just reach for the cheapest option. As Michael said himself, it’s a little strange to have a personal favourite deadly sin. But there you have it.

The 2026 Cyber Protect Report is well worth a look for any MSP or solution provider thinking about how to have a more strategic security conversation with their customers. Links in the show notes.

If you found this useful, follow or subscribe to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca wherever you get your podcasts – you’ll find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and all the major directories. Ratings and reviews are always appreciated and genuinely help other people in the channel find the show.

Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.

Today’s headline news for Canadian IT solution providers:

• Google Cloud has launched the new Google Cloud Partner Network, formalizing a shift in how the provider interacts with the channel ecosystem. The rollout is designed to streamline partner engagement and provide clearer pathways for partners building out generative AI practices, offering Canadian solution providers a strong secondary option to Microsoft’s ecosystem.
• Microsoft and OpenAI have altered the terms of their landmark partnership, including significant revisions to their revenue-sharing agreements. The restructuring points to a maturation of the relationship as both companies seek to maximize returns on infrastructure investments, a shift that will ultimately dictate pricing and margin opportunities for MSPs building practices around Copilot.
• Cybersecurity provider Guardz has released its 2026 MSP Threat Report, highlighting that non-human identities now outnumber human users by a ratio of 25 to one across client environments. The data indicates that threat actors are actively exploiting this expansion, using AI to accelerate attacks and bypass traditional perimeter defenses, forcing MSPs to expand their focus to comprehensive identity and access management.

Welcome to The Buzz from ChannelBuzz.ca, I’m Robert Dutt, today is Wednesday, April 29th, and here’s what’s happening in the channel today.

Google Cloud has officially launched its new Google Cloud Partner Network, formalizing a shift in how the provider interacts with its channel ecosystem. According to the company, the rollout is designed to streamline partner engagement and capitalize on solution providers looking to diversify their cloud infrastructure bets away from Microsoft’s dominant ecosystem. The new structure represents a strategic realignment for the hyperscaler, providing clearer pathways for partners building out generative AI and data analytics practices. For Canadian solution providers, the formalized program offers a tangible secondary option in the cloud space. Having a strong alternative ecosystem provides crucial leverage in vendor negotiations and gives MSPs a viable path for clients who are seeking different commercial models for their AI transformations or are wary of vendor lock-in.

Microsoft and OpenAI have altered the terms of their landmark partnership, including significant revisions to their revenue-sharing agreements. The move signals a shift in the underlying dynamics of the tech industry’s most closely watched artificial intelligence alliance. While the specific financial splits remain undisclosed, the restructuring points to a maturation of the relationship as both companies seek to maximize their returns on massive infrastructure investments. This realignment happens just as both vendors are aggressively expanding their respective channel footprints. The economics forged at the top of this partnership will inevitably dictate the pricing, packaging, and margin opportunities available to the broader ecosystem. Canadian MSPs building practices around Microsoft Copilot, or those exploring OpenAI’s recent moves to build a dedicated channel program, need to monitor these developments closely. When tier-one vendors adjust their revenue expectations, those shifts frequently cascade down to partner profitability.

Cybersecurity provider Guardz has released its 2026 MSP Threat Report, highlighting how AI-driven attacks are reshaping the threat landscape. According to the report released yesterday, non-human identities now outnumber human users by a ratio of 25 to one across client environments. This expansion is being actively exploited by threat actors, who are using AI to accelerate attacks targeting identity, email, and cloud infrastructure. The data indicates that traditional perimeter defenses are increasingly being bypassed by attackers leveraging unmonitored service accounts and API keys. This is a shift that lands directly on the service desk. Securing human endpoints and implementing standard multi-factor authentication is no longer sufficient. Solution providers now have to govern the massive web of non-human identities accessing their clients’ data. This represents a significant vulnerability that requires immediate remediation, but it also opens a distinct avenue to expand managed security practices around comprehensive identity and access management.

Later today on In The Channel, we’re talking about the seven deadly sins of SMB cybersecurity. Michael Crean, senior vice president and general manager of managed security services at SonicWall, joins the show to discuss the 2026 Cyber Protect Report and why MSPs need to stop ignoring the fundamentals.

And if you haven’t heard it yet, yesterday’s episode features a conversation on why networking is not sexy until it doesn’t work. Doug Houghton, director of global channels at Alkira, explains why legacy networks weren’t designed for the elasticity demanded by today’s AI workloads.

That’s how we’re seeing the headlines today. I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, thanks for listening. Have a great day.

There’s a line from this episode that’s worth leading with: “Networking is not sexy until it doesn’t work.” That’s Doug Houghton, Director of Global Channels at Alkira, and it’s a pretty concise summary of why his company exists.

Alkira was founded by the team behind Viptela – the startup that essentially created the SD-WAN category before being acquired by Cisco. The lesson they carried out of that experience is that SD-WAN, for all its promise, still ran into the limits of underlying infrastructure. You ended up with disparate networks, latency constraints, and complexity that didn’t disappear – it just moved somewhere else.

What they built in response is Network Infrastructure as a Service (NIaaS) – a cloud-native, consumption-based global backbone that abstracts multi-cloud connectivity into a single managed plane. The pitch to partners is concrete: consolidate 50 physical firewalls into virtualized functions, reduce total cost of ownership by 40-70%, and do it without a rip-and-replace cycle.

The timing matters, and Houghton is direct about why. AI workloads – distributed large language models, agentic workflows reaching across multiple clouds simultaneously – demand a level of network elasticity that legacy infrastructure simply wasn’t designed for. Alkira’s argument is that they’re the smooth road that makes AI-driven infrastructure actually work in practice.

For Canadian partners, Alkira has real resources on the ground: a solution architect based in Toronto, a dedicated channel account manager, and publicly referenceable Canadian customers including contact center provider ContactPoint 360. The Connect Partner Program, launched in March 2026, puts approximately 20 percent total margin on the table across base discount, rebates, MDF, and POC SPIFFs – with average initial deals around $500,000 USD and typical expansion of 4x in year one. Canadian partners interested in the conversation can reach the team at partners@alkira.com.

Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last sixteen years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca and your host for the show.

If you were around when SD-WAN was the big disruptive idea in networking – the promise of simplifying branch connectivity, cutting costs, getting smarter about traffic – you probably also remember it didn’t quite deliver everything it promised. Not because the technology was bad, but because the underlying network architecture couldn’t keep up. You still ended up with complexity. It just moved somewhere else.

That problem is essentially the founding insight behind Alkira. The company was built by Amir Khan and Atif Khan, the same team behind Viptela, the startup widely credited with creating the SD-WAN category before Cisco acquired it. What they learned in that experience is that SD-WAN, without a proper global backbone, just creates a different set of headaches. So they started fresh and built what they call NIaaS – Network Infrastructure as a Service – a cloud-native, consumption-based approach that abstracts the complexity of multi-cloud connectivity into something you could stand up, as my guest today puts it, with just a username and a password.

The timing is not accidental, because what AI demands from a network – elasticity, low latency, the ability to reach distributed workloads almost anywhere instantly – is exactly what legacy infrastructure wasn’t built to handle.

My guest is Doug Houghton, Director of Global Channels at Alkira. Doug has been in the channel a long time, knows the technology in a way that might genuinely surprise you coming from a channel chief, and has a lot to say about what it all means as a real business opportunity for Canadian VARs and MSPs.

Let’s get right into it, my chat with Doug Houghton.

Doug, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it.

Doug Houghton: It’s my pleasure. Thank you for having me on today, Robert.

Robert Dutt: So you were part of the team that built up the SD-WAN market at Viptela back in the day. What did you learn there that told you the next big thing was going to be NIaaS, and why now?

Doug Houghton: First off, that’s a great question. I felt a bit like a passenger in a car racing a thousand miles an hour when we were doing software-defined wide-area networking.

What we learned was that without organizing your cloud infrastructure properly, your cloud bill gets ridiculously large – especially if you keep your control element decoupled from your data plane in the cloud with all these workloads churning. But what we really learned, and what’s applicable to what we’re now doing at Alkira, is that SD-WAN truly did deliver on its core promise. It allows customers to influence traffic based on link quality and improve the user experience. If you’re on a phone call and it starts to get goofy, you can move over to a better-performing link in real time without dropping the call. That’s powerful. And the same with data traffic.

What I hadn’t fully thought through was what happens as global companies start to adopt SD-WAN and disaggregate across locations in Southeast Asia, China, Latin America, and everywhere else. The latency back to the control element isn’t easy to contend with. So you ended up with organizations making decisions that effectively created four separate, disparate networks for latency purposes. And that was not part of the original promise.

What we learned was that you need a global backbone that’s high throughput and low latency. The edge can still be SD-WAN – there are real things in SD-WAN that people still want, whether that’s WAN optimization, deduplication, caching, policy-based routing, forward error correction. All of that still has practical application, and site-to-site communications are still needed in many use cases.

But Alkira was built inside the cloud first, employing the same principle of decoupling control plane from data plane for scale. By abstracting the cloud infrastructure, we were able to remediate the latency that those four geographically dispersed networks created. We’re the global backbone – that middle mile with high throughput and low latency – and then you connect these clusters of SD-WAN networks together and all of a sudden the promise of SD-WAN gets a lot more consumable. You have a singular network managed from a singular control plane and element management orchestrator, and you can still get all the benefits of SD-WAN at the local sites.

Robert Dutt So in plain language, a Canadian MSP or VAR is used to selling network hardware or managing someone else’s infrastructure. How is selling, deploying, and managing NIaaS different from what they’re already doing, and what makes that distinction important?

Doug Houghton: Let’s take a half step back and talk about what NIaaS actually is. It’s Network Infrastructure as a Service. What Alkira does is abstract the cloud infrastructure and build a routed overlay on top of it. We think of it as a virtualized colocation facility that connects and normalizes communications across your entire network. For managed service providers and service providers, our solution accelerates bringing their customers to cloud applications, cloud workloads, storage, and everything else the cloud promises.

The way I explain it to my mom – and I’ve told this joke once already today because I’m sitting in a partner’s office right now – is this: if you went to Russia, Japan, Argentina, and San Francisco all in one day and had to transact in each place, and you could speak the native language in each one, that would be ideal. What we focused on was normalizing communications regardless of the cloud service provider, colocation provider, data centre – private or public – or whatever type of router is at the branch office.

As an MSP or service provider that comes in, what we give to our customers and partners is a username and a password. That lets you come in and – for your old-school folks in the audience – essentially etch-a-sketch your network together. You can turn a couple of knobs, and it’s not that we’ve cranked the amp up to eleven, we’ve just removed all the numbers and automated everything. It just knows what you want to do.

It’s a routed BGP overlay with the control plane abstracted from it, so the forwarding plane can route around things like the CrowdStrike outage, or losing an AWS region – which happens more frequently than AWS would like to admit – or any cloud service provider incident. The multi-cloud reality has accelerated adoption, but it presents a new problem: you’ve got an AWS expert on staff, but you don’t have an Azure, GCP, OCI, or Alibaba Cloud expert. Those are all different languages. When I tell my mom that we normalize the communications between all the assets in the network and make it easy to connect to all of them, she gets that.

For the MSP looking to monetize something new or add another revenue stream, we offer a couple of compelling things. In the middle of our stack, we place a solution inside the cloud – sitting in a VPC, VNet, VCN, or Google VPC – right in the middle of all the cloud, SaaS, and WAN workloads. We’ve pleased a lot of customers by lowering total cost of ownership through the consolidation of network services they already have in their environment, in the form of virtualized network functions.

Take a Palo Alto firewall deployment – say you have fifty Palos out there, all talking to Panorama, with a security engineer managing policy centrally. Instead of having fifty firewalls on the ground, you consolidate them. You go from the ground – five to ten milliseconds to the nearest public cloud PoP – hop onto the Alkira fabric, and terminate that traffic on a virtual port on our exchange point. In the middle of that exchange point, sitting in a VPC or VNet, you place a Palo Alto virtualized network function. You get the IP address of the Panorama server, and if you didn’t tell the security engineer anything had changed, they would not know. The form factor changes, but not how they interact with Panorama, how they build policy, or anything about how they secure the traffic. That remains exactly the same.

We virtualize the instance and place it on a global high-throughput, low-latency backbone inside our exchange point. We deploy exchange points in HA pairs, anywhere from 100 Mbps to 40 Gbps. The customer or service provider consumes one, and we maintain the other on their behalf – because every thirty days we’re fixing bugs and doing maintenance. We swing production workloads to the backup, do the work on the primary, then reverse the order, all while keeping these customers up and running. Because we’re delivering this as a service, it has to always be on.

One of the most important architectural decisions we made from the start was ensuring those two exchange points are always running active-active in a full mesh configuration, buttressed by hundreds of other exchange points globally distributed – all synchronized and aware of each other’s states.

Robert Dutt: You’ve said that legacy networks can’t handle what AI demands, specifically in terms of elasticity. Can you unpack that a little? When an MSP’s customer starts deploying language models or agentic workflows, what is it that actually breaks?

Doug Houghton: Good question, and I’ll give you an honest answer. I’ve started to fall in love with Claude – I think it’s one of the coolest things in the world. I can do all sorts of creative things with it. But Claude isn’t talking only to me. He’s a bit of a flirt – he goes to a lot of different places to get knowledgeable about various things and produce the outcomes I’ve asked for. And those other places are where you run into problems.

I used to say the three biggest AI providers are GCP, AWS, and Azure. That’s still largely true. But the likes of Anthropic and other AI labs are distributing LLM workloads everywhere. Without the right network underneath that, it’s like buying the hottest car and driving it down a pothole-filled road.

What we offer is a high-throughput, low-latency, elastic network. If you need to turn it up in a heartbeat, you can. We helped complete the S&P Global and IHS Markit merger network integration in about a tenth of the time they expected, because we’re natively segmented. Think about those two networks as large datasets that AI agents need to access. You have to secure the traffic, and you need it to be elastic – able to reach anywhere, instantly, to produce the outcome the agent was asked for.

The ability to go anywhere on a road that’s smooth as glass, in the hottest car possible – that’s what we offer. Our network infrastructure solution is an abstraction: a forwarding plane that goes everywhere, and your imagination is really the only limitation. Speed, elasticity, and securing access – even for agentic, self-directed workflows – it’s still a critical element.

And nobody – I said this earlier today, so I’ll say it again – networking is not really sexy until it doesn’t work. If I have to get in and route-peer and manually configure transit gateways, I’m going to punch myself in the face repeatedly. I just don’t want to do it. It slows everything down. I can automate it with Terraform, sure. But I want to consume it now. I want to prompt it now. I want the outcome now.

Robert Dutt: You’ve launched Alkira NIA, your AI co-pilot and network infrastructure assistant, along with an MCP server last year. It’s interesting – you’re essentially putting AI on top of the infrastructure that’s enabling AI. What does NIA actually do for an MSP’s day-to-day operations?

Doug Houghton: Maybe I have a limited imagination, but I still use it like a utility. NIA is great because it allows you to search through all our documentation in a more organized way. We have amazing documentation – there’s a lot of it – and when you’re looking for a specific configuration or something captured in a knowledge base, that tool is really useful.

But continuing the utility theme: how do I do something? If I want to create a micro-segment to distribute to a bunch of business units, or build an isolated Layer 3 routing table and get it to various business units, and then set up billing with specific billing tags for each segment – I know how to do that because I’ve done it many times. But a new user may not. You can use the NIA agent to search the documentation, search previous implementation notes, best practices, all of that.

That’s real value. But you can also ask it something like “why is the sun bright” and it won’t return the answer you expect. I’ve done that too.

Robert Dutt: Let’s talk about the Connect Partner Program and the economics. You’ve got the Partner Profit Stack – tiered margins, quarterly rebates, MDF, SPIFFs, the Connect Pipeline Fund. It’s a full toolkit, and it’s stuff partners have seen before. What’s the real math? What does a Canadian MSP at the Premier tier actually walk away with on a typical deal after they’ve done the work?

Doug Houghton: Usually about nineteen percentage points – maybe a little more. On the pre-sale side, when we get into a POC, our Premier partners can earn a $1,000 SPIFF. We close about 85% of our POCs, so there’s real value in that. Add in the rebates and MDF access, and the total haul is closer to 20% on each deal.

Worth mentioning: we’ve been a 100% channel company since May 2022. My partner David Klubinoff, my technical counterpart – we worked together at Viptela and we started the Alkira channel together. It took a couple of weeks to convince our CEO that going 100% channel was the right call. I think he’s a believer now. We’ve driven significant revenue for the company, and our partners are our thought leaders – out in the market talking about our solution and solving customer problems.

I was in Chicago yesterday doing a technical enablement session with thirty-plus SAs and SEs. We had the classic SD-WAN questions, and a lot of questions about segmentation and M&A. There’s enormous consolidation happening in insurance, healthcare, and other sectors, and the overlapping IP address problem that comes with mergers is something MSPs face all the time. We’ve entirely simplified that. You build a NAT policy right in the solution and the overlapping IP issue is resolved within an hour.

In the case of S&P Global and IHS Markit, they thought their merger network integration was going to take a couple of years. The issue was largely the overlapping IP addresses – IHS couldn’t talk to the HR applications at S&P, and vice versa, plus all the other interdependencies. You need a fast way to solve the overlapping IP problem before you can even get to the real work. That’s been a core design element of our solution from the very start: take care of the small things, and people can move faster and get to market faster.

Our biggest MSP – and this is a publicly referenceable customer – is CEDA, a French-based organization that provides managed network services to 95% of the world’s airlines. For them, it means being able to turn up a new customer faster, connecting on-premises assets to their control elements so they can begin actually managing that network. Speed, and the efficiencies and cost reductions that come from it – that’s what it does for all MSPs. If you’re consolidating fifty firewalls into virtualized functions, you’re making a good commission, getting MDF support, quarterly rebates, and a SPIFF when you engage us collaboratively on a POC. All of that happens at an accelerated rate.

I’ve been screaming from the mountaintop about our solution for about four years. Invariably, you’d walk into a room, say “Hi, I’m Doug Houghton from Alkira,” and they’d say “Who?” That’s starting to happen a lot less, which is a genuinely nice thing. Over the last twelve to twenty-four months, the business has grown exponentially, the diversity of our partner ecosystem has increased, and partner margins have been very healthy. The tiered structure was really about celebrating partners who have invested in us.

Honestly, I’m waiting for the day my boss tells me to stop incentivizing partners – because when that happens, I’ll know we’ve hit the apex. Our partners will be generating so much revenue that someone gets uncomfortable with what we’re paying out. I can’t wait for that day.

Some of the more interesting things in the program came from actually listening. I went around and talked to a bunch of partners about their ideal partner programs and built from there. And one of the realizations – I thought it was significant – was what we were actually doing on the post-sale side. We white-glove every implementation right now, because it’s critically important to us. We haven’t lost a customer, and we intend to keep it that way. But that doesn’t scale forever.

So the question became: why don’t we help our partners productize the post-sale work? We built a product catalog, a pricing calculator, and a new partner portal we’re about to release, with its own AI agent for searching market assets. The product catalog was a light bulb moment. We pay healthy margins on the pre-sale side at every tier of Alkira Connect. But we had never touched the post-sale side at all.

We’re largely automated and NIaaS is as simple as possible to consume – a username and a password. My thirteen-year-old could configure a network, and she’s really smart. But there’s still some implementation work. You still need to build policies in Panorama. There’s still DDI work. There are still services that partners can benefit from – and all partner types, MSPs, VARs, master agents, sub-agents, service providers, now have a post-sale commission opportunity.

Robert Dutt: You mentioned services – you’ve got services attach plays around modernization assessments, segmentation design, migration sprints. Starting from zero, how long does it realistically take a partner to get their first deal with those services attached through the door, and what does the ramp look like?

Doug Houghton: There’s a lot in that question. Let’s take a half step back. We have virtual sales and go-to-market training – three modules – and then five or six technical training modules. We’ve got a lab-in-a-box environment, foundational and advanced technical training, and DDI training. Partners typically start there. Then we run regular in-person and virtual sessions – one partner has regular office hours with me, my SE counterpart David, or our architect Christopher Arenas, and we just invite partners to come and ask questions. Getting partners genuinely comfortable with the technology is the most important thing we do, because nobody goes out and sells anything unless they’re confident they can explain how Alkira solves their customer’s problem. That’s what I’m doing in Chicago today.

Our customers tend to be fairly large. We’ve got our first Fortune 10 customer now. The more complex the network, the larger and more global the deployment – multiple countries, security vendors, firewalls, DDI providers, load balancers, service providers, colos. We sit right on top of all of that.

The average sales cycle is about 190 days – a little over six months. A newly enabled partner might encounter an M&A overlapping IP use case, recognize the problem, and say “I think we can solve this with Alkira.” They go through a POC together with us, the customer commits, and that first deal closes around 190 days. A little class week: it’s actually 190 and a half.

The average deal size is about $500,000 USD. We then see significant expansion: typically 4x growth in the first twelve months after the initial close, and around 8x in the second twelve months. Real incentive to stick with it. We’re loyal – if the customer doesn’t kick the partner out, we go to bat with that partner on every expansion deal. We land, then expand, with the same partner. BNSF, one of our other public references, has expanded several times to address more and more use cases. The solution gets sticky and customers are genuinely surprised by how easy it is.

On the post-sale side, we come in and help with implementation, especially early on. But we’re reaching the point where more capable partners can handle it themselves. We’re building a post-sale certification for Alkira right now. In the meantime, we ride shotgun through the first couple of implementations – virtually in Slack or in person – until partners are fully up to speed.

All partners have access to our Slack channel, along with our entire solutions architecture and SE staff. One partner working on a Fortune 10 engagement has a great habit of putting a subject header in Slack and starting a conversation. He’s been on services at this customer for three or four months – a significant engagement. He’s the one who originally described the network as a “spaghetti mess,” which I still chuckle about. I actually built the product catalog based on those Slack headers – pulled them together, socialized them with a group of partners, got input, and built from there.

To directly answer your question: you’ve got to get through that first deal, and we’re going to ride shotgun with you through the first couple of implementations. The partner learns, gets comfortable, can monetize it, and can deliver independently from there. We have no illusions about going back to being a direct company after May 2022. It’s ride or die – 100% channel, and we enable our partners to solve their customers’ problems and support them while they do it. Because our partners have been our biggest growth engine.

Robert Dutt: You’ve talked about a goal of doubling revenue through partners. What does the ecosystem look like when you get there? This sounds like it could primarily be a GSI or large integrator play, given the customer complexity you’re describing. Or do you genuinely see a path for mid-market MSPs and VARs to build a meaningful NIaaS practice?

Doug Houghton: Another tough question. Yes, I do have GSIs as partners. We have a fairly robust and diverse partner ecosystem, and we see small shops rising up while larger shops are moving a bit more slowly, honestly. We’re still in that brand awareness honeymoon period – people are realizing our technology is compelling, getting themselves enabled. Some large partners we’ve recently brought on are still ramping. The biggest and most established organizations aren’t yet as capable as they will be, but we’re working diligently on that.

Some of our smaller partners, on the other hand – I’m thinking of a friend of mine in Utah who is just an absolute champion. He knows our solution better than almost anyone. He closed six or seven deals in the past year, supported the implementations, did it largely on his own, because he’s curious, motivated, read all the documentation, and has been through full implementation cycles with us. He works at a ten-person shop. They just happen to have really good customers, and he knows the solution cold.

So we’re at different stages with different partners in terms of maturity. The answer to your question is genuinely both. The small shop in Utah and the large national partner dedicating more resources as they see more customer problems Alkira can solve – we see wins across both. In the networking space, a six-month sales cycle is about as fast as it gets. I’m giving you a username and a password and you’re going in and connecting all of a customer’s assets together. The path exists for partners of every size.

Robert Dutt: You’ve called out Canada specifically in your expansion plans, alongside the UK, EU, and the Middle East. What does that look like operationally – localized support, a Canadian channel team – or is it more of a global platform available to Canadian partners?

Doug Houghton: Let’s talk personnel. We have a dedicated rep in eastern Canada, based out of New Hampshire, and a brilliant solutions architect just outside of Toronto. We’ve got a channel account manager – very capable teammate of mine, Savannah Stone – and the entire global solutions architecture staff accessible via Slack.

We recently closed a very significant logo in Canada – a large insurance company – and our publicly referenceable Canadian customer is ContactPoint 360, a contact centre and BPO provider. They wanted to connect their Latin American operations back to Canada and couldn’t find an effective way to do it without us. We route them through the US West region, and the results have been excellent. We’ve also added CDW Canada as a partner, and I’ve got a value-added distributor that helps with field events.

It’s not a massive footprint yet – it’s a bit of “they come first, then we build” – but there is a tremendous amount of opportunity in Canada and in Latin America that I’m genuinely excited about. Nobody’s told me no yet on spending budget, so here we go.

A great story on the Canadian side: a gentleman named Chris Thelosinos, an architect and consultant who works with others in our space, is a member at a wine shop in Toronto. During the Toronto International Film Festival last year, we hosted a wine event right next to TIFF. I don’t drink alcohol, so it was entirely about the conversations for me – and I had the best time. We had significant customers come out, and the demand for simplicity, ease of implementation, and everything Alkira does well was just as strong in Canada as anywhere else. The market need is real.

We talk about global backbone as a service all the time. Connecting China to San Francisco carries a distance and time tax, but it’s easy to configure. For organizations navigating geopolitical complexity around China access, or needing GPU connectivity in and out, we just abstract the Azure and AWS mainland China instances. They operate the same way as their Canadian or US equivalents. And you can consume it pay-as-you-go – stop using it, stop paying for it. That’s a compelling model for MSPs looking to grow into different regions.

Robert Dutt: Last question then. For that Canadian MSP who’s listened to this and is thinking, “This sounds like a real opportunity” – what’s the one thing you’d want them to take away and act on?

Doug Houghton: I’d ask them to go to partners@alkira.com and send us a note. And I will ply them with all sorts of content – videos, learnings, deal registration information, everything they need to get started in the space.

Tongue in cheek, and also completely seriously: partners@alkira.com. If you’re looking to grow your business as a managed service provider – managed network, managed security, managed load balancing, managed DDI, managed connectivity – we’re a really great place to start. Because it’s never unpopular to walk into a customer and solve their problem quickly and say, “I can help you with X, Y, and Z, and I can do it in the next couple of hours – and that’s going to drive a total cost of ownership savings of 40 to 70%.” Nobody ever kicks you out of the office when you say something like that.

Robert Dutt: Amazing. Doug, I appreciate you taking the time. Thank you very much.

Doug Houghton: Robert, thank you for the engaging conversation. I hope your listeners get some good stuff out of it.

Robert Dutt: There you have it – Doug Houghton from Alkira.

I’d like to thank Doug for his time, and honestly for being one of the more entertaining guests I’ve had on in a while. “Networking is not sexy until it doesn’t work” is a line I’m going to be thinking about for a while.

Thanks to you for listening as well. If this conversation sparked something – whether it’s curiosity about NIaaS, the AI infrastructure angle, or what roughly 20% total margin on a $500,000 average deal could do for your business – Doug made it easy for you to take the next step. Drop a note to partners@alkira.com. That’s the front door. And from what I heard today, they will absolutely get back to you.

Here’s the thing that stuck with me most in this conversation: the argument that the AI moment isn’t just a software or services play. It’s going to force a reckoning with network infrastructure that a lot of organizations have been deferring for years. The partners who treat that reckoning as an opportunity rather than a fire drill are probably going to look very smart in about three years.

If you’re finding the In The Channel podcast from ChannelBuzz.ca useful, the best thing you can do is follow or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. We’re on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and most major directories. And if you’re enjoying the show, ratings and reviews are genuinely appreciated – they help other people in the Canadian channel find us.

Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.