Some numbers are big even for a company the size of Google.

Like 1 trillion, as in the 330 businesses Google says consumed over 1 trillion LLM tokens each over the past 12 months, or the 35 businesses that gobbled up 10 trillion or more over that span.

Or how about 16 billion, which is the average volume of tokens Google currently serves up per minute via direct API use, a figure that has soared by 60% in the last quarter alone.

And then there’s 750 million. Let’s put a pin in that one and return to it after discussing a much smaller figure, 32,000, which is the approximate number of attendees at last week’s Google Cloud Next conference in Las Vegas. Google doesn’t know for sure how many were SMBs, except that it was in the thousands and significantly larger than in years past.

“It’s just really nice to have so many small to medium businesses here at Next,” says Sharon Prosser (pictured), Google’s vice president of Google Cloud SMB sales and scaled acquisition.

It’s also no coincidence. According to Prosser, Google went out of its way to grow SMB attendance. “We built a 13-session track for SMBs so that they felt like they could have a tailored experience,” she says, and devoted far more time than usual to showcasing SMB growth opportunities and success stories.

“We’re trying to give them some of the limelight,” Prosser explains.

For a very good reason. Though it’s outgrowing them both at the moment, Google trails AWS and Microsoft by double digits in cloud infrastructure market share, according to the latest figures from Omdia. And while its Workspace apps have 3 billion users globally, just 11 million of them are paying customers. Microsoft, by contrast, reported over 450 million paid Microsoft 365 seats in its most recent quarterly financials, up 6% year over year thanks primarily to strong adoption of its SMB and frontline worker offerings.

That’s cloud, however, a rapidly growing yet relatively mature market. AI is comparatively in its infancy and agentic AI’s so young that even the forward-looking folks in venture capital only really climbed on board in a big way last year, as the chart at the bottom of this page makes clear.

“Three quarters ago, companies were talking about how to use GenAI to improve a process,” says Phil Larson, managing director of the Google Cloud Partner Network. “Now it’s increasingly, ‘how can I rethink my business and rebuild it in an agentic way so that these processes are running independently?’” They’re looking to IT providers for answers, he continues, “so the partners are thinking through how their business models need to change.”

All of which tells Google that businesses and their partners are very much up for grabs in AI right now, especially in agentic AI and especially at the smaller end of the spectrum.

“If you think about enterprise organizations, they’ve been at this for several years,” Prosser observes. SMBs are just getting started. Indeed, though 76% of small businesses are currently using AI, according to Goldman Sachs, just 14% have fully embedded it in core operations and 73% want greater access to training and implementation assistance.

“This is going to be the next big frontier for AI adoption,” says Prosser of SMBs, adding that for Google it already is. “We’ve seen this hockey stick adoption of Google Cloud AI tools that we’re trying to keep up with.”

I know many people (the leadership teams at Nerdio and at Syncro come immediately to mind) who will scoff at the thought, but Google thinks it has an extremely legitimate shot at turning that early momentum into enduring SMB leadership.

Hear them out. They have a case.

Comprehensive and open

It begins with the company’s deep, and deeply integrated, AI stack. “No other hyperscaler can bring the hardware all the way up to the AI tooling to the customer base, and this is across small businesses as well as enterprise,” Prosser says.

Brooks Borcherding agrees. “It’s the most comprehensive toolkit for us as a services partner,” says Borcherding (pictured), who was once CRO at Datto and is now CEO of Google partner Pythian. “They have everything from infrastructure all the way up to the chat agents itself.”

They also own the infrastructure part along with the custom processor and server architecture it runs on, and have adequate supply—now, when the AI opportunity is at its ripest—not to mention the free cash flow to build more. Anthropic, by contrast, is so compute constrained that it’s selling equity to Google in exchange for chips it badly needs and doesn’t make, while OpenAI needs obscenely large funding rounds to rent capacity from companies that haven’t yet built a lot of it. Neither company is even close to profitable.

Unlike Microsoft, meanwhile, which relies chiefly on models from OpenAI and Anthropic, Google also owns Gemini, one of the industry’s most advanced LLMs. That’s a potentially big advantage for reasons the folks at Kaseya have been talking about for years: native integration eats external API integration for lunch.

“Google owns from top to bottom and can make sure each of the layers is actually working well together,” says John Campbell, SVP of Google solution sales at services giant Insight.

That includes the productivity layer, Workspace, which has come with embedded Gemini for over a year and gained even more AI smarts last week. Insight clients are switching from alternative productivity suites (presumably including M365) to Workspace as a result, Campbell says. Businesses want to use Gemini without turning sensitive data into training fodder, he notes. “The easiest way to do that is typically to procure Workspace.”

Workspace is often the gateway drug to the rest of Google’s AI offerings, moreover. “From there, they’re going into tools within Gemini Enterprise,” says Prosser, citing Agent Designer, a no-code, drag-and-drop agent writing platform launched last year as an example.

“I can’t emphasize enough the day one value, the ease of use,” she says. “Those have to be first order principles when we’re building products and thinking about small to medium businesses,” including products like the newly introduced and far more expansive Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform.

Solutions like that are paying off, apparently, and not just with SMBs. According to Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian in a recent interview with Ben Thompson, Gemini Enterprise revenue has grown 40% sequentially quarter-over-quarter. Google is using Gemini behind the scenes to make its AI software more secure as well, he adds.

“We’ve introduced Gemini inside our threat intelligence tools,” Kurian tells Thompson. “It’s 98% accurate and has processed 3.9 million threats in the last year, so that’s an example of Gemini being used as an embedded capability.”

It’s also not the only advantage Google has over rivals in security, says Campbell, noting that along with an AI infrastructure and models Google owns Wiz, Mandiant, and Chronicle, or Google Security Operations as it’s been known since Google parent Alphabet converted the system from a stand-alone “moonshot” project to part of the Google Cloud security portfolio in 2019.

“Those are all leading in the space, and I think that allows them to have a really good understanding of what they need to do to basically make sure [AI] compliance, governance, security are all there and working properly,” Campbell says.

They’re exhibiting interest in letting other companies in on that understanding too, according to Ingram Micro CISO Forrest Smith. “I’m seeing hints and signals that they’re looking at security very broadly,” he says. “They’re looking at, can I do security across Gemini and Anthropic and GPT?”

Which gets to another Google strength, in its own eyes and that of its partners—an openness to peaceful co-existence with AI products from other companies.

“On any transformation of this magnitude, you have to come to customers where they are, not where you wish they might be,” Larson says. “There’s going to be a bunch of models that do very, very targeted things extraordinarily well, and we embrace customer choice in that.”

Borcherding likes that about Google’s AI stack. “It’s open,” he says, citing Google’s Model Garden as an illustration of that philosophy in action. “It doesn’t restrict us from still deploying what would be the best model in the best scenario.”

Sanjib Sahoo, president of Ingram Micro’s global platform group, appreciates Google’s willingness to play well with others too. “It’s cloud agnostic,” he says of the company’s AI platform, and even more so since last week’s release of a new cross-cloud Lakehouse that federates data from Google and non-Google sources in a single repository. Xvantage, Ingram’s AI-forward, next-gen platform, runs almost entirely on Google Cloud, Sahoo notes, but interfaces with a variety of other systems as well. Google’s openness makes that easier.

“They’re trying to play the connector, not just an individual cloud provider, which is, I think, really smart, because more and more you have to be cloud agnostic and you have to be solution agnostic,” Sahoo says.

Microsoft partners intrigued by Gemini Enterprise can take advantage of that agnosticism too, Prosser adds. “We’ve got connectors to the Microsoft tools,” she says. “We’re not saying that you have to rip and replace something that’s already in place. We’re giving you something to wrap around it and get even more value out of it.”

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Building the channel

As impressive as everything we’ve discussed to this point is, though, all it does is get Google into the agentic AI ball game. To win that game, the company needs partners too. And it knows it.

“Customers are embarking on their agentic transformation,” Larson (pictured) says. “We need to build an ecosystem of partners to go help them.” The all-new partner program Google began rolling out earlier this year is purpose built for that mission, he adds.

But perhaps not sufficient to get the job done entirely on its own, which brings us back around to 750 million. That’s the number of dollars Google says it’s put into a new fund designed to accelerate agentic AI channel development, an amount so big it dwarfs the mere $100 million Anthropic set aside for partners just last month and left Borcherding a little giddy.

“I was doing cartwheels in the hallway,” he says. “That helps us make the investments that we need to continue to grow and expand and take advantage of the momentum that’s happening right now in the market, so I was thrilled with it.”

According to Larson, some of the new money will go into training and enablement resources. Some will cover the cost of implanting forward deployed engineers of the kind OpenAI has assigned to Shield Technology Partners with global system integrators like Accenture, Cognizant, and Deloitte. And several hundred million of it will serve as “deal acceleration funds” to help partners of all kinds and sizes conduct co-sell activities like workshops, assessments, and pilots.

Prosser hopes the sheer scale of that commitment, if nothing else, inspires partners who haven’t thought seriously about working with Google in a while, including the giant mass of SMB partners long aligned with Microsoft, to give the company a second look. “I think they’d be pleasantly surprised,” she says.

Borcherding, who’s been a member of Google’s partner advisory board since last fall, certainly has been. “They’re leaning heavily in with partners,” he says. “It wasn’t always like that at Google.”

That said, Borcherding continues, the company still has some work to do, like ensuring that its field sales reps both appreciate the importance of partners and know which one to bring in on which opportunity. Google aspires to attach a partner to 100% of deals, according to Prosser, in no small part because deals involving partners are 5% larger than direct ones on average and close at a 1.5x rate. By her own admission, though, it has yet to turn that aspiration into reality. “We’re close” is about as specific as she’ll get for now.

It’s one of many things partners serious about AI and open-minded enough to consider forging new vendor relationships will be watching closely.

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Over on the Business of Tech

Host Dave Sobel is pondering the AI governance gap:

Here’s the mechanism: once GenAI touches real workflows, two properties dominate. It’s metered—cost scales with usage. And it’s probabilistic—outputs vary, and can be wrong. Put those inside a business process and you don’t have a software rollout problem. You have an operations problem.

Lots more thoughts on the topic available here.

A few more bits and pieces

1. Google feels the need for speed too. Remember this passage from last week’s post about how desperate partners are to capitalize on AI ASAP?

“I cannot tell you how often I’ve heard that,” says Pax8 chief strategy officer Ryan Walsh. “I want to go faster. If I have an insight, I want to go faster. If I have a good offering, I’ve got to go faster.”

Well, Larson is hearing it too, and factoring it into the ongoing launch process for the new partner program he leads.

“I’m used to having to take a measured approach towards rolling out partner programs because the ecosystem takes time to consume it,” he says. “Here, the partner’s message to me is very different. It’s go faster. There’s an inflection point here. We realize that this is the world’s greatest opportunity that we might see in our lifetimes, but also a threat if we don’t seize that opportunity and stay out in front of it.”

2. Google has no fear of agentic disintermediation. You may also remember my writing last week about N-able’s new MCP server and the decision it reveals inside the company to embrace an inevitable future in which agents bypass its interfaces to work directly with underlying data. Google has a similar attitude.

“There’s a strong recognition that the genie’s out of the bottle and it’s not going back,” Larson says.

Ingram Micro holds the same conviction. Its Xvantage platform has a new MCP server that some partners are testing right now.

“What we have to work out is the security components of MCP, where they’re working with us agent to agent,” Sahoo (pictured) says. Once that’s done though, he continues, MCP will play perfectly into Ingram’s long-term strategy for continuing to attract and retain partners despite competition from hyperscaler marketplaces.

“They’re not partnering with a distributor anymore. They’re partnering with a platform,” Sahoo says. “More and more, we are moving away from selling products to selling outcomes with intelligence. That’s what MCP will do for us.”

3. Google sees resellable agents as a partner opportunity. Regular readers have spent much of the last year following an active debate between companies like Pax8 heavily invested in the idea that selling ready-made agents is a partner opportunity and others like Ingram Micro that question whether ready-made agents are even a thing. Count Google as a member of Team It’s a Thing.

“There’s going to be agents of all kinds,” Larson predicts. “There’s going to be some agents that partners decide to use just internally. There’s going to be some agents that they feel like they can monetize with their customers.” Google will be more than happy to help sell those agents through its Agent Gallery, he continues, noting that there are roughly 2,000 agents in there now, and many more coming.

4. Data alone does not a moat make. Ingram CEO Paul Bay recently called the company’s 40 years of customer and partner data its competitive moat in the age of AI. Sahoo has a slightly more nuanced view of the matter.

Yes, he says, Ingram’s mass of data, which he spent much of his first year on the job with the company consolidating, is an incredible resource. But a data lake isn’t much use without a surrounding AI infrastructure.

“If you do not have your architecture abstraction right, it’s not going to work the same,” Sahoo says. “Our architecture is our secret sauce.”

But still not enough to sustain a moat on its own. People matter too.

“We’ve brought in a lot of engineering talent,” Sahoo says.

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The security downside of agentic AI

Agentic AI is a source of immense promise for partners—and equally immense risk. Agentic security exec Avihay Nathan of Palo Alto Networks explains the risk part as only someone with his insider’s knowledge of the topic can on the newest episode of MSP Chat, the podcast I co-host. More episodes here.

Also worth noting

• You’ve still got some time to influence where GTIA donates the $2 million it’s set aside to support non-profit technology workforce and community initiatives.

• Just in time for Next: CrowdStrike has extended its real-time cloud detection and response capabilities to Google Cloud environments.

• Acronis has launched GenAI Protection to help MSPs secure and govern the use of AI tools.

• Todyl has introduced an assurance marketplace full of solutions enabling security proof, compliance, and insurability.

• Zapier’s new AI governance features are designed to cover AI agents, MCP-connected AI assistants, no-code workflows, and every other surface where AI runs.

• Who wants to bet AI’s any better: 34% of security pros say they have significant cloud security skills, 53% say they have some, and 13% say they have none, according to ISC2.

• And not a moment too soon! Cisco has introduced a universal quantum networking switch to advance development of scalable quantum networks.

• And not a moment too soon! Juniper Research says 27% of businesses globally are deploying post-quantum cryptography solutions.

• And not a moment too soon! Portal26 has added AI agentic cost control capabilities designed to manage and optimize spending on AI-driven services.

• Speaking of quantum, Cowbell has launched a new U.S. cyberinsurance policy offering coverage of emerging AI and quantum-related risks.

• Zero Networks has launched AI segmentation technology designed to control AI agents, improve visibility, and prevent AI-driven lateral movement in enterprise environments.

• Kamiwaza has expanded public-sector access to its ARIA 508 accessibility AI agent in alliance with TD SYNNEX and Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

• Yikes: 53% of businesses are operating agents autonomously, according to research from the Cloud Security Alliance and Token. 59% say their monitoring of those agents is “largely periodic.”

• Want more anxiety fuel? ShareGate says 93% of organizations say they’re confident their Microsoft 365 governance framework can support AI responsibly. Yet 29% also say AI tools have already surfaced sensitive data they shouldn’t have accessed.

• Cato Networks says the new universal zero-trust network access addition to its enterprise browser eliminates the need for multiple browser-related tools.

• Ivanti has added new autonomous AI-driven capabilities for IT and security operations to its Neurons platform.

• Mega Mega-er: New Charter Technologies has acquired Florida-based MSP ICG.

Perhaps it’s time to rethink resilience.

OpenAI certainly thinks so. There are nine references to “resilience” and “resilient” in the company’s recently published thought piece on AI’s social, economic, and political implications, only one of which is (glancingly) about the kind of resilience we in IT know best, which is cyber resilience.

N-able thinks so too. Protecting systems and data is critical stuff, the company believes, but bring it up with a CEO and they’ll pass you along to their CIO, or whoever else they pay to worry about systems and data.

Business resilience, by contrast, goes straight to every CEO’s innermost anxiety: business continuity. As in, will I continue to have a business if it gets hit with something dangerous and unexpected. Same underlying technologies. Different, more compelling conversation, which is why encouraging partners to discuss business continuity in the existential sense was high on N-able’s agenda during its Empower conference in Fort Lauderdale last week.

“The goal really is to make sure that there’s a resilience layer around businesses so they’re not disrupted,” says John Pagliuca (pictured), the vendor’s president and CEO.

He was talking about the kind of disruption associated with downtime, of course, but I’d argue that in the AI era the kind of disruption associated with Clayton Christensen is at least as relevant to business continuity. SMBs appear to agree too. 62% of them, according to data from Pax8 last month, think AI has become a requirement for continuing to be competitive, and 67% expect to use AI more often in the next year as a result.

The problem, however, is that AI refuses to stand still. With new models, new tools, and new growth strategies, both real and illusory, popping up faster and faster, true business resilience these days is about more than being ready for cyberattacks. It’s about being ready for anything.

“There’s a workforce level of resilience that we need to be thoughtful of. There’s a financial level of resilience that we need to be thoughtful of. There’s a technological level of resilience,” Pagliuca observes.

And, if you’re an IT provider, a level of “unit economic resilience and margin resilience” as well, according to Will Dawson, mideast regional CEO of Lyra Technology Group, the managed services arm of mega mega MSP Evergreen.

“For me, the first step to resilience is owning your P&L and having that P&L discipline so you can react and then reinvest or shift as necessary,” he says. “You can’t be nimble, you can’t react in real time to macroeconomic market changes and market dynamics that are occurring, unless you actually have that very, very dialed in.”

Especially now, when the real time you’re trying to react to keeps accelerating. “The world is speeding up and it’s going to just get faster and faster in this agentic world,” Pagliuca observes.

MSPs are desperate to keep pace. “I cannot tell you how often I’ve heard that,” says Pax8 chief strategy officer Ryan Walsh. “I want to go faster. If I have an insight, I want to go faster. If I have a good offering, I’ve got to go faster.”

Which is why I’m starting to think that the strategic software asset MSPs most need might not be systems of action, per an earlier post, after all. Action is fine when you’re talking generative AI. It’s too slow when you’re talking agentic AI. To win under agentic conditions, you don’t need a system of action. You need a system of speed.

When humans are too slow

It’s a clumsy term that I just made up, so you’ll probably never encounter it again, but the underlying logic is clear enough. A system of action automates work. A system of speed accelerates automation by taking humans as far out of the loop as one dares.

The most obvious use case, per my RSA Conference writeup a few weeks ago, is security. Businesses used to have a good two weeks to detect and remediate a breach before data was exfiltrated, encrypted, or both, says Robert Johnston, the VP and general manager in charge of N-able’s Adlumin MDR/XDR unit.

“Now you might have 10 minutes, 20 minutes,” he notes. “We’re going to be outpaced by attackers if we’re not able to change the way we do defense.”

And overwhelmed, one might add, once frighteningly effective models of the kind Anthropic has teased us all with make finding and exploiting vulnerabilities much, much easier.

“There’s a tidal wave coming,” says Mike Adler (pictured), N-able’s chief technology and product officer.

Adlumin is N-able’s system of speed for coping with that tidal wave. Powered by the same AI that attackers are exploiting, the service handles 90% of incidents that “might have taken you hours, maybe the better part of a day” to tackle, according to Pagliuca, in more like 14-16 minutes instead.

Modern Threat Protection is ConnectWise’s equivalent. Introduced earlier this month, the combo managed EDR, SIEM, and email security solution employs seven role-specific agents to triage and analyze security events and then, if necessary, isolate affected endpoints, open a ticket, and attach a detailed incident report, all at a speed humans can’t match.

“People, especially in tier one, are too slow,” says Russ Humphries, the vendor’s EVP of product management for cybersecurity and data protection.

They also make too many mistakes, Humphries adds. Agents, by contrast, are reliable enough for ConnectWise to offer a 15-minute SLA and money-back guarantee on the managed EDR portion of Modern Threat Protection now, and an additional portion soon.

“All of that agentic goodness, all of that auto-ticket generation, all of that auto-triage, and the SLA promise will be coming to our SIEM offering by the end of this quarter,” Humphries says.

ConnectWise, as we saw earlier this year, is bringing system of speed functionality to ticketing as well. So too now is N-able. Among its several product announcements at Empower was the launch of N-zo, an AI-powered technical expert embedded in N-able’s unified endpoint management solutions.

“It’s really a series of experts,” Adler says. One, for example, specializes in scripting. Others focus on patching, asset management, backup, and the like. Right now, all of them provide real-time advice through a natural language chat window. Later this year, they’ll begin accelerating response times by handling tasks (with human approval) autonomously for users as well. Longer term, according to Pagliuca, forthcoming proactive AI technologies will cut response times to zero by reducing the need for response times in the first place.

“The real goal is not to respond to a ticket fast,” he says. “The real goal is to alleviate the majority of tickets from happening before they even need to happen.”

Partners like Frank DeGeorge, CTO of Lake Forest, Ill.-based Impact Networking, are willing to wait for advances like that, from N-able and others. But not forever. Vendors are making a lot of AI-related profitability promises right now, he notes. Sooner versus later, that ROI needs to start materializing in objectively measurable ways.

“So revenue per employee, profit per employee, number of endpoints per engineer, first call effectiveness,” DeGeorge says. “Those are the things that I’m going to look for in the next 12 months, because all this is BS if it doesn’t move that number. There has to be real operating leverage.”

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N-able and ConnectWise agree: SecOps alone does not a platform make

The need for speed isn’t the only thing N-able and ConnectWise agree on. They’re also big believers in the power of platform. As you’ve read here before, most MSPs these days like the sound of sourcing more products with tighter integration from fewer suppliers.

“MSPs prefer to consume full end-to-end solutions that provide them an outcome, and if they can get that from a single vendor, that’s a win,” Adler says.

The DRaaS solution N-able introduced during Empower illustrates why, he adds. MSPs need BDR solutions and post-disaster recovery environments. Getting both from the same vendor saves time and money.

“I can test a runbook from beginning to end, and I only have one vendor to worry about, and I know that it’s all integrated,” Adler says. “That’s just tremendous value.”

It’s also something most security platform purveyors don’t offer, making it part of a larger edge both N-able and ConnectWise claim over companies like Palo Alto, CrowdStrike, and Trend Micro. Those vendors do security operations, notes N-able CMO Vikram Ramesh. We do security operations, IT operations, and data protection operations in a single, natively-integrated package.

“Our competitors offer one piece of the story, or they may offer the second piece with a partnership, but they don’t have all three,” Ramesh says.

That N-able does saves its partners time during investigations and remediations, Johnston notes, and saves them money on service delivery.

“When you look at our customers, the same people doing IT operations are the same people doing security operations,” he says. Handling both functions in one place boosts technician productivity.

Humphries (pictured) agrees. Security vendors can promise the same result via “perceptual” platform connections with alliance partners, he observes, but can’t deliver the same results without the kind of deep integration made possible by real platforms like ConnectWise’s Asio.

“Perceptual platforms are quite often a set of modules that are glued together with plumbing,” he says. “A real platform has services and a microservice architecture and service buses.” MSPs, Humphries asserts, want the real thing.

From the department of corrections

Mea culpa. Remember when I said that N-able’s now a security vendor last November? I was wrong. Or rather, I was right, but only partially so.

Talking with N-able executives last week about the vendor’s unified SecOps/ITOps/DataOps platform made clear that while N-able is a security vendor, it’s also an endpoint management vendor and data protection vendor. That, in turn, means its competitors include not only Barracuda and Sophos, but ConnectWise, Kaseya, NinjaOne, and Veeam as well. That’s a lot of well-known, well-funded businesses to outflank, Ramesh concedes, but key to the company’s value proposition as well.

“We’re the only vendor focused on the SMB space that has the three pieces of the story,” he says.

Over on the Business of Tech

Host Dave Sobel spent time talking about Treeline, the venture-backed MSP I wrote about recently, with someone who looks a whole lot like me.

Because he was me. Or is me, rather. Listen to the whole conversation here.

Some vendors fear SaaSpocalyptic disintermediation. N-able doesn’t.

At least three companies I’m aware of made MCP-related news last week. One was N-able, which unveiled a new MCP server giving third-party AI solutions direct access to data in the company’s unified endpoint management systems. The other two are Salesforce and GreenCore Solutions Corp.

And who, you ask, is GreenCore Solutions Corp.? Why, none other than the maker of the TreeFree Diaper®, an environmentally responsible alternative to the likes of Pampers and Huggies that’s now also, thanks to GreenCore’s new MCP server, “the first AI-ready diaper SKU in the market.”

Laugh if you like, but I applaud their vision. Parents have done the diaper shopping for about as long as retailers have sold diapers, but in the not-too-distant future their agents will perform that function instead. Rather than fight that development and its troubling implications for brand awareness and customer relationships, GreenCore is embracing the inevitable.

So is N-able. Some CEOs undoubtedly fear becoming an invisible data lake for MSPs who use Claude or ChatGPT as their primary help desk tool. Pagliuca (like the folks at BDR vendor Slide) is entirely chill about it.

“Some folks in MSP-land and enterprise are going to choose to have a different interface experience, and so they might not be spending all of their time in the SaaS tools, which troubles a bunch of SaaS vendors,” he says. “It doesn’t bother me.”

Everyone else should get used to it too, Johnston adds. “The writing on the wall is customers expect to be able to chat and interact with their systems and command them to do things and consume information from them in a natural language format,” he says. “That’s just the bandwagon all the software vendors have to get on, because consumer expectations are going to go that way.”

And by consumer he very much means MSPs, and all of them, within perhaps five to seven years. No matter how intuitive their design, today’s RMM solutions take time to learn. “What MCP kind of allows you to do and AI allows you to do is erase that to zero. You just have to know what you want and somewhat what the system is capable of doing, and then you can just chat it in or voice it in and it’ll figure it out for you,” Johnston says. “You don’t have to learn the UI anymore.”

N-able doesn’t even mind the disintermediating prospect of ending up a contributing data provider to someone else’s newer system of action or more all-encompassing system of record.

“Different folks will bring different AI solutions to the market,” Adler says. “We can provide them pieces. We gain economic value. They gain economic value. It’s a win for both of us.”

And a source of competitive advantage over less forward-thinking peers, he adds. “We’re able to service different kinds of customers from the same avenue.”

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Two pod interviews for the price of one!

And that price is nothing. I spent the first part of last week, before my visit to N-able Empower, at the Channel Partners Conference & Expo, moderating panels, speaking (off the record) with Shield Technology Partners CEO Jim Siders for the first time, and recording two interviews for MSP Chat, the podcast I co-host. One was with Bobby DeMarzo, the impresario in charge of the Channel Partners show. The other was with Peter Kujawa, the EVP in charge of ConnectWise’s IT Nation and Service Leadership groups. Both are included in the latest episode, available here.

Also worth noting

• Speaking, as we have been, of cyber resilience, 87% of U.S. SMBs feel slightly to very confident that their business is cyber resilient, according to research from ESET. I’ll be getting into that with the company on an upcoming episode of MSP Chat.

• According to Kaseya’s 2026 State of the MSP Report, 48% of MSPs rank AI and automation as their top client needs for 2026, but just 13% are generating revenue from them. I’ll be getting into that on another upcoming episode of MSP Chat.

• Veeam’s latest research says that 90% of security leaders believe they can recover quickly but only 28% hit by ransomware could fully restore all affected data. I’ll get into this with the company a little under a month from now at its VeeamON event.

• New Charter Technologies is mega mega-er following its acquisition of GraVoc.

• Microsoft’s Windows 365 Business service will be 20% cheaper starting May 1^st.

• TD SYNNEX has added dedicated NVIDIA HGX B300-based clusters to its Nebius AI Cloud offering.

• TD SYNNEX is also partnering with Orca Security on AI-driven cloud security.

• D&H’s new Success Path to MSP Toolkit is designed to help resellers become MSPs or MSSPs.

• Salesforce has launched a Forward Deployed Engineer Partner Network and AgentExchange, a Pax8-esque marketplace for AI agents and related solutions.

• WatchGuard is integrating its cloud-based management interface with Halo’s rapidly up-and-coming PSA solution.

• Bitdefender has introduced GravityZone Extended Email Security to provide advanced email threat protection.

• Axonius has released AI-powered remediation capabilities across a wide range of asset types and environments.

• And not a moment too soon, either: Sectigo has added private post-quantum cryptography certificates to its Certificate Manager offering.

• KnowBe4’s new Agent Risk Manager aims to secure both human users and AI agents against security threats.

• Aura has launched a BYOD security offering for MSPs designed to protect employee-owned devices in business environments.

• Cork has introduced an automated data mapping feature to address the “dirty data problem” in MSP cybersecurity programs.

• Blancco and Cambrionix have launched an integrated solution for erasing and reimaging Apple devices at scale.

• 86% of businesses expect AI agents to outpace their organization’s security guardrails within the next year, according to Rubrik.

• Keep in mind that Anthropic’s Project Glasswing is scarcely two weeks old and that Synack probably hasn’t seen Mythos Preview yet before deciding whether or not to take Synack’s new Glasswing Readiness Assessment.

• Trustifi has introduced AI-powered security awareness training videos.

• Keeper Security has added new governance and visibility capabilities to its Endpoint Privilege Manager solution.

• According to HP, Poly Edge V Series desk phones all use NoiseBlockAI technology to deliver next-gen call clarity.

• 80% of IT professionals see their role shifting from operator to AI orchestrator, according to new research from SolarWinds.

• SolarWinds has also launched SW1, an agentic AI teammate designed to automate and enhance IT operations.

• Procure IT and NetWolves are partnering to deliver AI-driven intelligence and technology expense management.

• Tracy Thibodeau is the new VP of product, AI, at Monjur.

• AppDirect has acquired PartnerStack to equip its B2B subscription commerce platform with built-in PRM.

• The Alliance of Channel Women has announced winners of its 2025 IMPACT and Sponsor Awards recognizing contributions to the channel community and its 2025 LEAD, INSPIRE, and EMPOWER awards honoring influential women in the channel.

• Cloud Girls Rising’s Women to Watch awards program has recognized six emerging women leaders in technology.

• Tech4Change has announced the winners of its inaugural Heart of the Channel Awards.

At least three companies I’m aware of made MCP-related news last week. One was N-able, which unveiled a new MCP server giving third-party AI solutions direct access to data in the company’s unified endpoint management systems. The other two are Salesforce and GreenCore Solutions Corp.

And who, you ask, is GreenCore Solutions Corp.? Why, none other than the maker of the TreeFree Diaper®, an environmentally responsible alternative to the likes of Pampers and Huggies that’s now also, thanks to GreenCore’s new MCP server, “the first AI-ready diaper SKU in the market.”

Laugh if you like, but I applaud their vision. Parents have done the diaper shopping for about as long as retailers have sold diapers, but in the not-too-distant future their agents will perform that function instead. Rather than fight that development and its troubling implications for brand awareness and customer relationships, GreenCore is embracing the inevitable.

So is N-able. Some CEOs undoubtedly fear becoming an invisible data lake for MSPs who use Claude or ChatGPT as their primary help desk tool. N-able president and CEO John Pagliuca (like the folks at BDR vendor Slide) is entirely chill about it.

“Some folks in MSP-land and enterprise are going to choose to have a different interface experience, and so they might not be spending all of their time in the SaaS tools, which troubles a bunch of SaaS vendors,” he says. “It doesn’t bother me.”

Everyone else should get used to it too, Robert Johnston, the VP and GM in charge of N-able’s Adlumin business, adds. “The writing on the wall is customers expect to be able to chat and interact with their systems and command them to do things and consume information from them in a natural language format,” he says. “That’s just the bandwagon all the software vendors have to get on, because consumer expectations are going to go that way.”

And by consumer he very much means MSPs, and all of them, within perhaps five to seven years. No matter how intuitive their design, today’s RMM solutions take time to learn. “What MCP kind of allows you to do and AI allows you to do is erase that to zero. You just have to know what you want and somewhat what the system is capable of doing, and then you can just chat it in or voice it in and it’ll figure it out for you,” Johnston says. “You don’t have to learn the UI anymore.”

N-able doesn’t even mind the disintermediating prospect of ending up a contributing data provider to someone else’s newer system of action or more all-encompassing system of record.

“Different folks will bring different AI solutions to the market,” N-able chief technology and product officer Mike Adler says. “We can provide them pieces. We gain economic value. They gain economic value. It’s a win for both of us.”

And a source of competitive advantage over less forward-thinking peers, he adds. “We’re able to service different kinds of customers from the same avenue.”

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Two pod interviews for the price of one!

And that price is nothing. I spent the first part of last week, before my visit to N-able Empower, at the Channel Partners Conference & Expo, moderating panels, speaking (off the record) with Shield Technology Partners CEO Jim Siders for the first time, and recording two interviews for MSP Chat, the podcast I co-host. One was with Bobby DeMarzo, the impresario in charge of the Channel Partners show. The other was with Peter Kujawa, the EVP in charge of ConnectWise’s IT Nation and Service Leadership groups. Both are included in the latest episode, available here.

There’s a lot we don’t know about AI.

Like how much time we have before it drowns us with zero days, how much of what it says is correct (and how many of us even care), how much we can trust the results when it aces a safety test, and whether or not it’s making us dumber.

Most of us don’t know what we’re spending on it either.

I mean, we know it’s a lot and growing fast. AI spending of all kinds will climb 44% this year to $2.5 trillion, according to Gartner, while spending specifically on AI models will soar nearly 83% to $26.4 billion. The growth is even sharper for specific AI workloads, furthermore: Average per-organization consumption of tokens for reasoning in particular rose 320x last year at OpenAI, for example.

We also know that totals like that translate to smaller yet substantial equivalents at individual businesses, some 40% of which now spend $10 million or more a year on AI, according to cloud cost management vendor CloudZero. For perspective, that’s similar to the 47% of businesses that spend the same amount on cloud computing, and the gap’s closing fast.

Yet we really don’t know how to forecast AI outlays. AI spend projections were off by 50% or more, in fact, at 20% of the companies surveyed by CloudZero, which encapsulates the reason why nicely in a press release.

“Most companies use some combination of public cloud, private cloud, third-party GPU providers, and hosted LLM APIs. These providers have different billing frameworks, send bills at different intervals, and use different data formats, making it nearly impossible for companies to get a comprehensive overview of what they’re spending—much less what exactly they’re spending it on.”

Even businesses that get all their AI from one source, moreover, often struggle to anticipate future needs. “The volatility of AI workloads—from bursty training cycles to unpredictable inferencing spikes—means that static budgeting and quarterly forecasts can’t keep up,” writes Jevin Jensen, a research vice president for infrastructure and operations at IDC, in an excellent blog post about AI FinOps. “Every new experiment, every dataset added, every prompt creates a ripple in compute, storage, and energy consumption—often in exponential amounts.”

Is it any wonder that spending businesses can’t accurately forecast and struggle merely to track tends to be less than efficient? According to IDC, 41% of organizations are wasting more than 15% of their AI budget currently.

“If you’re talking about projects that are half a million dollars, a million dollars, and if you’re a big company, multimillion dollar projects, 15% is not a small amount of money you’re wasting,” Jensen (pictured) observes.

And that’s before the global population of agents autonomously and often invisibly consuming tokens rises from 28.8 million last year, according to IDC, to a staggering 2.3 billion in 2030.

“You’re talking about having two or three agents per employee,” Jensen says. “All of a sudden you’ve got more agents than you have servers.”

Issues like this are a problem, needless to say, for end users (“I’ve run the numbers, boss, and our projected AI spend for the rest of the year is somewhere between our current run rate and infinity”). They’re even thornier ones for MSPs selling AI solutions and services with unpredictable costs to customers who want entirely predictable rates, not to mention vendors serving MSPs with similar demands.

“A big question becomes - how can you price your product such that you don’t torpedo your business into perpetual negative gross margin,” writes Jamin Ball of Altimeter Capital in a recent blog post.

Or merely declining gross margin. OpenAI itself saw margins drop from 40% to 33% last year, according to The Information, thanks to a 4x increase in inferencing expenses.

Imperfect answers

Jensen has seen this movie before. Cloud costs were devilishly hard to govern even before the Covid pandemic led businesses to put everything on-prem online instead.

“Then they got the bills one month, two months, three months later, and their CFO had a heart attack,” Jensen says.

Cloud FinOps solutions proliferated as a result. IDC, in fact, tracks 135 such systems at present, and while not all of them have AI FinOps features, those that do help businesses set spending guardrails, catch anomalies early, and design systems with cost in mind. Theoretically, they can also spare CFOs at companies with tokenmaxxing developers a fresh round of heart attacks too.

“FinOps tools cannot eliminate variability, but they can make it manageable,” says Rem Baumann (pictured), head of product at AI FinOps vendor Vantage.

Same goes with pricing. “FinOps tools break down cost per API call, per workflow, or per tenant,” Baumann says. “That allows providers to align pricing with actual cost and protect margins as usage scales.”

Unfortunately for managed service providers, Vantage makes one of just a handful of AI FinOps solutions with multi-tenancy. MSPs that don’t want or can’t afford any of them can potentially create something similar on their own, however, using the same AI that created their cost management headaches in the first place, according to Evan Rice, president and COO of managed services software maker Rev.io. Indeed, that’s exactly what he and his team have done.

“Our agents internally, including my own personal one every week, does an ROI dashboard for me that shows, ‘here’s the workflows I did. Here’s the token utilization around those workflows,’” says Rice on the latest episode of the podcast I co-host. Pull in some sales and accounting information too and you’ve got a pretty good sense for whether what you’re spending on AI adds up in light of what you’re making and saving with it.

“That’s how we framed it to our agents. You’re an employee, you’re a valued member of the team. Your salary and compensation are your token consumption. Calculate your costs and justify your continuing to do these things and show the value that you’re delivering,” Rice says. “They’ve done a pretty good job with it so far.”

I’m sure they have. Digital workers may be a lot less predictable than human ones, but they’re every bit as eager to avoid unemployment.

Follow Me on LinkedIn

Speaking of Evan Rice…

You can hear him speak yourself, intelligently and at length, about how MSPs can own the agentic layer at SMBs on the latest episode of MSP Chat. Available right here, right now.

Ready or not (and you’re probably not), quantum computing’s nearing

So, as we’ve just established, there’s a lot we don’t know about AI. Same’s true of quantum computing, where experts like David Mooter, a principal analyst at Forrester, didn’t even know with 100% certainty that it would ever come off the drawing board in a meaningful way as recently as a couple years ago.

“The error rates were just way too high. The qubit counts were just too low,” he says.

And now?

“Now I feel like it will be a reality. I’m very confident in that,” Mooter (pictured) says. “When is definitely more of an up-in-the-air question.”

And also an extremely important one, certainly for venture capital firms, which tripled their investments in quantum startups last year to $5.8 billion, and almost certainly for the rest of us too. Before I discuss why, I should make clear that quantum computers are not supercomputers that can just solve everything, because…well:

“One thing I have seen that drives me nuts is journalists who don’t know what they’re talking about will describe quantum computers as supercomputers that can just solve everything,” Mooter says. “The way I like to describe it is that quantum computers are not supercomputers. They’re different computers. They solve problems in a different way.”

That different way, without getting deep into the (quantum) mechanics of the matter, lends itself especially well to combinatorial challenges like the traveling salesman problem in which there are huge volumes of possible solutions, way more for a human to sort through ever and more than even powerful classical computers can handle quickly. Mooter points to modeling molecular interactions for drug discovery as one example and optimizing investment portfolios as another. Optimizing supply chains, energy grids, and chemical manufacturing processes are among others frequently cited.

Good news for anyone who likes the sound of improving all those areas and more: Your wait continues to get shorter and shorter. In fact, quantum computing made such strides last year as “vendors moved beyond theoretical fault‑tolerant architectures into early engineering reality,” per a recent Forrester report, that practical commercial applications of the technology could begin arriving as soon as 2030, a good five years earlier than the analyst considered likely just 15 months ago.

Developments like that have inspired pretty much all my past writing about quantum. Generative AI was supposed to be years away when it upended our entire industry late in 2022. I’m hoping we can avoid repeating that scenario this time, but also increasingly thinking we’re going to have to move a lot faster to do so.

To take one of a steadily arriving series of examples, research published days ago by Caltech and quantum startup Oratomic outlined a new approach to quantum error reduction that could cut the minimum number of qubits required to make a useful quantum computer from millions to as few as 10,000.

Consider as well the progress being made in hybrid quantum computing, which divides processing chores across classical and quantum machines. P&G used the technique last year in an experiment aimed at optimizing a manufacturing process with 10^{^114} possible arrangements of components and ingredients, more than the number of atoms in the universe.

Acting on its own, a regular computer needed six hours to come up with an answer. SAS’s quantum AI platform needed two minutes, but produced unreliable results. Working together, however, the conventional and quantum computers produced an accurate, actionable result in 12 minutes, or about 96.7% less than what the classical machine needed solo.

Time for partners to start thinking up quantum and hybrid quantum solutions then? Maybe not.

“Don’t view quantum as the next layer that will replace CPUs and GPUs,” said Omdia analyst Jay McBain in a conversation at the Canalys Forum late last year. “It won’t, and it’s going to be interesting for very few partners, maybe in the thousands total.”

But it will be very interesting, or more accurately terrifying, for every partner in the industry with respect to security, and sooner perhaps than any of us would like. Remember that 10,000 qubit breakthrough at Caltech? Well, these guys claim they’ve found a hybrid way to break RSA encryption with just 5,000.

Could be hot air, of course, but gets to the reason we probably need to be thinking harder about quantum computing than most of us are even so. The same Forrester report that said commercial uses of quantum computing could start arriving by the end of the decade said that “Q-Day,” when quantum machines break current public-key cryptography, could arrive then too. Google is getting nervous about timelines on quantum security as well.

And we’re not ready. Governments, financial institutions, utilities, and infrastructure providers are working toward adoption of post-quantum cryptography schemes capable of keeping data safe past Q-Day, says Sandy Carielli, a VP and principal analyst at Forrester. “Firms in other industries are still learning and coming up to speed and are not as far along.”

Meaning they’re late. “I’ve been telling my clients that they have to start now, because full migration will likely take them past that 2030 date,” says Carielli, who also recommends inventorying data and prioritizing it by importance and longevity, along with forming a cross-functional Q-Day team, as good steps toward partial readiness.

And partial readiness is a whole lot better than no readiness. The other similarity between AI and quantum computing, in addition to there being a lot we don’t know about both, is that both are progressing very quickly and appear likely to progress even faster in the near future. At present, only a relative handful of people have access to quantum computers, but that was once true of classical computers as well. Then universities and research institutions started deploying them, sparking a “Cambrian explosion of algorithms,” Mooter notes.

“That took decades,” he continues. “We’ll see the same thing with quantum computers, but it won’t be decades because we’re building on the foundation of classical computer science and we have a lot more funding rolling in than computers did back in the 1950s.”

So years more likely, and I suspect they’ll feel like short ones. Brace yourself now.

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Over on the Business of Tech

Host Dave Sobel discusses Treeline, the a16z-backed, AI-native MSP I wrote about last week, with the author of that piece. As in me. I’ll be appearing on the show live this coming Wednesday here.

OpenText Cybersecurity takes a stab at closing the AI alignment problem

In a recent post, I shared data from GTIA indicating a modest but still worrying erosion of member satisfaction with vendor partner programs, as well as GTIA analyst Carolyn April’s hypothesis that misalignment between what partners want from channel programs in the age of AI and what those programs provide is probably to blame.

Mike DePalma, VP of business development at OpenText Cybersecurity and a member of GTIA’s channel executive council, saw that data too, and wasn’t surprised by it.

“That’s one of the biggest conversations that we’re all as vendors trying to figure out,” he says. “We’re all seeing a drop in satisfaction, and we know that we need to change, and it’s hard.”

Like April, he suspects that meeting partners where they are in relation to vendors versus where they once were has a lot to do with the issue. “The MSPs are different than they were 15 years ago,” DePalma (pictured) says. “Partner programs have stayed the same.”

The alliance agreement OpenText announced with Hatz AI last week is DePalma’s first stab at a remedy. It’s also the first example I can think of since I attended that GTIA conference of a channel chief offering a new benefit to partners specifically in response to changing needs due to AI.

And to be clear, this is all about partner sat. There’s no back end integration happening here. The deal is a referral program pure and simple, and a one-way referral program at that, with leads flowing solely from OpenText to Hatz.

“There’s nothing coming back our way,” DePalma says. “We’re looking at it as what can we add to our partner program that they’re asking for that moves the needle.”

Introductions to Hatz was not a guess. OpenText asked partners what would move the needle in focus groups and got two answers. One was more enablement resources. The other was connections with other vendors. “They’re asking for vendors to work together, to form stronger alliances, whether they’re competitors or not,” DePalma says. The Hatz AI agreement satisfies both asks.

“We want people that are partners to feel that OpenText really cares about us. They don’t just care about what they’re spending with us, they care about helping us grow,” DePalma says.

DePalma and his colleagues at OpenText are exploring lots of ways to send that message at present as they race toward readying an all-new partner program for an official launch on July 1. What they come up with will be of intense interest to OpenText partners. It will also be of some interest to channel watchers like me and channel chiefs at other vendors curious to see what a blank slate partner program for the age of AI looks like.

Also worth noting

• Three things not to miss at next week’s Channel Partners Conference & Expo in Las Vegas: This session I’m moderating, this other session I’m moderating, and the Alliance of Channel Women’s opening day networking event.

• Modern Threat Protection, ConnectWise’s new security platform, combines managed EDR, SIEM services, and email security. More on this coming next week.

• Titan has Silicon Valley AI engineers. Shield has Silicon Valley AI engineers. Treeline has Silicon Valley AI engineers. Looks like Kaseya wants a few too.

• Gradient MSP has released a major upgrade to MSP Studio, its content marketing platform, aimed at solving the industry’s reliance on generic, “canned” content.

• Nerdio and Nutanix have forged an alliance to bring Microsoft-based virtual desktops to hybrid cloud environments.

• The new Acronis MDR by Acronis TRU offers 24/7/365 managed detection and response services tailored for MSPs.

• WatchGuard has unveiled a new endpoint pricing model aimed at giving MSPs a competitive edge through simplified and cost-effective licensing.

• Cynomi has introduced a Go-to-Market Academy designed to help MSPs grow cybersecurity revenue through structured enablement and training.

• Also from Cynomi: new CISO Intelligence AI agents designed to help MSPs scale cybersecurity services and business growth.

• NWN, which discussed AI governance with us recently, has launched a new cybersecurity offering designed to help organizations manage risk and improve security posture.

• Speaking of AI governance, 51% of MSPs say data governance and compliance challenges are the main obstacle to AI adoption, according to AvePoint and Omdia.

• 30.3% of incidents tracked by Blackpoint Cyber in 2025 involved malicious use of legitimate RMM tools, according to a new study by the company.

• Keeper Security has expanded its privileged access management and browser isolation capabilities to support advanced secure browsing workflows.

• Dashlane’s new integration with KnowBe4 aims to convert employee security awareness training into real-time, proactive defense against credential-based threats.

• Norton has added AI agent protection to Norton 360.

• PRM vendor Channelscaler has launched Scailyn, an AI-powered channel agent designed to accelerate partner engagement and innovation.

• Wasabi Technologies says it will acquire Seagate Lyve Cloud to expand its cloud storage business.

• Cisco says it will acquire Galileo to enhance its observability and AI agent monitoring capabilities.

• Channel Leaders, a peer group for channel sales professionals, is now a full-blown community for channel sales professionals called the Channel Sales Association.

• Alex Hesterberg is the new CEO at Devicie, who you read about here earlier.

• Lindsey Westbrook is the new VP of marketing at Coro.

• Alysia Vetter is the new director of PR and communications at GTIA.

• Sharon Florentine is now manager and research analyst at GTIA.

In a recent post, I shared data from GTIA indicating a modest but still worrying erosion of member satisfaction with vendor partner programs, as well as GTIA analyst Carolyn April’s hypothesis that misalignment between what partners want from channel programs in the age of AI and what those programs provide is probably to blame.

Mike DePalma, VP of business development at OpenText Cybersecurity and a member of GTIA’s channel executive council, saw that data too, and wasn’t surprised by it.

“That’s one of the biggest conversations that we’re all as vendors trying to figure out,” he says. “We’re all seeing a drop in satisfaction, and we know that we need to change, and it’s hard.”

Like April, he suspects that meeting partners where they are in relation to vendors versus where they once were has a lot to do with the issue. “The MSPs are different than they were 15 years ago,” DePalma (pictured) says. “Partner programs have stayed the same.”

The alliance agreement OpenText announced with Hatz AI last week is DePalma’s first stab at a remedy. It’s also the first example I can think of since I attended that GTIA conference of a channel chief offering a new benefit to partners specifically in response to changing needs due to AI.

And to be clear, this is all about partner sat. There’s no back end integration happening here. The deal is a referral program pure and simple, and a one-way referral program at that, with leads flowing solely from OpenText to Hatz.

“There’s nothing coming back our way,” DePalma says. “We’re looking at it as what can we add to our partner program that they’re asking for that moves the needle.”

Introductions to Hatz was not a guess. OpenText asked partners what would move the needle in focus groups and got two answers. One was more enablement resources. The other was connections with other vendors. “They’re asking for vendors to work together, to form stronger alliances, whether they’re competitors or not,” DePalma says. The Hatz AI agreement satisfies both asks.

“We want people that are partners to feel that OpenText really cares about us. They don’t just care about what they’re spending with us, they care about helping us grow,” DePalma says.

DePalma and his colleagues at OpenText are exploring lots of ways to send that message at present as they race toward readying an all-new partner program for an official launch on July 1. What they come up with will be of intense interest to OpenText partners. It will also be of some interest to channel watchers like me and channel chiefs at other vendors curious to see what a blank slate partner program for the age of AI looks like.

Share

As we recently established in a separate post, there’s a lot we don’t know about AI. Same’s true of quantum computing, where experts like David Mooter, a principal analyst at Forrester, didn’t even know with 100% certainty that it would ever come off the drawing board in a meaningful way as recently as a couple years ago.

“The error rates were just way too high. The qubit counts were just too low,” he says.

And now?

“Now I feel like it will be a reality. I’m very confident in that,” Mooter (pictured) says. “When is definitely more of an up-in-the-air question.”

And also an extremely important one, certainly for venture capital firms, which tripled their investments in quantum startups last year to $5.8 billion, and almost certainly for the rest of us too. Before I discuss why, I should make clear that quantum computers are not supercomputers that can just solve everything, because…well:

“One thing I have seen that drives me nuts is journalists who don’t know what they’re talking about will describe quantum computers as supercomputers that can just solve everything,” Mooter says. “The way I like to describe it is that quantum computers are not supercomputers. They’re different computers. They solve problems in a different way.”

That different way, without getting deep into the (quantum) mechanics of the matter, lends itself especially well to combinatorial challenges like the traveling salesman problem in which there are huge volumes of possible solutions, way more for a human to sort through ever and more than even powerful classical computers can handle quickly. Mooter points to modeling molecular interactions for drug discovery as one example and optimizing investment portfolios as another. Optimizing supply chains, energy grids, and chemical manufacturing processes are among others frequently cited.

Good news for anyone who likes the sound of improving all those areas and more: Your wait continues to get shorter and shorter. In fact, quantum computing made such strides last year as “vendors moved beyond theoretical fault‑tolerant architectures into early engineering reality,” per a recent Forrester report, that practical commercial applications of the technology could begin arriving as soon as 2030, a good five years earlier than the analyst considered likely just 15 months ago.

Developments like that have inspired pretty much all my past writing about quantum. Generative AI was supposed to be years away when it upended our entire industry late in 2022. I’m hoping we can avoid repeating that scenario this time, but also increasingly thinking we’re going to have to move a lot faster to do so.

To take one of a steadily arriving series of examples, research published days ago by Caltech and quantum startup Oratomic outlined a new approach to quantum error reduction that could cut the minimum number of qubits required to make a useful quantum computer from millions to as few as 10,000.

Consider as well the progress being made in hybrid quantum computing, which divides processing chores across classical and quantum machines. P&G used the technique last year in an experiment aimed at optimizing a manufacturing process with 10^{^114} possible arrangements of components and ingredients, more than the number of atoms in the universe.

Acting on its own, a regular computer needed six hours to come up with an answer. SAS’s quantum AI platform needed two minutes, but produced unreliable results. Working together, however, the conventional and quantum computers produced an accurate, actionable result in 12 minutes, or about 96.7% less than what the classical machine needed solo.

Time for partners to start thinking up quantum and hybrid quantum solutions then? Maybe not.

“Don’t view quantum as the next layer that will replace CPUs and GPUs,” said Omdia analyst Jay McBain in a conversation at the Canalys Forum late last year. “It won’t, and it’s going to be interesting for very few partners, maybe in the thousands total.”

But it will be very interesting, or more accurately terrifying, for every partner in the industry with respect to security, and sooner perhaps than any of us would like. Remember that 10,000 qubit breakthrough at Caltech? Well, these guys claim they’ve found a hybrid way to break RSA encryption with just 5,000.

Could be hot air, of course, but gets to the reason we probably need to be thinking harder about quantum computing than most of us are even so. The same Forrester report that said commercial uses of quantum computing could start arriving by the end of the decade said that “Q-Day,” when quantum machines break current public-key cryptography, could arrive then too. Google is getting nervous about timelines on quantum security as well.

And we’re not ready. Governments, financial institutions, utilities, and infrastructure providers are working toward adoption of post-quantum cryptography schemes capable of keeping data safe past Q-Day, says Sandy Carielli, a VP and principal analyst at Forrester. “Firms in other industries are still learning and coming up to speed and are not as far along.”

Meaning they’re late. “I’ve been telling my clients that they have to start now, because full migration will likely take them past that 2030 date,” says Carielli, who also recommends inventorying data and prioritizing it by importance and longevity, along with forming a cross-functional Q-Day team, as good steps toward partial readiness.

And partial readiness is a whole lot better than no readiness. The other similarity between AI and quantum computing, in addition to there being a lot we don’t know about both, is that both are progressing very quickly and appear likely to progress even faster in the near future. At present, only a relative handful of people have access to quantum computers, but that was once true of classical computers as well. Then universities and research institutions started deploying them, sparking a “Cambrian explosion of algorithms,” Mooter notes.

“That took decades,” he continues. “We’ll see the same thing with quantum computers, but it won’t be decades because we’re building on the foundation of classical computer science and we have a lot more funding rolling in than computers did back in the 1950s.”

So years more likely, and I suspect they’ll feel like short ones. Brace yourself now.

Share

Over on the Business of Tech

Host Dave Sobel discusses Treeline, the a16z-backed, AI-native MSP I wrote about last week, with the author of that piece. As in me. I’ll be appearing on the show live this coming Wednesday here.

Also worth noting

• Three things not to miss at next week’s Channel Partners Conference & Expo in Las Vegas: This session I’m moderating, this other session I’m moderating, and the Alliance of Channel Women’s opening day networking event.

• Modern Threat Protection, ConnectWise’s new security platform, combines managed EDR, SIEM services, and email security. More on this coming next week.

• Titan has Silicon Valley AI engineers. Shield has Silicon Valley AI engineers. Treeline has Silicon Valley AI engineers. Looks like Kaseya wants a few too.

• Gradient MSP has released a major upgrade to MSP Studio, its content marketing platform, aimed at solving the industry’s reliance on generic, “canned” content.

• Nerdio and Nutanix have forged an alliance to bring Microsoft-based virtual desktops to hybrid cloud environments.

• The new Acronis MDR by Acronis TRU offers 24/7/365 managed detection and response services tailored for MSPs.

• WatchGuard has unveiled a new endpoint pricing model aimed at giving MSPs a competitive edge through simplified and cost-effective licensing.

• Cynomi has introduced a Go-to-Market Academy designed to help MSPs grow cybersecurity revenue through structured enablement and training.

• Also from Cynomi: new CISO Intelligence AI agents designed to help MSPs scale cybersecurity services and business growth.

• NWN, which discussed AI governance with us recently, has launched a new cybersecurity offering designed to help organizations manage risk and improve security posture.

• Speaking of AI governance, 51% of MSPs say data governance and compliance challenges are the main obstacle to AI adoption, according to AvePoint and Omdia.

• 30.3% of incidents tracked by Blackpoint Cyber in 2025 involved malicious use of legitimate RMM tools, according to a new study by the company.

• Keeper Security has expanded its privileged access management and browser isolation capabilities to support advanced secure browsing workflows.

• Dashlane’s new integration with KnowBe4 aims to convert employee security awareness training into real-time, proactive defense against credential-based threats.

• Norton has added AI agent protection to Norton 360.

• PRM vendor Channelscaler has launched Scailyn, an AI-powered channel agent designed to accelerate partner engagement and innovation.

• Wasabi Technologies says it will acquire Seagate Lyve Cloud to expand its cloud storage business.

• Cisco says it will acquire Galileo to enhance its observability and AI agent monitoring capabilities.

• Channel Leaders, a peer group for channel sales professionals, is now a full-blown community for channel sales professionals called the Channel Sales Association.

• Alex Hesterberg is the new CEO at Devicie, who you read about here earlier.

• Lindsey Westbrook is the new VP of marketing at Coro.

• Alysia Vetter is the new director of PR and communications at GTIA.

• Sharon Florentine is now manager and research analyst at GTIA.

Early last month, a blog post by Sequoia Capital partner Julien Bek made the online rounds among people (like yours truly) interested in AI, software, services, and private capital. It began with a provocative assertion: “The next $1T company will be a software company masquerading as a services firm.”

That got my attention in no small part because some of my most widely read posts last year were about what are, IMO, software companies masquerading as managed services firms, specifically Titan and Shield Technology Partners. Both are budding MSP rollups backed by $74 million from venture capital giant General Catalyst in Titan’s case and by $200 million from venture giant Thrive and ZBS Partners (plus direct technical assistance from none other than OpenAI) in Shield’s case.

Both those companies use custom-developed AI tools to do work for their customers. The $1 trillion behemoth Bek anticipates will do the same, and eliminate fears of becoming Claude’s next SaaSpocalypse victim in the process.

“If you sell the tool, you’re in a race against the model. But if you sell the work, every improvement in the model makes your service faster, cheaper, and harder to compete with,” Bek writes.

There’s a whole lot more money to be made selling work versus tools too. “A company might spend $10K a year for QuickBooks and $120K on an accountant to close the books,” Bek says. “The next legendary company will just close the books.”

Those words resonated with Peter Doyle, co-founder and CEO of a new player on the managed services landscape named Treeline. During his nine-plus years at venture capital firm Accel, Doyle (pictured) says, he discovered a “dirty secret” about enterprise SaaS companies: they all have implementation, support, and customization arms.

“They’re just kind of, in another form, a software and service hybrid company,” he says. “We’re no different.”

Except that Treeline is different, from Titan, Shield, most MSPs, any SaaS vendor I know of, and pretty much everyone else in IT. In fact, Treeline is so different from anything else I’ve written about before that the best way I can think of to get at what they are is to list all the things they’re not.

1. They’re not actually new. Though the company went public with its story last week, it’s been inconspicuously doing business for two years and currently has around 200 clients, mostly with 30 to a few hundred users each.

“We’ve been operating nicely and scaling nicely for some time,” Doyle says. “We just felt like operating quietly and figuring out the right messaging to the market and the right long-term roadmap was a nice precursor before beating the drum.”

2. They’re not new to managed services either. Doyle, to be sure, is relatively new to the field, which he first encountered during his time in VC.

“I just kept finding the general problem space really interesting within the MSP category,” he says. “Not just is there another tool they can buy with a credit card swipe that can improve what service providers do and how they operate on a daily basis, but is there actually fundamentally a new model that we can create that is, in our definition, the modern or next generation iteration of this market?”

To bring that vision to life, Doyle acquired three MSPs with direct industry experience and, more recently, brought Jeff Gaines on board as chief growth officer. Gaines is a former MSP who until this January was SVP of growth at Lyra Technology Group, the managed services arm of mega mega MSP Evergreen. He kind of knows his way around the market.

3. They’re not masquerading as a services company. They are a services company, albeit one leaning into software as far “as is appropriate,” Doyle says. “We don’t want to go far enough to where we’re disintermediating the customer and user fully from white glove support, and technicians in the loop, and that human component.”

4. They’re not backed by private equity. Like Titan and Shield, they’re funded by venture capital, $25 million of it to be precise, provided chiefly by the grandaddy of all VC firms, Andreessen Horowitz.

That’s interesting for at least three reasons. For one, it’s the first time Andreessen Horowitz has invested this directly in managed services. For another, Treeline is more a services provider than a software company and Andreessen Horowitz’s motto remains “software is eating the world.” And for a third, it suggests that a16z has finally caught onto to the tip I offered it over two years ago.

5. They’re not using off-the-shelf AI. Like Titan and Shield, Treeline uses cutting-edge software written in-house from scratch by a team of Silicon Valley engineers (seven of them as of a few weeks ago). At present, the company says, its home-grown AI platform is augmenting or fully resolving 98% of customer-submitted help desk requests, onboarding employees in two minutes versus the previous 20, and slashing error rates for tickets it closes autonomously by 95%.

6. They’re not competing on price. Treeline leverages the operational efficiencies made possible by its AI stack to offer customers “very competitive pricing” that will get even more competitive over time, according to Doyle, “because when we scale with them, it’s not us having to add so much headcount to do it.” That’s not the message it leads with in sales meetings, though.

“You’re just going to qualitatively experience better service. You don’t need to wait as long in queues,” Doyle says. That value proposition, he adds, justifies rates that while cheaper than those of many peers won’t be cheap per se. The platform Treeline continues to build is powerful, Doyle observes, “but it doesn’t come without significant engineering investment.”

7. They’re not employing AI solely to automate the service desk. Unlike Titan and Shield, for the moment at least, Treeline offers its clients AI-powered MDR and compliance services too. The compliance piece, it’s worth noting, doesn’t run entirely on AI software the company wrote itself.

“It’s messy,” says Doyle of compliance, “so we will partner with folks like Vanta and Drata for some areas that we just don’t want to build.”

8. They’re not only using AI internally. Sure, Treeline employs AI to automate its service desk, but according to Doyle that’s table stakes.

“Had we made that pitch to Andreessen and a lot of our investors, they probably wouldn’t have invested,” he says.

The reason they did invest is because Treeline plans to supplement help desk revenue with strategic, sticky, margin-rich AI roadmapping, implementation, training, and development services.

“We don’t just want to stop at technician improvements,” Doyle says. “We want to use that as a way to further build a relationship with a customer and offer them much more value over time in all these other areas.”

9. They’re not an MSP rollup. Titan and Shield are both actively recruiting as many high-quality MSPs as they can find. Treeline, as I mentioned, has bought three MSPs to date and will buy more in the future, but solely to supplement its staff.

“We will continue to opportunistically merge with and bring on additional service providers over time,” Doyle says. “Not a huge number, but where it complements our skillset and complements the types of businesses and markets we’re going after, that’s great.”

Which means that “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” isn’t as much an option here as it is with Titan and Shield. Treeline is much more interested in competing with the vast majority of MSPs reading this article than it is in purchasing them.

Can AI governance tools close the AI governance gap?

Broadly speaking, when an MSP has a business problem, tooling is more likely to be the excuse than the culprit. It’s not my poorly designed workflows, my spotty documentation, my loosely trained techs, or what have you. It’s my damn tool stack.

As I said, though, that’s usually the case, not always. Sometimes tools really are part of the problem. Maybe AI governance is one of those cases.

You’ll recall that I wrote in dismay recently about the yawning gap between how badly businesses need AI governance services and want to get them from MSPs on the one hand and the relative scarcity of MSPs eager to provide those services on the other, and then podcasted in dismay about the same topic a few days later live from the RSA Conference in San Francisco. The biggest explanations I pointed to for that state of affairs were that a) many MSPs don’t yet grasp AI’s governance dangers, and b) those same MSPs are too busy trying to think through AI basics to get into AI governance.

But tooling, in fairness, is a barrier too.

There are plenty of data loss prevention tools on the market, notes Leeron Walter, vice president of marketing at DLP and insider risk management vendor Teramind, but almost all of them were written well before users within and across companies began exchanging data with chatbots and agents.

“There are gaps in visibility, and it might be much easier for an employee with non-malicious intent to accidentally leak information and data,” Walter notes.

Legacy governance solutions, meanwhile, typically detect policy violations after someone has broken the rules. By that time, notes Harry Labana, SVP and general manager of Proofpoint’s Digital Communications Governance business unit, data leaked by chatbot users and agents has probably become LLM training fodder.

“AI is turning software into an active participant in business communication,” Labana (pictured) says. “What that implies is that governance can’t happen only after the fact. It needs to happen upfront as well.”

Proofpoint’s recently released Nuclei Discovery & Archive Suite is designed to do precisely that, Labana says. Based on technology the vendor acquired last May, the system uses AI agents to spot potential instances of misconduct, insider risk, and AI misuse in real time and notify downstream security solutions capable of blocking it. The goal, according to Labana, is to let businesses capitalize on all of AI’s productivity-boosting power, but responsibly and without asking end users to flawlessly apply policies they don’t fully understand.

“We’re not here trying to stop AI,” he says, “but it’s got to be done in a way that protects you.”

That’s Teramind’s goal as well, Walter says. “Companies owe it to their customers to protect their credit cards,” she says, and multiple regulations require them to meet that obligation. Teramind AI Governance, released on the same day as Proofpoint’s Nuclei solution as it happens, is designed to help them do so by applying the company’s insider risk management expertise to a new use case.

Teramind, however, is an enterprise-oriented company. MSPs need easy, automated, multi-tenant solutions optimized for use by IT providers with limited time, money, and security expertise. That’s where tooling starts becoming a legitimate excuse for MSPs ignoring AI governance, because there aren’t many systems like that. CultureAI has one, as does Kipling Secure (disclosure: Kipling is a client of the consultancy I serve as chief analyst). Cyflow offers a third.

“We’re monitoring everything that’s going on in the company,” says Amit Israel, Cyflow’s co-founder and CRO. “The main thing is that we can block it, meaning we’re not only monitoring,” he adds. “We can block that while in action and we can report that while in action.” Otherwise, Israel continues, an MSP with a few dozen clients could spend their entire day responding to AI security alerts. “It will be a nightmare.”

Though not, arguably, as big a nightmare as the one MSPs will suffer if they continue ignoring AI governance. End users know they’re seeing the tip of a much larger iceberg when it comes to LLM data leakage, Walter says. “They have no idea how quickly things can escalate, and everyone is kind of scrambling to figure out what companies can do to ensure they have those guardrails.”

MSPs really need to have an answer for them.

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Over on The Business of Tech

Host Dave Sobel concurs about AI governance:

There’s a lot of interesting context for that statement, all waiting for you here.

What does a security system of record look like? Maybe like Torq.

Regular readers know that I’ve been thinking about systems of action, systems of record, and their implications for the MSP market this year.

For the benefit of less regular readers: systems of record are big, centralized business applications that employ deep compilations of authoritative data to help users accelerate critical workflows. Systems of action, on the other hand, actually execute those workflows for you. Thread, Pia, and recent ConnectWise acquisition zofiQ all make systems of action for MSPs. Cyft and Lexful make systems of record for MSPs with system of action functionality.

All of those companies, however, play at or near the service desk. What do their equivalents in security look like?

That’s an easy enough question to answer so far as systems of action go. They look like the agentic, autonomous AI SOC and MDR solutions from companies like N-able and Arctic Wolf that I wrote about last week. I would have had more trouble describing a system of record for security, though, until a recent conversation with Torq.

Strictly speaking, Torq too is an AI SOC vendor. Founded six years ago and valued at $1.2 billion as of January, the company’s core platform uses agentic triage, automation, case management, and remediation functionality to close 90% of Tier 1 tickets autonomously. It also, however, has over 300 integrations that allow it to automate actions in and ingest incident feeds from security solutions made by companies like SentinelOne, Palo Alto Networks, and CrowdStrike.

Which is interesting, because it’s all about platforms these days, especially in cyber, and SentinelOne, Palo Alto Networks, and CrowdStrike are all platform makers.

“The differentiation for Torq in our space is that we are truly a one-stop shop single pane of glass,” says Sheldon Muir (pictured), the vendor’s head of global channels and alliances. “As awesome as CrowdStrike is, or a lot of this technology is, it’s only as good as its purview. It’s only as good as the CrowdStrike ecosystem. What do you do outside of the CrowdStrike ecosystem? Torq facilitates that.”

Making it a kind of … what? Uber platform? Hyper platform? Platform of platforms?

How about security system of record? What’s intriguing about Cyft and Lexful is that they’re each using current and forthcoming integrations to build a powerful, exceptionally strategic superset of data housed in PSA systems, email, Teams, Slack, HubSpot, and the rest of an MSP’s tool stack. Torq’s doing the same thing in its realm, and positioning itself to be a kind of master system of action too. Say CrowdStrike finds a compromised email attachment, for example.

“No doubt CrowdStrike could tombstone that file, clean that file, but now maybe we could reach out to Proofpoint too and quarantine that host,” Muir says. “We could reach out to the Office 365 environment, the Google Drive environment, tombstone, trigger remediation, and so on.”

Though roughly a third of Torq’s customers are MSSPs and MDR operators, the company mostly serves large businesses. Maybe readers will point me to someone, but I don’t think there’s anyone focused on MSPs offering quite the same security system of record/system of action capabilities.

I’m just sure there will be.

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Based on this podcast interview, we really need that system

The sooner a security system of record/action for MSPs arrives, the better, based on a conversation with Michael Crean of SonicWall on the latest episode of the MSP Chat podcast. New research we get into documents just how often MSPs and their clients fail to enforce the most basic of cybersecurity basics. The brutal truth is all right here.

Also worth noting

• Get yours in now, folks: GTIA is accepting nominations for this year’s Cecilia Galvin Scholarship, which will award $5,000 to a female senior high school student with a 2.0 or higher GPA who’s a leader in their school and community and has demonstrated an early interest in technology.

• Kaseya has added multiple AI-powered tools to its BCDR portfolio.

• N-able has enrolled Zensec and Atomatik in its Technology Alliance Program.

• Coro has launched an MCP integration. I’m guessing theirs is secure.

• Bitdefender now offers a free internal attack surface assessment offering through its GravityZone PHASR solution to help organizations identify exposure to insider threats.

• Exabeam has extended insider threat behavior detection to tools like ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot.

• The new white-label capabilities in IDrive’s e2 object storage platform are designed to let MSPs and resellers deliver custom-branded cloud storage services.

• DaaS IQ, from ControlUp, is designed to optimize costs and simplify operations in desktop-as-a-service environments.

• Close this gap, MSPs: According to Object First, 89% of IT leaders fear AI-powered cyberattacks will impact their data yet only 58% use immutable backup storage.

• Cato Networks says the modular adoption model it just added to its AI-native SASE platform enables users to adopt functionality incrementally as their needs evolve.

• Big week for IGEL, which released joint cloud desktop reference architectures with Microsoft, announced a new distribution deal with Exclusive Networks, and made a big, long list of product announcements.

• Pia has joined the Pax8 marketplace.

• The Channel Marketing Association has awarded its 2026 Founders Award for contributions to channel marketing to Diane Brode.

Broadly speaking, when an MSP has a business problem, tooling is more likely to be the excuse than the culprit. It’s not my poorly designed workflows, my spotty documentation, my loosely trained techs, or what have you. It’s my damn tool stack.

As I said, though, that’s usually the case, not always. Sometimes tools really are part of the problem. Maybe AI governance is one of those cases.

You’ll recall that I wrote in dismay recently about the yawning gap between how badly businesses need AI governance services and want to get them from MSPs on the one hand and the relative scarcity of MSPs eager to provide those services on the other, and then podcasted in dismay about the same topic a few days later live from the RSA Conference in San Francisco. The biggest explanations I pointed to for that state of affairs were that a) many MSPs don’t yet grasp AI’s governance dangers, and b) those same MSPs are too busy trying to think through AI basics to get into AI governance.

But tooling, in fairness, is a barrier too.

There are plenty of data loss prevention tools on the market, notes Leeron Walter, vice president of marketing at DLP and insider risk management vendor Teramind, but almost all of them were written well before users within and across companies began exchanging data with chatbots and agents.

“There are gaps in visibility, and it might be much easier for an employee with non-malicious intent to accidentally leak information and data,” Walter notes.

Legacy governance solutions, meanwhile, typically detect policy violations after someone has broken the rules. By that time, notes Harry Labana, SVP and general manager of Proofpoint’s Digital Communications Governance business unit, data leaked by chatbot users and agents has probably become LLM training fodder.

“AI is turning software into an active participant in business communication,” Labana (pictured) says. “What that implies is that governance can’t happen only after the fact. It needs to happen upfront as well.”

Proofpoint’s recently released Nuclei Discovery & Archive Suite is designed to do precisely that, Labana says. Based on technology the vendor acquired last May, the system uses AI agents to spot potential instances of misconduct, insider risk, and AI misuse in real time and notify downstream security solutions capable of blocking it. The goal, according to Labana, is to let businesses capitalize on all of AI’s productivity-boosting power, but responsibly and without asking end users to flawlessly apply policies they don’t fully understand.

“We’re not here trying to stop AI,” he says, “but it’s got to be done in a way that protects you.”

That’s Teramind’s goal as well, Walter says. “Companies owe it to their customers to protect their credit cards,” she says, and multiple regulations require them to meet that obligation. Teramind AI Governance, released on the same day as Proofpoint’s Nuclei solution as it happens, is designed to help them do so by applying the company’s insider risk management expertise to a new use case.

Teramind, however, is an enterprise-oriented company. MSPs need easy, automated, multi-tenant solutions optimized for use by IT providers with limited time, money, and security expertise. That’s where tooling starts becoming a legitimate excuse for MSPs ignoring AI governance, because there aren’t many systems like that. CultureAI has one, as does Kipling Secure (disclosure: Kipling is a client of the consultancy I serve as chief analyst). Cyflow offers a third.

“We’re monitoring everything that’s going on in the company,” says Amit Israel, Cyflow’s co-founder and CRO. “The main thing is that we can block it, meaning we’re not only monitoring,” he adds. “We can block that while in action and we can report that while in action.” Otherwise, Israel continues, an MSP with a few dozen clients could spend their entire day responding to AI security alerts. “It will be a nightmare.”

Though not, arguably, as big a nightmare as the one MSPs will suffer if they continue ignoring AI governance. End users know they’re seeing the tip of a much larger iceberg when it comes to LLM data leakage, Walter says. “They have no idea how quickly things can escalate, and everyone is kind of scrambling to figure out what companies can do to ensure they have those guardrails.”

MSPs really need to have an answer for them.

Follow Me on LinkedIn

Over on The Business of Tech

Host Dave Sobel concurs about AI governance:

There’s a lot of interesting context for that statement, all waiting for you here.

Regular readers know that I’ve been thinking about systems of action, systems of record, and their implications for the MSP market this year.

For the benefit of less regular readers: systems of record are big, centralized business applications that employ deep compilations of authoritative data to help users accelerate critical workflows. Systems of action, on the other hand, actually execute those workflows for you. Thread, Pia, and recent ConnectWise acquisition zofiQ all make systems of action for MSPs. Cyft and Lexful make systems of record for MSPs with system of action functionality.

All of those companies, however, play at or near the service desk. What do their equivalents in security look like?

That’s an easy enough question to answer so far as systems of action go. They look like the agentic, autonomous AI SOC and MDR solutions from companies like N-able and Arctic Wolf that I wrote about last week. I would have had more trouble describing a system of record for security, though, until a recent conversation with Torq.

Strictly speaking, Torq too is an AI SOC vendor. Founded six years ago and valued at $1.2 billion as of January, the company’s core platform uses agentic triage, automation, case management, and remediation functionality to close 90% of Tier 1 tickets autonomously. It also, however, has over 300 integrations that allow it to automate actions in and ingest incident feeds from security solutions made by companies like SentinelOne, Palo Alto Networks, and CrowdStrike.

Which is interesting, because it’s all about platforms these days, especially in cyber, and SentinelOne, Palo Alto Networks, and CrowdStrike are all platform makers.

“The differentiation for Torq in our space is that we are truly a one-stop shop single pane of glass,” says Sheldon Muir (pictured), the vendor’s head of global channels and alliances. “As awesome as CrowdStrike is, or a lot of this technology is, it’s only as good as its purview. It’s only as good as the CrowdStrike ecosystem. What do you do outside of the CrowdStrike ecosystem? Torq facilitates that.”

Making it a kind of … what? Uber platform? Hyper platform? Platform of platforms?

How about security system of record? What’s intriguing about Cyft and Lexful is that they’re each using current and forthcoming integrations to build a powerful, exceptionally strategic superset of data housed in PSA systems, email, Teams, Slack, HubSpot, and the rest of an MSP’s tool stack. Torq’s doing the same thing in its realm, and positioning itself to be a kind of master system of action too. Say CrowdStrike finds a compromised email attachment, for example.

“No doubt CrowdStrike could tombstone that file, clean that file, but now maybe we could reach out to Proofpoint too and quarantine that host,” Muir says. “We could reach out to the Office 365 environment, the Google Drive environment, tombstone, trigger remediation, and so on.”

Though roughly a third of Torq’s customers are MSSPs and MDR operators, the company mostly serves large businesses. Maybe readers will point me to someone, but I don’t think there’s anyone focused on MSPs offering quite the same security system of record/system of action capabilities.

I’m just sure there will be.

Share

Based on this podcast interview, we really need that system

The sooner a security system of record/action for MSPs arrives, the better, based on a conversation with Michael Crean of SonicWall on the latest episode of the MSP Chat podcast. New research we get into documents just how often MSPs and their clients fail to enforce the most basic of cybersecurity basics. The brutal truth is all right here.

A few weeks ago, the consultancy I’m part of made a decision about a minor, nagging business issue we’d been debating. And then promptly forgot what it was.

During a team meeting last Monday I agreed to dig through email and figure out what we’d agreed to. It was the kind of small, time-sucking chore that puts a ten-minute dent in your day, and can destroy a week if you accumulate enough of them.

This chore, however, ended up being dentless, because I decided to use it as a test case for Claude Cowork’s newly acquired ability to manipulate desktop apps in addition to web services. I told it what I needed to know and where it was likely to find the answer, then let it search through Outlook, find the appropriate thread, read it, and summarize what it discovered. Which it did, to perfection, in a few minutes while I worked on something else.

It was kind of magical, and a mere hint at what Claude will apparently soon be capable of doing (aside from crash markets).

On the other hand, it could also have ended very differently. The task I’d assigned Claude didn’t require it to write or send an email on my behalf, but given that AI agents have been known to do things even when explicitly told not to, it was at least possible that my simple prompt could have resulted in the distribution of the company’s latest financials to everyone in my address book.

Or something worse. The trick with agentic AI security risks is that they shapeshift—and expand—too fast for most of us to keep pace with.

Which is why it’s kind of perfect that I conducted my Claude Cowork experiment at an airport lounge on my way to San Francisco for this year’s RSA Conference in San Francisco, where pretty much every exhibitor on the show floor would be promising answers to problems ranging from agentic browser hijacking to agentic insider threats to so many other real and potential agentic dangers that Microsoft needs 28 pages to catalog them all.

And that’s what researchers are worried about now. It’s a sure bet there will be something new worth worrying about next week. People ask what the threat landscape’s going to look like in six months, muses Coro CEO Joe Sykora (pictured). Six months?

“This stuff is going so fast that I don’t know if anyone can really comprehend what it’s going to be in three months,” he says.

Which is new and difficult terrain for security vendors. How do you secure end users against dangers posed by autonomous, rapidly advancing technologies that move in ways so mysterious even the people who created them can’t explain how they work?

The answer, my conversations at RSAC suggest, entails pairing the newest, most sophisticated defenses with their very oldest counterparts.

Fighting speed with speed

Arctic Wolf’s SOC collects a little over 1.5 trillion security observations a day. According to Dan Schiappa, the company’s technology and services president, that’s about the equivalent of everything the app formerly known as Twitter processed in its first decade of existence. Finding and then mitigating threats in all that noise is hard work.

“I used to always say it was like an arms race in the past, but now it’s like a nuclear arms race,” Schiappa says.

So what will it be two years from now when there will be 1.3 billion agents exchanging traffic across the internet, according to IDC, or two years after that when IDC expects the number of agents in use at businesses to have risen 10x over 2025 levels? Keep in mind before answering that threat actors will be using agents themselves to create sophisticated new zero days, at scale and cost-effectively.

“It becomes almost a volume game for these attacks to come down market” into SMBs, observes Tuan Nguyen, vice president of channels and alliances at Huntress.

And a speed game as well, adds Michal Jankech, global VP of enterprise, SMB, and MSP at ESET. “Agentic AI can create new variants of malware much faster than an actual attacker,” he says. “It’s like a multiplier effect.”

Which means SOC vendors have to move faster in response. “We must attack speed with speed is just the reality of where we’re at now,” says Will Ledesma, director of global MDR cybersecurity operations at N-able.

Superhuman speed, one might add, which is why N-able is one of many vendors I spoke with at RSAC fighting AI threat fire with AI SOC fire.

Or AI MDR fire in N-able’s case. According to Ledesma, a senior analyst at the company’s Adlumin XDR/MDR unit recently uncovered 10 indicators of attack in a mountain of client telemetry after a major incident in an impressive 60 minutes. AI needed just three seconds to detect the same 10 IOAs—plus three more the human analyst missed entirely.

Not everyone, it’s worth noting, is fixated on time to detection. Rohit Ghai (pictured), who became CEO of Barracuda last September, thinks MSPs serving SMBs need simplicity more than speed, and is building the company’s MDR platform accordingly.

“We’re going to prioritize easy over fast,” he says. “It’s a contrarian view.”

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An ounce of prevention

For all the talk about high-speed SOCs at RSAC, though, even their biggest proponents recognize the dangers of betting everything on detection and response. LLMs are masters of unpredictability, after all, so the surest way to keep their “agents of chaos” from wreaking havoc is to neutralize them before they have a chance to surprise you.

Hence Gartner’s prediction that “preemptive cybersecurity technologies” will account for over half of security spending overall by 2030, up from less than 5% in 2024. For the first time since EDR made anti-virus unhip, it seems, good old fashioned prevention is where it’s at.

“Which is cool,” Jankech says. “We’ve been saying that for years.”

Indeed, ESET has long identified itself as a “prevention-first” vendor. The latest manifestation of that philosophy, unveiled at RSAC, is the addition of a runtime cloud workload security solution to the company’s PROTECT Platform. Products from other vendors announced at the conference similarly seek to deny detection and response solutions anything to detect or respond to.

“The best incident response is no incident response,” says Dan Candee, CEO of Cork Cyber, whose new Automated Asset Analysis tool vaults the company past merely identifying gaps, misconfigurations, and inconsistencies across dozens of security solutions to remediating them, at the press of a button now and automatically in the near future.

“We’re closing and locking the windows and doors before the threat actors are able to get to the house and find the windows and doors,” Candee explains.

Huntress, a vendor best known for right-of-boom offerings in the past, introduced left-of-boom posture management solutions for endpoints and identities shortly before RSAC with the same goal in mind.

“That’s really kind of where we see the opportunity,” Nguyen says. “It isn’t just about how do we respond once we see an attack, but how do you actually help prevent an attack?”

Veeam’s latest solution, meanwhile, unifies left- and right-of-boom functionality specifically for agentic AI in a single package. Called Agent Commander and announced last month, the system combines automated detection and rollback of agent-initiated mistakes with policy enforcement and permissions control features designed to prevent mistakes from happening in the first place. Mitigating the human propensity for error has long been one of the biggest reasons to use data protection tools, observes Brad Linch, Veeam’s director of enterprise strategy.

“You even more need to be concerned, in my opinion, with the increased accidental mistakes that take place with these AI agents when these projects get deployed and they’re given more rights than they should be,” he says.

The human touch

N-able’s SOC was investigating and remediating 90% of incidents automatically as of last year, and the company expects that number to go as high as 99% by the end of 2026. Coro, for its part, is processing about 94% of SOC tickets automatically at present, and that figure too is rising. But only to a point, according to Sykora.

“We will never get to 100%,” he says.

Every SOC operator I spoke with at RSAC agrees. No matter how good AI gets at addressing agentic threats, it will never completely eliminate the need for HI, as in human intelligence.

“AI is only trained on what it’s seen, what’s already happened,” Jankech says, which means it’s likely to be stumped by something totally new. “You need to have skilled humans who can actually empathize with the attacker and think like the attacker.”

Schiappa, of Arctic Wolf, sees a collaborative future ahead for humans and AI in security too. The state-of-the-art agentic SOC his company introduced last week relies heavily on a “swarm of experts,” hundreds of function-specific agents chattering away with each other under the supervision of an AI-powered security orchestrator that is itself continually monitored and assessed for efficacy by an AI judge.

And who judges the AI judge?

“We also have human judges,” Schiappa says. “AI is not always right.” Nor are humans, however.

“That AI judge also judges the output of the humans,” Schiappa notes. “With the AI and the human together, we’re getting accuracy higher than humans alone and higher than the AI alone.”

Just as Claude and I are now getting more done together than either of us could apart. What’s true in the SOC is true on my laptop too, it seems.

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Over on The Business of Technology

Host Dave Sobel is pondering agentic security as well.

A whole post full of thoughts on the topic is available here.

Three final insights from RSAC 2026

1. It’s still all about platforms in security

It’s not hard to envision a world in which the challenges of AI security broadly and agentic security specifically lead big-time platformization proponents to adopt point solutions with capabilities not available in their platform of choice. Based on my RSAC conversations last week, platform-of-choice vendors aren’t worried much about that vision becoming reality.

Barracuda, for example, believes AI makes the power of platforms like its BarracudaONE even more compelling for the SMBs in its target market.

“They’re resource constrained. They can’t deal with tool sprawl,” Ghai says. Or with a newer, still emerging version of that phenomenon, he adds.

“In the AI era, it’s not tool sprawl. It’s now agent sprawl, because everybody and their brother and their sister and their dog is delivering an agent,” Ghai says. Bad things happen, he adds, when those agents don’t work together well.

“Agents have, well, agency, and if they act in conflict, it’s not a question of efficiency or efficacy. It’s a disaster,” Ghai explains. Which is why businesses of all sizes, he maintains, are better off getting all their agents from one source.

Plus, platforms can share telemetry and coordinate responses in ways point products can’t, adds Greg Clark, senior director of product management for enterprise cybersecurity at OpenText Cybersecurity, whose platform includes systems for managing sensitive data, setting access permissions, and threat monitoring.

“When a human or a non-human or an agent is doing something around data that maybe they shouldn’t or that seems anomalous to the identity system or the threat detection system, that heightened signal will allow us to act quicker with more specificity,” he says.

2. Fears of a security SaaSpocalypse may be a tad overblown

Anthropic’s recent release of an AI code-checking product sent security share prices plummeting, as did word of a forthcoming “step change” improvement in the company’s Claude model. Schiappa isn’t losing sleep over the matter. LLMs are powerful tools, he says, but lack the deep end user knowledge needed to excel at security.

“I honestly don’t think that in a lot of the security I’m involved in they’re going to have that big of an impact, because they just can’t get to that individual customer context,” Schiappa says. “That’s not what they do. They’ll produce great models and we use them as the basis of our small language models and we’re huge fans of them, but they’re never going to get us where we need to go without our own models on top of it.”

3. Security vendors are using AI to fight AI-related partner program sat risks

I wrote early this month about research from GTIA hinting at erosion in member satisfaction with vendor partner programs for reasons probably related to misalignment between what partners need in the AI era and what partner programs offer. What I didn’t mention is that while AI may be partly responsible for a modest decline in partner program sat, according to GTIA, it’s also made working with vendors easier in ways partners appreciate.

More specifically, 37% of partners surveyed by GTIA said that access to vendor AI has made enablement and support easier, 35% said the same of collaboration on product and service roadmaps, and 34% said the same of pricing, discount, and margin management. Which bodes well for the vendors I spoke with at RSAC, many of whom are using AI to boost partner engagement and loyalty.

SentinelOne, for example, is actively exploring a wide range of AI-based portal enhancements. “How do you give partners real-time access to data about how they’re performing for the customer, customer renewals, customer insights, the pipeline, the deal registrations,” says Brian Lanigan, the company’s senior vice president and global head of partner ecosystem. “How do we give them more visibility to what we’re doing? How do [we help them] understand the health of their business with us and what we expect from them?”

The company’s looking for ways to use AI behind the scenes to accelerate responsiveness as well, he adds. “What can we do on our end, whether it’s with Google Workspace and what we can instrument through the AI capabilities across Gemini and working with NotebookLM and Google Apps Script and those things, that can really streamline how we service our partners?”

Sophos, for its part, is rolling out functionality that lets partners build self-service quotes in natural language via Microsoft Copilot.

“That can happen within seconds, versus oftentimes it takes minutes to hours or a phone call” to get a quote, says Chris Bell (pictured), the vendor’s SVP of global channel, alliances, and corporate development.

The revamped partner program Barracuda rolled out during RSAC similarly features an AI-powered portal offering guided onboarding, automated deal registration, simplified MDF tracking, and more, with AI‑based marketing automation capabilities coming later.

All of that is necessary but not sufficient for Barracuda and software makers like it though, according to Michelle Hodges, the vendor’s senior vice president of global channels and alliances. Yes, she says, AI tools make doing business with Barracuda simpler, but the vendor’s “secret sauce” is and must remain people.

“It’s still two entities that need to create connection, understand what the joint opportunity is, what the sweet spot is to be able to grow,” Hodges says. “We can’t forget about the role of people in partnership programs.”

Bell agrees. The biggest benefit of chatting with AI, he says, is that it frees up time for chatting with humans.

“My whole goal, and this is what I always tell my team, is how can we give sales capacity back so our partners can have more touch with their customers and we can have more touch with our partners,” Bell says. “That human engagement can’t be replaced.”

Subscribe now

Live from RSAC

Want to see my podcast co-host and me enjoy a rare moment of serenity at RSAC while discussing AI governance in California sunshine outside the Moscone Center? Tune into the latest episode of MSP Chat, which should go live on Monday. Until then, there are more great (IMO) episodes located here.

What will it take to move the numbers on women in cyber?

Forgive me for leaving this last part until the end as if it doesn’t matter as much as what preceded it, because I think it matters a lot.

An ISC2 blog post published two weeks before RSAC shared details from the association’s most recent Cybersecurity Workforce Study about the role women play in that workforce. As I’ve written before, that role is way too small. Indeed, just 16% of participants in ISC2’s study were women, a number all too consistent with input from survey respondents that 21% of cybersecurity teams are 10% female or less and that 14% of teams have no women at all.

It speaks volumes about how accurate ISC2’s data is that of the 20 people I interviewed at RSAC, precisely one—Barracuda’s Michelle Hodges—was a woman. She’s the one I chose to ask about the gender gap in security and what can be done about it.

“I’m in the latter half of my career, not the last chapter but the latter half of my career, and when you get to this stage you start to reflect on what’s really important to you and what drives you,” she said. For her, getting more women involved in the security industry is a big part of the answer.

“I feel that I have a responsibility to share my experience and also to continue learning from women in cyber and in technology to be able to pay it forward for future generations,” Hodges (pictured left) says.

Working with HR teams and boards to keep women from exiting the workforce is one way she acts on that responsibility. “You might be a carer, you might be a mother, lots of different things, and the environment that you start in might not be conducive to some of them,” Hodges notes. Helping security vendors be more accommodating is a top priority, she says, as is helping women appreciate the existence of career paths in security that fit well for caregivers.

“Particularly if you’re an engineer, you don’t need to leave the workforce because that culture might not be good,” Hodges observes.

Helping men in security be better allies to women is another focus area, she says, noting that some of that work is no more complicated than making men aware of what female colleagues often endure at work.

“We did a roundtable at this breakfast where we had women responding to questions about what is their experience like, and even the most woke of guys was like, ‘Really? That’s your experience?’”

There’s a lot more we all can contribute. Diving into ISC2’s data on the topic is a good place to start.

Also worth noting

• Huntress expanded ID threat detection and response coverage to Google Workspace.

• WatchGuard announced expanded NDR capabilities.

• Cisco announced a security architecture designed to protect the “agentic workforce” by embedding security directly into AI-driven workflows and identities.

• Cisco also introduced DefenseClaw, a new AI-powered security capability aimed at detecting, analyzing, and responding to advanced agentic threats. (Want to guess which one in particular they had in mind when choosing that name?)

• Palo Alto Networks introduced a secure workspace platform designed to help small businesses simplify and strengthen cybersecurity across users, devices, and applications.

• Palo Alto also unveiled a secure browser purpose-built for agentic AI environments.

• CrowdStrike introduced new next-gen SIEM and MDR capabilities, launched Falcon Data Security, and introduced Flex for Services to provide flexible consumption of cybersecurity services.

• SentinelOne introduced new AI-driven security offerings aimed at improving threat detection and response capabilities for defenders.

• SentinelOne and LevelBlue expanded their strategic partnership to deliver AI-powered managed security operations and incident response services.

• Proofpoint introduced a redefined email and data security platform designed to secure the agentic workspace and protect human-centric risks.

• ExtraHop outlined a comprehensive approach to agentic security built around AI asset inventory and real-time observability.

• Snyk launched an agent security solution designed to protect the full AI lifecycle, and announced general availability of its Evo AI SPM platform.

• Nudge Security expanded its platform with AI agent discovery capabilities.

• Mimecast introduced runtime data security technology to provide visibility and control over AI-related data risks.

• Darktrace introduced an AI-native managed email security offering for MSSPs.

• Dell announced expanded cybersecurity and resilience offerings designed to address AI-era threats and emerging risks such as quantum computing.

• HP introduced a range of new security innovations, updated its LaserJet portfolio with enhanced security and digitization capabilities, and highlighted new AI-driven workforce experience platform capabilities.

• HPE announced a new Juniper SRX400 series of firewalls, expanded hybrid mesh firewall capabilities, and more.

• KnowBe4 launched a Phish Alert Button for Microsoft Teams and added AI agents designed to advance human risk management capabilities.

• Gurucul launched an open AI SOC platform designed to reduce vendor lock-in and lower security data costs.

• More evidence that online marketplaces are huge and getting huger: security-focused marketplace operator Sherweb has secured $125 million in investment funding.

• ScalePad has introduced an MCP server that lets your favorite chatbot access client relationship data.

• TD SYNNEX announced that it’s achieved Microsoft’s Frontier distributor designation.

• Sectigo introduced a multi-tenant partner platform to deliver certificate lifecycle management as a managed service.

• TeamViewer unveiled AI-driven TIA reporting designed to provide deeper insights into digital workplace performance and user experience.

• Shianne Sampson is the new CRO at JumpCloud.

1. It’s still all about platforms in security

It’s not hard to envision a world in which the challenges of AI security broadly and agentic security specifically lead big-time platformization proponents to adopt point solutions with capabilities not available in their platform of choice. Based on my RSAC conversations last week, platform-of-choice vendors aren’t worried much about that vision becoming reality.

Barracuda, for example, believes AI makes the power of platforms like its BarracudaONE even more compelling for the SMBs in its target market.

“They’re resource constrained. They can’t deal with tool sprawl,” Rohit Ghai, Barracuda’s CEO, says. Or with a newer, still emerging version of that phenomenon, he adds.

“In the AI era, it’s not tool sprawl. It’s now agent sprawl, because everybody and their brother and their sister and their dog is delivering an agent,” Ghai says. Bad things happen, he adds, when those agents don’t work together well.

“Agents have, well, agency, and if they act in conflict, it’s not a question of efficiency or efficacy. It’s a disaster,” Ghai explains. Which is why businesses of all sizes, he maintains, are better off getting all their agents from one source.

Plus, platforms can share telemetry and coordinate responses in ways point products can’t, adds Greg Clark, senior director of product management for enterprise cybersecurity at OpenText Cybersecurity, whose platform includes systems for managing sensitive data, setting access permissions, and threat monitoring.

“When a human or a non-human or an agent is doing something around data that maybe they shouldn’t or that seems anomalous to the identity system or the threat detection system, that heightened signal will allow us to act quicker with more specificity,” he says.

2. Fears of a security SaaSpocalypse may be a tad overblown

Anthropic’s recent release of an AI code-checking product sent security share prices plummeting, as did word of a forthcoming “step change” improvement in the company’s Claude model. Schiappa isn’t losing sleep over the matter. LLMs are powerful tools, he says, but lack the deep end user knowledge needed to excel at security.

“I honestly don’t think that in a lot of the security I’m involved in they’re going to have that big of an impact, because they just can’t get to that individual customer context,” Schiappa says. “That’s not what they do. They’ll produce great models and we use them as the basis of our small language models and we’re huge fans of them, but they’re never going to get us where we need to go without our own models on top of it.”

3. Security vendors are using AI to fight AI-related partner program sat risks

I wrote early this month about research from GTIA hinting at erosion in member satisfaction with vendor partner programs for reasons probably related to misalignment between what partners need in the AI era and what partner programs offer. What I didn’t mention is that while AI may be partly responsible for a modest decline in partner program sat, according to GTIA, it’s also made working with vendors easier in ways partners appreciate.

More specifically, 37% of partners surveyed by GTIA said that access to vendor AI has made enablement and support easier, 35% said the same of collaboration on product and service roadmaps, and 34% said the same of pricing, discount, and margin management. Which bodes well for the vendors I spoke with at RSAC, many of whom are using AI to boost partner engagement and loyalty.

SentinelOne, for example, is actively exploring a wide range of AI-based portal enhancements. “How do you give partners real-time access to data about how they’re performing for the customer, customer renewals, customer insights, the pipeline, the deal registrations,” says Brian Lanigan, the company’s senior vice president and global head of partner ecosystem. “How do we give them more visibility to what we’re doing? How do [we help them] understand the health of their business with us and what we expect from them?”

The company’s looking for ways to use AI behind the scenes to accelerate responsiveness as well, he adds. “What can we do on our end, whether it’s with Google Workspace and what we can instrument through the AI capabilities across Gemini and working with NotebookLM and Google Apps Script and those things, that can really streamline how we service our partners?”

Sophos, for its part, is rolling out functionality that lets partners build self-service quotes in natural language via Microsoft Copilot.

“That can happen within seconds, versus oftentimes it takes minutes to hours or a phone call” to get a quote, says Chris Bell (pictured), the vendor’s SVP of global channel, alliances, and corporate development.

The revamped partner program Barracuda rolled out during RSAC similarly features an AI-powered portal offering guided onboarding, automated deal registration, simplified MDF tracking, and more, with AI‑based marketing automation capabilities coming later.

All of that is necessary but not sufficient for Barracuda and software makers like it though, according to Michelle Hodges, the vendor’s senior vice president of global channels and alliances. Yes, she says, AI tools make doing business with Barracuda simpler, but the vendor’s “secret sauce” is and must remain people.

“It’s still two entities that need to create connection, understand what the joint opportunity is, what the sweet spot is to be able to grow,” Hodges says. “We can’t forget about the role of people in partnership programs.”

Bell agrees. The biggest benefit of chatting with AI, he says, is that it frees up time for chatting with humans.

“My whole goal, and this is what I always tell my team, is how can we give sales capacity back so our partners can have more touch with their customers and we can have more touch with our partners,” Bell says. “That human engagement can’t be replaced.”

Subscribe now

Live from RSAC

Want to see my podcast co-host and me enjoy a rare moment of serenity at RSAC while discussing AI governance in California sunshine outside the Moscone Center? Tune into the latest episode of MSP Chat, which should go live on Monday. Until then, there are more great (IMO) episodes located here.

Forgive me for leaving this last part until the end as if it doesn’t matter as much as what preceded it, because I think it matters a lot.

An ISC2 blog post published two weeks before RSAC shared details from the association’s most recent Cybersecurity Workforce Study about the role women play in that workforce. As I’ve written before, that role is way too small. Indeed, just 16% of participants in ISC2’s study were women, a number all too consistent with input from survey respondents that 21% of cybersecurity teams are 10% female or less and that 14% of teams have no women at all.

It speaks volumes about how accurate ISC2’s data is that of the 20 people I interviewed at RSAC, precisely one—Michelle Hodges, Barracuda’s senior vice president of global channels and alliances—was a woman. She’s the one I chose to ask about the gender gap in security and what can be done about it.

“I’m in the latter half of my career, not the last chapter but the latter half of my career, and when you get to this stage you start to reflect on what’s really important to you and what drives you,” she said. For her, getting more women involved in the security industry is a big part of the answer.

“I feel that I have a responsibility to share my experience and also to continue learning from women in cyber and in technology to be able to pay it forward for future generations,” Hodges (pictured left) says.

Working with HR teams and boards to keep women from exiting the workforce is one way she acts on that responsibility. “You might be a carer, you might be a mother, lots of different things, and the environment that you start in might not be conducive to some of them,” Hodges notes. Helping security vendors be more accommodating is a top priority, she says, as is helping women appreciate the existence of career paths in security that fit well for caregivers.

“Particularly if you’re an engineer, you don’t need to leave the workforce because that culture might not be good,” Hodges observes.

Helping men in security be better allies to women is another focus area, she says, noting that some of that work is no more complicated than making men aware of what female colleagues often endure at work.

“We did a roundtable at this breakfast where we had women responding to questions about what is their experience like, and even the most woke of guys was like, ‘Really? That’s your experience?’”

There’s a lot more we all can contribute. Diving into ISC2’s data on the topic is a good place to start.

Surely everyone appreciates the importance of governance when it comes to AI by now, right?

I mean, end users certainly do. 90% of them worry about their data being used by AI tools without their consent, according to Malwarebytes.

Their employers get it too. In fact, when Jitterbit asked decision-makers to name the primary bottlenecks keeping AI initiatives out of production, “security, governance, and data privacy risks” was the number one response.

They’re correct to be concerned too. You’ve been reading here about the “shadow AI” problem plaguing businesses for a year now, and more recent data from Teramind suggests both that 80% of workers use unapproved AI tools on the job and that a third have shared proprietary data with unsanctioned platforms.

Businesses know exactly whose help they most want with those and related problems. Fully 94% of them plan to lean on MSPs over the next two to three years for help navigating AI governance, according to Logicalis.

And there’s real money on the line. Global spending on AI governance will climb from $440 million this year to $1.51 billion in 2031, according to Mordor Intelligence, and Forrester expects spending on off-the-shelf AI governance software to more than quadruple by 2030 to $15.8 billion.

Yet what happens when you ask MSPs about the importance of AI governance, for their customers and their own service portfolios? No really, try it. Ask a few. I’ll wait. Except I’ve done it myself and I know what you’ll probably hear, which is this:

[sound of crickets]

As in they don’t seem terribly interested in the topic. Such was the case not long ago, certainly, when I helped a client of the consultancy I serve as chief analyst test governance-focused solution messaging with a focus group of MSPs and got a lot of yawns in response, along with warnings from an especially governance-savvy participant that the entire topic “probably flies over a lot of MSPs’ heads”.

Want some objective evidence for that assertion? When analyst firm Techaisle asked channel partners to name their top business priorities for 2026, “Developing Governance & Compliance Services” placed eleventh on the list, behind legitimate but (I’d argue) less urgent issues like “Adopting AI-Driven/Intent-Based Marketing” and “Operationalizing AI-Orchestrated Account Capture”.

What gives?

It’s a question that Jason LaPorte (pictured), CTO/CISO, at New York City-based MSP Power Consulting Group, has been wondering about just like me ever since he found himself staring into a room full of glazed-over eyes while speaking on a conference panel dedicated to governance last year.

“People were befuddled by the idea,” he says. “They don’t think about it.”

And therefore don’t comprehend why it matters, he adds. “I don’t think people understand how LLMs train and learn, and I think they misunderstand what happens when you take an Excel spreadsheet or a whole notepad of data and stick it in a non-private LLM.”

Or a private one for that matter. “You can ask Copilot to go find anything that says anything about raises or payroll and it would take about twelve seconds,” LaPorte notes.

Most MSPs who get that, meanwhile, don’t know what to do about it, according to Brent Lazarenko, chief AI officer and global head of innovation at NWN, an AI-focused managed service provider with some 6,000 customers and a roughly $1.3 billion top line.

“It’s definitely a skills gap,” he says.

And closing it takes time few overworked MSPs believe they can spare, especially while simultaneously sorting through what feel like more fundamental questions about what to do with AI internally and how to sell it to their customers. Which is a shame, Lazarenko notes.

“They’re going to miss out on higher value AI strategy conversations if they’re not doing the governance,” he says.

Those are exactly the kind of conversations MSPs need to be having with businesses at a time when endpoint, network, and cloud management services have become all but completely commoditized too. “Are you going to get a meeting to talk about their devices? No,” Lazarenko says. “You can get a meeting to talk about AI governance with just about any one of your clients today if you really wanted to.”

You can earn more than just one-time project fees afterward too. “The need to continuously monitor and do enforcement will never go away on this,” Lazarenko says, noting that NWN’s managed governance service tracks a range of issues.

“Is the model up? Is the model hallucinating? Is the model giving out PII? Is it filtering out the right things? How are agents taking action, or not taking action? Is a human in the loop wrong or right? How is the model evolving?”

Even organizations large enough to have in-house IT rarely have the time, tools, or inclination to answer such questions, he adds, and few AI consultancies with the know-how to set governance policies want to monitor those policies after the fact.

“MSPs are on the other side of the house saying, ‘we’ve got the tools to monitor this stuff, but we don’t really care about having a governance strategy conversation,’” Lazarenko notes. “An MSP that can bridge both of those worlds wins, and that’s where we’re positioning ourselves.”

Along with other wise MSPs, of course. The clock is ticking until one of them starts talking with everyone else’s clients.

Speaking of tactics for moving to AI…

It’s one of several topics Alex Stanton, the managed services thought leader you’ve met here at Channelholic before, discusses during the latest episode of MSP Chat, the podcast I co-host. The whole conversation—which Stanton recorded at 9:00pm local time from the rear of a rented catamaran while vacationing in Thailand, by the way—is well worth listening to IMO.

Evidence from ConnectWise that everyone in startup land is all-in on AI

It’s impossible to say, unless you work at ConnectWise anyway, whether any of the contestants in this year’s PitchIT startup competition will be AI governance vendors. That close to all of them will be AI something, on the other hand, is a much easier call.

“Everybody’s using AI in their description,” says Sean Lardo, the vendor’s vice president of IT Nation Communities. “You’re either built on AI and you’re an AI offering or you’re infusing with AI to maybe improve your product.” Some of the applications are even vaguer than that to a degree Lardo finds dangerous for the companies that submitted them.

“People are very nervous these days about AI,” Lardo says. “You have to be thorough on what problem you’re solving for.”

PitchIT, for those new to it, is a contest ConnectWise has been staging annually since 2018 to nurture young makers of ConnectWise-compatible software. Lardo, who turned it into a startup accelerator as well two years ago, reports record interest in joining this year’s cohort, which he expects to include 25-ish companies. Indeed, he had already received over 50 applications (via this page) when we spoke two weeks ago on the sidelines of GTIA’s annual Community & Councils Forum in Chicago.

“People I’ve never even heard of,” says Lardo, who expects to receive more than 150 submissions in all by the April 30^th deadline. “We’ve averaged about a 25% increase in applications year over year,” he adds.

I’m guessing this year’s uptick will be even bigger given how rapidly AI-native startups focused on MSPs, some of which you’ve read about here before, are coming into existence at present.

“The barrier to entry has gone down significantly because a lot of them are just using AI to build the code,” Lardo observes.

Plus, there’s a lot of investment capital to draw on. “AI-tagged companies account for as much as 69% of VC-backed SaaS companies within select segments,” according to a recently published report from PitchBook, amid a spike in venture deal volume.

Lardo and his team are evaluating would-be PitchIT competitors much the same way venture funds evaluate would-be funding recipients.

“If you’re an investor, you’re looking at are they strong enough to survive?” Lardo explains. Meaning do they have not just an interesting, shipping product but customers for it too, and maybe even upbeat buzz among MSPs.

“We’re literally looking on LinkedIn, Facebook, X, Reddit,” he says. “We want to see what’s being said.”

Lardo won’t disclose much about the applicants ConnectWise has heard from so far except to note that at least six of them make AI-powered service desk automation software of the kind 2023 PitchIT winner Thread makes, and that others are seeking to streamline additional operational processes.

“Right now, there seems to be a huge push on AI sales-driven stuff, especially with data cleaning and opportunity management,” he notes.

This year’s contestants will be vying for $150,000 in prizes, up from $100,000 before. Unlike previous years though, in which all of the money was distributed in cash, this year’s pool includes $50,000 of cash and $100,000 of sponsorship credit at ConnectWise events.

“What we were finding is we’d cut the winners their check for the prize money and then they’d turn around and just give it right back to us for sponsorship,” Lardo explains. The new arrangement eliminates that round trip.

ConnectWise will name this year’s contestants early in May, and name three finalists some four months later. The winner will be chosen by a panel of judges in front of a live audience at the vendor’s IT Nation Connect event in November. I’ll be watching in the front row, as I have the last two years running.

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Want in on AI fast, MSPs? Maybe you should outsource everything else.

MSP vendors aren’t the only companies eager to sell AI-native solutions. A lot of MSPs, including some extremely large ones, are as well. How much easier would it be for them to acquire skills, envision offerings, perfect a sales motion, and more if they didn’t have to deliver increasingly commoditized bread-and-butter endpoint, network, and cloud management services at the same time?

Come to think of it, how great would it be for AI-forward service providers if they didn’t have to deal with any of that old school hassle at all?

As of last week, they don’t, courtesy of MSP-as-a-Service, a new venture from investment and operating company Summit Holdings that will happily do all of that work for them on an outsourced per-user, per-month basis.

Subscribers, according to Summit co-founder and CEO Juan Fernandez, simply pick their tool stack of choice from a menu of some 60 RMM, PSA, backup, security, and other applications.

“We build it, we organize it, and we operate it for them,” he says. As them, he adds, meaning white label via NOCDOC, a 24/7 U.S.-based NOC and SOC vendor Summit bought last year.

“We quiet the noise for them,” Fernandez (pictured) notes.

And not just help desk noise, it’s worth noting. MSPaaS helps with pre-sales engineering, client onboarding, and QBR delivery, chores few of the offshore outsourcers serving MSPs for years can handle.

“They serve a purpose to answer the phone and to do ticket triage,” says Fernandez of such firms, “where we’re actually operating the platform.”

The appeal for would-be AI consultants is obvious. “They don’t really have to do much other than just manage and operate their business and migrate into the future,” says Fernandez.

And do so while turning a profit, he adds. Without getting deep into specifics, Fernandez says the scale MSPaaS operates at enables it to price its services low enough for MSPs to make 30-50% margins while charging about 30% less than prevailing market rates.

“We wanted to make sure we could build this bridge, stabilize the foundation, and make it super affordable and profitable for them so that they could actually make some money at doing this, and for the first time, work on their business and not in their business,” Fernandez explains.

MSPs migrating to AI are but one of several markets MSPaaS hopes to penetrate. Private equity firms looking for a consistent, easily deployed, and profitable way to build rollups are investigating the service too, according to Fernandez, as are resellers and telco service providers in search of a fast track to opening a managed service practice.

“It’s zero to done,” he says. “They can move quicker and deploy value to their customer base without the implementation, the conversation, the contract, and all the other things. We end up compressing that down to moments versus months.”

For now, Fernandez won’t specify any of his several dozen strategic vendor partners, all of whom are integrated with his back end infrastructure at the kind of depth required to make a rapid-fire, mix-and-match offering like MSPaaS possible. But he’ll begin parting the curtain on their names soon, he says, in conjunction with a stream of new feature rollouts set to unfold across the rest of the year.

“This is just the built first building block,” Fernandez says. “We have a lot coming in the future, almost something every month.”

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Over on The Business of Tech

Host Dave Sobel has some observations that Fernandez and his partners will appreciate.

Context for that assertion and a whole lot more available here.

Also worth noting

• Edging into security? NinjaOne now offers AI-driven vulnerability management functionality.

• Rewst’s RoboRewsty AI Workflow Builder is designed to simplify automation workflow for MSPs.

• CrowdStrike and NVIDIA have introduced a “secure-by-design” blueprint for building and operating AI agents safely.

• Dell says it’s the first hardware maker to ship an NVIDIA GB300 desktop system capable of supporting autonomous AI agents using NVIDIA NeMoClaw and OpenShell.

• ServiceNow has new governance capabilities for managing those same autonomous AI agents.

• Cato Networks has introduced an NVIDIA GPU-powered SASE platform with native AI security capabilities.

• Just in time for the RSA Conference: IT-Harvest has published a report arguing that AI security will become a defining factor in the future of digital defense.

• Also just in time for the RSA Conference, Torq has introduced an agentic AI builder to enable security teams to create and deploy automated workflows more easily.

• Menlo Security has launched a browser security platform designed to govern and secure AI agents as non-human users.

• Salt Security has launched an agentic security platform designed to protect AI stacks across LLMs, MCP servers, and APIs.

• Netwrix has expanded its 1Secure platform to provide visibility and control over AI agent access to sensitive data.

• Huntress says its new Managed Endpoint Security Posture Management and Managed Identity Security Posture Management solutions expand its agentic security capabilities across endpoint, identity, and human risk.

• Proofpoint’s new intent-based AI security solution is designed to detect and mitigate human-targeted cyber risks.

• The new Users API from 1Password gives partners programmatic management of users and accounts within its platform.

• The new Unified Access solution from 1Password gives partners centralized access management across devices, applications, and infrastructure.

• Email security vendor Abnormal AI has introduced a behavioral foundation model designed to defend against AI-driven cyberattacks.

• KeeperDB, from Keeper Security, adds zero-trust database access capabilities to the vendor’s privileged access management platform.

• Nile’s latest enhancements are designed to bring “datacenter-class security” to branches and campuses.

• Blumira has enhanced its EDR and ITDR capabilities to improve active threat detection and response.

• ManageEngine has added AI-powered endpoint threat detection and automated remediation, among other things, to its Endpoint Central solution.

• Graylog has equipped its AI-powered SIEM solution with explainable AI and automated investigation features for small-to-midsize security teams.

• The latest enhancements to Orca Security’s platform include AI-powered security agents and real-time detection of AI usage across cloud environments.

• GoTo has a new LogMeIn Partner Network for resellers, MSPs, and global system integrators.

• Exabeam has added a new MSSP-focused commercial framework to its APEX Partner Program.

• AI agents are now standing by to help partners automate administrative tasks and streamline opportunity management on the AWS Partner Central platform.

• Speaking of agentic development, the new application security platform from Checkmarx is tailored for exactly that use case.

• Will May is the new CRO at Arctic Wolf.

It’s impossible to say, unless you work at ConnectWise anyway, whether any of the contestants in this year’s PitchIT startup competition will be AI governance vendors. That close to all of them will be AI something, on the other hand, is a much easier call.

“Everybody’s using AI in their description,” says Sean Lardo, the vendor’s vice president of IT Nation Communities. “You’re either built on AI and you’re an AI offering or you’re infusing with AI to maybe improve your product.” Some of the applications are even vaguer than that to a degree Lardo finds dangerous for the companies that submitted them.

“People are very nervous these days about AI,” Lardo says. “You have to be thorough on what problem you’re solving for.”

PitchIT, for those new to it, is a contest ConnectWise has been staging annually since 2018 to nurture young makers of ConnectWise-compatible software. Lardo, who turned it into a startup accelerator as well two years ago, reports record interest in joining this year’s cohort, which he expects to include 25-ish companies. Indeed, he had already received over 50 applications (via this page) when we spoke two weeks ago on the sidelines of GTIA’s annual Community & Councils Forum in Chicago.

“People I’ve never even heard of,” says Lardo, who expects to receive more than 150 submissions in all by the April 30^th deadline. “We’ve averaged about a 25% increase in applications year over year,” he adds.

I’m guessing this year’s uptick will be even bigger given how rapidly AI-native startups focused on MSPs, some of which you’ve read about here before, are coming into existence at present.

“The barrier to entry has gone down significantly because a lot of them are just using AI to build the code,” Lardo observes.

Plus, there’s a lot of investment capital to draw on. “AI-tagged companies account for as much as 69% of VC-backed SaaS companies within select segments,” according to a recently published report from PitchBook, amid a spike in venture deal volume.

Lardo and his team are evaluating would-be PitchIT competitors much the same way venture funds evaluate would-be funding recipients.

“If you’re an investor, you’re looking at are they strong enough to survive?” Lardo explains. Meaning do they have not just an interesting, shipping product but customers for it too, and maybe even upbeat buzz among MSPs.

“We’re literally looking on LinkedIn, Facebook, X, Reddit,” he says. “We want to see what’s being said.”

Lardo won’t disclose much about the applicants ConnectWise has heard from so far except to note that at least six of them make AI-powered service desk automation software of the kind 2023 PitchIT winner Thread makes, and that others are seeking to streamline additional operational processes.

“Right now, there seems to be a huge push on AI sales-driven stuff, especially with data cleaning and opportunity management,” he notes.

This year’s contestants will be vying for $150,000 in prizes, up from $100,000 before. Unlike previous years though, in which all of the money was distributed in cash, this year’s pool includes $50,000 of cash and $100,000 of sponsorship credit at ConnectWise events.

“What we were finding is we’d cut the winners their check for the prize money and then they’d turn around and just give it right back to us for sponsorship,” Lardo explains. The new arrangement eliminates that round trip.

ConnectWise will name this year’s contestants early in May, and name three finalists some four months later. The winner will be chosen by a panel of judges in front of a live audience at the vendor’s IT Nation Connect event in November. I’ll be watching in the front row, as I have the last two years running.

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MSP vendors aren’t the only companies eager to sell AI-native solutions. A lot of MSPs, including some extremely large ones, are as well. How much easier would it be for them to acquire skills, envision offerings, perfect a sales motion, and more if they didn’t have to deliver increasingly commoditized bread-and-butter endpoint, network, and cloud management services at the same time?

Come to think of it, how great would it be for AI-forward service providers if they didn’t have to deal with any of that old school hassle at all?

As of last week, they don’t, courtesy of MSP-as-a-Service, a new venture from investment and operating company Summit Holdings that will happily do all of that work for them on an outsourced per-user, per-month basis.

Subscribers, according to Summit co-founder and CEO Juan Fernandez, simply pick their tool stack of choice from a menu of some 60 RMM, PSA, backup, security, and other applications.

“We build it, we organize it, and we operate it for them,” he says. As them, he adds, meaning white label via NOCDOC, a 24/7 U.S.-based NOC and SOC vendor Summit bought last year.

“We quiet the noise for them,” Fernandez (pictured) notes.

And not just help desk noise, it’s worth noting. MSPaaS helps with pre-sales engineering, client onboarding, and QBR delivery, chores few of the offshore outsourcers serving MSPs for years can handle.

“They serve a purpose to answer the phone and to do ticket triage,” says Fernandez of such firms, “where we’re actually operating the platform.”

The appeal for would-be AI consultants is obvious. “They don’t really have to do much other than just manage and operate their business and migrate into the future,” says Fernandez.

And do so while turning a profit, he adds. Without getting deep into specifics, Fernandez says the scale MSPaaS operates at enables it to price its services low enough for MSPs to make 30-50% margins while charging about 30% less than prevailing market rates.

“We wanted to make sure we could build this bridge, stabilize the foundation, and make it super affordable and profitable for them so that they could actually make some money at doing this, and for the first time, work on their business and not in their business,” Fernandez explains.

MSPs migrating to AI are but one of several markets MSPaaS hopes to penetrate. Private equity firms looking for a consistent, easily deployed, and profitable way to build rollups are investigating the service too, according to Fernandez, as are resellers and telco service providers in search of a fast track to opening a managed service practice.

“It’s zero to done,” he says. “They can move quicker and deploy value to their customer base without the implementation, the conversation, the contract, and all the other things. We end up compressing that down to moments versus months.”

For now, Fernandez won’t specify any of his several dozen strategic vendor partners, all of whom are integrated with his back end infrastructure at the kind of depth required to make a rapid-fire, mix-and-match offering like MSPaaS possible. But he’ll begin parting the curtain on their names soon, he says, in conjunction with a stream of new feature rollouts set to unfold across the rest of the year.

“This is just the built first building block,” Fernandez says. “We have a lot coming in the future, almost something every month.”

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So, what’s new since my last post?

Well, for one thing, we learned there’s a “Frontier Suite” version of Microsoft 365 coming that features a “control plane for agents,” something you’ll almost certainly want just as soon as you figure out what it does. Perplexity, meanwhile, has unveiled an OpenClaw-esque agentic “digital proxy” that will happily run—or wreck, time will tell—large parts of your life for you. And a new study reveals that the average end user spends three hours and 50 minutes a week validating AI outputs that save them three hours and 38 minutes of labor.

Oh, and cyber warfare has knocked a medical device maker offline.

“It’s a complex time,” says Dan Wensley, CEO of the Global Technology Industry Association, aka GTIA.

And to be clear, that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

“The word complexity usually conjures something negative to people,” observes Carolyn April, GTIA’s vice president of research and market intelligence, during an episode of the podcast I co-host. Yes, she observes, complexity is hard.

“But for those of us in any industry, really, where you are the experts, complexity can be your friend,” April (pictured above) says. “It generates demand for your expertise.”

Based on new data she presented during a keynote at GTIA’s annual Community & Councils Forum in Chicago last week, IT providers know it. Half of them pointed to increased demand for IT services in response to complexity when asked to identify factors contributing to channel health.

As it happens, the number two contributor on the list, cited by a far lower 37% of surveyed partners, turns out to be the number one source of complexity for those partners themselves.

“We’re in a period of time where the channel is trying to absorb a new pivot to AI,” April says. “During transitions like this, you often will be in a period where you are in between your old way of doing things, the new way of doing things, and figuring out how you’re going to bridge from one side to the other. And that’s the period of time that we’re in right now.”

It’s an interesting period too. As we’ll see momentarily, April’s biggest recommendation for navigating it is by her own admission decidedly not interesting. There’s reason to believe it’s wise advice just the same.

Plenty of evidence in April’s research makes clear that the AI pivot is far from over. Close to three and a half years into the genAI era, fully 98% of partners are using AI in some capacity at this point. Only 20%, however, are using it strategically in conjunction with rigorous policies, programmatic enablement, and a defined set of internal and customer-facing usage plans.

“Lots of us are experimenting and using AI in organizations. Very few of us have a formalized plan around it,” April says. As a result, while 71% of partners expect AI to be a growing source of revenue in the next two years, only 28% expect that growth to be significant.

In the next two years. This transition is going to take a little while, as transitions this profound usually do.

“Workforce level disruption is going to happen, competitive level disruption is going to happen, how you interact with the vendors and the other people in your ecosystem is going to be disrupted,” April notes. And don’t forget the constantly evolving tools and techniques you have to master to bring the power of AI to your customers.

“Technologists don’t just learn by osmosis,” April observes.

Which brings us to her wise, if uninteresting, piece of advice for everyone coping with all that change. “In this disruptive environment, operational soundness, as boring as that does sound, is really what’s going to matter most here,” April says.

None of what she has in mind is terribly sophisticated either. “We’re talking about being good at basic operational ways to run a business: finance, accounting, forecasting, understanding KPIs, good fundamental sales and marketing processes,” April notes. “It pays off.”

Specifically with respect to AI, moreover, and you can see it in the data. Let’s take it as a given that the most operationally sound businesses not only have concrete business goals for the year but are outperforming them thanks to disciplined execution. 24% of the partners in April’s survey fit that profile, and of those, 51% expect greater than 15% AI revenue growth through 2027. Just 18% of partners trailing their goals have the same expectation.

“People who are ahead of their business plan, who are working their operational models effectively, who’ve got their employees working too in a productive manner, those are the companies that are tending to do best right now with AI revenue,” April says.

And I’ve got to say, at this moment of continual disruption, it’s nice to know that you don’t have to reinvent, revolutionize, or digitally transform anything whatsoever to set yourself up today for AI success tomorrow. You just need to buy every Peter Drucker book you can get your hands on, read them cover to cover, and live by what you learn, because management matters most if you want to be a winner in the next new thing. Thus it is now, according to April, and thus it has always been.

“The companies that have good operational foundational practices tend to be the ones that are on that leading edge,” she says. “I see it over and over and over again.”

The AI alignment problem no one talks about involves partner programs

Here’s something else worth noting in GTIA’s data: Partners are less happy with their vendors than they used to be.

We’re talking relatively less, mind you. Happiness overall is pretty high. But the number of partners who describe themselves as satisfied with vendors dropped from 88% last year to 74% this year, and the portion who call themselves very satisfied plunged all the way from 39% to 18%.

Hard to know why, but April’s pretty sure it has less to do with anything vendors are doing wrong than it does with things they’re still relearning to do right.

“It’s about alignment and the changes that are going on in the marketplace today with AI,” she says. “The types of priorities that are important to [IT solution providers] and the things they want to see in a partner program, for instance, they’re different now.”

Before AI, she explains, partners valued margin points, volume discounts, and access to MDF. Now, just as they increasingly price services based on outcomes, they want to be rewarded based on outcomes too.

“Vendors are struggling a little bit to figure out what the best partner program looks like for the most partners that they’re able to reach,” April says. “It’s not as easy as saying, ‘we’re going to pay you X percent on the number of desktops you sell.’”

To be fair, part of why vendors are struggling with that challenge is because their partners are struggling to define new AI business models. “That’s going to change the interactions that they have with vendors and what the programs are going to look like to reward AI-based types of partners,” April says.

So moving targets on both sides of the relationship, which brings us back to where we began a short time ago.

“It’s just complex,” April observes. “This is an example of perhaps not so fun complexity for the channel.”

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Over on The Business of Tech

Host Dave Sobel has some thoughts of his own about partner program alignment issues in the age of AI:

Read the whole thing here.

GTIA brings the power of community to complex times

In addition to attending an industry association meeting last week, I also researched an MSP mental wellness program and the $70 million funding round announced by a very young BCDR vendor. Somewhat astonishingly, I hope to prove in the remainder of this post, all three activities are connected by the word community.

Which is just another word for most people, but a nearly sacred concept for MSPs. Just ask ConnectWise CEO Manny Rivelo, who was in London at the company’s IT Nation Connect Europe conference last week, and who marveled at the power of the MSP community during last year’s edition of the same event.

“This is a unique community,” he said. “This is a community that helps each other drive success. You tell each other your best secrets and how to increase your profitability, how you drive your revenue.”

MSPs need that secret-sharing now more than ever, according to Sean Lardo, ConnectWise’s vice president of IT Nation communities. “It’s always been important,” he says. “It’s extremely important now.”

Wensley (pictured) agrees.

“With the evolution of AI, the pace of change is so incredibly enhanced and accelerated that having these conversations quickly is really a requirement,” he says. “There is no more important time to come together as a community and share best practices and share ideas.”

And no more important time to do that in a truly impartial way, he continues. Communities run by companies like ConnectWise have for-profit objectives, as they should and must. What MSPs are starving for right now, however, are the kind of non-partisan insights provided by GTIA.

“We’re in a unique situation where we’re just bringing everybody together to have these conversations and aren’t beholden to any particular software or advancement where the market is,” Wensley says.

Slide’s liftoff is as much about culture as tech

The thing about communities like GTIA is that the members have a pretty good idea of who’s there to give and who’s there mostly to take. The same goes for the MSP community more broadly in relation to vendors. People can tell who means it when they say they’re committed to partner success and who says it because it sounds good. They reward vendors in the former camp with their business and loyalty.

The latest evidence came our way last week courtesy of Slide, the BCDR startup founded by Datto veterans Austin McChord and Michael Fass, which you’ve read about here a few times since its first product reached market last February. The company made headlines last week in conjunction with a $70 million Series B funding round and the revelation that its nearly 1,000 MSP partners have sold roughly 4,000 devices in about 13 months.

Slide’s leadership is very proud of those devices, but they’re also quick to describe them as part of a larger, culture-level commitment to MSPs at the company.

“We spent almost two years in the lab building the tech that is delivered through Slide,” Fass (pictured) says. “That’s not because we were curious. It’s because we’re passionate. It’s because we care about MSPs, we are MSP focused, and we bring every ounce of passion that we can to the project.”

There’s no way to know for sure, of course, but I’d wager heavily that the degree to which MSPs feel that passion, in and beyond Slide’s products, has a lot to do with how Slide attracted 1,000 partners—a milestone that MSP favorite NinjaOne needed 18 months to reach—in a touch over a year.

Fass points to several ways MSPs can see Slide’s “deeply empathetic” approach to MSPs in action, including its month-to-month pricing (something MSPs love and few vendors offer) and its refusal to sell direct to end users, even when (as actually happened not long ago) one of them tries to place a 250-appliance order.

“Regardless of the deal size, what was important to us was holding to that core value,” says Carlson Choi, Slide’s COO. “Even if we lost the bid, right? It’s the right thing to do for the channel.”

Interestingly enough, VC fund General Catalyst, which led Slide’s Series B, specifically called out the company’s commitment to doing right by the channel as a reason for its willingness to invest in the company.

“Michael, Austin and the team understand the MSP community at a foundational level and are rebuilding a critical category with modern architecture and long-term conviction,” said General Catalyst partner Mark Crane in the press release announcing the funding round.

Fass calls the scale of that round a sign that despite turmoil, trouble, and uncertainty in various corners of private capital, investors remain bullish on managed services.

“The investor community is seeing that there is a massive untapped market for great technology delivered by MSPs through MSPs to tens of thousands of small to medium-sized businesses across the globe,” he says. “We are, in some ways, a good proxy for that.”

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Wait, what about platformization?

Humility is an admirable trait in my opinion, so let me display a little here. I’ve made the case before that MSPs prefer platforms to point solutions, so much so that it’s a rough time right now to be a maker of stand-alone anything, and especially stand-alone data protection.

Unless, apparently, you’re Slide, which is and intends to remain 100% focused on backup.

“Our commitment is to build an MSP technology company focused on backup solutions,” Fass says.

Though not exactly stand-alone backup. “Our mandate is to backup data wherever it lives,” Fass says. “We’ve got a big horizon of solutions that we’ll be coming down the pike with over time.”

Sounds like a data protection platform along the lines of what Veeam’s building. Is it? If so, then maybe Slide will turn out to be less the exception that proves the platformization rule than simply yet another example of the platformization rule in action.

MSP Well offers a helping hand out of the IT pressure cooker

The examples of community we’ve discussed to this point have basically been B2B. I’ll close this week by discussing an arguably even better manifestation of the MSP channel’s spirit of community that’s P2P, as in person-to-person.

I’m referring to a recently launched non-profit community called MSP Well dedicated to connecting MSPs and others in the managed services ecosystem to mental health resources.

And really, could there be an ecosystem more in need of something like this? Running a managed services practice is a relentlessly-paced pressure cooker of a job held by people who spend their days, nights, and weekends taking care of clients, employees, spouses, and children—everyone, in fact, but themselves.

“If you don’t take care of yourself, how are you going to take care of others?” asks Larry Meador (pictured), channel chief at data security posture management/attack surface management vendor Cavelo, who now moonlights as MSP Well’s executive advisor for strategy and communities. It’s a seemingly obvious question that MSPs, like many others, try hard to avoid.

“Talking about mental health and admitting that you yourself perhaps have a challenge is one of those things that especially men don’t want to admit,” Meador says. “Traditionally it’s seen as a sign of weakness, so people don’t want to talk about it.”

Until recently, those people included Cavelo CEO James Mignacca, who was trying as so many of us do to muscle his way through stress and depression all alone.

“He just happened to open up to me one day at a conference, and I just sat there and listened,” Meador says. “A few weeks later, he was like, ‘You know what? That was the best thing that could have ever happened. I just needed someone to listen to me and just tell me I’m not crazy.’”

A few months after that he broached the possibility of helping others in the industry experience the same relief. “I said, ‘I think it’d be a fantastic thing,’” Meador recalls.

So did Joe Ussia, CEO of Canadian MSP Infinite IT, who quickly signed on to co-found MSP Well alongside Mignacca. An extensive set of advisors soon volunteered to help as well. Their mission is to connect members in need to information, advice, and peers.

“Every single one of us has something going on,” Meador says. “All we want to do is facilitate a place for them to go and get the help that they perhaps haven’t sought out before.”

It does that free of charge, he adds, noting that the organization is self-funded by its founders and advisors for now. Mignacca and Ussia hope to get financial support from vendors and other sponsors in the future, and Meador’s optimistic they’ll succeed given the enthusiasm the initiative has inspired since its launch week before last.

“We knew that this would have legs out of the gate. We didn’t realize it would go sprinting out of the gate,” he says. “It’s gone viral.”

Which shouldn’t actually surprise anyone familiar with that strange, wonderful spirit of community I referred to before, and which animates MSPs and their vendors in ways that people in other professions would have trouble recognizing.

“We always talk about how unique this channel is, but I don’t think people really understand just how truly unique this channel is,” Meador says. “We’re all one big, happy, dysfunctional family.”

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You’ve heard my take. What does Carolyn April think about GTIA’s latest research?

Find out on the new episode of MSP Chat, the podcast I co-host, which also features further thoughts from yours truly about the power of community, Slide’s Series B, and MSP Well. Tune in to that and earlier episodes right here.

Also worth noting

• One last note from GTIA CCF: The association named the winners of its North America Spotlight Award there.

• Clio—remember them from this recent story?—has launched Clio Operate to give large and midsize law firms a unified system for managing complex legal workflows.

• New features in Robin, the artist formerly known as Atera Autopilot, include the ability to build custom AI workflows with playbooks and the ability to instruct Robin to resolve tickets independently or escalate them based on configurable confidence levels.

• AvePoint’s new AgentPulse Command Center is designed to provide governance, visibility, and security controls for AI agents across multicloud environments.

• Salesforce’s new Agentforce for Contact Center is designed to assist service teams and automate customer support workflows agentically.

• Like many others, OpenAI’s concerned about agentic security, enough in fact to have bought agentic security vendor Promptfoo.

• The latest enhancements to Fortinet’s Security Operations platform include a unified SOC experience, agentic AI capabilities, and expanded endpoint protection.

• Also from Fortinet, the newest version of FortiOS adds secure AI controls, AI-agent integration within its security fabric, and expanded SASE and SD-WAN capabilities.

• Also also from Fortinet, the new version of its Engage Partner Program is designed to reward partners at the point of value rather than the point of sale alone. Smart.

• Huntress has expanded its global partner program to encompass resellers as well as MSPs.

• Businesses are scaling up usage of AI solutions way faster than security testing of AI solutions, according to HackerOne.

• ESET’s new eCrime Reports are designed to give organizations strategic intelligence on cybercriminal groups and emerging attack trends.

• In a move beyond password management, LastPass has introduced an IAM solution for SMBs named Secure Access Essentials.

• Hackers are getting very interested in AI very quickly: Discussions of AI-related cybercrime on the dark web rose 1,500% between November and December of last year alone, according to Flashpoint.

• According to HP, 57% of IT decision makers call print security a low priority even though 56% of SMBs experienced at least one print-related data loss in the past year.

• It remains a challenging time to be a woman in security: 21% of them surveyed by ISC2 say their team is just 10% women or fewer, and 14% say there are no women on the team at all. Good reason to attend ISC2’s virtual Global 50x50 Women’s Summit conference on March 18^th.

• Also worth attending: Registration for The Channel Marketing Association’s 2026 Marketing Summit is now open.

• The Q4 numbers that Ingram Micro reported a few weeks back are one way the company’s investment in its Xvantage platform is paying off. The two patents Xvantage won more recently are another.

• TeamViewer’s new regional restricted access for U.S. customers allows organizations to limit remote connections to specific geographic regions for enhanced security.

• ControlUp’s new Tap-to-App provides end-to-end visibility into login and application-launch experiences in healthcare environments via hardware running IGEL OS.

• Action1’s vulnerability and patch management solution now integrates with Rapid7, Tenable, CrowdStrike, and Microsoft Defender.

The examples of community we’ve discussed to this point have basically been B2B. I’ll close this week by discussing an arguably even better manifestation of the MSP channel’s spirit of community that’s P2P, as in person-to-person.

I’m referring to a recently launched non-profit community called MSP Well dedicated to connecting MSPs and others in the managed services ecosystem to mental health resources.

And really, could there be an ecosystem more in need of something like this? Running a managed services practice is a relentlessly-paced pressure cooker of a job held by people who spend their days, nights, and weekends taking care of clients, employees, spouses, and children—everyone, in fact, but themselves.

“If you don’t take care of yourself, how are you going to take care of others?” asks Larry Meador (pictured), channel chief at data security posture management/attack surface management vendor Cavelo, who now moonlights as MSP Well’s executive advisor for strategy and communities. It’s a seemingly obvious question that MSPs, like many others, try hard to avoid.

“Talking about mental health and admitting that you yourself perhaps have a challenge is one of those things that especially men don’t want to admit,” Meador says. “Traditionally it’s seen as a sign of weakness, so people don’t want to talk about it.”

Until recently, those people included Cavelo CEO James Mignacca, who was trying as so many of us do to muscle his way through stress and depression all alone.

“He just happened to open up to me one day at a conference, and I just sat there and listened,” Meador says. “A few weeks later, he was like, ‘You know what? That was the best thing that could have ever happened. I just needed someone to listen to me and just tell me I’m not crazy.’”

A few months after that he broached the possibility of helping others in the industry experience the same relief. “I said, ‘I think it’d be a fantastic thing,’” Meador recalls.

So did Joe Ussia, CEO of Canadian MSP Infinite IT, who quickly signed on to co-found MSP Well alongside Mignacca. An extensive set of advisors soon volunteered to help as well. Their mission is to connect members in need to information, advice, and peers.

“Every single one of us has something going on,” Meador says. “All we want to do is facilitate a place for them to go and get the help that they perhaps haven’t sought out before.”

It does that free of charge, he adds, noting that the organization is self-funded by its founders and advisors for now. Mignacca and Ussia hope to get financial support from vendors and other sponsors in the future, and Meador’s optimistic they’ll succeed given the enthusiasm the initiative has inspired since its launch week before last.

“We knew that this would have legs out of the gate. We didn’t realize it would go sprinting out of the gate,” he says. “It’s gone viral.”

Which shouldn’t actually surprise anyone familiar with that strange, wonderful spirit of community I referred to before, and which animates MSPs and their vendors in ways that people in other professions would have trouble recognizing.

“We always talk about how unique this channel is, but I don’t think people really understand just how truly unique this channel is,” Meador says. “We’re all one big, happy, dysfunctional family.”

Share Channelholic

The thing about communities like GTIA is that the members have a pretty good idea of who’s there to give and who’s there mostly to take. The same goes for the MSP community more broadly in relation to vendors. People can tell who means it when they say they’re committed to partner success and who says it because it sounds good. They reward vendors in the former camp with their business and loyalty.

The latest evidence came our way last week courtesy of Slide, the BCDR startup founded by Datto veterans Austin McChord and Michael Fass, which you’ve read about here a few times since its first product reached market last February. The company made headlines last week in conjunction with a $70 million Series B funding round and the revelation that its nearly 1,000 MSP partners have sold roughly 4,000 devices in about 13 months.

Slide’s leadership is very proud of those devices, but they’re also quick to describe them as part of a larger, culture-level commitment to MSPs at the company.

“We spent almost two years in the lab building the tech that is delivered through Slide,” Fass (pictured) says. “That’s not because we were curious. It’s because we’re passionate. It’s because we care about MSPs, we are MSP focused, and we bring every ounce of passion that we can to the project.”

There’s no way to know for sure, of course, but I’d wager heavily that the degree to which MSPs feel that passion, in and beyond Slide’s products, has a lot to do with how Slide attracted 1,000 partners—a milestone that MSP favorite NinjaOne needed 18 months to reach—in a touch over a year.

Fass points to several ways MSPs can see Slide’s “deeply empathetic” approach to MSPs in action, including its month-to-month pricing (something MSPs love and few vendors offer) and its refusal to sell direct to end users, even when (as actually happened not long ago) one of them tries to place a 250-appliance order.

“Regardless of the deal size, what was important to us was holding to that core value,” says Carlson Choi, Slide’s COO. “Even if we lost the bid, right? It’s the right thing to do for the channel.”

Interestingly enough, VC fund General Catalyst, which led Slide’s Series B, specifically called out the company’s commitment to doing right by the channel as a reason for its willingness to invest in the company.

“Michael, Austin and the team understand the MSP community at a foundational level and are rebuilding a critical category with modern architecture and long-term conviction,” said General Catalyst partner Mark Crane in the press release announcing the funding round.

Fass calls the scale of that round a sign that despite turmoil, trouble, and uncertainty in various corners of private capital, investors remain bullish on managed services.

“The investor community is seeing that there is a massive untapped market for great technology delivered by MSPs through MSPs to tens of thousands of small to medium-sized businesses across the globe,” he says. “We are, in some ways, a good proxy for that.”

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Wait, what about platformization?

Humility is an admirable trait in my opinion, so let me display a little here. I’ve made the case before that MSPs prefer platforms to point solutions, so much so that it’s a rough time right now to be a maker of stand-alone anything, and especially stand-alone data protection.

Unless, apparently, you’re Slide, which is and intends to remain 100% focused on backup.

“Our commitment is to build an MSP technology company focused on backup solutions,” Fass says.

Though not exactly stand-alone backup. “Our mandate is to backup data wherever it lives,” Fass says. “We’ve got a big horizon of solutions that we’ll be coming down the pike with over time.”

Sounds like a data protection platform along the lines of what Veeam’s building. Is it? If so, then maybe Slide will turn out to be less the exception that proves the platformization rule than simply yet another example of the platformization rule in action.

It’s a sign of how healthy the managed services sector is, all in all, that a double-digit growth projection is just a touch deflating.

And yet that was my first reaction to the news that the analyst team at Omdia is forecasting a 10% revenue bump for MSPs this year in their 2026 MSP Trends and Predictions Report.

Actually, to dial up the disappointment factor a bit: a) the prediction is for 10% revenue growth in a best-case scenario, and b) they also expect overall IT spending to rise 10.2%. Which means that in a departure from recent trends, managed services growth will slightly trail the rest of the IT industry overall.

If everything goes as well as possible, that is. It’s conceivable, though unlikely, that MSP top lines grow a mere five to six percent.

“Which I think would essentially be flat if you count inflation in prices and acquisition-related growth,” says Robin Ody, Omdia’s head of MSP research, during an appearance on the latest episode of the podcast I co-host. This is the first time he’s ever made best- and worst-case predictions, Ody noted during that conversation, but then again it’s also the first time he’s made predictions of any kind under conditions quite this resistant to forecasting.

“Around the world, we’re seeing significant difficulties from an end customer perspective in terms of budget planning for the next year, because people don’t necessarily know where markets are going to be, they don’t necessarily know where GDP is going, and they don’t necessarily know where the growth is coming from,” Ody (pictured) observes.

They don’t know where tariffs will be, where interest rates and inflation are going, what gas will cost, and where the hardware makers they buy from will get DRAM, assuming they can get it at all, either.

All of that is beyond any MSP’s control, of course, but there’s a longer-term issue very much in their control that dovetails with a lot of what I’ve been talking about in recent months. Revenue will rise 10% for MSPs in aggregate this year, but at a range of rates for MSPs individually. And according to Ody, the distance between the top of that range and the bottom is growing wider.

“Where previously you may have expected more and more of the partners to actually be growing at or close to the market rate, I think we’re actually seeing a bifurcation between the haves and the have-nots,” he says.

At a high level, what the haves have that the have-nots lack is a business model aligned with where managed services have been headed since even before N-able’s John Pagliuca first predicted a have/have-not split among MSPs here in Channelholic. Pricing on commoditized last-generation network, endpoint, and cloud management services has hit a ceiling that it’s unlikely to break through any time soon, Ody notes. As a result, the best way for MSPs to grow profits as well as revenue is to offer next-generation services valuable enough to command strong margins.

“You have to have managed security services capability. You have to have advisory services around compliance and regulation. You have to have capability around AI management, particularly from the vertical requirement of each customer,” Ody says. “It’s easier said than done.”

Indeed. Not every MSP can afford to develop all those capabilities and not every end user can afford to buy them, especially at a time when they don’t know what everything else is going to cost them.

“There are relatively few customers that are ready to spend at the levels that essentially create profitability for MSPs, [and] the number of partners that can go after those customers is relatively low,” Ody says.

That fortunate minority, however, will probably do better than 10% growth this year. The less fortunate majority is probably in for single-digit growth or worse.

“This is why I think we’re starting to see a difference between the haves and the have-nots,” Ody says.

It’s also one more thing for the smaller MSPs likely to be overrepresented among the have-nots to worry about amid the rise of very (in some cases extremely) large competitors.

More good reasons for MSPs to take AI seriously

A few other data points in that new Omdia study are worth calling out before we move on to other topics:

1. You’ll note that I carefully called making money on next-generation services the best way for MSPs to grow profits just now, as opposed to the only way. That’s because spending less on the services they already deliver helps too.

This is the logic behind the many AI-powered service desk automation startups coming into existence these days and the investments more established vendors like ConnectWise and Kaseya are making in similar capabilities. Omdia’s research suggests that users of those technologies are seeing real results, as in a 15% to 25% technician productivity improvement and a 40% to 70% reduction in ticket resolution times. According to Ody, the more you spend your time resolving easy tickets, like password resets, the closer you’ll come to the 70% end of that spectrum.

2. Up to 70% efficiency gains help explain why AI service desk solutions will be one of two top-growing vendor offerings for MSPs this year, according to Omdia. Here are some numbers that explain why AI SOC solutions will be the other.

• Thanks in part to AI assistance, the average time cybercriminals need to break out beyond an initial post-breach foothold has shrunk to 29 minutes, according to CrowdStrike’s 2026 Global Threat Report, which further says that the fastest breakout time last year was just 27 seconds.

• When the security professionals polled by analyst firm Futurum for a recently published N-able study were asked to name their top hurdles for resolving security vulnerabilities and incidents, alert fatigue and lack of skills tied for first place.

• Awareness of MFA as a cyber hygiene best practice among consumers and commercial end users has risen from 52% in 2021 to 77% last year, according to the National Cybersecurity Alliance, yet actual use of MFA has dropped to 53% from a peak of 94% in 2022, perhaps because 25% of people believed losing money online was unavoidable back then and 31% hold that expectation now.

In other words, there are more threats than before, they’re moving faster, they’re overwhelming understaffed security teams with alerts, and their intended victims are getting increasingly fatalistic about the dangers they face. I’m oversimplifying, of course, but it sure sounds like it’s going to take a lot of automated AI SOC horsepower to get us through that.

Plus a lot of services from MSPs and MSSPs, which is why Omdia expects managed security spending to climb 14% this year and MDR spending to rise 13%.

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Why take my word for it on all this?

Ody speaks for himself about his 2026 MSP predictions in the latest episode of the podcast I co-host, MSP Chat. Or click the logo below to hear a whole lot of other industry thought leaders and hotshots share their take on managed services, AI, security, M&A, and more.

Do NOT call Certinia’s solution a PSA platform

Officially, Certinia makes a PSA solution. Just don’t let Prasad Narasimhan Sulur catch you saying as much.

“I don’t love the way the market defines the word,” or at least the way MSPs do, says Sulur, formerly a senior partner at Bain & Co. and now Certinia’s chief business officer as of about a month ago. PSA solutions like ConnectWise PSA and Datto Autotask help MSPs manage their help desk. Solutions like Certinia’s help a wider range of IT services organizations manage projects.

“It’s actually two completely different markets,” Sulur (pictured) says, and conflating them can leave MSPs thinking they don’t need a solution like Certinia’s. Which they probably do, I’d argue, if they intend to become one of those next-generation MSPs Ody speaks of.

Sulur understands managed service providers, PSA solutions, and Kaseya for that matter, better than most C-suite executives at enterprise software makers, as regular readers discovered last October when he spoke with Channelholic about agentic AI pricing models following an onstage appearance at Kaseya’s 2025 DattoCon event in Miami. But MSPs are at best a small portion of the market he’s targeting, which is IT service providers with a lot of complex work to do delivering projects.

“They have to create the opportunity. They have to staff the opportunity. They have to make sure the project is progressing the right way,” Sulur says. Then there’s billing, revenue forecasting, and much more. Certinia’s solution, he continues, uses AI to simplify all that and transform the services business in the process.

“If you use AI correctly, the same project that used to cost a million dollars might cost $500,000 or $200,000,” Sulur says, allowing you to charge less, make more, or both. You can also complete projects faster, he adds, noting that one Certinia user went from executing 30 projects a month to 300.

On the other hand, delivering services at those prices and velocity poses challenges of its own. “Your revenue and billing model changes,” Sulur says, “and your cost profile changes. You have human people who previously used to do time and expense. You have AI costs coming in. You have software platform costs coming in. You have data costs.”

Helping service providers manage all of that, along with the resources, expenses, timelines, milestones, and more associated with the projects themselves, at scale and high speed, is what Certinia’s software is designed to do. You’ll be hard-pressed to find other enterprise applications similarly tailored to the things services organizations struggle with, Sulur adds.

“CRM is built for product-oriented companies,” he says. “ERPs are built for product-oriented companies.”

And PSA solutions, one might add, are built for ticket-oriented companies. Yet as Omdia just helped us appreciate, closing tickets is heavily commoditized, low-growth, low-margin work. AI and cybersecurity projects are among the next-generation services MSPs looking to escape that trap must provide, and they’ll need a different kind of platform to do it.

Certinia offers such a platform, as does Rocketlane as of a few days ago. Moovila, a company I’ve written about before, is in that category too and focuses specifically on MSPs. Sulur encourages anyone who wants to collect the productivity benefits of AI management functionality and the money-making benefits of AI project work to adopt one of those systems, or another one like them.

“MSPs have to be very forward-thinking on this topic,” he says.

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BetterTracker’s big bet on brutal truth

Kevin Lancaster has been up to a lot in recent years. The common thread unifying all of it, arguably, is an effort to convert radical honesty into profit.

Consider: Shortly after selling ID Agent, the security vendor he founded roughly a decade ago, to Kaseya in 2019 Lancaster launched Channel Program, a company dedicated to collecting and disseminating unvarnished MSP product reviews.

Then a few years later, Channel Program launched NaviStack, a tool that in the process of helping MSPs catalog all the vendors they do business with also helped them—and everyone else—see who the real leaders are in various product categories, versus who claims that status.

That was followed last year by a tool called BetterTracker that, by importing data from an MSP’s bank accounts and credit cards, showed a lot of people who took pride in financial discipline how much they were wasting every month not only on software they never use but on a whole bunch of other things to boot. Those people included Lancaster himself, who discovered during beta testing that he was spending $600 a month on a subscription he thought he’d canceled six months earlier.

And then, last week, the company renamed BetterTracker in response to that system’s unexpected success began publishing the StackMarket 250 Index, a sort of S&P 500 for the managed services world offering an extremely public look at the top five names in 50 product segments based on objective, anonymous adoption and month-over-month momentum data from close to 10,000 MSPs.

“We think it’s the first time that anybody’s ever shown in an impartial, unbiased way the true market share of these vendors,” Lancaster (pictured) says. “Some vendors might not be happy about it.”

They will, however, finally and definitively know exactly who their top competitors are. As will venture capital and private equity firms looking for rigorously empirical signals on who’s hot and not in product categories they wish to enter and MSPs hungry for something more than Reddit posts to go on when evaluating vendors too.

“We’re helping both sides make better decisions,” Lancaster says.

Beginning Monday, meanwhile, BetterTracker subscribers from the vendor side of that divide and their private capital backers will have access to far deeper market insights via the Strata Intelligence Suite, a new source of brutal truth that displays not only a more extensive list of category leaders but what their market share is and whether it’s trending up or down. Based on the user product reviews BetterTracker collects, the system also shows vendors how MSPs score them on key product attributes.

A similar offering for MSPs due within the next two months will help them compare the tools they use to what their peers use. “We can show them based on their size what their stack should look like,” Lancaster says.

That latest instance of tough love will be followed by yet another soon when the StackMarket 250 begins gradually evolving into the StackMarket 1000.

“We have pretty deep data now on about 200 different product categories,” Lancaster says. “Over the next probably month and a half, you’ll start to see us put in at least another 50 to 75.”

Over on The Business of Tech…

Podcast host extraordinaire Dave Sobel says that AI has made speed a scarce resource for MSPs.

“Your clients are not buying ‘ticket closure.’ They’re buying throughput with accountability. If your operating model is optimized for queues and approvals, you will be seen as the thing slowing the business down—and the business will work around you.”

Much more on that and other topics you care about right here.

Also worth noting

• Wish I could have been there to see the launch! ThreatLocker now has a zero trust network and cloud access platform designed to prevent credential-based cyberattacks by enforcing least-privilege and zero-trust access controls.

• Cork Cyber’s new software installer scripts are part of a broader expansion from cyber warranties to continuous cyber risk intelligence and automated remediation.

• The Insurability FastTrack Program, from Sophos and Spektrum Labs, aims to help Sophos MDR users improve their cyber risk posture and qualify more easily for cyber insurance coverage.

• The three new AI agents from IRONSCALES are designed to help security teams detect and respond to advanced phishing attacks and emerging forms of agent-driven cybercrime.

• Keeper Security has added integrations with Atlassian Jira to help organizations unify privileged access governance with security incident response workflows.

• Forcepoint’s latest data security functionality includes the Aria AI assistant and expanded endpoint data protection designed to safeguard data across distributed environments.

• I wrote about the role distributors play in accelerating AI and cloud adoption here. GTDC has written about it now too in a new white paper.

• Monjur’s new Monjur Pilot is an AI-powered assistant designed to help MSPs answer contract questions, automate redlining, and manage negotiations faster and with less risk.

• Proofpoint’s AI-enabled Discovery & Archive suite for SMBs is designed to simplify compliance, data retention, and e-discovery with automated intelligence.

• Cato Networks has shipped an auto-adaptive threat prevention engine designed to automatically adjust security defenses based on network behavior and emerging threats.

• Teramind’s new AI governance platform provides tools to monitor, control, and manage risks associated with autonomous AI systems.

• Salesforce has introduced a redesigned partner program designed to offer value-based rewards, expanded enablement, and new incentives aligned around customer success and AI-driven innovation.

• Alkira’s new partner program aims to turn the network infrastructure-as-a-service vendor into a “partner-first company”.

• Roland Palmer is the new CISO at JumpCloud.

• Chad Reese is the new SVP of global channels at Vectra AI.

• Rohit Chakravarthy is the new chief accounting officer at Pax8.

Kevin Lancaster has been up to a lot in recent years. The common thread unifying all of it, arguably, is an effort to convert radical honesty into profit.

Consider: Shortly after selling ID Agent, the security vendor he founded roughly a decade ago, to Kaseya in 2019 Lancaster launched Channel Program, a company dedicated to collecting and disseminating unvarnished MSP product reviews.

Then a few years later, Channel Program launched NaviStack, a tool that in the process of helping MSPs catalog all the vendors they do business with also helped them—and everyone else—see who the real leaders are in various product categories, versus who claims that status.

That was followed last year by a tool called BetterTracker that, by importing data from an MSP’s bank accounts and credit cards, showed a lot of people who took pride in financial discipline how much they were wasting every month not only on software they never use but on a whole bunch of other things to boot. Those people included Lancaster himself, who discovered during beta testing that he was spending $600 a month on a subscription he thought he’d canceled six months earlier.

And then, last week, the company renamed BetterTracker in response to that system’s unexpected success began publishing the StackMarket 250 Index, a sort of S&P 500 for the managed services world offering an extremely public look at the top five names in 50 product segments based on objective, anonymous adoption and month-over-month momentum data from close to 10,000 MSPs.

“We think it’s the first time that anybody’s ever shown in an impartial, unbiased way the true market share of these vendors,” Lancaster (pictured) says. “Some vendors might not be happy about it.”

They will, however, finally and definitively know exactly who their top competitors are. As will venture capital and private equity firms looking for rigorously empirical signals on who’s hot and not in product categories they wish to enter and MSPs hungry for something more than Reddit posts to go on when evaluating vendors too.

“We’re helping both sides make better decisions,” Lancaster says.

Beginning Monday, meanwhile, BetterTracker subscribers from the vendor side of that divide and their private capital backers will have access to far deeper market insights via the Strata Intelligence Suite, a new source of brutal truth that displays not only a more extensive list of category leaders but what their market share is and whether it’s trending up or down. Based on the user product reviews BetterTracker collects, the system also shows vendors how MSPs score them on key product attributes.

A similar offering for MSPs due within the next two months will help them compare the tools they use to what their peers use. “We can show them based on their size what their stack should look like,” Lancaster says.

That latest instance of tough love will be followed by yet another soon when the StackMarket 250 begins gradually evolving into the StackMarket 1000.

“We have pretty deep data now on about 200 different product categories,” Lancaster says. “Over the next probably month and a half, you’ll start to see us put in at least another 50 to 75.”