Podcast appearances and mentions of Ingram Micro

The episode reveals a structural transfer of forecasting and adoption risk from AI vendors to managed service providers (MSPs) and IT service organizations. Five companies—CyberFOX, Intezer, Sophos, Flamingo, and Charles IT—have taken distinct strategies to expand AI capabilities within the channel, underscoring a coordinated attempt to shift the uncertainty of AI demand, usage, and revenue forecasting off vendors' balance sheets and onto service providers.A central data point comes from Gartner's survey of over 1,300 technology leaders at companies above $50 million in revenue: fewer than one in four have successfully scaled an AI project across business units, even as 85% plan to increase AI investment and many cannot quantify current spending. Analysts note a move away from flat-rate subscriptions toward usage-based AI pricing, significantly increasing projected IT costs through 2035 for customers. The episode highlights that vendors are pre-building AI channel programs with the expectation that third-party providers will absorb both commitment risk and customer deployment burdens.Supporting evidence includes announcement details: CyberFOX's new North American deal with Ingram Micro, Intezer's launch of a comprehensive partner portal, Sophos's OpenAI integration targeting MSPs, Flamingo's open-source AI agent platform, and Charles IT's acquisition of Descent, an AI-native MSP. Spending data from Ramp and adoption surveys from the Census Bureau and Futurum Group further illustrate the gap between stated AI success and actual operational adoption, elucidating systemic uncertainty and reporting bias in AI project returns.For MSPs and IT leaders, the implications are clear: the structural shift means channel programs increasingly pass fixed commitments and usage volatility to service firms while providing little guaranteed demand. Practical safeguards include independently counting and verifying clients with active, process-integrated AI adoption before entering distribution contracts. Defining specific, outcome-focused criteria for adoption can protect against being tied to overambitious vendor forecasts, allowing providers to negotiate terms on verifiable demand rather than projections that vendors themselves could not convert.00:00 Everyone Is Selling To You 03:41 The Forecast That Didn't Convert06:29 Nobody Can Prove The Demand09:38 Why Do We Care?Supported by: GoTo(LogMeIn) Pax8

Twenty-five years after September 11, I still believe that day has important lessons to teach us about fear, preparation, and leadership. This time, Michelle Abraham from AmplifYou takes over the hosting seat and interviews me about my experience escaping the World Trade Center with my guide dog, Roselle. We talk about why knowing the building and its emergency procedures mattered, how I worked to keep fear from taking control, and why focusing on what I could control helped me keep moving. I also share how September 11 changed the direction of my life, led me into professional speaking, and helped shape the Unstoppable Mindset philosophy I continue to share today. Highlights: 02:30 – The ordinary morning that became September 11. 08:04 – How preparation shaped Michael's response when the tower was hit. 18:34 – How Michael and David helped keep panic from taking over. 27:15 – Why trusting Roselle mattered during the collapse. 31:38 – The lesson of focusing only on what you can control. 41:52 – How September 11 helped shape the Unstoppable Mindset philosophy. About the Host: Michael Hingson is a New York Times best-selling author, international lecturer, and Chief Vision Officer for accessiBe. Michael, blind since birth, survived the 9/11 attacks with the help of his guide dog Roselle. This story is the subject of his best-selling book, Thunder Dog. Michael gives over 100 presentations around the world each year speaking to influential groups such as Exxon Mobile, AT&T, Federal Express, Scripps College, Rutgers University, Children's Hospital, and the American Red Cross just to name a few. He is Ambassador for the National Braille Literacy Campaign for the National Federation of the Blind and also serves as Ambassador for the American Humane Association's 2012 Hero Dog Awards. https://michaelhingson.com https://www.facebook.com/michael.hingson.author.speaker/ https://twitter.com/mhingson https://www.youtube.com/user/mhingson https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelhingson/ Thanks for listening! Thanks so much for listening to our podcast! If you enjoyed this episode and think that others could benefit from listening, please share it using the social media buttons on this page. Do you have some feedback or questions about this episode? Leave a comment in the section below! Subscribe to the podcast If you would like to get automatic updates of new podcast episodes, you can subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher. You can subscribe in your favorite podcast app. You can also support our podcast through our tip jar https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/unstoppable-mindset . Leave us an Apple Podcasts review Ratings and reviews from our listeners are extremely valuable to us and greatly appreciated. They help our podcast rank higher on Apple Podcasts, which exposes our show to more awesome listeners like you. If you have a minute, please leave an honest review on Apple Podcasts. Transcription Notes: Michael Hingson  00:00 Everyone, I am Michael Hingson, the host of Unstoppable Mindset. You've heard my voice for the last 471 episodes, but I'm calling you all out today and asking you to listen to this because we're going to make a special announcement now regarding the next four episodes, starting with 472. We're going to help commemorate the historic events of September 11, 2001. Yes, they're definitely historic, although not necessarily the most positive things that have ever happened. But as many of you may know, I was in the World Trade Center working on September 11, 2001, on the 78th floor of Tower One, and escaped with my guide dog. I've delivered a speech about that, which we put in the first episode of this podcast series back in August of 2021. But this Friday, episode 472 is going to have an updated speech that I delivered just a few years ago at the Marshfield, Missouri Cherry Blossom Festival. That festival is a yearly event celebrating different kinds of things that have happened in American history, and I was invited to come and speak, which I did. I'm going to put that speech up for you as episode 472. I think you'll find it enlightening. It'll teach you something about blindness and blind people. It'll tell you my story, and it'll give you some inspiration that I hope you will find helpful. Next Tuesday, september 8, Michelle Abraham is going to interview me. Michelle is with Amplify You, the company that does all of our back office stuff and helps me with the editing and other things regarding the podcast. Michelle owns her own podcast, and she is going to interview me about September 11th and other kinds of things relating to what I've learned and things that have happened over the past 25 years. She's also going to be putting this up on her podcast Amplify You, so you can find us in a lot of different places. On September 11th, I'm going to chat with Bob Ellis. Bob was in the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, and had literally just walked out the door of the Pentagon when the plane crashed into the Pentagon and did the things and the damage that it did, and of course generated all the things that occurred at the Pentagon. On the 15th of September, I'm going to come back and have a conversation with all of you about lessons that I've learned over the past 25 years, and just reminisce a little bit about all of that. While the podcast is occurring on September 11th, I will be actually in Kilgore, Texas, doing a speech about September 11th. So lots of things going on, I hope you listen to these episodes. I hope that you'll tell everyone that you can about them. I really enjoy all of the support that you've given us over the years, and we're going to continue to do things with Unstoppable Mindset. And of course, as always, if you'd like to come on or know anyone who would, please let us know. We're always looking for guests. Thanks very much. We'll see you on Friday with the first of these four episodes. What if the biggest thing holding you back isn't what's in front of you, but rather what you believe? Welcome to Unstoppable Mindset, where inclusion, diversity, and the unexpected meet. I'm your host, Michael Hingson, speaker, author, and advocate for inclusion and possibilities. This podcast explores how the beliefs we carry shape the way we live, lead, and connect with others. Each week, I talk with people who challenge assumptions, face adversity head-on, and show what's possible when we choose curiosity over fear. Together, we focus on mindset, resilience, and the small shifts that lead to meaningful change. Let's get started. Hi, everyone, and welcome to another episode of Unstoppable Mindset. When and today is a little bit different than what we normally do because I'm going to be the guest on the podcast, Michelle Abraham from Amplify You, who is also putting this particular podcast episode on her podcast, but Michelle is going to mainly be interviewing me. As many of you should know, this is the 25th commemoration or remembrance of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, and we thought it would be very relevant to to spend some time on a few podcast episodes talking about that a little bit. Michael Hingson  04:46 For those of you that listened to the last episode before this one, you heard me deliver my speech talking about what happened to me on september 11. I used. A speech that we we delivered just a couple of years ago. So it's a little bit different than the one that, if you listen to the initial episodes of Unstoppable Mindset, you heard way back 472, 473 episodes ago. But this one still tells the the same story, which is which is kind of cool, and so we're going to talk about that, and we'll talk about our next episode, which will be delivered on September 11th, and that one will be a conversation between me and Bob Ellis, who was in the Pentagon on September 11th, and so that'll be a little bit fun, and then we'll talk about some other stuff as well. But I'm going to turn this over to Michelle because she's the the interviewer, the the boss, and I'm just a guest today. So hi, Michelle. Amplifyou   05:50 Hey, Michael. Well, thanks for being a guest on your own show today for us. It's great to be here with you, and we've been with you all along the Instoppable Mindset Show. It's been really fun to work with you on this show, and so I know we've had we've recorded episodes around your story, and our listeners would have just listening to your keynote. But I would like to tap into Michael 25 years later. When you think back of the morning of September 11, 2001, what comes to your mind? It Michael Hingson  06:23 was a typical day. We we did have a thunderstorm about 1230 that morning, and Roselle, my fifth guide dog, who was my guide dog at the time, was afraid of thunder. She had developed this phobia. The theory, basically, about dogs being afraid of thunder is it's not just the thunder sounds, but it's also the fact that the dogs have a static charge that builds up on their fur, and that gives them a tingly and kind of a strange feeling, and between that and the thunder, they learn to equate the two, and that just causes a lot of angst. And in Roselle's case, at 1230 in the morning, we weren't even hearing a thunderstorm, but she started getting really nervous, and so I took her down to my office. And as I was going downstairs, we started hearing thunder, and the storm actually came right over our house. So I love to say God clearly has a sense of humor of some sort because the thunder-I had never heard thunder like I heard That morning, that is, literally, it came right over our house, so we heard what were explosion sounds. It was it was different than I had ever heard before, but I didn't have any message that said you shouldn't go into the World Trade Center or go to work that day, and I had been planning on going to work that day because we were going to be conducting some sales training seminars, teaching about 50 people from a bunch of resellers under the auspices of Ingram Micro, our major distributor. We were going to be teaching them how to sell our products, so I was going to be there. David Frank, a colleague from our corporate office, was going to be there. He was flying. He flew in to deal with the pricing and distribution models that the Ingram Micro salespeople and resellers would be dealing with, but I was going to be doing the majority of the seminar. Well, anyway, at 1230, I took Roselle down and we stayed there in my office at home until 2o'clock, and then the thunderstorm had passed away and Roselle had calmed down. So we went back up and got to sleep, and woke up at five in the morning, which is what I originally planned on doing. I'd actually planned on going in a little bit earlier than usual, just to be able to spend more time preparing. And I got to the New Jersey train station in Westfield, the New Jersey Transit train station, at somewhere around 615, and I had been planning on taking a 6:18 train into the city. And at about 6:20 or 6:21, train having not arrived, an announcement came over the PA system that there was a problem with the train, and another train would be coming. The next train would be there in a little bit, and we could get on it, and and all that. The day was a calm day. It was a nice autumn day. was great. No indication of of anything to worry about. And I didn't read anything into trains not working, much less the thunderstorm before. So when the train finally arrived, I got on the train and we went into Newark. Then I caught the train that takes me directly to the World Trade Center. It's called Path Train. Path stands for Port Authority Trans Hudson, and that train went straight in from Newark Penn Station with the well to the World Trade Center, and so I got there. And by the time all of a sudden done, I got there at the normal time I would get there rather than getting there 20 or 25 minutes earlier. Go figure, but I went upstairs and I went to the office and there was a person standing outside the door with a big cart. We had ordered breakfast for all the early arrivals, and so I took him in and showed him where to set up, and then I went in. And got my laptop projector and other things that I needed to be able to set up to do the presentations, and went in and set all that up. And then David Frank, my colleague from our corporate office, got there about 8o'clock and helped do the final things, like making sure the projector was totally appropriately aimed. His aim is better than than mine was, anyway. Michael Hingson  10:21 So again, everything was proceeding just as we expected it to do. David came with some early arrivals from Ingram Micro, and we put them in the in the conference room where we were going to be doing the presentations, and the the cart was all set up so they could have breakfast. As I love to tell people, best ham and cheese croissants in the city-they're still good, as far as I remember-but all was was going well, and so we we were getting prepared. And the last thing we had to do before the seminars were to start was to create a list of all the people who would be attending that day and put it on letterhead. We had a spreadsheet with all the names, but we had to put it on letterhead and then fax the list on letterhead to the Port Authority security people so that they would have a list that they would recognize was legitimate. And then when people came into the World Trade Center, they'd go up to the security counter, they'd show their ID, and their names would be compared with a list, and if their name was on the list, then they would just be given a badge with a a barcode where they could go to the appropriate elevator and come up to our floor. So that was kind of the last thing we had to do before the seminars were to start. Amplifyou   11:34 Kind of sounds like business as a norm and business as usual kind of morning for you. It Michael Hingson  11:40 was. It was a total business as usual morning, by every stretch of the imagination. No clue about anything else. Amplifyou   11:48 So, did you guys begun your seminar when the the troy towers were hit? Michael Hingson  11:55 No, the seminar was supposed to start at 9o'clock, and literally, I was reaching for letterhead to print the list at about 845, 846. When suddenly we heard a muffled kind of explosion, the building sort of shuddered. And then, if you imagine my hand as the tower, literally as I'm tipping my hand towards the camera, that's exactly what the tower did. It started tipping and tipping and tipping, and we moved maybe about 2025 feet before the building stopped. Now the thing is that I had spent time learning all I could know about the World Trade Center, learning what to do in an emergency, learning what the fire department did, learning what the police would do, learning where the emergency exits were, learning about all the emergency evacuation procedures, and the reason that I learned all of that was I had opened this office for Quantum Corporation, and I was the Mid-Atlantic region sales manager. I was the leader. I was going to be the person who would be running the office, and I knew that I needed to do what any other leader would do difference being I didn't see stuff, so I needed to learn rather than rely on signs and other things that most sighted people would do. I actually had to learn everything to be able to function. But the difference is that by doing that, what I didn't really realize was I was creating a mindset that says you know what's going on, you know what to do. I knew why the building tipped because tall buildings like that are built with expansion joints. They're made to be buffeted in windstorms, and I had felt that happen many times at the World Trade Center. If there were a wind, we could feel it sort of shake a little bit. But who would have ever thought that somebody would fly into the building with a plane load of jet fuel, 36,000 pounds of jet fuel? But nevertheless, I knew all that I could learn about everything. I learned where different offices and built and and organizations were in the World Trade Center. I had explored the kiosks on the first floor and the shopping mall, so I knew where all the phone kiosks were and where other things were. I knew where the restaurants were, so that if we ever had guests in and we were doing demonstrations and then we were going to be negotiating contracts, we decided to take a break for lunch. I could say, "What kind of lunch do you want? "Oh, you want a deli sandwich? There's this great restaurant downstairs called Fine and Shapiro. Let me take you there, and I would take them. I would lead the way because I couldn't very well say, "Oh, I don't know how to get anywhere. I'm blind. Someone's going to have to lead me. How's that going to work a couple of hours later if we're negotiating multi-million dollar contracts? I needed to literally work, and I don't mean this in a negative way, but from a position of strength. I needed to know all of this in order to be able to do my job as the appropriate leader of the office, and so I learned all of that and put all of that together for whatever was going. On in the World Trade Center at any given time, and so when the building was struck and and the building was tipping, I was standing in my doorway, the doorway between my office and the other parts of of our facility, and the building tipped. David was holding on to my desk as it was tipping. Roselle was asleep under my desk, and finally, David and I were speculating about what was going on. He thought maybe it was an earthquake, and I said no because the building's not shaking around; it's going in one direction. I thought maybe it was just some sort of an explosion, which in a sense it was. But he said it didn't sound like it, and it didn't. But the issue was that we were 18 floors on average below where the tower was hit and on the other side of the building, but that was a calculation that came later. But the bottom line is that the building tipped and then it stopped, and it came back the other way and got vertical again. Amplifyou   15:54 That's incredible! Wow. Michael Hingson  15:56 And as soon as it got vertical, I went back into my office. I met Roselle coming out from under my desk. I took her leash. I told her to heal, which meant to come around on my left side, which she did. She sat down, and about that time, the building dropped straight down about six feet. Amplifyou   16:10 Wow! Michael Hingson  16:10 Now, the reason it dropped is because tall buildings like that are constructed with expansion joints, which is why that it tipped in the first place, and the building didn't break off, but then when it got to be vertical again, after a few seconds, literally the expansion joints contracted and the building went back to its normal configuration, which is exactly what happened. Amplifyou   16:32 Gosh, interesting like technology that that's built in there. I know you you never really I would never known that. Had you not explain that in the story? That's very interesting. That expands like that, and then the six foot drop was then it contracting Michael Hingson  16:47 again. The expansion joints were going back to normal configuration. Amplifyou   16:50 Interesting. If Speaker 1  16:55 you enjoy unstoppable mindset and would like to help us continue bringing these conversations to you each week. We've created a way for you to support the show. Your contribution helps us cover production costs and continue sharing stories, insights, and ideas that inspire people to live with purpose and possibility. If supporting the podcast feels right for you, you'll find the link in the show notes. Thank you for being part of the Unstoppable Mindset Community. Amplifyou   17:28 And so there's so then what happened? So take us to the next steps. Michael Hingson  17:32 So the building dropped about six feet, and then David turned from holding onto my desk and looked out the window, looking south toward Battery Park, and he started shouting, "Oh my God, Mike! There's fire and smoke above us! There are millions of pieces of burning paper falling outside our window! And I could hear stuff going by our window, and I was wondering what it was because normally the sound was sort of like what window washers would do if they were on their tracks washing windows, but that wasn't what was going on. It was debris falling, and David was describing it: millions of pieces of burning paper falling outside our window, and he said, "We got to get out of here right now. And I said, "Slow down, David. We'll get out, but we're not going to rush. No, we got to get out of here right now. Slow down, David. We'll get out. Don't worry about it. And finally, I I said several times, "Slow down. He kept saying we got to get out of here right now, and then he used what I call the big line: "You don't understand. You can't see it. Well, first of all, I knew everything that David was seeing and saying because he was telling me about it. So I knew we had millions of pieces of burning paper. Clearly, he said, "There's fire and smoke above us, so the building's on fire. I had all that information, but the problem was that it wasn't what I wasn't seeing that was the issue; it was what David wasn't seeing. David wasn't seeing that sitting next to me was my guide dog Roselle, yawning and wagging her tail, going, "Who woke me up anyway? I was sleeping real good here, sports fans, and and Roselle was not reacting. I wasn't smelling anything that gave me an indication that we were in such peril that we had to run for our lives, and so I kept telling David to slow down. And finally, David did. He stopped. I said, "David, get our guests to the stairs. Do not let them take elevators, because I had learned, of course, that if the building's on fire anywhere, if fire gets into elevator shafts, then anybody in elevator cars is probably going to perish, which did happen. And so David took our guests out of our office, got them to the stairs, and I made it really clear: do not let them take elevators, because there could be fire in the elevator shafts. Well, he got them to the stairs, and then he came back. Meanwhile, I called my wife Karen to let her know that something had happened, or an explosion, or something. But we didn't know. People tell me all the time, even today. Well, of course you didn't know because you couldn't see it. You know, I think all these people who tell me I didn't know because I couldn't see it need to get a. The problem is they really don't know a whole lot about blind people. The airplane hit, on average, 18 floors above us. It hit between floors 93 and 99, so I just say 96, which is 18 floors above where we were in on the 78th floor. But it also hit on the other side of the building. It hit on the north side, and we were on the south side. The last time I checked, Superman and X-ray vision are fiction, and people can't really see through buildings, see through rebar and steel and concrete. The fact of the matter is that they no one knew what was going on. I didn't know, but other people did, and I'll prove that in a moment, but the fact of the matter is, you can't see through all that stuff. Blindness had nothing to do with it, but people keep saying, "Well, you didn't know because you couldn't see it. Well, yeah, well, we'll get to that. Anyway, David got our guest to the stairs. I called Karen. I told her that something had happened. We didn't know what. She wanted to know more, but there was nothing else I could tell her, and so we we parted. I just said, "I'll call you back as soon as I can, and by that, you know, the media hadn't even gotten the story yet. Michael Hingson  21:12 So I love to joke around and say that I beat Charlie Gibson in Good Morning America by eight minutes, but I still haven't gotten a Pulitzer Prize for it. But it's very disappointing. But anyway, so I disconnected with Karen. David came back. We swept the office. We went to the stairs, and we started down. Almost immediately, I began smelling an odor, and it was a familiar odor, but I couldn't quite place it. And it took me a while to realize I was smelling the fumes from burning jet fuel. I did a lot of traveling for my company, and so I was very used to what was in airports and the smells and the odors. But it took me like four floors to figure out that I was smelling burning jet fuel. Other people were speculating, wondering what happened, why were we evacuating, what was the building doing, why did it shake, and all that. And then I observed that I was smelling burning jet fuel, and other people said, "You're right. That's burning jet fuel. We must have been hit by an airplane. But you see, we didn't know. We had no clue. Eyesight had nothing to do with it. The fact is that we only figured out we were hit by an airplane because the blind guy realized he was smelling burning jet fuel, and so anyway, we went down the stairs. A couple of burn victims passed us along the way, and a woman, when we got down about 10 floors, stopped and she said, "I can't go on, and we're not going to make it out of here. And I literally just stopped and turned around and gave her a hug right there on the stairs. Roselle gave her some kisses, and other people stopped and joined us. And we all said, "Come on, you can keep going. You can do it. Let's go. And she was able to keep going as we went down the stairs. But we knew instinctively we had to make sure that panic didn't ensue on the stairs. Amplifyou   22:56 Right. Michael Hingson  22:57 We got to about the 50th floor, and then David suddenly said, and he had been getting quieter, but suddenly he said, "Mike, we're going to die. We're not going to make it out of here. And I said, in my best sharp voice, "Stop it, David. If Roselle and I can go down these stairs, so can you. And he told me that that brought him out of the funk that he was singing into. And he said, "I want to walk a floor below you, if it's okay, and I'll tell you whatever I see on the stairs. But I got to do something to get my mind off of worrying about all this stuff. Is that okay? And I said, sure. If that's what you need to do, go ahead. Did it really matter? Well, you know, it did to David, and that's all that really counted. But anyway, David walked a floor below us, and so when I got to the 48th floor, for example, I heard, "Hey, Mike, I'm on the 47th floor. All's good here. Going on down the stairs. We went down, and finally I got to the 45th floor. And David said, '44th floor is where I am. This is where the Port Authority cafeteria is. Not stopping. Going on down the stairs, and he did that all the way down the stairs. Why is that important? And why do I even mention it? Because we all did everything we could to keep panic from taking over on the stairs, and by definition, because David was just speaking up, "Hey, Mike, 42nd floor, all's good here, and just shouting up to me what he saw on the stairs and sounding confident. By definition, anyone who was in the sound within the sound of his voice heard someone who was sounding okay and just able to go down the stairs and wasn't seeing any problem, and so they focused on him, and that certainly had to help keep panic from ensuing on the stairs as we went down, and it's so often not even mentioned, but David had to do that for maybe hundreds or 1000s of people who could hear him all the way up and down the stairwell, and I think that's just one of the most important things that I remember about the day that David had to, by definition, help keep panic from going on on the stairs. Now, meanwhile, I was up. Encouraging Roselle, what a good dog, good girl, Roselle. Keep going, let's go, good dog, doing that all the way down the stairs. And I've had people come up to me at speeches that I've given ever since. For example, one in Kansas City, and a woman came up afterward, and she said, "I came into the stairwell on the 54th floor just as you passed by, and I heard you praising your dog and encouraging your dog and sounding very confident, I and other people just followed you because you sounded really good and you didn't sound like you had a problem at all and weren't afraid. We just followed you, so you know that's why I also know that what David was doing was so important because people focused on his voice. Amplifyou   25:42 How fascinating! Someone that was right behind you that day in the stairwell, too. Michael Hingson  25:46 Yeah, yeah. So we continued down. We got to the 30th floor, and that's where we met firefighters coming up. They wanted to help me go down the stairs, and I didn't want their help. I didn't need their help, first of all, but I didn't want their help because that would have meant we were always walking at least two abreast, and they were going to grab my arm and try to lift me as we were going downstairs and do other things that sighted people think you got to do if you're helping a quote a blind person go down the stairs. But there was a more important reason that I didn't want their help, and you know when the firefighter, the first guy, came up and he said, "We're going to send somebody with you. I kept saying, "No, don't do that. We don't need that. What I knew because of all that I had learned was that they were a team. They had to carry all their equipment up the stairs with them. Why? Where would you store it? Let's say you decided to store it on the 34th floor, and fire broke out on the 33rd floor. You'd never get to the equipment. They had to carry all their equipment up with them. They were a team, all 50 of those firefighters, and so I was not about to want to break up the team when, especially, I didn't need it anyway. And I I worked at getting them finally to focus, and I said, look, I got my guide dog here, and they started petting Roselle, and it wasn't the time to give them a lecture about don't pet a guide dog in harness. And by the way, don't pet a guide dog in harness. If you see a guide dog in harness, you can ask me if you can pet the dog, and if I have time, I will stop and I'll take the harness off because Roselle likes to relax, Alamo, my current guide dog, likes to relax. The dogs all love to relax, but if I don't have time, I'll say, "Look, we're kind of in a hurry, so sorry, but we just don't have time. But the firefighters were petting her, and it wasn't the time to give him a lecture about don't pet the guide dog and harness, and it wasn't the time to give him a lecture about don't worry about the blind guy just because he can't see and you can. The reality is that blindness isn't the problem; it's your attitudes about blindness that are more of the problem. But anyway, they finally agreed. When I finally said, "Look, I got my friend David over here who can see, and David and I are going down the stairs together, and they turn to David and they go, "You're with him. And David said, "Yeah, Lee Malone, he's fine. And mention all the hundreds Amplifyou   28:06 of people that are following you. Michael Hingson  28:08 Yeah, and and they all had to stop as we're talking to the firefighters. But anyway, so they eventually started going up the stairs, and I continued down. David reassumed his scouting position, and we followed David by a floor down the stairs, and and did what we needed to do, and then we we finally got to the first floor. Well, David did, and he said the water sprinklers are on. You're going to have to run through a curtain of water to get out of the stairwell, and the the reason there were sprinklers on is if there was fire in the stairwell, the water sprinklers would be keeping the fire from getting into the lobby. But if it were in the lobby, the sprinklers would be keeping the fire from getting into the stairwell. That's part of what was supposed to happen. Well, it it all worked perfectly. So David went through the curtain of water, and I got down to the first floor, and I took Roselle's harness and said forward and hop up and let's go. And we went through this curtain of water and came out the other side into the lobby of Tower One. There was a guy with a bullhorn going, "Go this way, no, no, don't go over that way, go this way, go to the central part of the building, don't go outside, no, no, don't go that way, go this way. And that was because that if they had gone outside, they would have been below where people were jumping, and you know who knows what else, so they didn't, and and they went to the central part of the building. We got out, and I was hearing the guy with the bullhorn. This guy comes up to David and me, and he said he's with the FBI, and he'll take us where we need to go. And I asked him what's going on. He said, "There's no time to tell you. I wish he had, but he didn't know me. He didn't know that information was what I really valued more than anything else, and I wasn't going to panic just because I heard information. But he took us through the complex and eventually up an escalator by the borders books, as far away from the towers as we could be, and then we got out. And as soon as we got out, David saw fire in Tower Two. We had no idea where that came from. We speculated that maybe our building, which had been tipping toward Tower Two, had its fire sort of jump across, maybe somehow. But we didn't know what was going on, and so we were told to leave the area, which we did. We went over to Broadway, which is again what we were told to do and told to get away from the complex, so we went over to Broadway and started walking north on Broadway. So as we were walking north, on my left side was the building, on my right side was Broadway. We're on the west side of Broadway as we're going north, and we passed several streets, and then after we passed all the well, we passed a number of streets, and we finally got to Vessi Street. And David said, "You know, we're very close to Tower Two. I want to take pictures of this fire I see in Tower Two. I said, "Okay. I took out my phone. I tried to call Karen. I couldn't get through. The circuits were busy, as we now know. Of course, people were saying goodbye to loved ones, but for me, I couldn't get through, so I put my phone away. And David was putting his camera away when a police officer yelled, "Get out of here! It's coming down now! And we heard this sound, as I describe it, as kind of a combination of a freight train and a waterfall. What we heard was Tower Two collapsing like 100 yards away from us. You could hear glass breaking and shattering, you could hear metal clattering, and then the white noise of Tower Two just collapsing straight down, which is exactly what it was supposed to do. David and everyone turned and ran. I lifted Roselle by the harness, turned her 180 degrees, and started running back the way I came. David was long gone. Michael Hingson  31:36 I got to the next street back that we had crossed a little while before, and that was Fulton Street. Turned right on Fulton to get more of a building between us and what was collapsing, and we ran about 25 yards and caught up to David. It turns out that we had gone the same way he went, but he had stopped realizing that he had left me and was going to come back and find me. But I found him first, and he apologized. I said, "Don't worry about it, David. Let's keep going. And we kept running. We got caught in all the dirt and the dust and the debris from Tower Two's collapse. As David said, he couldn't see his hand six inches in front of his nose. For my part, I couldn't. With every breath I took, I could feel debris going down my throat into my lungs and settling. It was crazy, and we ran, and eventually, I decided we got to get out of this. So I started telling Roselle right, right, giving her hand signals. I don't know whether she could hear me over the noise of the building collapsing, or whether she could see my hand signals. But I kept telling her to turn right because I wanted her to, because there was a building on my right. Now that we were going the other way, I wanted her to go into the nearest opening that she could find. As we ran, I suddenly heard an opening, and Roselle obviously knew what I wanted because she turned right. She took one step. She stopped. She wouldn't move. Come on, Roselle, keep going. She wouldn't move. Come on, Roselle, you can do it. Keep going. She wouldn't move, and I realized, wait a minute, she's a guide dog. She's doing what she's supposed to do. She stopped for a reason, which she had. I checked. I stuck out my foot, stuck a hand out along the wall, discovered we were at the top of a flight of stairs. Roselle had done her job perfectly. She stopped. So when I gave her the command to go forward, she went down the stairs, and we went down into what was the Fulton Street subway station, and we were there for about 15 minutes or so. Then a police officer found a bunch of us together and said, "The air is clear up above. You need to leave now. And didn't wait for a response; just turned, and we all followed him back to the stairwell, up the stairs, through the little arcade that we had we had passed through part way down the stairs before, up the rest of the stairs and got outside. David looked around and he said, "Oh my God, Mike, there's no Tower Two anymore. And I said, "What do you mean? He said, "All I see are pillars of smoke, hundreds of feet tall. There's no Tower Two. It's gone. Are you sure, David? "Yeah, it's gone. It's not here. We stood there for a moment, and then we continued to walk west on Fulton Street. And we walked for about 10 minutes, and then we were in this little plaza area when suddenly we heard that freight train waterfall sound again, and we figured it was probably our tower collapsing. David looked back and he saw another dust cloud coming our way, and in this plaza where we were, there was a small retaining wall, probably a planter or something, but anyway, there was a retaining wall. We got behind it, we ducked down, and we just waited till everything passed us by and stopped. And then we got up, and David looked around and he said, "Oh my God, Mike, there's no World Trade Center anymore. And I said, "What do you see? And he said, "All I see are fingers of fire and flames, hundreds of feet tall, and pillars of smoke. It's gone. The towers and everything are gone. And we stood there a moment, not able to fathom it. Then I tried to call Karen again, and this time I got through because all the circuits freed up from all the loved ones saying goodbye. Needless to say, and after, as I put it, tears on both sides of the phone line. Michael Hingson  34:59 Karen was finally the first one who told us how two aircraft had been crashed deliberately into the towers of the Pentagon, hijacked aircraft towers at the World Trade Center. That is, one into the Pentagon, and a fourth was still missing over Pennsylvania at that moment. And so that's kind of what happened. The rest of the day we spent getting up toward Midtown Manhattan, and eventually was able to get trains back to New Jersey and so on. And David walked up to where he was staying with his sister, who lived on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Amplifyou   35:30 What an experience, Sue! Thank you for going through that with us again. And you know, there's there's a lot of things that I want to well, there's something I want to ask you. It's like we often talk about preparation of that day, like all the things you did to prepare for what what you actually were able to do during that day. What mattered on that day from all that preparation? Michael Hingson  35:55 That I knew what to do in an emergency. Also, although I really started learning to verbalize it more later, what I learned was how to control the things that I could and not worry about everything else. We what if everything to death as human beings? Yeah. And we what? Well, what if what if you were in the build in the World Trade Center and it collapsed? Well, okay. What could I have done about that? So it's no sense worrying about it, because I, you know, I didn't have access to something to hold the building up, you know, and so many different things. Well, what if Roselle had panicked? Well, that's why I encouraged her and praised her so she wouldn't. But the bottom line is, I didn't have control over that, other than the fact that I encouraged her and and worked with her so well. Well, what if other people panicked on the stairs? I didn't have control over that, other than doing all I could to try to keep panic from happening. And you know, I and other people did a number of things like what David did to keep people from panicking on the stairs. But the bottom line is, there was no sense worrying about those things because we had no control over them. And when we got home that night, I took Roselle's harness off and I was going to take her outside. She ran off. She wouldn't. She wouldn't go outside right away. She grabbed her favorite tug botobone and started playing tug of war with my retired guide dog Linnie. And they were having a good old time just playing. When I talked to the veterinarians of Guide Dogs for the Blind the next day, I asked them, "What's it going to be like for Roselle going forward? And they asked, "Did Roselle have anything that specifically threatened her? And I said, "No, not really, because nothing hit her, nothing threatened her in any way, shape, or form, and the veterinarian who I spoke with said, "Well, there you are. She wasn't threatened. Dogs don't do what if about everything. They live in the moment. It was over for her. She wanted to play, and that's what she did, which was great anyway. But we what if everything to death, and we need to learn how to stop doing that and worry about just the 5% over which we really have control, and not worry about the rest. That's one of the lessons that I learned. I learned about don't worry about what you can't control. Focus on what you can and leave the rest alone. I learned about what if you know and things like that. Amplifyou   38:18 You and Roselle really understood each other in those moments. So what she realized what her job was, and you you were a leader in keeping everyone else under under control from you know reacting. Did you ever? You seem to have been very positive right from the beginning. Were there other moments that you were not sure that you or guys were going to get out of there. Michael Hingson  38:44 No, and my response is there wasn't time to worry about that for me. I was focused on Roselle. I was focused on listening because if people started to panic, I wanted to deal with it. There was a time on the 37th floor where people just started not talking. They were getting very quiet, and I went, "Oh, they're going to be like David was, and so I said, "Hey, everybody, whether you can see me or not, my name is Mike, and I've got my guide dog Roselle here. I'm blind, but I don't want anybody to worry, because if the power and lights go out in the World Trade Center, we're offering a half-price special to get you out today only. You know, and and that's exactly what I wanted them to do was to laugh, and I got people to laugh, which, which I'm sure helped. But those are the kinds of things that that I could focus on dealing with. But I I didn't worry about what I couldn't control, even though that was sort of an instinctive thing. But the mindset kicked in. All the things that I had learned that led up to September 11th kicked in that day, that allowed me to be able to function and and also help other people, and that's the the important part about it is that they all did kick in the mindset kicked in and it all worked well. Amplifyou   39:54 You've told this story so many times. Has the meaning of the story ever changed for you over 25 years? Michael Hingson  40:00 No, I got to say that it hasn't. Well, in some, yeah, I guess in some senses it has. Maybe some of the reasoning has changed. For example, speaking today, I'm speaking to oftentimes a generation of people who have absolutely no memory of the World Trade Center because they weren't even born yet, or they were too young to remember it. Probably, if you're under 30 years old, you really don't have any memory of it. And if you're under 25, you weren't even born at the time. My job, I believe, and so I've expressed this more lately than I have in the past. But my job is to take people in as I speak to the building with me, and take them down the stairs. Take them through the experiences that I had and went through, and why I went through those experiences, and the lessons to be learned from those. And then bring them out when we get to the bottom and outside. Take them all the way through and out, so that they get the full sense of what I experienced. And I've had so many people tell me we were with you every step you took down the stairs. You tell the story so vividly and so well, and and you just you just had us with you all the way down the stairs, which is exactly what I wanted, because I want them to understand that in reality you can learn to deal with things that come along, there are going to be things that you can't deal with because you don't have the skill or whatever. But we all have a lot of skills that we don't think we do, and one of them is that we can learn to control fear. We can learn that fear is around us, but we don't have to let it overwhelm, blind, or paralyze us. We can learn to use fear in a very positive, constructive way to keep us focused and going down the stairs. Amplifyou   41:45 What made you to decide to keep using your experiences each other's? Michael Hingson  41:49 Well, after September 11th, we and and the media got the story, and then people started calling because we got very visible in the media, and people started calling and saying we'd like to hire you to come and talk to us about what we should learn from September 11th. Learn about teamwork. Learn about what happened that day. Learn the lessons of World Trade Center, and so I decided that I would would do that and teach people what they could remember and and take away from it, and people started calling and saying, "Gee, would you come and let us hire you to tell the lessons of September 11th? And by the beginning of 2002, I had so many of those kinds of requests that Karen and I decided that selling life and philosophy was a whole lot more fun than selling computer hardware and being a computer hardware sales manager, and so that's what I turned to doing full time, and learning to help people understand that the reality is that you are a lot better than you think you are, and you need to learn that. But you really can do in a more strong way what you think you can do than than a typical way. Amplifyou   43:02 That's what I was just going to ask you: is if September 11th changed the direction of your life, and it did, from the career you had into now being a professional speaker. Interesting. Michael Hingson  43:13 Oh, yeah, it's helped a lot. And you know, I I also there are other things that that helped me in terms of dealing with public speaking, I love to tell the story that when I was growing up, before I had access to braille, I had braille in kindergarten in Chicago, but then I didn't have braille in California until the fourth grade, and my parents helped me learn things, and I learned all the spelling words that you know you had every every week you had to learn words, and then on Friday you the teacher would tell you the words, and you had to write them down, and you change papers, and the teacher would write the words on the board. Except in my class, in my class the teacher didn't write the words on the board. The teacher would say, "Mike, you have to spell the words out loud for everybody. So I learned how not to fear crowds and learned that I could spell the words. I know one time I messed up a word, and I don't even remember what the word was, but I heard somebody go, "Uh-uh, and I and I went, "Oh, I must have got it wrong, and I figured it out, and then I spelled it right. But that that only happened one time that I can recall. But clearly, that helped me learn not to be afraid of audiences. And today, I don't even understand why people are afraid to speak publicly. The fact of the matter is, audiences don't come to hear you so they can joke at you, make fun of you, yell at you, and so on. They come because they value what you're you're going to talk with them about, and they want to hear it. They want you to be successful, and they'll help you be successful if you let them, Amplifyou   44:41 I think you were always destined to be a public speaker, but it seems like the September 11th really just the universe conspired to make that happen. Maybe sooner than it would have. Did you ever see yourself before that becoming a public speaker? Michael Hingson  44:57 I never thought of being a public speaker before that. Neither had I ever thought of being an author. I I was used to it because working at Quantum on any given day I could be speaking to anybody from the board of directors of a Wall Street firm to IT people to other management people and so on. So I got used to doing it, and I and I learned all about selling and being articulate in sales, so I kind of learned a lot about public speaking from that. But I never really thought I would just be speaking for a living. But given what happened on September 11th, and that I get the opportunity to talk with people and help them see that in reality, what happened on September 11th is a day of lessons that taught us, or can teach us about resilience, can teach us about dealing with things that we don't expect to happen, and that we can learn how to control fear and so on, rather than letting it overwhelm us. So it it is it's really been pretty good. Amplifyou   45:57 Yeah, and when you hear the phrase "unstoppable mindset, how much of that philosophy do you think was shaped on that day, september 11? Michael Hingson  46:05 Oh, I think a lot of it came from from that day and and beyond. You know, the mindset kicked in on september 11 because of what I knew. But I think also that when it came time to start this podcast, which someone asked me to do as part of being involved with the company. I heard a lot of people talking about resilience and so on, and I just thought of unstoppability, unstoppable mindset, because the reality is we all are more unstoppable than we think we are, and so the podcast is literally an opportunity to converse with anyone who wants to come on, and it is a conversation more, much more than an interview, but it's a conversation about them, their lives, what they've done, and including what did you do that made you realize that you're more unstoppable than you think you are, and maybe you didn't realize that, but you are, and here's let's talk about this, and so those are those are things that I talk about. But I believe that everyone has a story to tell, so I'm always looking for people to come on the podcast and tell their stories and talk with with me about their experiences and so on, and that's how you know we found Bob Ellis, who's going to be with us on the Pentagon. I had actually contacted him about speaking to his organization, and I always mentioned the World Trade Center in initial introductory letters. And he wrote back and said that he would love to help, but he also wrote back and said, you know, I was in the Pentagon on September 11th, and that opened our dialog. And the result was that we finally set up for him to come on Unstoppable Mindset. And when when we did our conversation, I learned, for example, that he walked out the door, and it just he was supposed to be in a meeting that was right near where the plane actually came through the window, and in Bob's case, he had literally just left because the meeting ended up not happening, and he had just walked outside the door when he heard the plane, and he didn't really understand what was happening. But the plane sped up, and then it just crashed right into the tower, into the Pentagon, and he ran from the area, but he was very much involved with with talents that allowed him to help acquire things to help other people survive and so on, and did that for a couple of days or four days. But Bob will tell his story on September 11th. But he was literally just out the door when the plane hit. Amplifyou   48:42 Wow! Well, your guests can look forward to that interview. Will be the next up after this one. And I want to thank you, Michael, for sitting down with me today. I oh, it's always a pleasure, and thanks for allowing me to take over the hosting seat for today on your show, so we can hear more of your story, and thank you for sharing all the lessons you've learned from this experience. Michael Hingson  49:07 Well, well, thank you, and and I hope people will take them to heart. And I would say, if anyone wants to be on the podcast, we would love to have you send me an email at speaker s p e a k e r at michael hingson m i c h a e l h i n g s o n.com. If you know of any speaking opportunities that need a keynote speaker to come in, not only to tell an inspiring story, but I want to make it very clear, but to teach also lessons about resilience, business continuity, and other things like that, email me at speaker@michaelhingson.com. Would love to talk with you about that. My website is www.michaelhinkson.com, or you can go to www.michaelhinkson.com/podcast. But we'd love to hear from you in in any way and and get to know you better and you know go from there. Amplifyou   49:57 Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Michael, for today. We'll take care and see you soon. Michael Hingson  50:02 Sounds good. Thank you for being here with me on Unstoppable Mindset. I hope today's conversation left you with a fresh perspective, a new insight, or at least something worth thinking about. If you're ready to go deeper into the ideas that shape how we see ourselves and others, I have a free gift for you. Head over to michaelhingson.com and download my free ebook, Blinded by Fear. It explores the invisible beliefs that hold us back and shows you how to reframe them so you can move forward with clarity and confidence. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast, leave a review, and share this show with someone who can use a reminder that growth starts with mindset. When people think differently, we all move forward together. Thanks again for listening. Keep learning, keep questioning, and keep choosing to live with an unstoppable mindset.

Surviving September 11 took more than courage. It took preparation, trust, and the ability to manage fear. I share my experience escaping from the 78th floor of the World Trade Center with my guide dog, Roselle, and the lessons that shaped how I responded that morning. You'll hear how years of learning my surroundings, trusting my training, and understanding my role as a leader helped me stay focused during the evacuation. I also explore blindness, the limits society places on blind people, and the power of teamwork between a guide dog and handler. Most of all, this story is about focusing on what you can control, trusting the relationships you've built, and preparing yourself to act when fear shows up. Highlights: 00:10 – Why Michael is revisiting September 11, 25 years later. 11:45 – How Michael learned that blindness itself isn't the limitation. 32:50 – Why preparation inside the World Trade Center mattered when crisis hit. 36:40 – How staying calm helped Michael lead others toward safety. 44:46 – The lesson Michael heard while running from the collapsing tower. 51:59 – What Roselle taught Michael about fear, trust, and moving forward. About the Host: Michael Hingson is a New York Times best-selling author, international lecturer, and Chief Vision Officer for accessiBe. Michael, blind since birth, survived the 9/11 attacks with the help of his guide dog Roselle. This story is the subject of his best-selling book, Thunder Dog. Michael gives over 100 presentations around the world each year speaking to influential groups such as Exxon Mobile, AT&T, Federal Express, Scripps College, Rutgers University, Children's Hospital, and the American Red Cross just to name a few. He is Ambassador for the National Braille Literacy Campaign for the National Federation of the Blind and also serves as Ambassador for the American Humane Association's 2012 Hero Dog Awards. https://michaelhingson.com https://www.facebook.com/michael.hingson.author.speaker/ https://twitter.com/mhingson https://www.youtube.com/user/mhingson https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelhingson/ Thanks for listening! Thanks so much for listening to our podcast! If you enjoyed this episode and think that others could benefit from listening, please share it using the social media buttons on this page. Do you have some feedback or questions about this episode? Leave a comment in the section below! Subscribe to the podcast If you would like to get automatic updates of new podcast episodes, you can subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher. You can subscribe in your favorite podcast app. You can also support our podcast through our tip jar https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/unstoppable-mindset . Transcript: Michael Hingson  00:04 Hi everyone, and welcome to another episode of Unstoppable Mindset. I am your host, Mike Hingson, and today we're doing something a little bit different. This is Friday, september 4, 20/26, and this is the first of four episodes commemorating all of the events that happened in and around September 11, 2001. As many of you know, I was in the World Trade Center working for a company. I had opened an office for them on the 78th floor of Tower One of the World Trade Center, and on September 11th, I was in my office because we were going to be doing some special sales training for people, and I was there getting prepared to do all of that when the terrorists attacked the towers, and then later the Pentagon. And as you may know, a fourth aircraft was crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, because people on the aircraft took it over from the terrorists or tried to anyway, so one of the things that we thought would be helpful would be for me to give you again a taste of what I actually went through and what occurred on September 11, 2001, when we started this podcast back in August of 2021, I played a speech that talked about some of what happened to me in the World Trade Center. But today we're going to do a different speech. In April of 2024, I was invited to be a speaker at the Marshfield, Missouri Cherry Blossom Festival. Now that festival is a yearly event celebrating and commemorating different events in American history. In 2024, I was invited to come and speak and talk about my experience at the World Trade Center and to help put some of that into context. I thought it would be very relevant for all of you if we played that speech for you, so that you would again get a taste of what occurred with me, why I was able to survive and escape, and a little bit about the lessons that we should learn about not only September 11th, but frankly, from my perspective, being the fact that I have been blind since I was born in 1950, I want you to learn a little bit more about blindness. So we're going to present to you now my speech delivered in April on April 27, 2024, at the Marshfield, Missouri Cherry Blossom Festival. I hope that you'll enjoy it. I hope that it will teach you some things, and don't forget that we have other episodes coming up. We have another episode occurring on the eighth of September where I'm going to be interviewed by Michelle Abraham from Amplify You. Amplify You is the company that I work with to get these podcasts out twice a week, and Michelle has her own podcast, and she's going to interview me to talk about lessons we've learned, to talk a little bit about what happened on September 11th. But we won't give anything away for what's going to happen later in this series of episodes. On September 11th, I will be talking with Bob Ellis. Bob was at the Pentagon on September 11th and literally just walked out the door just before the aircraft hit the Pentagon. We're going to talk about that and again, hopefully, put some of things in perspective for you. Then on the 15th of September, I'm going to come back on episode 475 of our podcast, and talk a little bit more in detail about the lessons that I've learned, and talk about things that I hope people will take away and remember from september 11. I know many of you weren't even born when the World Trade Center terrorist attacks occurred, and so this episode 472, especially, I hope will give you a little bit better sense of what occurred, and from my perspective, why things occurred the way they did, and and how we proceed. So I hope you'll enjoy this episode. Hope that you'll enjoy what it brings, and we will definitely be moving forward to talk about some other things later on. Speaker 1  04:24 There are moments in American history that changed the national conscience. Yesterday, we heard about the assassination of President Kennedy. Some of you might be old enough to remember the attack of Pearl Harbor, and for most recently in American history, of course, the terrorist attacks September 11th. Today, you're going to hear a riveting account, a a heroic story of a man whose story I believe will really pull at your heartstrings. And to moderate that panel today, or that interview, to do is conduct our interview. Today is Mary Acher, who's no stranger to this stage, good friend, presidential historian, and a great interviewer. If you'll put your hands together for Miss Mary, Speaker 2  05:11 I just am so honored to met Michael Hinkson and Alamo. You know by what you see that he came down on the 78th floor of the North Tower with his guide dog Brosel, but I have a friend named Doug Weed who always told me, "You don't brag on yourself; you get somebody else to brag on you. And I want to brag on Michael before we start this. Before I ask him to tell this story, Michael was a premature baby, and at the time when he was born, they put the babies in pre in a the premature babies in a incubator sealed with 100% oxygen, and the doctors didn't know that then, but it blinded the children, and Michael was blinded at birth. So Michael was very fortunate that he had parents that refused to allow him to even think about being disabled. They mainstreamed him before mainstreaming was even known, and they taught him to ride a bicycle. They let him drive a car, and later in his life, he actually piloted an airplane. Is that amazing? He loved mathematics. He loved physics. He was taught geometry. He solved math problems in his head. He's got a master's degree in physics and another-not a master's, but a regular in in teaching. So that is why he is such an amazing man. He's never ever let this what enough people call a disability stop him at all? As a matter of fact, he has been such an amazing gift to the unsighted community in in the Braille and things that technology that blind people can utilize to be online and be all kinds of of things that they wouldn't ever have been allowed to do even 50 years ago. So anyway, I'm just so honored to have met you, Michael. It's just been amazing. I'm going to take him to Lambert's tomorrow. He says I have to catch the rolls, or somebody else will catch them and they'll eat them and he won't get it. I promised him I'd catch the rolls. All right, my dear Michael, would you start telling us about that horrendous day? I am Michael Hingson  08:00 going to not do what I said I was gonna do. I'm gonna stand up, and I'm gonna be very interested to go to Lambert's to see what they do with me, since normally they would throw the rolls, as I understand it. And I'm gonna point out that doesn't really work. So now, what are you gonna do? Because if they all fall on the floor and the dog gets them, and the dog gets sick, you guys are in trouble. So I'll be interested to see exactly what happens. No, I'm sure it will work out. Mary, thank you for those those kind words. I'd like to start by defining a couple things to help us in all of this. Mary is absolutely right about what my parents did in their position, the doctors told my parents when it was discovered I was blind at about four months of age that I should be sent to a home because no blind child could ever grow up to amount to anything or contribute to society. If you think that's bad, it was worse in other parts of the world where, when children were born who were blind, were just drowned in a bucket of water. So, in a sense, it wasn't as bad. Not every child who was born premature and put in an incubator did go blind, and it's unfortunate, in a sense, that at the time that I was born. Dr. Arnold Papps at the Wilmer Eye Institute at Johns Hopkins University had discovered that, in fact, oxygen could cause blindness, and even a few minutes a day of a non-oxygen environment would drop the incidence of blindness down to zero. But medical science didn't believe him because they said, "Well, too much oxygen can't be a problem. And what Dr. Arnold Pats essentially really proved is that too much of anything can be a problem. So it is it is an issue. I finally actually some time ago got to meet Dr. Pats. Before he passed, it was it was fascinating to talk with him about that. The condition at the time when I was born was called retroenterial fibroplasia. If you want to know how to spell that, I wrote a book called Thunderdog: The Story of a Blind Man, His Guide Dog, and the Triumph of Trust at Ground Zero, which we plan to have here, but the publisher messed up, so it wasn't. But you can go buy Thunderdog anywhere, and you can learn how to spell retrolateral fibroplegia. It is now called retinopathyoprematurity. I guess that's a little easier to spell. I don't know still why they changed the name, but they did. So fine, I don't care. I am blind. I don't care. Blindness isn't the problem. I've learned from my parents and growing up and being alive now for yep 74 years, blindness isn't the problem. The problem is our perception of blindness, what we believe blind people can and can't do, as opposed to what they truly can and can't do. If you want to really see a story or something about a blind person driving a car, there is a website www.blinddriverchallenge.org. Blinddriverchallenge.org. The president of the National Federation of the Blind in October of 2001 challenged private industry and universities to create a vehicle that a blind person could drive, not an autonomous vehicle, but truly a vehicle that would transmit to the blind person the information necessary for them to drive the vehicle. What you will see at blinddriverchallenge.org is a video of a gentleman named Mark Riccobono. Too many marks. Mark Riccobono driving a vehicle independently without any assistance around the Daytona Speedway, right before the 2011 Rolex 24 race, he will go through an obstacle course. He will pass boxes that are being thrown out of a van to try to block his way. He will pass the van and a number of things like that. The reality is, what is driving? It's all about you having the information necessary for you to control your vehicle, and as far as I'm concerned, given what Mark Riccobono did, and given the reality that the information is available to us, given the way most sighted drivers drive, I'll take me any day, especially where I live in Victorville. My gosh! But the the reality is, blindness isn't the problem. I grew up believing that I went to public school. I went to college. Michael Hingson  12:26 I did get a master's degree in physics. As I love to tell people, I'm as good as Doc Brown from Back to the Future in building reactors and nuclear bombs. The only difference between me and Doc Brown is I won't go steal fissionable material from some source that might come after me later. So you know, I think I was a little smarter than Doc Brown, but the fact is, again, it's not the problem. I was also the program director of the campus radio station for a while, and I worked at the campus radio station KUCI 89.9 on your FM dial for seven years. I did a show playing old radio shows every Sunday night from six to nine. Didn't even know what 60 minutes was. I heard about it, and one day finally somebody from the show or from the the Orange County Jail called and said, "We really got a situation. We want you to know about it here at the jail. People who heard about you, they've heard about 60 minutes, and on Sunday nights we have to divide the jail in half. Half of the people go up to a television room to watch 60 Minutes, and the other half, which is the bigger half, want to hear your show playing old radio shows on Sunday nights. So you know we must be doing something right. That even at the jail, they liked us. I went to work in 1976 for the National Federation of the Blind. It's the largest organization of blind consumers in the country. I was offered a position because I was in in the science world, one of the few at the time in that world. And the president of the federation, Dr. Jernigan, told me in late 74, early 75, we got a situation. There's a guy named Ray Kurzweil. You may have heard of Ray. He's a futurist. He's an inventor. He's invented the singularity. I'm not totally sure I agree with everything that Ray says. You know, Ray once said the only problem with God is we haven't invented it yet. I don't agree with that. And the other part about it is Ray says that we're really going to all become part of the world when chips are created that will allow us to directly interact with computers. Well, we'll see. I don't want to chip in my brain yet. But Ray at that time had developed a piece of technology that would actually look at a printed page. It actually had to build it up line by line, so it wasn't like snapping a picture. But it would learn to recognize all the characters on that page, no matter what their type styles or print styles were, and it would read it out loud, called the Kurzweil Reading Machine for the Blind. Just like with blindness and retro-entral fibroblasia, the government didn't believe he could do it because nobody else had been able to do it, and so they wouldn't help fund it. He came to the federation, and the federation said, "Tell you what we're going to do." Ray, I'm not sure they said it quite that way, but tell you what we're going to do, Ray. We're going to send somebody up there with a bunch of material, and if your machine reads what we bring up, not what you want to read, if it reads what we bring up, then we're going to help you get funding. And Ray, I'm sure again it wasn't quite the way he said it, but he said, "Bring it on. They did. It did, and a relationship began that exists to this day-a machine that literally would read print out loud. And Ray wanted the first application of omnivore optical character recognition to be a machine that would read print out loud for blind people. We created a project where we purchased several machines, and then for 18 months, from 1976, in October through June of 1978, I lived in suitcases or out of suitcases in hotels, traveling around the country where we put machines at places like the New York Public Library, the Iowa Commission for the Blind, the San Francisco Public Library, and some other agencies for the blind around the country. Michael Hingson  15:59 The idea being that we wanted blind people to come and use the machine, read whatever they wanted to read, and then give us information about what needed to go into a final production model of the machine. I wrote training curriculum. I wrote the the technical manuals for teaching people how to use the machine. I taught people to use it. I observed people using it. Sometimes grabbed my old soldering gun and fix things that broke on the machines. These were $50,000, 400 pound machines. They weren't little things like an app on an iPhone today, right? So anyway, we finally wrote the final recommendations, and then Ray said, "I want to hire you to come and do the same sort of thing within the company. So I went to work for Ray, moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts. Actually, I learned I moved to Winthrop, Massachusetts, learned how to go from Winthrop to Cambridge every day, and we began a relationship. And I worked at Kurzweil Computer Products, in and that started in again October of 1978. In May of 1978, I was called into the office of the VP of Marketing, and Andrew Parson said, "We're laying you off. What? We're laying you off. Why? Oh, it's not that you're doing a bad job or anything, but unfortunately, like a lot of engineering startup companies, we've hired too many people who aren't revenue producers, and we have to have more revenue producers. And so, as important as your job is, it's not as important as making money for the company. So we have to lay you off. Then he paused and he said, "Unless you'll go into sales. Now, I'm a science guy. However, I thought about it for a micro nanosecond, and I said, "Sure, I'll go into sales. As I love to tell people, I decided I would lower my standards and go from science to sales, and did. I said I don't know anything about sales. He said we'll send you to a Dale Carnegie sales course and all that. Well, I started selling, but not the reading machine for the blind. Instead, I sold a new product they had called the Kurzweil Data Entry Machine, and unlike the reading machine for the blind that sold for $50,000, if you want one, we might be able to find one of the old machines for you for 49 995. Instead, I sold a new product called the Kurzweil Data Entry Machine, which was only $125,000. I guess they had confidence in my ability, and I was very grateful for it. The real reason that I didn't want to refuse the sales position is I knew that at that time, and it's still somewhat today, the unemployment rate among employable blind people is close to 70. That is seven 0% It's not because we can't do the work; it's because people think we won't be able to do the work and don't give us the opportunity. So the bottom line is, I lowered my standards and went from science to sales, and did that for a while. And then in 1981, while Xerox was considering and actually working toward buying the product, I was asked by Ray and the VP of Sales to move back to California, where I was from, to help integrate Kurzweil into the Xerox West Coast environment, including their research center called Palo Alto Area Research Center Park, and I did. And my thanks for that was that after the the whole sale was consummated and Xerox completely took over. I was the last salesperson in June of 1984 to receive a FedEx letter saying thank you for your service, but we don't want you anymore. Goodbye, because all Xerox wanted was the technology. They didn't want the people. Now I was confronted with the situation. How am I going to find a job? What am I going to do? 70% unemployment. and I went out and I wrote lots of cover letters, sent out lots of resumes, and I even got a headhunter who called me and said, "Love your resume. We're going to have you interview with this company up in San Jose, California. We'll send you a ticket. They sent me the ticket the night before the flight. The guy called. Back and he says, "You know, I was just looking at your resume again. I see you do a lot of things with blind people. Michael Hingson  20:04 Is there somebody in your family who's blind? You notice that? And I said, "Yeah, I'm blind. You're blind? Well, I'm going to have to call them. They're not going to want to talk to you. I said, "Nothing has changed. My resume is still the same, but you're blind. It's all changed. No, it hasn't. There were no laws to stand on. The reservation was canceled, and I didn't do the interview. Their loss. If Speaker 3  20:30 you enjoy Unstoppable Mindset and would like to help us continue bringing these conversations to you each week, we've created a way for you to support the show. Your contribution helps us cover production costs and continue sharing stories, insights, and ideas that inspire people to live with purpose and possibility. If supporting the podcast feels right for you, you'll find the link in the show notes. Thank you for being part of the Unstoppable Mindset Community. Michael Hingson  21:02 Eventually, not finding a job, I started my own company selling computer-aided design systems to architects. A blind guy selling CAD systems? Why the heck not? I didn't need to work the machine. What I needed to know was how to work the machine, so I could describe it to architects, and I could sit them down in front of a machine and talk with them and talk them through it. We also hired people to demo CAD systems, and I did that for four years. And then I went back into the workforce. And when I went back into the workforce, my wife and I were talking one day, and she said, "You know, I got this great job I just discovered in the newspaper. It's selling high-end, new, revolutionary, hot, pluggable disc technology. It's perfect for you. You should apply. And I said to my wife Karen, who I had married in 1982. By the way, Karen also had a disability. She was in a wheelchair her whole life. She reads. I push. Worked out well. I said, so do I say in my cover letter I'm blind or not? Because typically, if you say you're blind, same thing will happen with the headhunter. You won't even get a call back if you don't say you're blind. You might get a callback, but then they're going to have all their defenses go up when you show up for the interview. And she said, "You're an idiot. Wives can do that, gentlemen, and it's fine. You're an idiot. Why? What's the most important thing you always said to every salesperson you ever hired, well, I wasn't quite sure which things she was thinking of. I had several things that I always said to salespeople I hired. She said, "You always told every salesperson you ever hired turn here's the operative word perceived liabilities into assets. You ever watch those little cartoons in the newspapers and all that, where the light bulb goes on over your head. Well, that's what happened, and I went and I wrote a cover letter to send with this resume to this company. And here are the last two paragraphs of the letter. The most important thing you need to know about me is that I am blind. As a blind person, I have had to sell all my life just to be able to function and survive. I've had to sell to take my guide dog on airplanes. I didn't tell them that we had to sue one airline because they violated their own policy because they wouldn't let me go on an airplane with my guide dog. I've had to sell to convince people to let me buy a house, move into apartments, sometimes take my guide dog into grocery stores, and do anything else because I was blind, I've always had to sell. So, second paragraph: When you're hiring someone for this job, do you want to hire somebody who comes in and works for eight or 10 hours a day, and then just goes home because the job is over, or do you want to truly hire somebody who understands sales for the science and art that it is, and who sells 24 hours a day as a way of life. Sent off the letter. Waited for two weeks, wondering if I'd get a call or an email. Well, no, not an email, not back then. But in late June 19 or May 1989, I got a call. This is Doug Cooper, head of marketing for Articon. We love your letter. Would you come for an interview? And I said sure. Next day we were down there. I was hired and started on july 2, 1989. Love to start on the second of July, or actually the third of July, because then I got the next day off. It was great. So I went to work for them, and we moved from where we were living in Mission Viejo down to Vista, California. The company was in Carlsbad. I began selling to the East Coast, selling our technologies and other technologies, Sun Microsystems products, and so on. And then in 1996, the owner of the company asked me to move to New York for them because we were selling to Wall Street. Michael Hingson  24:37 Wall Street was always good at getting and demanding and getting what they demanded, and they always said, "If you are a manufacturer and you're selling products to us, we want a representative, not an agent, but we want the company in Wall Street Arena to be able to to hold responsible and deal with. So we moved to New York. And I went to work on the 23rd floor of Tower Two of the World Trade Center, and was there for about a year, and then was recruited away by another company, and it wasn't hard because Articon did not figure out how to support a branch operation. So I was recruited away, and then in 1999 I was recruited away by Quantum Corporation, and now we're getting to what Mary asked about. But I needed to give you the background. Hope it was okay. So in 1999, I was hired to open an office for Quantum Corporation on well in New York City. Quantum was a company that made products called tape libraries. They were big boxes that consisted of tape drives and lots of tape cartridges, and you would attach them to computer networks, and then you would use software like one called Veritas, which is still used today. And what you would do is you would back up all of your data over the network into these tape libraries, onto tape cartridges, and then you would take the tape cartridges out and store them off-site. Now I gotta stop and be spiteful because in New Jersey they love to say that they stored them in a town called Mountainside Under a Mountain. You ever see a mountain in northern New Jersey? I came from California where we had mountains that were eight, 910, 1000 feet tall. They didn't even have decent hills, but they still called it a mountain. That was fine, whatever. They still were able to store the tapes in safe places. But the point is that all the data was backed up off-site, which is what they needed to do. We opened the actual office on august 1, 2000. I hired a staff, and we had a staff that came in and and sold, and we also worked with resellers. And in August of 2001, our main distributor Ingram Micro said, "You know, we got a lot of resellers who are selling your products, but they don't really know how to do it. Can we hold some seminars to teach our your reseller partners, our customers, the resellers, how to sell your product? I said, "You bet. We worked it out with the folks at Quantum. David Frank, who was in charge of pricing and distribution, said he wanted to come back to be a part of the seminars, and we set up doing the seminars. The idea was that we would teach them. I would be their main point of contact since I worked and lived there. David would be the person that I or they would contact without with any pricing issues, but I would be the technical point of contact contact. Master's degree in physics helps, and so we set up the seminars. And wouldn't you know it, we set them up to be held on september 11, 2001. The evening before, or the morning of September 11th, about 12:30, Roselle, my guide dog at the time, woke me up. She was very nervous and fidgety. I knew what it was like when she was fidgety. It was usually because it was a thunderstorm. She didn't like thunder, and we went down to my office. And of course, a thunderstorm did happen, and the storm literally came right over our house. I've never been in an environment where bombs went off around me, but I got to say that in this case, the thunder claps were, as I said, literally right over us, and it had to be like what a bomb sounds like going off. Anyway, it went on till about two, and then we went back up and got a couple more hours of sleep, three more hours of sleep. I got up. We went in and got to the office at about 7:40 in the morning on September 11th. As I came to the door, somebody came up with a cart. It turns out it was a guy from the Port Authority cafeteria. Michael Hingson  28:33 We were going to be providing breakfast and snacks for the first and second seminarians. We had seminars going all day, so we went in. I showed him where I wanted to set up everything in the conference room. I went in, got my laptop computer out of my backpack briefcase. I got my PowerPoint projector, and I went into the conference room and set everything up because I was going to be doing a PowerPoint show that day to give people all the information they needed about the ATLP 3000, the ATLP 1000, and so on. Yes, blind people can do PowerPoint, folks. It's not magic. You sighted bigots. So I had a script, and my wife and I had created the script, and I'd used it many times. The script was in Braille. I knew what was on every slide. We put a couple of things in addition on the script. We put all the wording from the slides on the script, and we also put on the script descriptions of the pictures, as well as where the picture would show up on the screen. So I would, for example, when we showed this to other customers around the city, I'd blow their minds because I would be doing the presentation. My sales guys loved it when I went out and did PowerPoint presentations because I could just point over my shoulder. On the left side of your screen, you'll see the ATLP 3000 with 16 cartridge, 16 drives, 326. Cartridges, and you see the label that says Prism Technology. We could hook five of them together. On the right side of your screen, you'll see the ATLP 1000, which was a single unit with 30 cartridges and one tape drive. And people would come up to me afterwards, and they say, "You know, we're ticked at you. I go, "Why? Well, first of all, your presentation was not boring, which usually they are. But second of all, you never turned and looked at the screen. You kept looking at us, even though you were pointing right to where everything was with your laser pointer. We didn't dare fall asleep. We forgot you were blind. And my response was, "You don't get it. My dog was down here taking notes. If you'd fallen asleep, we would have got you anyway. But that was what it was about. My responsibility was to be the leader of that office, and I had to do what anyone else would do. One of the main things that I did was spend hours, days walking around the World Trade Center, learning what the kiosks were in the shopping mall on the first floor, learning where different offices were, consulting with the Port Authority police and the fire prevention people learning what to do in case of an emergency because sometimes I might be in the office all by my little self. There would be nobody else around. I didn't want my staff in the office. I wanted them out selling and working and supporting customers. Not being in the office, of course, they did usually come in at least once a week. And and so I learned never watched The Sopranos, but I got to tell you, I learned more about the Sopranos from all the Italian Americans on my staff who talked about the Sopranos constantly. Bada bing, bada boom, and I learned a whole lot about Tony Soprano without ever watching the show. But the point is that I needed to know all that stuff. I needed to know where the restaurants were. Customers come into the office. Oh, you want to go out to lunch? What kind of food do you want? There's a great deli downstairs called Fine and Shapiro. Let me take you there. How would it have looked if I didn't know how to do that, and I had to say to someone, "You're going to have to let me take your arm and lead me there because I don't know how to get there, and two hours later we're supposed to be negotiating multi-million dollar contracts? No, I needed to know it. I didn't have the luxury, and I don't regard it as a luxury. I regard it as a disability of reading signs. I needed to know all of that stuff. What I didn't realize is that was creating a mindset in me, which I'll talk about in a moment. Michael Hingson  32:15 Anyway, got all the laptop projectors and everything set up. The only thing I knew I didn't know how to do extremely well is to get it exactly aimed right, but about 8o'clock, David Frank came in and I said, "Say, David, this is all set up, but let's aim the projector just exactly where you want it on the screen. And we did have to turn it just a little bit, but not too much. But anyway, at 845, I was in my office and David was with me. We were creating a final list of all the people who were going to be attending the seminars, because the Port Authority police, the security people, needed to know who was coming. There were two ways you could get into the building: either we faxed on letterhead a list of people who were coming on any given day, and then the people coming in would show their photo IDs, and it would be verified against the list. And if they were allowed in, then they would be given a badge that they would put over their neck, and they would carry that, and they could scan barcode and go into the appropriate elevator to come onto our floor, or they'd have to call us every time somebody came in. And I didn't want a lot of phone calls coming in, so we were faxing the list. I was reaching for Letterhead to fax to to print the list on Letterhead when suddenly I heard and felt kind of a muffled thump and a vibration. And then literally, if you any blind people in the room, well, I'll do it anyway. I'm holding up my hand, and what happened was that literally, as I'm now tipping my hand toward you, the building began to tip. We probably moved about 20 feet. The building kept tipping and tipping. David and I said together, "What's going on? I don't know. What's going on? What do you think? Was it an explosion? I said. David said, "Didn't sound like it. Is it an earthquake? David was from New York, and now he's living in California. He didn't know about earthquakes. I said, "No, the building wasn't shaking around. It was going in one direction. And finally, and I went over and I stood in the doorway between my office and the the outside lobby of our our offices, and I stood there. Roselle was asleep under my desk. David was just on the other side of my desk, holding it near our windows, looking out over Manhattan, the south side of Manhattan. And finally, David and I both said goodbye to each other because we thought we had moved so far that the building was going to take a 78 floor plunge to the street. And then the building slowed down, and it stopped, and it moved back. As soon as it got vertical, I started walking back into the office. I met Roselle coming around from under my desk. I took her leash. I said "heel, which meant to come around behind me to sit and lie down, which is what I would normally have Alamo do, but he's comfortable, so we'll just leave him there. Roselle sat down, and about that time. The building dropped straight down about six feet. Why did it drop down? Because tall buildings like that literally are springs. They're made to flex in windstorms and other things like that. An Empire, an airplane hit the Empire State Building in the 1940s because it got lost in a fog bank. Tall buildings are flexible. They have expansion joints, and when the building was hit, the expansion joints took up all of the the things that were going on. And then when the building got straight again, the expansion joints dropped back down to their normal configuration. I knew that because I had talked to people about stuff like that. I'd forgotten it until later, but I knew it. What I hadn't realized is that what was happening when I was learning so much stuff was that a mindset was being developed in me that said, "You know what to do in an emergency. And as soon as the building dropped, David turned and looked out the window and started shouting, "Oh my God, Mike! There's fire and smoke over us! There were millions of pieces of burning paper falling outside the windows. Michael Hingson  35:59 We got to get out of here right now! Slow down, David. No, we got to get out of here. The building's on fire. I could hear things rushing and brushing outside our windows, and now I knew what they were. David told me millions of pieces of burning paper, right? And I didn't smell any smoke. Roselle wasn't doing anything to indicate any concern, and David kept saying, "We got to get out of here. The building's on fire. And I kept saying, "Slow down. Our guests began to scream. We had like five or six who were in our conference room. Early arrivals. They started coming out, but then they heard me say, "Slow down, stop, David. Just wait. And they waited to see what was going to happen. And finally, David used the big line: "You don't understand. You can't see Speaker 4  36:37 it. The Michael Hingson  36:38 problem wasn't what I wasn't seeing, the problem was what David wasn't seeing-a dog sitting next to me, wagging her tail, yawning, going, "Who the heck woke me up? I was comfy, not giving any indication of fear. And I eventually got David to focus, and I said, "David, get our guests to the stairs. Don't let them take the elevators, because I knew if there's fire, especially because if there's fire, the elevators could become fire traps. The fire could get into the elevator shafts, which it did, and anybody in the cars would be burned. David left with our guests, got them to the stairs. Meanwhile, I called Karen and told her that there had been an explosion or something. We had no clue. There was no way to know. I love it. Reporters, even today, and other people say, "Well, of course you didn't know you couldn't see it. Excuse me, you numbskulls. The last time I checked, Superman and X-ray vision were fiction, and the airplane hit 18 floors above us on the other side of the building. No one knew. All the way down the stairs, we didn't know because no one saw it. No one knew. Anyway, I called and told Karen she wanted to know more. I said, "I don't know anything else. I've got to go because we're not staying here. We knew instantly that we had to leave, but we got our guests out. Then David came back. We swept the offices one last time. Went to the stairs and we started down. If I knew it was the last time I was going to be in the building, I would have taken a couple of things that I didn't take. Like I had a really neat talking scientific calculator that I couldn't replace. And if I had known that I wasn't coming back, I would have taken it. It would have been a little heavier, but I would have taken it anyway. We started down the stairs. There were other people, of course, on the stairs. We got down about four floors, and I was smelling an odor. I couldn't quite figure it out, and suddenly I realized I'm smelling the fumes from burning jet fuel. I traveled 100,000 miles a year for my company. I knew what the odor of jet fuel was like. I knew the kerosene smell, but it took a while to associate it with the World Trade Center because no one would have ever thought you would have smelled it there. When I realized what it was, I observed to the other people around me on the stairs, "I'm smelling the fumes from burning jet fuel. And they said, "Yeah, you're right. That's what it is. We must have been hit by an airplane. You understand? Nobody knew. We must have been hit because of what we're smelling, so we all accepted that that was what was going on, but we had no clue. We continued down the stairs, about 10 floors down. At one point, a woman stopped right behind me, and she said, "I can't go on. I can't breathe. We're not going to make it out. And I stopped and turned around and said, "Sure, we are. Come on, this is my guide dog Roselle. He's guiding me, and and she'll encourage you. Roselle gave her kisses, and this lady gave Roselle a few pets, and so on. And other people surrounded her, and we had a group hug, and the lady was able to keep going. A few burn victims passed us on the stairs as we went down. At about the 50th floor, David, who had gotten a little quiet. Suddenly said, "Mike, we're going to die. We're not going to make it out of here. Now you heard that I have a teaching credential. What you don't know, and teachers won't generally acknowledge it, but I'm going to tell you anyway. There's a secret class we take called Voice 101: How to Yell at Students. Didn't know that, did you? And anyway, as soon as David. Said Mike, "We're going to die. We're not going to make it out of here. I just said as sharply and with a snap into my voice that I could, "Stop it, David! If Rosella and I can go down these stairs, so can you. And David told me later that that brought him out of his funk. Michael Hingson  40:12 What he then said is, "I got to keep my mind off this. I want to walk a floor below you and shout up to you what I see on the stairs. Is that okay? And I said, sure. Did I really need him to do that? No. Did it matter? No, but it did to David. However, what I came to realize over time was, David doing that was one of the most important things that I experienced on that day. So I'm going down the stairs. I get to floor 49. David, I'm on the 48th floor. All's clear here, Mike. Going on down. I get to 48 floor, 47. We keep going down. Finally, I get to the 45th floor, David. I'm on the 44th floor. This is where the Port Authority cafeteria is. Not stopping. So David was obviously doing better, and he kept going down. Why do I say what I did about David and doing that? Because David became a focal point for anyone within the sound of his voice who could hear him say, "43rd floor, all's clear, everything is good. He had to have helped 1000s of people stay focused and not panic going down the stairs, and I think that was so cool that he did that all the way down 42nd floor, all good. We kept going down the stairs. We met firefighters on the 30th floor. They wanted to escort me down, and I finally convinced them that I was capable of going down without them. And I did it by playing the sight card. I said, "Look, my friend David is here. He can see we're good, and the firefighters let us go. I didn't want them to escort me. First of all, they don't know how to work with a blind guy and do sighted guide. But second of all, I didn't want to break up their team because I knew that each of those people were carrying the equipment that they had to use to fight the fire. You couldn't store it somewhere. Where would you store it? Oh, the 34th floor. And what happens if a fire broke out on the 33rd floor, you couldn't get to it. You had to carry the equipment, so we kept going down the stairs. Finally, got to the first floor. David got there, and I was at floor two. And he said, "Hey, there are water sprinklers running. You're going to have to run through a waterfall or a down torrent of water to get out of the stairwell. Why was there all that water? Because it wanted to keep fire either in or out of the stairs, if fire was around. David ran through. Then I got to the bottom. Roselle stood there, and I picked up her harness and said, "Rosel, forward, hop up, which is a command to speed up. We went through this torrential downpour. It was a waterfall, and we came out the other side, soaking. David was there, and there were voices. Hey, don't go outside! No, no, don't go that way. Go this way. A PA system, a guy on a bullhorn. No, no, no! Don't go outside. Don't go to the outside. Go this way. What we didn't know is, if they had let people go out, they might have been right below where people were jumping. And so that was one of the reasons they didn't want anyone out. They wanted people to go through the complex and get out at the far side, as far away from where everything was occurring that they could. This guy comes up to us and he goes, "I'm with the FBI. I'll get you where you need to go. And of course, I'm sitting there with my warped sense of humor, going, "I'm sorry, I only talked to McGarrett, and I didn't do it. I'm innocent. I just thought that I didn't say any of it out loud. Anyway, he got us through out to the outside of Tower One. We passed now the empty Ben and Jerry's ice cream kiosk that was there. Darn didn't get a chance for a scoop. Kept going. Finally, went up an escalator and got outside into the sunshine outside of Tower. Well, of the whole complex, as far away from the towers as we could be, we got outside. Michael Hingson  43:44 We were told to leave the area, but David looked around and he said, "Mike, I see fire in Tower Two. And I said, "What are you talking about? There's fire in Tower Two, really? What's that all about? We didn't feel a thing going down. We were in our own little cocoon, our own little cave. We had no clue. Anyway, we were told to leave, so we went to Broadway. We walked across the plaza to Broadway, turn left, going now north on Broadway. There was a building on my left. Broadway was on my right. We crossed several streets, crossed Fulton Street, finally got to Vetsy Street. David said, "I want to stop because I can see the fire in Tower Two really clearly from here, I want to take some pictures, and I said, "Great, I'll try to call my wife. I got out my phone. David was taking pictures, which I have today. I tried to call Karen. I couldn't get through. Later, of course, we learned that people were saying goodbye to loved ones, and that was why the circuits were busy. I had just put my phone away, and a police officer, and while David was putting his camera away, and a police officer yelled out of here! It's coming down now. We heard this rumble that became this deafening roar. I describe it as kind of a combination of a freight train and a waterfall. You could hear glass breaking and tinkling, and metal crashing down, and then this white noise sound as Tower Two, 100 yards away from. Pancake down. Everyone turned and ran. David ran. He was gone. I literally lifted Roselle by the harness, turned her 180 degrees, and started running back the way we came. And the first thing I remember saying in my mind was, "God, I cannot believe that you got us out of a building just to have it fall on us. And as soon as I thought that, I heard in my head as clearly as you hear me now, a voice that said, "Don't worry about what you can't control. Focus on running with Roselle, and the rest will take care of itself. Who is God? Absolutely no question. Don't worry about what you can't control. Focus on running with Roselle, and the rest will take care of itself. And so I also had this incredible sense of peace and calm that came over me. That said, you're okay if you work together. We kept running. We got back to Fulton Street, turned right on Fulton Street, and ran about 25 yards. And suddenly we caught up to David, who had apparently gone the same way. And David suddenly realized that he had left us behind and he was going to come back, but we caught up to him first, and he apologized. I said, "David, don't worry about it. Let's just keep going. The building's coming down, you know. And we both just started to run with Roselle, and suddenly we were engulfed in all the dirt and debris and the dust cloud from Tower Two. It was so thick that David said he couldn't see his hand six inches in front of his face, and all I can tell you is that every breath I took, I felt dirt and debris and junk going down my throat into my stomach, and we knew we had to get out of that. So I started telling Roselle, "Go right, right. There was a building on our right side, and I wanted her to find the nearest opening if she could even hear me, see my hand signals, or whatever. And I was also listening for openings. Yes, I can hear when I pass an opening, and I and I can tell it's there and deal with it accordingly. Like during a time when you're running away from a collapsing building, run into it. Suddenly, I heard an opening on the right, and Roselle must have known what I wanted. She must have been able to see my hand signals or something because she turned right, she took one step, she stopped, and she would not move. Come on, Roselle, keep going. She wouldn't move. Come on, Roselle. Nope, wouldn't do it. And I realized, focus on running with Roselle, and the rest will take care of itself. So I stuck out a foot. Michael Hingson  47:13 I trailed a hand along a wall, and realized that we were at the top of a flight of stairs. Roselle had done exactly what she was supposed to do, and I knew what I was supposed to do if I wanted to get her to move. But before I did that, I gave her a big hug, good girl, and then I said, "Roselle, forward! That's the command. And we went down the stairs into an arcade area that was the entrance to the Fulton Street subway station. There were a few other people down there. Then a guy came up from the subway system and saw about eight or nine of us there. He introduced himself as Lou, an employee of the subway system, and he took us down to an employee locker room where we could sit down and and kind of hack and cough and get the dust out of our lungs. There was a water fountain and there were fans. We were there about 10 minutes. Then a police officer came, and he said, "You got to get out of here right now. The air's clear up above. You can't stay here. And so we followed him. Of course, he probably had already been told that Tower One was going to collapse. the The officials knew that each building was going to collapse probably about a half hour before it actually did. At least that was their presumption, and that's what I've been told. Anyway, we followed him back up the stairs, through the arcade, up the last two flights of stairs. We got outside. David looked around and he goes, "Oh my God, Mike, there's no Tower Two anymore. And I said, "What do you see? And he said, "All I see are pillars of smoke, hundreds of feet tall. We stood there for a moment, and then we just turned, and we kept walking. Now west on Fulton Street, we walked about 10 minutes, and we were in this little plaza area when we heard that freight train waterfall sound again, and we knew it must be our tower collapsing. We saw a little retaining wall David did, and we got behind it and ducked down, and we waited until everything stopped, and then we stood back up. And David looked around and he said, "Oh my God, Mike, there's no World Trade Center anymore. And I said, "What do you see? And he said, "I just see fingers of fire and flame, hundreds of feet tall. We see, I see pillars of smoke. It's gone. Are you sure? Yeah, it's gone. It's not there. We stood there a moment, then I tried to call my wife Karen again. That was kind of my first thought. I need to tell her we're okay. This time I did get through because clearly the circuits were were free. And after some tears on both sides of the phone, she is the one who told us how two aircraft had deliberately been hijacked and crashed into the towers, one into the Pentagon, and a fourth at that time was still missing over Pennsylvania. Who would have thought? We spent the rest of that day getting up toward Midtown Manhattan, and eventually I got to Penn Station, learned that the trains were running, and went back. Out to New Jersey, David wanted to go back up to be with his sister, who he who he was staying with. She lived on the Upper East Side, so I got on trains and I went back over toward New Jersey. I called Karen and told her what was going on, and a friend of ours, a friend that Karen had known since high school out in California, Tom Painter, was also living in New Jersey, he had come down to be with her, not even knowing at the time whether I was in the World Trade Center or working from home that day or whatever. But he drove her to the station in our accessible van, and as I came off the train, I heard the van show up. I went downstairs, climbed and went up the ramp into the van, and got to hug Karen about 7o'clock that night, for the first time since leaving home, we got home. Tom drove us home. We all went inside. I was going to take Roselle outside because she hadn't been out since like five that morning. Michael Hingson  50:53 Well, I take that back about six that morning, and I took her harness off. But before I could do anything else, she was off like a shot. She went to her toy box, found her favorite tug bone, and started playing tug of war with my retired guide dog Linny. Why? Because it was over for her. And I talked to the guide dog people later, and I said, "Will any of this affect her? And they said, "Was she threatened? Did anything hit her or injure her in any way, and I said no. They said then no. It was over for her because dogs don't do what if. It was over. It was done. She was fine. Lesson to be learned. Lesson you will learn more about if you buy our new book, Live Like a Guide Dog: True Stories from a Blind Man and His Guide his dogs about being brave, overcoming adversity, and walking in faith. That that book is available for pre-order, and I've been signing bookmarks all day. I still even have a few with me. But the point is, you can pre-order it, and and it's about something that I learned later. I thought about during the pandemic. I've talked a lot about escaping and not being afraid because I developed a mindset that said you know what to do, but what I've not done is to teach others how they can learn to recognize that fear is not something that needs to blind or overwhelm you. You can use fear as a very powerful tool to guide you and steer you in the right direction if you know how to control it, and live like a guide dog is all about that. So I hope that you'll all get that when it comes out in August. But again, you can pre-order it now if you go to michaelhinkston.com. There's a link there where you can go to a web page to get information and to go to a link where you can pre-order it. And like I said, I have some bookmarked with a QR code on it, and and I'm and I yes I am plugging the book, but I'm also saying, look, folks, the bottom line is we operate in so many ways with misconceptions about things. I've talked about blindness. Anybody could have been in the World Trade Center, and and a lot of people were. The reality is, though, if you learn what to do and how to prepare for situations in general, when it becomes something specific, you'll know what to do. People have asked a number of times, "Well, wasn't your guide dog trained to operate in an emergency like the World Trade Center? How are we going to do that? No, the dog isn't trained to do that. The guide dog's job is not to lead. Guide dogs do not lead blind people. Guide dogs' jobs are to make sure that we walk safe. It's my job to know where to go and how to get there to give the dog direction. The dog depends and relies on me to give it direction. The dog's job, as I said, is to make sure we walk safely. It's a team effort. We each have a job to do, and we develop a trusting relationship when we learn to trust each other and respect the job the other member of the team is doing, which is what it's all about. Which is what happens on any team, trust is all around us. Trust is under attack in so many ways from our politicians, and in so many ways. But the reality is, trust is all around us. I think we all trust that the roof isn't going to fall in on the church. I think that we trust that the PA system is going to continue to work, and so on. Trust is all around us. The difference between dogs and people is that dogs, while they do love unconditionally, do not trust unconditionally. But dogs are open to trust unless some incredibly traumatic thing has happened to them where they lose that ability. But dogs are open to trust, dogs want humans to give them direction to establish rules, and all too often with our pets and so on, we don't do that. We don't really develop the relationship that we should and can with them. Michael Hingson  54:54 If we would, we would have so much stronger bond and relationships with them. It would be. Amazing for for all of us, but the bottom line is that's the relationship that I get with each guide dog. That's the relationship I have with Alamo. He trusts that I am going to feed him before too awfully long. He trusts that you guys are going to buy books, so he'll have kibbles for me to feed him. Just saying, but but seriously, the the trust has to be earned with a dog or with people or whatever, and if you find that you you discover you can't trust someone, don't wish them ill will, forgive them and move on. So you don't trust them, but you know what you have, and you go off and make new friends and learn other trusting relationships that you can develop. Focus on running with Roselle; the rest will take care of itself. The reality is, we worry so much about so many things. We are always doing what if we create most of the fears that we face in our lives, and we Don't need to do that. If we would focus on just the things that we have some control over and leave the rest alone, well, we might want to be aware of them, but we don't have to worry about them. We don't have control over them. Trust and deal with the things that you have to deal with, and let the rest take care of itself. And that was what I learned on September 11th, listening to the voice of God, absolutely, and that is something that I pass on to all of you, and I think that's the most important thing that I can leave you with. Hi again, everyone. This is Mike Hingson. I hope that you found that speech to be helpful and relevant and interesting. I hope that you learn some things from it. From a personal standpoint, I hope that you learn that blindness isn't really the big problem that I face. The challenge that I face really comes from the fact that people who have eyesight tend to believe that blind people are not capable of doing much because they can't see. Wrong thing to believe. I'm not going to spend a lot of time on that because we did it during the speech, but I just wanted to thank you for being here today, for listening and watching this episode. I hope that you will also tune in for our episode on Tuesday, where I'm in conversation with Michelle Abraham on next Friday, the 11th of September, that you will tune in to hear the conversation with Bob Ellis, and then episode 475, which will occur on the 15th of September, where we will talk about lessons to be learned and and give you some things to hopefully take away that maybe you haven't thought about. Thanks very much for being here with us. I really very much appreciate all of your support. If any of you have any questions or want to reach out to me, you are welcome to do so. Please feel free to email me at speaker@michaelhinkson.com. That's s p e a k e r at m i c h a e l h i n g s o n.com speaker@michaelhingson.com hope to hear from you and as you gather I do speak I continue to speak publicly I've been a keynote speaker since September 11 if anybody knows of anyone that needs a keynote speaker or you can use us in events that you have please reach out to me at speaker@michaelhingson.com let's talk about it. Let's see how we can help. I'm always looking for ways to inspire, but also to teach and help. And I'd like to be part of your world in that regard. Thanks again for being here. Thanks for listening, and come back next time for another episode of Unstoppable Mindset.

Microsoft Copilot ist mehr als eine Software – es ist ein Transformationsprojekt. Wie Mittelständler Copilot sicher, wirtschaftlich und erfolgreich einführen, erklären Metin Yolcu und Armin Yousef von Ingram Micro in dieser Folge von IT-Business Unplugged. Weiterhin geben sie praxisnahe Tipps zu Datenhygiene und Security, zeigen mögliche Folgekosten auf und legen dar, wie man als Geschäftsführer seine Mitarbeiter ideal auf den Produktiveinsatz von KI vorbereitet.

Sanjib Sahoo, executive vice president and president of the Global Platform Group at Ingram Micro In this episode of In The Channel, we sit down with Sanjib Sahoo, EVP and President of the Global Platform Group at Ingram Micro, to unpack the “AI Revenue Intelligence” strategy that is currently driving the distributor’s record momentum. Sahoo discusses the evolution of the Xvantage platform from a digital infrastructure vision to a fully trained intelligence layer featuring over 400 proprietary models. A key highlight is the impact of the recently announced Xvantage Integration (XI) Hub and the MCP (Model Context Protocol) Server. Sahoo describes MCP as the “USB-C for AI,” allowing partners to securely connect their own AI agents—whether running on Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini—directly to Ingram Micro’s data mesh. Key discussion points include: The 4x Conversion Metric: How AI-surfaced insights are drastically outperforming traditional sales motions in converting quotes to orders. Democratizing AI: Why small MSPs are becoming the fastest adopters of the MCP Server to bypass complex, expensive ERP system integrations. Operational Efficiency: Real-world examples of partners saving 1,500 hours annually by reducing complex quoting cycles from days to mere seconds. The Human Shift: How the role of the Ingram associate is pivoting from transactional fulfillment to training algorithms and high-value solutioning. For partners looking to get started, Sahoo recommends visiting the Xvantage Developer Portal to explore how to “think big and act small” when it comes to AI adoption. Read Full Transcript Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca and your host for the show. Today, we’re joined by a man who’s effectively the architect of the modern digital Ingram Micro. Sanjib Sahoo is the EVP and president of the Global Platform Group at Ingram Micro and the visionary behind Xvantage. We’re coming off a week where Ingram reported record Q2 results, and Sanjib joins me to talk about why AI revenue intelligence is the engine behind those numbers. We dig into the recently launched XI Hub and MCP server—tools that are allowing even the smallest MSPs to connect their own AI assistants directly to Ingram’s data mesh. We talk about how this is saving early adopters up to 1,500 hours a year and why Sanjib thinks the industry is moving from a world of order takers to order makers. Let’s get right into it. My chat with Sanjib Sahoo. [MUSIC] Robert Dutt: Sanjib, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it. Sanjib Sahoo: Absolutely, it’s a pleasure to be here. Robert Dutt: You guys just came off record Q2 results. A big part of that is the idea of what you guys are calling AI revenue intelligence. For the folks on the ground, what does that term actually mean? Is this about Ingram’s revenue, partner revenue, or sort of the intelligence sitting between those two fields? Sanjib Sahoo: Absolutely. If you look at it, intelligence is the key that connects the lifecycle in the channel. What we have been doing in the last year or couple of years is building functionality with Xvantage. But that is the infrastructure. What we have done is train our intelligence layer. All the models we have built—more than 400 models—and the intelligent integrations that we have built, it all added to that AI layer. Today, that AI layer goes out, looks at all the quotes, looks at multiple parameters, and then stack-ranks opportunities for our sales team to go and outreach our partners. It’s changing the sales motion where we are moving from order takers to order makers. That is converting at almost four times the rate that traditional distribution converted those quotes to orders. That actually has high-quality revenue. And most importantly, it is really giving us a way to close our cycles faster. That is that AI-led revenue—primarily intelligent revenue—that we are doing. Robert Dutt: That 4x number is pretty striking. You’ve been the architect of Xvantage since the beginning—it’s been your baby. Based on what you described, it’s safe to say we’ve gone from vision well into the momentum phase. I’m curious: what’s the biggest difference in the conversations you’re having with partners today versus, say, even the beginning of the year? Sanjib Sahoo: I think our partners are understanding more and more that this is not another platform or a tool for doing distribution better. This is a way for them to leverage that intelligence that Ingram Micro has from being in business for more than 45 years. It’s about leveraging insights to drive their business. Ultimately, where we want to move, Robert, is away from just selling products to selling outcomes by intelligence. I think more and more, that intelligence is the new relationship and value that we can create. The platform is immaterial; the experience is great, but the intelligence is what they need to drive operations. Robert Dutt: I’m curious how you have found the channel’s aptitude or ability—how is the channel prepared for this move towards intelligence? What is the biggest opportunity for the average MSP at this moment to jump on? Sanjib Sahoo: I think the channel is changing. The entire tech ecosystem is no longer linear. It’s more about solutioning, ecosystem orchestration, and demand gen. We need to scale the “long tail”—the small MSPs and the VARs—and that requires a lot of automation. Let me ask you a question. What is the operating system you have on your phone? You might know it’s iOS or Android, but you don’t know the exact version, right? Does it matter? No. But the operating system is what does the disk cleanup and the CPU optimization. Without that, it doesn’t work. We want Xvantage to be that agnostic operating system of the channel that solves all these complexities of SKU ingestion, billing, attaching, and reconciliation, powered by intelligence. This leads to our announcement about MCP. We have spent too much time on system integration; now we are connecting and combining intelligence. Robert Dutt: Let’s get into that. You’ve recently announced XI Hub and the MCP server layer. You guys have positioned this as “operationalizing AI” for the channel. In plain English, how do those two pieces work together to let an MSP connect their own AI to Ingram’s data? Sanjib Sahoo: Absolutely. If I’m a small MSP or an SMB, I don’t have a lot of IT budget. System integration takes a long time. But today, you can quickly write a quick agent or use your own LLMs. How do you connect that to an Xvantage or Ingram Micro without a massive integration? That is MCP. MCP is connecting intelligence to intelligence—agent to agent—versus system integration. It bypasses the complexity. I recently heard of a partner who got connected with MCP within an hour and is already driving value. Data helps you run the business, but intelligence helps you grow the business. Imagine if an MSP can get that constant intelligence from us for renewals or bundles—fulfillment happens as a byproduct, but intelligence is the value. Robert Dutt: You’ve described MCP as the “USB-C for AI.” Why was it important for Ingram to go through MCP and use an open standard like that, rather than building a “walled garden” approach? Sanjib Sahoo: Because a custom approach takes a long time. This is the fastest way to abstract your systems. Imagine you have ChatGPT or Claude and you connect it securely to Ingram Micro’s Xvantage to run your business. That’s amazing. We have architected it this way because ERPs can answer what, but they can’t answer why. Our architecture—with the real-time data mesh, AI Factory, and headless engines—really creates an environment where MCP can work much faster. Robert Dutt: If I’m an MSP and I’m plugging in an AI assistant to my business systems and to your live data, my first thoughts are going to be security and data leakage. How do the XI Hub and MCP server keep that data secure? Sanjib Sahoo: We have a lot of work going into security—data segregation, multiple protocols for how we expose data. We have different protocols for read versus write. We have been very careful about the details for obvious reasons, but there is a massive focus on security. Robert Dutt: You guys have talked about some incredible numbers—early adopters saving 1,500 hours annually and radically reducing quoting cycles. What was the partner doing manually that an MCP-connected assistant can do for them now? Sanjib Sahoo: They can get instant access to insights and figure out any question they have without needing to invest in extra OpEx or partners to do those activities. That saves them a lot of hours. But it’s also about growth. We see that Xvantage-integrated partners are doing much more business with us. It’s transactional efficiency and growth opportunities. Robert Dutt: When it comes to quoting, how is AI reducing the cycle? Is it fetching data faster or actually suggesting configurations? Sanjib Sahoo: MCP itself isn’t doing the quoting. We have worked hard to build a custom quoting engine in Xvantage as one of our headless engines. It takes complexity out and does the vendor integrations from config to order. MCP is just the pipe giving you the data from that engine. The complexity is solved by the Xvantage infrastructure; you’re just taking advantage of it by connecting with the MCP layer. Complex quotes that used to take days can now be done in minutes or seconds. Robert Dutt: Now that XI Hub and the MCP server are out there, what’s been the most unexpected or novel way that you’ve seen a partner use it? Sanjib Sahoo: I thought the big customers or the mid-market would lead, but I’m seeing a lot of traction with the “long tail”—small customers. It makes sense because they don’t have the budget to invest in heavy IT. They are connecting to MCP, looking at data, looking at renewals, and getting insights. Some are doing it in less than an hour. It really surprised me how this “relationship fabric” is giving them value through AI rather than just through sales calls. Robert Dutt: For those smaller partners—that 10-person MSP—what’s the on-ramp? How “AI-ready” do they need to be? Sanjib Sahoo: They can be ready pretty fast. There are so many models available. They know their own context, and if they plug into us, they can drive their business in a very different way. The XI Hub and MCP server are strategic components of a broader vision to democratize enterprise AI in the channel. The future of distribution is not just moving products; it’s about connecting intelligence across the tech value chain. Robert Dutt: You’ve talked about the move from “sell-in” to “sell-with.” Does this change the role of the Ingram associate or the account rep? If AI is doing the quoting, how does the human role shift? Sanjib Sahoo: There is always a human role. First, they are training the algorithms to make the intelligence better every day. Second, they can focus on being proactive rather than reactive. They focus on high-value, high-complexity solutioning with the customer rather than basic operations. We are focusing on the exceptions rather than transactional connectivity. Robert Dutt: You often talk about “mindset over skillset.” If a partner wants to capture this opportunity, what’s the one big mindset shift they need to make? Sanjib Sahoo: Think big and act small. Focus on the 60% chance to succeed versus the 40% chance to fail. AI is not perfect, but interacting with it every day makes it better. Data helps you run your business, but intelligence helps you grow it. We need our partners to move from instinct to intelligence. Robert Dutt: Looking at the rest of the year, what is the next big milestone for Xvantage? Sanjib Sahoo: The next “hub moment” will be about how we improve the intelligence every day to drive outcomes. We will always build features, but I want to celebrate intelligently operating this channel. We are moving from a platform for distribution to a platform company that does distribution. Robert Dutt: Last one. If I’m a partner who hasn’t yet looked at the Xvantage developer portal or XI Hub, where do I start? Sanjib Sahoo: You can Google the Xvantage Developer Portal or talk to your account manager. Some are figuring it out on their own, but we are there to help. Let’s work together to transform this industry. Robert Dutt: Brilliant. I appreciate you taking the time to walk us through this. Sanjib Sahoo: Absolutely, Robert. Thank you so much. Robert Dutt: There you have it, Sanjib Sahoo from Ingram Micro. I’d like to thank Sanjib for his time. It’s not often you get a peek under the hood of a platform handling four petabytes of data to see exactly how it’s changing the day-to-day life of the partner. The big takeaway for me was the 4x metric—AI-driven insights are converting at four times the rate of traditional sales motions. For the MSP, the message is clear: the long tail isn’t being left behind here. In fact, if you don’t have a massive IT budget, the MCP server might be your fastest way to operationalize AI without a developer team. I’d like to thank you for listening. You can find the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and most major directories. Ratings and reviews go a long way. Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.

Today’s headline news for Canadian IT solution providers: Expel MDR for AI attack surface: Expel has launched what it says is the first managed detection and response service covering the full AI attack surface, extending its SOC capabilities to threats launched with AI, employee AI misuse, and exposure inside AI systems themselves. The company announced the expansion at Black Hat 2026, adding an Anthropic Claude integration that pulls enterprise compliance signals and prompt content into Expel’s detection pipeline. Expel’s operators work the prompt content itself to surface intent, not just activity, and the company has mapped its detection library to 13 of 16 MITRE ATLAS tactics. Expel Huntress CEO on autonomous adversary: Huntress CEO Kyle Hanslovan is warning that autonomous, AI-powered attacks have moved from theoretical concern to active reality. In an interview with CRN, Hanslovan cited OpenAI’s disclosure that its AI agents compromised the Hugging Face platform during testing, as well as subsequent Anthropic disclosures about its Claude Mythos 5 model, as evidence that autonomous hacking is already happening. Huntress, which recently crossed $250 million in annual recurring revenue, has built its business around protecting smaller organizations that lack enterprise-scale security teams. CRN Myriad360 acquires F3 Technology Partners: Myriad360 has acquired the assets of F3 Technology Partners, a Connecticut-based healthcare IT solution provider, pushing the combined organization past $1 billion in estimated annual revenue. While Myriad360 is U.S.-based, the firm services the Canadian market through its global logistics and international business operations. F3 brings deep healthcare vertical expertise to Myriad360’s portfolio, reinforcing a trend of mid-market consolidation that is creating a new class of “Super-VARs” with the scale to compete for multinational enterprise business. CRN Nutanix MCP server: Nutanix has released an open-source MCP server for the Nutanix Cloud Platform, enabling AI assistants including GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, and Cursor to automate cloud operations through the Prism v4 API. The move follows Ingram Micro’s MCP server launch for its Xvantage marketplace and reflects growing channel investment in the Model Context Protocol as a standard for AI-tool integration. Nutanix Halo AI Studio and MCP push: PSA vendor Halo unveiled AI Studio and MCP integrations at XChange August, giving MSPs tools to build AI agents for service desk, sales, customer success, reporting, and quarterly business reviews. The company also launched an MCP server to act as a central interface across MSP tools. Halo partner John Douglass of Pileus Technologies said the AI Studio capabilities are “a game changer” for automating service delivery. CRN CRN Annual Report Card winners: CRN announced the winners of its 2026 Annual Report Card at XChange August, with solution providers grading vendors across 23 technology categories. Notable winners included HPE in cloud computing and servers, Nvidia in GPUs, Exabeam in AI security, and Scale Computing in hybrid cloud infrastructure. Complete scores will be published on CRN.com on October 5. CRN Liquidware CommandCTRL 1.5: Liquidware launched CommandCTRL 1.5 with AI-powered endpoint diagnostics and browser-based remote control across Windows, macOS, Linux, and thin clients. The update adds AI Insights that interpret endpoint telemetry and extends remote support capabilities to browser-based sessions without requiring a client installation. Liquidware Read Full Transcript TRANSCRIPT TO COME

Today’s headline news for Canadian IT solution providers: [Schneider Electric]: The company yesterday unveiled its next-generation APC Smart-UPS at XChange August 2026, introducing what it says is the first multi-chemistry battery technology for distributed and edge environments. The platform accepts both VRLA lead-acid and lithium-ion batteries, allowing customers to start with lower-cost lead-acid and upgrade later without replacing the chassis. Read more on CRN. [Ingram Micro]: The distributor says hundreds of channel partners are now using its Xvantage Integration Hub and secure Model Context Protocol Server to connect AI assistants directly to their business systems. Trust X Alliance member Matrix Integration estimates the platform will save its team between 1,000 and 1,500 hours this year, while IT Design Consulting says it cut quoting from hours or days to seconds. Read the announcement on Ingram Micro. [D&H Distributing]: The distributor is now authorized to carry Dell Technologies’ full enterprise storage portfolio in the United States and Canada, adding a new sourcing option after Dell ended its relationship with Arrow Enterprise Computing Solutions. D&H says its Advanced Solutions+ business unit now accounts for more than 25 percent of its overall business. Read more on CRN. [Acronis]: The company unveiled an autonomous IT platform update with an AI-driven console, service desk, and migration tools designed to help MSPs automate operations and expand services. Read more on msp-channel.com. [NCC Group and SailPoint]: The two companies have partnered to strengthen identity security services for both human and non-human identities. Read the announcement on NCC Group. [Lexful]: The company announced general availability of its AI-native IT documentation platform for MSPs, with plans to join the Pax8 and Sherweb marketplaces before the end of 2026. Read more on Yahoo Finance. [Circana]: Research presented at XChange August says AI’s workforce shock is unlikely to ease in the near term, with MSP executives noting persistent talent gaps despite automation advances. Read more on CRN. Read Full Transcript Welcome to The Buzz from ChannelBuzz.ca, I’m Robert Dutt, today is Tuesday, August 11, 2026, and here’s what’s happening in the channel today. Schneider Electric yesterday unveiled its next-generation APC Smart-UPS at XChange August 2026, introducing what the company says is the first multi-chemistry battery technology for distributed and edge environments. The new platform accepts both traditional VRLA lead-acid batteries and lithium-ion batteries, allowing customers to start with lower-cost lead-acid technology and upgrade to longer-lasting lithium-ion later without replacing the chassis. Adam Compton, offer management leader at Schneider Electric, told CRN that the chassis is engineered to recognize different battery chemistries through firmware and battery management systems, which then alert EcoStruxure IT monitoring software about the specific battery type and replacement timeline. The company says future battery chemistries will also be supported as they become viable. For channel partners, the flexibility creates new service opportunities around battery lifecycle management, assessment, and the Rip-Replace-Recycle refresh program. Gordon Lord, vice president of channels, said Schneider Electric is doubling down on its Gateway program to give partners visibility into distributed power infrastructure across customer sites. The online versions of the new Smart-UPS are slated to be available starting September 1, with line-interactive versions following next year. Partners will not require new certifications. Canadian partners working with regulated and industrial customers should note the air-gapped deployment potential and the EcoStruxure monitoring layer as a recurring services hook. Ingram Micro says hundreds of channel partners are now using its Xvantage Integration Hub and secure Model Context Protocol Server to connect AI assistants directly to their business systems. The distributor announced the expanded adoption last Wednesday, positioning the platform as a way to reduce integration friction and automate workflows across quoting, ordering, and customer management. Executive Vice President Sanjib Sahoo described the MCP Server as a way to bring AI directly into the flow of business, giving partners a secure, real-time connection to Ingram Micro’s data mesh without building custom integrations. Trust X Alliance member Matrix Integration estimates the platform will save its team between 1,000 and 1,500 hours this year. IT Design Consulting CEO Ryan Evans said his team cut quoting processes from hours or days to seconds using the XI Hub integration. Ingram Micro is offering on-demand training sessions to help partners build AI-powered solutions through the platform. The company is positioning the offering as part of its broader strategy to make Xvantage an intelligent operating layer for the global channel. Canadian partners should watch how quickly small MSPs adopt the plug-and-play connectivity, since Ingram Micro reports that smaller providers are the fastest adopters so far. D&H Distributing is now authorized to carry Dell Technologies’ full enterprise storage portfolio in the United States and Canada, adding a new sourcing option for partners after Dell ended its distribution relationship with Arrow Enterprise Computing Solutions last month. The Harrisburg, Pa.-based distributor is bringing Dell’s advanced infrastructure, including Dell Apex as-a-service and subscription technologies, to its Advanced Solutions+ business unit. Chief Commercial and Consumer Officer Marty Bauerlein told CRN that Dell’s decision followed an RFP process and was influenced by D&H’s execution capabilities and growth mindset. Partners including Precision Computer Services and CompuCom have praised D&H’s responsiveness and collaborative approach. D&H says its Advanced Solutions+ unit now accounts for more than 25 percent of its overall business. For Canadian partners, the move adds another distributor option for Dell storage and server infrastructure at a time when Dell is also rolling out program changes focused on AI outcomes and faster rewards. The timing means partners can evaluate sourcing alongside the new rebate and registration structures Dell is expected to introduce this month. In Brief – Acronis unveils autonomous IT platform update with AI-driven console, service desk, and migration tools for MSPs. NCC Group partners with SailPoint to strengthen identity security services for human and non-human identities. Lexful announces general availability of its AI-native IT documentation platform for MSPs, with plans to join the Pax8 and Sherweb marketplaces before the end of 2026. Circana research presented at XChange August says AI’s workforce shock is unlikely to ease in the near term. Full details and links in the show notes or the blog post. Later today on In The Channel, my conversation with Exabeam about rebuilding the MSSP commercial model to fix the economics of managed SIEM. And if you haven‘t heard it yet, check out my conversation with Chris Fabes from TD SYNNEX Canada about his three-sided view of the channel. That’s how we’re seeing the headlines today. I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, thanks for listening. Have a great day.

Shayna Daly from Polytechnic Consulting joins Ingram Micro's AWS Partner Spotlight to discuss how their strategy-first approach differentiates them in the AWS partner channel — especially when working with federal, state, and local government clients navigating legacy systems and complex procurement cycles. Shayna also shares how Ingram Micro's Accelerated Development Program helped fast-track their AWS practice's growth.Key Takeaways

Shayna Daly from Polytechnic Consulting joins Ingram Micro's AWS Partner Spotlight to discuss how their strategy-first approach differentiates them in the AWS partner channel — especially when working with federal, state, and local government clients navigating legacy systems and complex procurement cycles. Shayna also shares how Ingram Micro's Accelerated Development Program helped fast-track their AWS practice's growth.Key Takeaways

Lisa from Ingram Micro joins this episode of Ingram Micro Insider to break down how the Industry Solutions Organization helps AWS partners break into public sector — from leveraging contract vehicles like OMNIA, NCPA, and GSA, to accessing a dedicated grant writer and underused business intelligence tools. Lisa shares practical advice on where new partners should focus first, how to build credibility fast, and the biggest myths holding partners back from public sector success.Key Takeaways

Lisa from Ingram Micro joins this episode of Ingram Micro Insider to break down how the Industry Solutions Organization helps AWS partners break into public sector — from leveraging contract vehicles like OMNIA, NCPA, and GSA, to accessing a dedicated grant writer and underused business intelligence tools. Lisa shares practical advice on where new partners should focus first, how to build credibility fast, and the biggest myths holding partners back from public sector success.Key Takeaways

In this episode of The IT Experts Podcast, I sit down with Gemma Telford from the Archer Agency to unpack one of the most underused resources available to growing MSPs, vendor Marketing Development Funds, or MDF. With two decades of experience across tech marketing, including roles at Ingram Micro, Sage and Palo Alto Networks, Gemma Telford brings a rare view from both sides of the channel, having worked with vendors, distributors and partners alike.    We open with a wider discussion on why so many MSP owners struggle to embrace marketing in the first place. Many of us built our businesses on technical strength rather than promotional confidence, and Gemma and I agree that the answer often lies in reframing marketing as simply clear messaging about how you help people, rather than something big or intimidating. Bringing in dedicated marketing support, rather than expecting founders or inexperienced hires to carry the whole function, is one of the most reliable paths to sustainable growth.     From there, we move into the heart of the episode, MDF itself. Gemma Telford explains that marketing development funds sit within a vendor's budget specifically to help partners sell more of their products and services. Despite the funds being widely available, research referenced in the episode suggests that around sixty percent of MDF goes unused every quarter. The reasons are practical rather than mysterious. Vendors often allocate funding to whoever asks loudest, application processes can be convoluted, and many MSPs simply are not aware the money exists or how to access it.    A significant part of our conversation focuses on the mismatch between vendor expectations and MSP realities. Vendors frequently want to see leads or return on investment within a single quarter, which rarely reflects how MSP sales cycles actually work. Gemma Telford shares an encouraging example of an ERP vendor taking a longer-term view, building multiyear plans with partners and trusting that results will follow, even if not immediately. This kind of collaborative thinking, she suggests, is exactly what more vendors need to adopt.    Practical advice runs throughout the episode. Rather than approaching every vendor at once, Gemma recommends we choose one vendor to start with, ideally one connected to a business goal such as growth in a particular sector or vertical. From there, building a genuine plan, complete with revenue targets and a proposed timeline, gives vendors something concrete to support rather than a vague request for cash. Case studies and proof points are also flagged as powerful tools, since vendors are always seeking evidence that their products deliver real results for real customers.    We also touch on the importance of relationships within the channel. Strong connections with account managers and channel teams can open doors that generic outreach never will, and we both agree that treating vendor partnerships as a genuine collaboration, rather than a transactional exchange, tends to produce the best long-term outcomes.    Towards the end of the episode, Gemma Telford sets out three changes that would make MDF programmes work better for everyone. Vendors moving away from rigid quarterly ROI expectations, supporting partners to build their own plans rather than being overly prescriptive, and simplifying the application process so partners are not discouraged before they even begin. For any MSP wondering where to start, my advice is refreshingly simple, get a plan in place, understand your specialisms and messaging, and proactively approach your vendors rather than waiting to be noticed.    This episode is a valuable listen for any MSP owner who has heard of MDF but never quite understood how to access it, or for those keen to strengthen their vendor relationships and unlock funding that is often sitting untouched.    You can connect with Gemma Telford on LinkedIn or find out more about her work at the Archer Agency.   Make sure to check out our Ultimate MSP Growth Guide, a free guide that walks you through a proven process to take your MSP from stuck to scalable, without working even more hours. It's 44 pages rammed with advice, insights and inspiration to help you decide what support is available to you now if you want to grow and scale your business. Click HERE to get your copy.    Connect on LinkedIn HERE with Ian and also with Stuart by clicking this LINK    And when you're ready to take the next step in growing your MSP, come and take the Scale with Confidence MSP Mastery Quiz. In just three minutes, you'll get a 360-degree scan of your MSP and identify the one or two tactics that could help you find more time, engage & align your people and generate more leads.    If you're serious about growth and want to explore what this could look like for your MSP, you can book a Right Fit Clarity Call with us HERE.  OR   To join our amazing Facebook Group of over 400 MSPs where we are helping you Scale Up with Confidence, then click HERE  Until next time, look after yourself and I'll catch up with you soon!

Derek Ross from TrueMark joins Ingram Micro's AWS Partner Spotlight to explain why being an AWS-only implementation partner lets his team go deeper than generalist competitors — from smarter VMware modernization and landing zone governance to cost optimization and secure enterprise AI on Amazon Bedrock. Derek shares how TrueMark helps lean IT teams in education and government scale confidently without sacrificing compliance or control over their data.Key Takeaways

Derek Ross from TrueMark joins Ingram Micro's AWS Partner Spotlight to explain why being an AWS-only implementation partner lets his team go deeper than generalist competitors — from smarter VMware modernization and landing zone governance to cost optimization and secure enterprise AI on Amazon Bedrock. Derek shares how TrueMark helps lean IT teams in education and government scale confidently without sacrificing compliance or control over their data.Key Takeaways

Will St. Clair from Practical Acceleration joins Ingram Micro's AWS Partner Spotlight to discuss how his team — all former AWS healthcare leaders with nearly 30 years of combined experience — is helping providers, payers, and health tech companies deploy agentic AI safely and at scale. Will shares why healthcare has a uniquely high bar for AI deployment, and how Ingram Micro's Accelerated Development Program helped his new company punch above its weight from day one.Key Takeaways

Chris Fabes, president of TD SYNNEX Canada Chris Fabes is two weeks into his new role as president of TD SYNNEX Canada, and he brings a perspective almost nobody else in the Canadian channel can match: senior leadership experience on all three sides of the ecosystem. Fabes spent a decade at Lenovo Canada, where as channel chief he tripled channel revenue to $1.2 billion in three years. He then moved to SHI International, where he led the Canadian operation with a focus on enterprise and public sector. Now he’s at the distributor side, taking over from Mitchell Martin, who ran the business for 35 years through multiple mergers and industry transformations. In this conversation, Fabes discusses what he learned from seeing the channel from the vendor, reseller, and distributor sides – and how each perspective informs what partners should expect from TD SYNNEX going forward. He talks about the booming Quebec market (he’s Montreal-based and bilingual), the role of MSPs as “AI ambassadors” for 1.3 million Canadian SMBs, and the shift from traditional SaaS consumption toward tokenomics. He’s candid about needing more time to assess TD SYNNEX’s internal AI readiness, and he closes with a challenge to the Canadian channel: be “proud and loud” about what the ecosystem has accomplished. Read Full Transcript **Robert Dutt:** Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor at ChannelBuzz.ca, and your host for the show. Today I’m joined by Chris Fabes, who’s just a couple of weeks into his new role as president of TD SYNNEX Canada. Now, TD SYNNEX is of course the largest technology distributor in the world, and the Canadian operation has been a fixture of this channel for decades. But this is a transition moment. Mitch Martin ran the Canadian business for more than 35 years, starting out with Merisel Canada, through the Synnex acquisition, the pandemic, mergers with Westcon, and finally the merger with Tech Data. He retired earlier this year and TD SYNNEX went outside the organization for his replacement. They found Chris Fabes at SHI International, where he was running the Canadian operation. Before SHI, he spent a decade at Lenovo Canada, where as the channel chief he tripled channel revenue to $1.2 billion in three years. And before that, he started his career at a reseller. So, he’s one of the very few people in the industry who’ve held senior leadership roles on the reseller side, the vendor side, and now the distributor side. A 360-degree view that I think is worth exploring. We talked about what he’s seeing in his first two weeks, what partners should expect from TD SYNNEX Canada under his leadership, the Quebec market, which he calls home, AI, program simplification, and why he thinks the Canadian channel ecosystem should be, in his words, “proud and loud.” Let’s get right into it. My chat with Chris Fabes. Chris, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it. **Chris Fabes:** Thanks for having me. I also appreciate it. **Robert Dutt:** Pretty epic way to get the distributor side of things on your channel bingo card, having already done the reseller solution provider and vendor side. Congrats on the new gig and I guess in general, your thoughts on taking over the leadership of TD SYNNEX Canada at this moment. **Chris Fabes:** I appreciate that. And look, how could I not be excited? It’s an incredible opportunity. As you mentioned, I’ve been on the vendor side as well as the value-added reseller side, but distribution is definitely not new for me. I’ve been working with TD SYNNEX for many, many years in different capacities. So it’s exciting having known the organization, knowing a lot of the people, and just quickly being pulled into internal and external conversations about, “Hey, what can we go do to go big?” So it’s just really exciting and I couldn’t be happier. **Robert Dutt:** As we touch on there, you’ve had senior leadership roles reseller side, most recently SHI, the vendor side with Lenovo, and now you’re adding the distributor side—a perspective that not many people have at the senior level especially. How has seeing that ecosystem from all three of those sides changed what you think a distributor actually needs to do for partners? **Chris Fabes:** I think it gives me a perspective that is rather unique. I always like to look at what the market is asking of the channel ecosystem and for each of those components, where do we add value and how do we focus on the outcome that our customers, vendor partners, and the ultimate end user are looking for. I think we can all agree that while technology, the whole industry is an exciting place to be—and I think we’d be doing something different if we all wanted things to be simple—the pace of change and the pace of innovation is really exciting. I think with all of the growth and now complexities built into the ecosystem, distribution plays an even more pivotal role in being able to service the demand. That’s what’s really exciting looking at the future. **Robert Dutt:** At Lenovo, one of your signature achievements was tripling channel revenue to $1.2 billion over the course of three years. What was the thesis and the plan behind that growth in that time, and is any of that transferable to the distributor context where you’re one step further removed from the end customer? **Chris Fabes:** I think it absolutely is relevant and it aligns. It all starts with planning around what the expected demand is and making sure that the differentiation and the capabilities are aligned with that opportunity. Even answering your question from the Lenovo side of things, it was: where’s the appetite? Where are the routes to market? How do we pull the levers at the right times? How do we make sure that we’re talking to the customers, being the channel partners as well as the end customers, so that we can pivot as required? Looking at the distribution side of things, it’s really no different. In the Canadian market, it is really: where’s the spend coming from, who is touching those spend requirements, and how do we participate in a meaningful way where we’re adding value to the equation? **Robert Dutt:** You spent a decade at Lenovo on your way up, literally working your way up the organization. How does that kind of ground-level experience shape your leadership style and what are you looking for in the teams you’re building now? **Chris Fabes:** Great question. I’ve always looked at myself as being someone that respects people at all levels. I don’t see myself any different from anyone else in any organization. So I really seek to understand, look to build relationships, and listen first. I lead with trust, which I think allows you to operate with very low friction, allowing people to outperform at their best levels. I make sure that I celebrate success along the way, but also hold people accountable. It’s been fun being able to work for people and then have a flip-side relationship as I was able to grow into different leadership positions. Being humble and respectful of all those relationships has benefited me as I’ve moved into positions where the relationships, even if they might be different now, are very much respectful. I’m happy for them; they’re happy for me. We have a short memory when we want it to be short, but long when it matters. In this channel, being that it’s large yet very small at the same time, leaving those relationships better off has been an important part of the way I’ve looked at people. **Robert Dutt:** I asked you a little while ago your perspective on what you can bring from the vendor side to the distributor side of things. Sort of the same question, but coming at it from your more recent point of view from the reseller side at SHI. A massive reseller—what did your time there teach you about where distribution adds value, where it doesn’t, and what you wanted from distribution when you were in that seat? **Chris Fabes:** Sure. There were a lot of conversations. Most of my conversations at that point were internal around building strategy. I think we’ve touched on that quite a bit, but the other side was just talking with CIOs, CEOs, and VPs that were responsible for technology decisions. The technology decisions almost became the easy part. It was: Where can you help me around optimization? Where can you help me on cash flow? How can you do things that are lower friction? What happens when something might not be going perfectly? Is there an escalation path? So, process—that’s what I started to learn and be able to apply to that business. Again, I think having that lens of those customer expectations and understanding the flow down through the complete channel ecosystem allows me to look at distribution from a strategy and execution lens, combined with the ultimate goal of satisfying those that are ultimately deploying the technology—whether they be SMB, mid-market, enterprise, or large public sector. **Robert Dutt:** Mitch Martin ran this business for 35-plus years. That’s a pretty extraordinary tenure and he went through pretty wild changes in the industry and in the organization in particular. What do you see as the foundation that he left there? And what do you see, especially in your early days, as the biggest opportunities for fresh investment or new ideas? **Chris Fabes:** Respect the legacy. That’s first and foremost. In my first couple weeks of talking with the staff, what I recognize is there was a strong hand on the business. The foundation was strong, mature, and very well operated, but that doesn’t mean we still can’t look at areas of opportunity—the nuances, the incremental spend, and how we bring additional value. So I’ll be spending my time respecting the mature foundation and the expertise that already exists in the business, listening and having an open mind, but looking at that three-to-five-year future of where TD SYNNEX needs to be based on the market appetite. I want to underscore that in speaking to many people in my first days, it was so incredible to hear the tenures—10 years, 20 years, 30 years—and the passion that they’ve had as they’ve gone through their career with TD SYNNEX through multiple mergers and acquisitions. What they shared with me was just the trust and the love in the organization and the people. I consider myself very lucky to be taking that baton and moving forward with it. **Robert Dutt:** TD SYNNEX is the largest distributor in the world and the competitive landscape is shifting. You’ve got Ingram Micro as the other big traditional broadline folks, and you’re both redefining yourselves in your own ways. As always, there are specialists and newcomers. You’ve got cloud marketplaces. I guess I’m curious, where do you think from where you sit now that TD SYNNEX needs to differentiate itself most urgently to stand out in the current marketplace? **Chris Fabes:** We’re absolutely looking at how we maintain a position of leadership, and that comes down to understanding the market and understanding—and respecting—our competition. Those are going to be the conversations we’ll be having in terms of: How is the ecosystem changing? How is the appetite for technology changing? Are we in a position to meet the demand but also accelerate the demand? Obviously, there’ve been several tailwinds driving the appetite for various technologies, but there’ve also been headwinds where budgets have shifted in how the spend is being distributed. There’ll be that “tech talk” cycle of how we look at the opportunities and how we partner—and who we partner with—to make sure that we’re positioned to grow at scale but continue to take a leading position. **Robert Dutt:** The press release that announced your arrival at TD SYNNEX emphasized enterprise and public sector. Those are areas that you focused on at SHI. Is that a signal that that’s an area where we’re going to see TD SYNNEX push harder in Canada, or more reflective of your background in recent history? **Chris Fabes:** I don’t think we want to read too much into my background. There are no assumptions that I’ll take what I was doing and immediately deploy something like that in this new structure. But where I think there is an opportunity is looking at the buying flow of goods and where in the Canadian market we expect to see the need for services, partnerships, and guidance. There have been several announcements within Canada where there’s going to be increased spend in certain industries—defense is one. We can call that the broader public sector. We also continue to see from an ICT spend that security remains a high priority across the country, as well as the continued investment in readiness in the infrastructure stack. Ultimately, it’s what is driving that demand, and I will be looking at the segmentation and how we best support the customers and partners. **Robert Dutt:** TD SYNNEX’s operational heart—the offices of both legacies that have come together over the years—is typically in the western side of the GTA, and you’re out of Montreal. I’m curious how you’re thinking about the geographic balance of the Canadian business writ large, and with your presence in “La Belle Province,” is there an opportunity to lean harder into Quebec and the francophone market? **Chris Fabes:** Absolutely. The Quebec market is booming. It’s very attractive for us to continue to focus on the areas of growth. We will be taking a national approach, but it’s important that each market has its nuances and its differences. Yes, we have most of our team members within central Canada, on the west side of Toronto, but we’ll be looking at where the demand is. I’m lucky enough to be in Montreal and speak both official languages. I look forward to working with our Quebec partners and vendors to understand if there’re any areas of opportunity that we can help them address. It probably won’t hurt that I am local—born and raised here—and understand the market and the people. **Robert Dutt:** As we speak, you’re two weeks into the role. As this airs, it’ll probably be more like three—”grizzled veteran” territory, clearly. Can you tell me a little bit about what you’ve been focused on for that first fortnight in the role and what you’ve heard from the crew, from resellers, and from vendors? **Chris Fabes:** It’s been nothing but positive. If my wife was here, she would confirm the conversations that she’s overheard! I want this to be a very intentional and honest response. Whether it be the folks that I’ve worked with in the industry, the customers that we serve, or the staff I now have the opportunity to work with, it has been very positive. I was in the Mississauga office for the past few days. I intentionally spent multiple hours walking the floor, shaking hands with all of our people, and asking for feedback. My goal is for our vendor partners and customers to see the value we can bring scale when we understand their business. I personally will hold my team accountable to understand the business drivers of our partners and customers. I will personally make sure that I’m involved in those conversations and in that planning—the good and the bad—so that I have a pulse on what’s expected of us. It’s really about decisions being rooted in reality and relationships. **Robert Dutt:** Last month at ChannelNext Central, you talked about MSPs as “AI ambassadors” for a million or more Canadian SMBs. Now you’re running the biggest distributor in the country. How do you enable that? What’s the distributor’s role in making MSPs successful as AI adoption accelerates and especially SMB customers start looking for more on that front? **Chris Fabes:** Absolutely. There are going to be some additional opportunities to look at how we provide services to the broader MSP market and how we serve them in the infrastructure build-out. There’s also a real conversation around the FinOps change—whether it be consumption or traditional SaaS moving to tokenomics. I think we as a distributor have an opportunity to listen, adjust, and build supporting models that support their build-out. We already do have programs in place to be able to support the MSPs in Canada, so we’ll continue to engage through our partner-led events and continue to build out what that model looks like. **Robert Dutt:** Internally, we touched on AI with the last question. All the distributors are trying to build the business of the future around what AI will mean to the kind of data you can provide. I’m curious about your assessment of TD SYNNEX’s stature in that race at this moment and where you see the biggest opportunities for next steps. **Chris Fabes:** I would say, honestly, I need to spend more time understanding where TD SYNNEX is from an AI perspective. I say that with honesty because my message to the team is that I need to observe and understand the ins and outs of our business. But what I will say broadly is that the appetite for AI is absolutely there and it requires a lot of readiness. Each of our customers is at a different stage. We will meet you where you are, whether it is services readiness, policy, governance, and compliance where we can help at scale, or modernization around infrastructure. We will make sure that we are absolutely ready and take a leading position, because the opportunity is insatiable. Most critically, it’s: how do our partners and their customers use AI to increase their competitive edge and optimization? We’ll be right there beside them. **Robert Dutt:** Back to your Lenovo days, another one of your big projects was simplifying the channel program. “Deadpan Simple” was a phrase I think you liked to use at the time. Distribution programs tend to be on the complex side. I’m curious if you see a simplification opportunity for TD SYNNEX Canada? **Chris Fabes:** In the early feedback that I’ve already received, what customers focus on is the execution. While maybe there are a lot of moving parts, if we execute and communicate seamlessly, that’s the experience that our customers are getting. Is there an opportunity for me to go validate your statement? Absolutely, and I will. It will be a focus of how we make sure we’re bringing the right outcomes and operational excellence. I don’t have a future statement yet, but I’ll be looking at it over time. Our platforms and programs have to be best-in-class if we want to continue to take a leading position. **Robert Dutt:** You’ve been in this community for two decades. What do you see as the big differences between the Canadian channel ecosystem and the US? And what do American-headquartered companies get wrong or misunderstand about the Canadian market? **Chris Fabes:** Part of the reason why this was attractive for me is that there is a respected understanding of how the regions operate. Having leadership and teams that understand our market and our ecosystem was absolutely important. But at the same time, when you can centralize resources and apply the scale at a global level and then bring that to a market like Canada, that allows us to speak with our customers with a much bigger toolkit. I think there is a really interesting balance at TD SYNNEX between the centralized functions of a larger organization and the regional focus and ability to execute based on what the local market desires. **Robert Dutt:** So it sounds like it’s a matter of finding the right balance between the global playbook and local use. **Chris Fabes:** Absolutely. We can learn from anywhere in the world, whether it be at a technology level or a thought leadership level. I’m a big fan of best practices—some people would say “shamelessly borrow”—and you apply it to the market. There’s magic in being open-minded and collaborative but not losing sight of what’s expected locally. **Robert Dutt:** Wrapping it up, what can Canadian VARs, MSPs, and solution providers expect from yourself and from the team at TD SYNNEX going forward? **Chris Fabes:** Expect us to be collaborative. I really mean it. That is the way I operate and it’s what I’ll hold the team accountable for. A partner doesn’t tell the other partner how to do it without listening or understanding. We are going to win together. That is a commitment that I have to our team in Canada and to our customers and partners—that engagement and interest in growing in the right ways. **Robert Dutt:** And one last one, mostly just for fun. If you could wave the proverbial magic wand to change one thing about how the Canadian channel works today, what would it be? **Chris Fabes:** I would say the people and the execution—the level in which the Canadian market has, from time to time, outperformed other areas of the ecosystem. I think the Canadian ecosystem should be “proud and loud” in terms of the accomplishments that we’ve been able to achieve. I look forward to being part of that voice that we can further raise within the local community. **Robert Dutt:** All right, so just be louder and keep doing it better. Sounds great. Chris, good luck with the new role and I look forward to keeping track of things going on at TD SYNNEX. Thanks once again for taking the time to chat. **Chris Fabes:** Thanks, Rob. I enjoyed the conversation and look forward to connecting again soon. **Robert Dutt:** There you have it. Chris Fabes from TD SYNNEX Canada. I’d like to thank Chris for taking the time just two weeks into a new job to sit down and talk about where he’s been and where he thinks TD SYNNEX Canada is headed. Really appreciate his candour around AI. He basically says, “still learning where we’re at,” which is a lot more credible in week two than a rehearsed vision statement might have been. And I think his challenge to the Canadian channel to be “proud and loud” about what this ecosystem has built is worth thinking about. There are a few things I’m going to be watching for as he settles in. Whether TD SYNNEX makes a real push into Quebec now that they’ve got a bilingual Montreal-based president; what a program simplification effort might actually look like given his history of stripping complexity out of partner programs; and how he thinks about the distributor’s role in a world where more and more transactions are moving through non-traditional models like cloud marketplaces. If you enjoyed this episode, I’d really appreciate it if you followed or subscribed to the podcast wherever you get your podcasts. We’re at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and most of the major podcast directories. And if you have a moment to leave a rating or review, we appreciate it. Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca and I’ll see you in the channel.

Will St. Clair from Practical Acceleration joins Ingram Micro's AWS Partner Spotlight to discuss how his team — all former AWS healthcare leaders with nearly 30 years of combined experience — is helping providers, payers, and health tech companies deploy agentic AI safely and at scale. Will shares why healthcare has a uniquely high bar for AI deployment, and how Ingram Micro's Accelerated Development Program helped his new company punch above its weight from day one.Key Takeaways

Eric Evans and Charlie Clayton from Hanabyte join Ingram Micro's AWS Partner Spotlight to discuss how regulated organizations can move fast in the cloud without sacrificing security or compliance. They break down Hanabyte's "cradle to grave" approach — from mock audits and knowledge transfer to blurring the line between compliance and engineering — and how their Ingram Micro partnership helps clients navigate NIST, CMMC, FedRAMP, and HIPAA requirements.Key Takeaways

Eric Evans and Charlie Clayton from Hanabyte join Ingram Micro's AWS Partner Spotlight to discuss how regulated organizations can move fast in the cloud without sacrificing security or compliance. They break down Hanabyte's "cradle to grave" approach — from mock audits and knowledge transfer to blurring the line between compliance and engineering — and how their Ingram Micro partnership helps clients navigate NIST, CMMC, FedRAMP, and HIPAA requirements.Key Takeaways

Intelligence isn't about collecting more data. As Sanjib Sahoo argues, data runs the business. Intelligence grows the business. So why are so many organizations still relying on instinct? Harry sits down with Sanjib Sahoo, President of Global Platform Group at Ingram Micro, whose perspective challenges some of the biggest assumptions in modern B2B Sales. Many organizations focus on building bigger pipelines, automating more processes, or gathering more data. Sanjib believes they're solving the wrong problem. Why do the best sales teams become "order makers" instead of order takers? Why does reimagination create opportunity while automation alone creates fear? And why is curiosity becoming one of the most valuable competitive advantages in the age of AI? Those answers might change the way you think about Sales Leadership, AI in Sales, and Revenue Growth. You'll discover: • Why a bigger pipeline can actually hurt revenue • Why the future belongs to "order makers" • How Customer Intelligence changes customer relationships • Why curiosity may be your biggest competitive advantage in the age of AI

Nathaniel from InfoCap joins this AWS Partner Spotlight with Ingram Micro to unpack what makes agentic AI fundamentally different from both traditional workflow automation and today's generative AI — and why accountability, not capability, is the real challenge in government adoption. Nathaniel explains how InfoCap builds observable, auditable AI systems that reduce case backlogs while keeping humans firmly in the loop on final decisions.Key Takeaways

Nathaniel from InfoCap joins this AWS Partner Spotlight with Ingram Micro to unpack what makes agentic AI fundamentally different from both traditional workflow automation and today's generative AI — and why accountability, not capability, is the real challenge in government adoption. Nathaniel explains how InfoCap builds observable, auditable AI systems that reduce case backlogs while keeping humans firmly in the loop on final decisions.Key Takeaways

David from Global Paradigm joins Ingram Micro's AWS Partner Spotlight to explain how their "Next Gen MSP" model goes beyond traditional break-fix IT support — pairing strategic, transparent cloud guidance with their AI-powered help desk product, Inteledesk. David shares how this approach is cutting mean-time-to-repair by up to 60% and helping mid-market organizations turn IT into a true business asset.Key Takeaways

David from Global Paradigm joins Ingram Micro's AWS Partner Spotlight to explain how their "Next Gen MSP" model goes beyond traditional break-fix IT support — pairing strategic, transparent cloud guidance with their AI-powered help desk product, Inteledesk. David shares how this approach is cutting mean-time-to-repair by up to 60% and helping mid-market organizations turn IT into a true business asset.Key Takeaways

The episode identifies a core structural shift in the managed services industry: the decoupling of service measurement from observable work due to the adoption of autonomous service desk technologies. This shift is driven by the introduction of automation platforms—such as Atera's Robin, Acronis AI Service Desk, and NinjaOne's endpoint automations—that eliminate or obscure traditional service tickets, shifting operational baselines and the metrics used for client billing and value demonstration. Evidence of this shift includes Atera guaranteeing that within 90 days, its Robin system will autonomously resolve half of Tier 1 and complex Tier 2 tickets, enforced via commercial contract terms. The company builds baselines by requiring six months of client ticket history before implementation. Supporting data from Channel EDE and AT&T show that automation can suppress visible ticket volume while inflating claims of efficiency and avoided incidents, independent of provider-side measurement. According to Dave Sobel, AT&T tracked autonomous incident handling since 2018, but most MSPs lack comparable historical data. Further developments reinforce this transition: NinjaOne integrates with ServiceNow to create incidents without human intervention, while Ingram Micro channel feedback observes partners aiming to increase business without staff growth. Broader labor market data and user sentiment surveys reveal that AI-backed automation does not show aggregate productivity gains (Stanford Economic Policy Institute) and is generally viewed with skepticism: Gallup and Apistevist data highlight declining confidence in corporate AI deployments and increased worker nostalgia for pre-automation workflows. The operational impact for MSPs centers on data ownership, measurement accountability, and renewal risk. As traditional records like tickets are eliminated or fragmented, providers who lack their own carefully preserved baselines may find themselves forced to rely on vendor-generated claims for demonstrating avoided work or cost savings. This creates exposure to contract risk, compromised pricing leverage, and governance complexity—especially if ticket-level detail, taxonomy, or supporting operational notes are lost in platform migrations or poorly configured retention policies. According to Dave Sobel, preparing by exporting comprehensive ticket histories, freezing operational taxonomies, and independently counting non-ticket sources of demand are now urgent requirements to maintain accountability and defensible value in future client negotiations. 00:00 The Ticket Is Disappearing  03:45 You Can't Invoice an Absence  07:20 The Client Already Stopped Believing 11:18 Why Do We Care?    Supported by: ScalePad

Ingram Micro sits down with Moses and Nick from TGIX to explore why so many AI initiatives stall out in proof-of-concept and never reach production. They break down TGIX's holistic approach to AI transformation — from infrastructure and data pipelines to security — and share real examples of helping public sector organizations modernize for the AI era.Key Takeaways

Ingram Micro sits down with Moses and Nick from TGIX to explore why so many AI initiatives stall out in proof-of-concept and never reach production. They break down TGIX's holistic approach to AI transformation — from infrastructure and data pipelines to security — and share real examples of helping public sector organizations modernize for the AI era.Key Takeaways

In this AWS Partner Spotlight, Ingram Micro sits down with Jagdish and Sunil from Prijal to unpack their AWS journey — from Kubernetes and observability solutions in production to cutting-edge Edge AI and conversational business intelligence powered by Amazon QuickSight. Hear how Prijal leveraged Ingram Micro's Accelerated Partner Program to compress their go-to-market timeline and unlock new customer opportunities.Key Takeaways

In this AWS Partner Spotlight, Ingram Micro sits down with Jagdish and Sunil from Prijal to unpack their AWS journey — from Kubernetes and observability solutions in production to cutting-edge Edge AI and conversational business intelligence powered by Amazon QuickSight. Hear how Prijal leveraged Ingram Micro's Accelerated Partner Program to compress their go-to-market timeline and unlock new customer opportunities.Key Takeaways

Ray from Project Host joins Ingram Micro's AWS Partner Spotlight to discuss how their 20+ years supporting government and regulated cloud workloads has evolved into a fast, flexible path to FedRAMP and DoD authorization for ISVs. Ray shares how Project Host recently helped clients achieve full FedRAMP authorization in under four months — and what their growing AWS and Ingram Micro partnership unlocks for software vendors trying to break into the federal market.Key Takeaways

Ray from Project Host joins Ingram Micro's AWS Partner Spotlight to discuss how their 20+ years supporting government and regulated cloud workloads has evolved into a fast, flexible path to FedRAMP and DoD authorization for ISVs. Ray shares how Project Host recently helped clients achieve full FedRAMP authorization in under four months — and what their growing AWS and Ingram Micro partnership unlocks for software vendors trying to break into the federal market.Key Takeaways

Sanjay from CloudGov — the engineer who led the launch of AWS Control Tower — joins Ingram Micro's AWS Partner Spotlight to unpack why cloud costs spiral out of control, why AI spend behaves nothing like traditional cloud consumption, and how CloudGov's Commitment Shield and Token Shield products bring real-time financial and security governance to multi-cloud, AI-driven enterprises.Key Takeaways

Sanjay from CloudGov — the engineer who led the launch of AWS Control Tower — joins Ingram Micro's AWS Partner Spotlight to unpack why cloud costs spiral out of control, why AI spend behaves nothing like traditional cloud consumption, and how CloudGov's Commitment Shield and Token Shield products bring real-time financial and security governance to multi-cloud, AI-driven enterprises.Key Takeaways

Sam Price of GlobalMed joins Ingram Micro's Public Sector Partner Spotlight to discuss how satellite connectivity, portable telehealth clinics, and AWS-powered technology are closing the healthcare access gap for rural and underserved communities. Sam shares how GlobalMed partners with providers, government agencies, and acquisition platforms like SourceWell to get care moving fast — without the red tape.Key Takeaways

Sam Price of GlobalMed joins Ingram Micro's Public Sector Partner Spotlight to discuss how satellite connectivity, portable telehealth clinics, and AWS-powered technology are closing the healthcare access gap for rural and underserved communities. Sam shares how GlobalMed partners with providers, government agencies, and acquisition platforms like SourceWell to get care moving fast — without the red tape.Key Takeaways

Mark Sutor, president of Access Group This episode of In The Channel is sponsored by Ingram Micro Canada. Mark Sutor, president of Access Group and Canadian co-president on the Trust X Alliance Global Advisory Board, joins the show to discuss the community’s recent Global Leadership Summit and what it means for Canadian solution providers. Sutor says the summit’s real differentiator is its focus: “This is not a summit about IT. It’s a summit about leadership.” He reflects on sessions with Constellation Research founder R “Ray” Wang, who warned that AI is commoditizing expertise and that real differentiation lies in experience and market understanding. Ingram Micro executive Sanjib Sahoo also featured heavily, pressing attendees to ask for “insights, not updates.” Sutor breaks down the TXA AI agent coming to the TXA Expand platform, which he says will make the global community feel smaller by surfacing partner skills and capabilities through natural language queries – including publicly available data from websites and LinkedIn. He also addresses the community’s aggressive expansion: new markets including India, the TXA Access program for countries without a formal footprint, and a target of 1,000 member companies by 2027. On the idea that communities like Trust X were an early form of “distributor as platform,” Sutor draws a direct line between the insights he gains at live Trust X events and the AI-surfaced insights he now receives logging into Ingram Micro Xvantage. He says the platform has freed up Ingram’s reps to have proactive business-building conversations rather than transactional ones. Finally, Sutor assesses where the Canadian channel sits on Ingram’s “crawl, walk, run” AI maturity curve. His verdict: the channel has moved past curiosity toward expectation, but execution remains uneven. For partners not yet in Trust X, he argues the community’s core value is collective growth: members share best practices, AI strategies, and vendor program leverage to outpace the broader market. Read Full Transcript Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In the Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last sixteen years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca, and your host for the show. Today, a conversation about the evolution of partner communities in the AI age, and a look at how peer networks that predate the current platform buzzword may have been the original take on the “distributor as platform” idea. Mark Sutor is president of Access Group, a longtime solution provider in the Canadian channel, and he serves as Canadian co-president on the Trust X Alliance Global Advisory Board. He recently came back from the Trust X Alliance Global Leadership Summit in Texas and joined me to talk about what landed, where the community is headed, and how the Canadian channel fits into a rapidly expanding global peer network. Let’s get right into it, my chat with Mark Sutor. Robert Dutt: Mark, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it. Mark Sutor: Glad to be here. The summit was a unique experience — unlike anything I’ve seen in the IT channel before. I’m taking back several action items for Access Group and the Canadian community. Robert Dutt: You mentioned a session with Level Up that stood out. Can you elaborate? Mark Sutor: The Level Up presenter, Patrick, laid out a clear structure for leadership skills. It resonated with what we already do, but gave us a concrete, actionable framework. Robert Dutt: What makes this summit different from other channel events? Mark Sutor: It isn’t an IT-focused summit; it’s a leadership summit for partners, vendors, and Ingram Micro staff. The content is dedicated to personal and professional development, not sales or product demos. Although the material has an IT flavor, the lessons are applicable across industries. Robert Dutt: At the summit, legendary analyst Ray Wang talked about expertise being commoditized by AI. How does that translate for a Canadian partner? Mark Sutor: Ray’s insight reinforced that experience, market understanding, and geography are the real differentiators. Those elements set us apart from purely AI-driven solutions. Robert Dutt: What were the big takeaways for you from the conference at large? Mark Sutor: Several points stood out. First, industry direction: we need to think long-term about AI’s impact on service delivery and customer interaction. Second, AI evolution: AI will move from substituting tasks to fundamentally reshaping processes — much like Uber redefined transportation. And third, leadership discipline: AI is becoming a strategic discipline, not just a technology trend. Robert Dutt: How is applied AI being positioned within the Trust X Alliance community? Mark Sutor: As a member of the Global Advisory Council, I saw that partners are at varied stages — some delivering AI solutions, others exploring internal use cases. We developed a playbook to help members integrate AI internally first, then translate those use cases into client solutions. Robert Dutt: Can you give me the nickel tour on the new TXA AI Agent coming to the Expand platform? Mark Sutor: The AI Agent streamlines partner discovery. Instead of manually searching for a partner with specific skills — for example, installing a Cisco router in Saskatchewan — you can ask the agent in natural language and receive accurate results instantly. It also surfaces vendor solutions across the ecosystem. The tool pulls data from public sources like websites and LinkedIn, as well as internal information, making the community more searchable and collaborative. Robert Dutt: It sounds like the difference between a classic keyword search and a modern, conversational search experience that can even surface new ideas. Mark Sutor: That is absolutely correct. Of course, the challenge is that we all need to make sure we provide the information it needs, but the AI tool is also very good at consuming publicly available information from our websites and LinkedIn. It’s not just looking inwardly. It’s super cool. You use it and you say, “Wow, this is really neat.” You can see where it potentially goes in terms of hooks into the other things that Ingram Micro is doing with AI and agentic tech as that rolls out. Robert Dutt: Trust X Alliance is expanding aggressively — new markets including India, the TXA Access program, and a target of 1,000 member companies by 2027. For the Canadian community, does global scale add value? Mark Sutor: It does impact us, for sure. It’s one of the things I enjoy most about the global events — the camaraderie with other markets. On the environmental stewardship front, for instance, the folks in the UK have been doing amazing things for a few years, and Canada has grown close and participated in some of those ventures. It’s a great way to get a leg up on things happening in other parts of the world. Historically, people liked to go to the U.S. events for a preview of what’s to come, and that is still valid. But I’ve learned many things from the DACH region, the UK, and the Netherlands. I can’t wait to see what comes out of these new markets. Robert Dutt: How do you feel about Canada’s role, given we’ve been there since before the Trust X name existed, dating back to VTN? We’ve always had a reputation for punching above our weight. Mark Sutor: That has definitely continued. Canada has always had a voice a little bit louder than our size. Per capita, we have a very strong membership in Canada — we’re sitting just shy of 100 members now, which by population is much larger than a lot of other geographies. We’re going to continue to have a loud voice because of the dedication of the Canadian members. We always say, “You get out what you put in,” and the Canadian members put in their hearts and souls. Robert Dutt: One of the things I’ve been thinking about, especially as distribution has increasingly redefined itself as a platform, is that in many ways the communities were the first take of “distributor as platform” — not a transactional entity, but a network to create business value, connections, shared intelligence, and leverage. Now we’ve got the technology side with Xvantage. So you’ve got the human community and the digital platform. How does one reinforce the other? Mark Sutor: It’s a great question, and I’m not sure that anybody really knows one hundred percent. Obviously, Sanjib Sahoo spends all of his waking hours thinking about this aspect of distribution. I can tell you that the Xvantage journey has really been quite helpful. Canada is a little bit farther along in that journey than some other geographies. Every day when I log into Xvantage, there are some things there called insights. I learn things for free about my business and about my customers just by logging in. AI has surfaced various insights about things happening in my own company that perhaps I wouldn’t have even known. It’s remarkable that today, in certain areas, the point of trust for me is actually the data coming out of Xvantage and not necessarily my own system. Because Ingram Micro has done such a good job of collecting appropriate data that really can give those insights. I think you’re right — there’s a lot of parallels. When I show up to a Trust X event, I gain insights from other members, from vendors, from Ingram Micro itself. The platform is really helping extend that. Not only does it help extend that through insights, but it’s really enabling the employees at Ingram Micro to take a much more proactive approach to understanding our business. I’m having those conversations more and more often where we’re no longer talking about what’s the price and where is it, and much more about how do we build business, how do we grow, how can we market together, how can we go together into various accounts and be stronger together. These are the conversations we’re having. On the back end, it’s Xvantage that has enabled those cycles to be freed up and for Ingram’s people to show up in a different way. I can tell you that in Canada, they do show up differently today than in the past. Robert Dutt: How so? Mark Sutor: I was preparing for a discussion with Ingram not that long ago, and this was front of mind — how Ingram had showed up differently. While I was preparing, I got a phone call from one of the reps at Ingram saying, “Hey, I just wanted to see if we could get something in the calendar to talk about how we can grow your Azure business together.” I thought, “Well, there you go. That’s exactly it playing out in real time.” These things didn’t necessarily used to happen with the intensity or the frequency in the past. Now these cycles have been freed up, where Xvantage is taking care of a lot of the mundane day-to-day stuff in the back end, and now we can have real conversations about building value for our customers. Robert Dutt: As you talk to your peers, both within Trust X and outside of it across the Canadian channel, do you feel that this idea of the new role of distribution is widely understood, widely taken advantage of, widely optimized? Or is it still a competitive differentiator for those who went in early? Mark Sutor: This is the problem we struggle with. Is it known? Yes. Is it well known? I would say not as well as it should be. I know a lot of members don’t take advantage of the various insights and things that I had mentioned earlier. Getting that word out is one of the objectives of the Trust X Alliance moving forward, both inside the community as well as to the broader Ingram family. Ingram is showing up differently, but I don’t think that the progress they have made is that well known. There’s still a little bit of thought that, well, they have a great website, which is true, but it’s way more than that today. It’s a platform that can do many, many things for your business. It’s extraordinary what Ingram has done in the past couple of years. There are new features being added to the Xvantage platform weekly, biweekly at this point, and it’s a fast-moving process. Part of the challenge, whenever you’re improving a platform so quickly, is to make sure that people stay current with those changes. It’s a huge advantage. It’s a great thing because it’s moving at the speed of the industry, but at the same time, it’s hard for everyone to keep up to date with those various changes. And just to be clear, they do a fantastic job of revealing those new features. They pop up on your dashboard as they’re being revealed. There are various trainings and other things that go on, but life is busy, right? So it’s hard to keep that front and center, but this is a very good problem to have. In the Trust X Alliance, we’re happy to support those efforts and to make sure that the word gets out in an appropriate way. Part of that is to do things like we’re doing today, to make sure that we continue to talk about the successes that we’re having as members and make sure that the community at large, as well as the Ingram family at large, sees those wins. Robert Dutt: Ingram’s overall AI strategy cadence has been the crawl, walk, run idea. Do you see the channel as an aggregate still in crawl, or are we moving towards walk? Mark Sutor: Everyone is still at a very different place in their journey. But I think what’s shifted — I heard someone use this term in one of our affinity meetings the other day — is that things have moved towards expectation. We’re now expecting that AI is going to be doing great things for us. It’s no longer a curiosity, necessarily. And that’s really the shift that I see happening today. But it doesn’t change the fact that everyone’s at a very different position. And in some cases, rightly so. By various industry segment, I think by the nature of those segments, it makes sense to be either ahead or even behind the curve sometimes. But as a community, we’re very focused on elevating everyone’s experience to the point that makes sense for their business, and focusing on that internal use case for AI has been what makes a lot of sense for members. Robert Dutt: If a Canadian MSP or solution provider isn’t in Trust X Alliance today, what are they actually missing that they can’t get from a vendor program or a buying group? Mark Sutor: Well, we’re growing. I think that’s one of the biggest ones. Part of our approach to the marketplace is to grow faster together. And by sharing best practices, by working on things like our AI strategy, by leveraging vendor programs, and so on, we’ve been able to grow faster than the marketplace. And that’s, I think, the continued expectation of the organization is to continue to grow. Robert Dutt: Last one for me. What’s the one thing you’d want Canadian partners to know about where Trust X Alliance is headed over the next twelve months? Mark Sutor: Definitely watch us. I think that we’re doing a lot of really good things in the industry. The Trust X Alliance is really being positioned as the place to go for expertise, the place to go for knowledge, the place to go if you want a good job done as an end client. So the brand is really being built out in a lot of very interesting ways. It’s no longer necessarily just a brand in the IT community, but it’s gaining a lot of traction out there as the brand for IT. So we do extraordinary work together as a community, and I think we’re going to continue to do that. And yeah, I can’t wait to see where we go. Robert Dutt: Thanks for the conversation, Mark. Mark Sutor: Thank you, Robert. It’s been a pleasure. Robert Dutt: There you have it, Mark Sutor from Access Group. I’d like to thank Mark for his time and for sharing his perspective on the Trust X Alliance community and the Canadian channel’s place in it. A few takeaways from me on this one: the idea that peer communities like Trust X were arguably the first iteration of “distributor as platform” — not transactional, but network-driven — and that Ingram Micro’s Xvantage platform is now extending that same logic into digital insights. Mark’s observation that AI has shifted from curiosity to expectation in the channel is worth sitting with. And the note that Canadian partners, in his view, still underutilize what these platforms and communities can actually deliver. If you found the conversation useful, please follow or subscribe to the podcast wherever you get your podcasts. We’re on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and most directories. Ratings and reviews help others in the IT channel find the show. Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.

How do you transform a 45-year-old, $52 billion enterprise into an AI-native platform business and take it public in the process? In this episode of the CPO Rising series hosted by Products That Count Resident CPO Renee Niemi, Ingram Micro former CPO Ambrish Verma will be speaking on the frameworks he used to navigate tech debt, allocate innovation capacity, and build the moat that repositioned a legacy distributor as a technology platform company. He also shares what happened when he asked Claude to play the role of a board member and challenge every assumption in his strategy.

Today’s headline news for Canadian IT solution providers: HPE Discover 2026 wraps up in Las Vegas today, and if you’ve been following our coverage, you know we’ve had plenty to unpack this week. For the Friday edition of The Buzz, we doing something slightly different – a reporter’s notebook on what HPE’s channel leadership said when they were off the keynote stage. The quote validity extension was the headline that drew the most relief, but the backstory is more interesting than the policy change itself. HPE extended standard quotes from 14 days to 30 days for compute, storage, and GreenLake, effective Monday. Simon Ewington, who leads HPE’s worldwide partner organisation, told press and partners Wednesday that the change was ‘pretty well kept secret’ – his own staff didn’t know about it either. The commodity volatility that had forced the two-week window had moderated enough that HPE could stand behind a 30-day price with confidence. Behind the ‘Power of One’ marketing, there are mechanical changes that determine whether partners can actually make money. Juniper’s Elite Plus, Elite, and Select tiers will map to HPE Platinum, Gold, and Silver starting November 1. HPE introduced a 3x multiplier on software sales for Zerto, Morpheus, and OpsRamp, plus a 1.5x GreenLake multiplier, to help partners climb tiers faster. Smart Choice SKUs – pre-configured servers missing only drives – are a speed play for distributors. The competitive storage take-out targets 14,000 customers under the VH Rail framing, with Alletra MP already outpacing market growth by 2x and 0% financing for three years. Then there was candour. Ewington noted HPE is the vendor who ‘typically moves first… and then others polish.’ The distributor overlap between HPE and Juniper is only about 10%, so they’re ‘refining the landscape’ rather than forcing universal carry. Service provider growth is running 23% to 30% CAGR. And HPE’s sustainability insight dashboard gives partners a concrete tool to analyse customer environments and open carbon footprint conversations. You can find every episode of The Buzz and In The Channel from HPE Discover on our HPE Discover news hub. Read Full Transcript This epsisode of The Buzz is brought to you by HPE Discover 2026. Check out our full coverage of the event on ChannelBuzz.ca — you’ll find out HPE Discover 2026 News Hub in the menu bar at the top of the page. Welcome to The Buzz from ChannelBuzz.ca, I’m Robert Dutt, today is Friday, June 19th, and here’s what’s happening in the channel today. I’m recording this a bit earl in Las Vegas, because I’m on a plane all day heading home from Discover.  If you’ve been following our coverage this week, you know we’ve had a lot to unpack – the Partner Growth Summit on Monday, the networking and AI infrastructure keynote on Tuesday, and a steady drumbeat of announcements through Wednesday. For this episode, I want to do something slightly different. Think of it as a reporter’s notebook – the details, the mechanics, and the candour that came out when HPE’s channel leadership sat down with press and partners on Wednesday morning, off the keynote stage. Let’s start with the quote validity extension, because the backstory here is as interesting than the policy change itself. HPE extended standard quote validity from 14 days to 30 days for compute, storage, and GreenLake, effective Monday. You’ve heard that already. What you probably haven’t heard is how closely they guarded it. Simon Ewington, who runs HPE’s worldwide partner organisation, told us Wednesday that the change was a ‘pretty well kept secret.’  His own staff didn’t know about it either. They wanted zero leaks because the commodity and supply chain volatility that had forced the two-week window in the first place had finally moderated enough that HPE could stand behind a 30-day price with confidence. Keeping it quiet meant announcing it without hedging. For partners who’ve been managing customer decision cycles that simply don’t fit a 14-day window, the relief was audible. The Partner Growth Summit was dense enough that Ewington admitted partners told him it was ‘almost too much’ and they ‘needed an AI summary to recap everything.’ So let me pull out the operational details that actually affect how you navigate the program. First, Juniper integration. We now have firm tier mapping: Juniper Elite Plus goes to HPE Platinum, Elite to Gold, Select to Silver, effective November 1. HPE is also launching a Routing competency – number 15 in the framework – to support that transition. Second, multipliers. HPE introduced a 3x multiplier on software sales for Zerto, Morpheus, and OpsRamp, plus a 1.5x multiplier for GreenLake, to help partners hit higher membership tiers faster by weighting software more heavily than hardware. Third, Smart Choice SKUs – pre-configured servers that ship missing only hard drives. It’s a speed and velocity play for distributors. Fourth, the competitive storage take-out. HPE has identified 14,000 target customers for what they’re calling the VH Rail opportunity. Alletra MP is outpacing market growth by 2x, and they’re backing the migration with 0% financing for three years. These aren’t marketing headlines. These are the details that determine whether you can actually make money on the portfolio. Then there were the moments of genuine candour. Ewington’s line that HPE is the vendor who ‘typically moves first… and then others polish’ is either confidence or arrogance depending on your perspective, but it’s not ambiguous. You may have seen recently that HP formally announced its two main global distributors as Ingram Micro and TD SYNNEX. The distributor overlap reality is worth noting: only about 10% overlap between HPE and Juniper distributors. HPE is actively ‘refining the landscape’ rather than forcing every distributor to carry everything. That’s a concession that operational integration takes time and care. On services, HPE is expanding partner-branded services so partners own the Level 1 and 2 support relationship while HPE stays in the background for Level 3 and 4. Ewington said this largely came about because there have been some large partners who have declined to get closer to HPE because of the company’s previous retisense to allow partners to lead on services around its gear.  For service providers specifically, leadership cited 23% to 30% CAGR growth rates, and they’re opening CloudOps software to CSPs to build new services around. And on sustainability, which came up in the context of AI’s energy demands, HPE has built an insight dashboard that lets partners analyse customer environments and open conversations about carbon footprint and efficiency. It’s a practical tool rather than a vague pledge. If there’s a through-line to the week, it’s that HPE is trying to make ‘Power of One’ mean something operationally, not just rhetorically. The quote validity change was a trust repair. The multiplier and tier mapping are structural incentives. The distributor and services refinements are admissions that integration is hard and takes time. Whether it all lands as promised is what we’ll be watching through the second half of this year. That’s it for this edition of The Buzz. You can find our full HPE Discover 2026 coverage on ChannelBuzz.ca – there’s a news hub in the menu bar at the top of the page. And we’ll also have more epsidoes of In The Channel from Discover next week here on the site, including more HPE executives, and more reactions from Canadian HPE partners. That’s how we’re seeing the headlines from HPE Discover. I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, thanks for listening. Have a great day.

Jeremiah Jenson, vice president of North Amiercan channels at HPE This episode is the second half of a two-part conversation with Jeremiah Jenson, vice president of North America Channel and Partner Ecosystem at HPE, recorded ahead of HPE Discover 2026. Part one – the Discover preview and HPE’s AI infrastructure themes – is Monday’s episode. This half focuses on the announcements made at the HPE Partner Growth Summit on Monday, June 16. The centrepiece is what HPE is calling the “power of one” – one portfolio, one partner program, one integrated experience. It’s partly organizational messaging, but there’s real substance underneath: HPE spent the past 18 months merging three separate channel organizations (HPE, Aruba, and Juniper) into a single team, and the work of translating that into a coherent partner experience is now coming due. Concretely, that means Juniper partners integrating into Partner Ready Vantage on November 1 – with tier mapping already defined – along with Zerto, Private Cloud 3000, and Private Cloud 1000 shifting to channel-only routes to market. HPE is also extending free three-year Morpheus software licenses to approximately 600 partners for internal deployment, as much about building hands-on expertise as it is about the virtualization savings. The piece with the most direct relevance for Canadian MSPs is the new partner-branded services model: partners lead with their own brand, own the customer relationship, and HPE backs them as the invisible infrastructure layer for on-site break-fix and parts logistics. Jenson specifically calls out Canadian partners’ customer intimacy and regional compliance knowledge as a natural fit for that services-forward model. The “one more mile” close is worth hearing directly. Tuesday’s episode of The Buzz has the headline news breakdown – check that first if you want the full context. Read Full Transcript [Robert Dutt]: This episode of In The Channel is brought to you by HPE Discover 2026, and we’ll be bringing you full event coverage all week right here on ChannelBuzz.ca. Don’t miss it! Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca, and your host for the show. Quick note before we dive into this one – if you haven’t already listened to Tuesday’s episode of The Buzz, I’d really encourage you to go find that in your feed first. On The Buzz, we’ve got the headline rundown on HPE’s Partner Growth Summit announcements – what was announced, what moved, what the numbers are. What we’re doing here is going a level deeper with the person who actually owns this for North America. Jeremiah Jenson is the vice president of North America Channel and Partner Ecosystem at HPE. He returned to the company about a year ago, after a previous decade-plus that included the Aruba acquisition, a stint at AWS in between, and enough perspective on how the IT channel actually works to fill several episodes on their own. This is part two of a conversation we recorded just ahead of Discover. Part one, the Discover preview and the big AI infrastructure themes, is on the feed Monday if you want the full picture. This half is about the Partner Growth Summit announcements – what HPE is calling the power of one. One portfolio, one program, one partner experience. And specifically, what it means if you’re a Canadian reseller or MSP trying to figure out where HPE fits into your business right now and into the second half of 2026. Let’s get right into it. My chat with Jeremiah Jenson. Jeremiah, good to be chatting with you again. [Jeremiah Jenson]: Yeah, good to talk to you, Rob. Thanks. [Robert Dutt]: Let’s get into some of the stuff that was announced at Partner Growth Summit. And I guess let’s start here. You’ve now had about 18 months since the single channel org stood up, and now you’ve got the Juniper integration happening on top of that. From your seat, what did that single organization feel like to execute on? And what’s the one thing that turned out to be harder than expected? [Jeremiah Jenson]: One, it feels very good. So a little bit of my history – I was here when the Aruba acquisition happened some 10 years ago, and then I was with a different company for a period of time, and I’ve been back for about a year and a half now. And I will say it’s been fantastic to unify the channel in a lot of ways – making it more simple and easier and more profitable for partners to understand and to do business with, but also to take advantage of the power of the portfolio. So what’s it like? Simple answer. It’s great because we have a tremendous amount of channel history and momentum and power from that piece of the business, combined with a tremendous amount of channel history, momentum, and power on the hybrid IT side, and bringing all that together in a unified way. It’s fantastic. Now, the hardest part about that is you’re dealing with big businesses and the devil being in the details. And that’s where we just spend a lot of time working on. While the big themes are unification, ease of doing business, and simplifying things along those lines, the hard part is in the detail. Like, how do we actually want to help accomplish this? And so from that, we’ve had to get a lot of very big voices in the room and get through some very meaningful things on behalf of our customers and our partners. [Robert Dutt]: I guess, to your point on your history and the long history of HPE in this acquisition space, at least to some degree, you’ve got the muscle memory of doing the Aruba side of things and getting that integrated into the programs. And now it’s sort of doing that at a different timeline, at a different scale with Juniper. [Jeremiah Jenson]: It’s true. We have the muscle memory of acquisitions and some history of that. I think the one thing that is really just awesome to see is how people have come together with customer and partner being front and center, and how are we iterating and innovating on their behalf, and just a unified goal of how do we move really fast? Because the opportunity in that market is too big for us to miss. And so there’s really this motivation to move very, very fast and very quickly. And that’s why we’re ahead of our integration targets. We’re very pleased with where we are in that business, unifying the channel, unifying a bunch of business processes. You’re seeing that in the programmatic announcements we made. So it’s nice to be able to take advantage of that muscle memory. We’ve done the training, now we’re doing it for real. [Robert Dutt]: So the November 1 date is concrete, and the tier mapping for the Juniper roll into Partner Ready Vantage is clear – Elite Plus becomes Platinum, etc. But what about the Canadian partner today who’s a Juniper partner, but has never really sold HPE server or storage? What does that reality look like in practice? Is there a runway and enablement in place to help bring those folks on board? And obviously, I assume you want as many of them transacting as far across the portfolio as possible – what does it look like as the two truly become one? [Jeremiah Jenson]: Absolutely. So one, we want them participating across the full portfolio. One program gives partners a very clear, unified path across networking, cloud, and AI. And this move that we’ve made, it’s a major simplification that gives partners a more consistent way in which they can engage across those three – whether that’s networking, cloud, or AI. And it also paints a very clear opportunity in terms of how they can take the broader portfolio to their customers to solve those business problems. I always want to keep that customer front and center, and that they have a unique opportunity to solve a broader set of customer challenges. And so the value there is that partners can work across more of the portfolio without navigating disconnected experiences. And I also want to say, we’re not forcing anybody to become something that they’re not. This is an opportunity for them, and we’ve made it simple for them to capture that opportunity and to grow their business with HPE. [Robert Dutt]: It’s always a balancing act, right? You want to incentivize, but you don’t want to push too hard because that potentially breaks partner business models or creates challenges. But at the same time, it’s like – we’ve got all this stuff over here too. You want to sell it? That’d be cool. [Jeremiah Jenson]: Yeah, look, I’m not twisting anybody’s arm here. I think the opportunity speaks for itself. And I think our results in the market also speak for themselves. The opportunity is there, and that opportunity stands on its own. Whether you want to invest in an AI practice or whether you have an opportunity to help customers solve a problem with compute, we have the right enablement and want to come alongside that partner and take advantage of that opportunity and help that customer. But that opportunity is real and right there for them now. The value of the opportunity, the capability of our products, how that’s meeting the market with customers – that speaks for itself. So the opportunity is there, and I want to harness it. I want to take advantage of it with our mutual partners. [Robert Dutt]: We seem to be getting a little bit of a drumbeat going in terms of HPE products being declared channel-only in terms of go-to-market. Last year with VME Essentials, this year it’s Zerto, PC 3000, PC 1000. There’s clearly a strategic logic here beyond just adding product to the list. What’s the underlying principle on what makes a product the right candidate to be channel-only? And what does it mean for a partner that these products will only come through them and their peers? [Jeremiah Jenson]: Well, I mean, there’s a couple of things there. Certainly we’re expanding areas where partners can lead, and that creates additional room for growth, both for them and for us. And it’s a clear signal that HPE is expanding in areas where – like I said – where partners can lead, but especially in areas that are core to the market, whether that’s private cloud or virtualization with this great VM reset that we’ve got going on, or whether that’s data protection with some of our Zerto solutions and ransomware protection, things along those lines. So this gives partners more ownership and opportunity while also creating more room for them to differentiate. I don’t want a homogeneous channel. Each partner has not made the same investments. And so each partner has a level of capability, a market that they serve, and has made investments to serve their customers in the right way. And so this partner-led opportunity with these products gives them not only ownership of the opportunity, but clear ways in which they can differentiate by investing in these product sets. So it’s an area of channel leadership. And then finally, it also speaks to our channel heritage. We trust the channel. We partner with them very closely, and we see an opportunity for us to grow our collective business by allowing them to lead. [Robert Dutt]: To your point on the non-homogeneous nature of the channel, I think that’s represented well throughout the program and what you guys are talking about in terms of being open to embracing and facilitating multi-partner engagements when the customer needs support from different specialists in different areas to drive those outcomes. [Jeremiah Jenson]: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think this helps partners build higher-value practices. I don’t need them just to sell another product. We have lots of products that are available for sale, but this helps them see and build a higher-value practice, whether that’s the services capability that they can bring in – because we all know customers need help transforming to new and more efficient ways of doing business in a hybrid IT environment. So it creates more ways for partners to move up that value chain, whether that’s through their services or deeper expertise that they want to build. And it matters because that creates long-term growth. As they become more valuable to the customer through their differentiated capabilities, differentiated services, or the distinct and unique value that they bring to their customers, it creates long-term growth. It helps build something that outlasts not only them, but us. [Robert Dutt]: Part of the announcements is you’re giving up to 600 partners free Morpheus licenses to run their own environments. It’s interesting – it really sounds like it’s saying, sort of an opportunity to become your own reference customer, to drink your own champagne, to eat your own dog food, whatever your preferred analogy is there. What are the expectations around how partners use those capabilities? Is it about demos? Is it about building their own expertise? Is it about getting a chance to do some of that transformation and reinvention of their own infrastructure and tech stack so they can speak more clearly to customers about what’s possible? [Jeremiah Jenson]: Yeah, I mean, what is going on in the virtualization market is impacting everybody – the entire channel. And I don’t mean just how various companies are going to market. It’s impacting everybody, and that includes our partners who are customers of a lot of different companies. And there’s real power in our portfolio. We see a clear opportunity not only to invest in the channel with those partners who have invested in us, those partners who have invested in the virtualization competency – we want to invest back in them with the capability that our portfolio brings to them. So these VME licenses offer them an opportunity to reset their virtualization environment and set themselves up for continued modernization. And what better story to take to their customers than, “We know this works for you because we did it ourselves.” So drinking their own champagne is a very good analogy there. And that is our expectation – not only to help partners realize the true value of the portfolio, but also enable them to modernize and take that story to their customers. And there’s no better way than to say, “I’ve done it myself and here were the outcomes that we saw.” [Robert Dutt]: Given the scale of the HPE channel, I’m guessing there are going to be a lot of hands going up for those 600 slots. [Jeremiah Jenson]: Well, look, what we see in VME, the Morpheus software suite, is nothing short of impressive. I’ve got a history of working with and working for companies that move very fast, that make decisions fast and execute very quickly. What I have seen in this Morpheus VME space is impressive – it’s like nothing I’ve ever seen. The roadmap, our ability to execute against that roadmap, to produce enterprise-quality and just phenomenal products at pace and at scale is incredibly impressive. And so partners that are working with VME and Morpheus today are continuing to be blown away by the capability and the roadmap. And for those partners that haven’t taken advantage of that, please take a moment for yourself and look at what we’re doing here. It’s a fantastic product and a fantastic solution to help customers with what they need most – cost savings while setting the on-ramp to modernization. [Robert Dutt]: Especially in a moment where perhaps acquiring new tech is not going to be as easy as it has been from a hardware point of view. [Jeremiah Jenson]: Exactly. In a moment where everybody is looking for ways to save dollars, you can cut virtualization costs by up to 90% with this product. It has very simple per-socket pricing. And so what better opportunity not only to help our partners, but to get that message out to their customers. [Robert Dutt]: In terms of channel penetration, is this a fairly mature, realized market, or is there still a lot of greenfield out there on the channel side? [Jeremiah Jenson]: I mean, there’s a massive opportunity. You think about the size of that virtualization market – the size of the VM reset, the virtual machine market – it’s huge. So there is a tremendous amount of headroom in this market. There is a tremendous amount of opportunity for all of us. And we have to turn that opportunity into reality. And that’s happening now. [Robert Dutt]: Moving on to partner-branded services – this is one that really caught my interest, and I think is going to catch the interest of a lot of folks, especially those who are in the MSP mode. Can you walk me through what it actually looks like for a Canadian MSP? They’re putting their name on a support offering, HPE is the invisible backbone. What does it look like in terms of the customer call, billing, and what does HPE get out of participating in this model where it’s the partner and not HPE that’s the primary brand? [Jeremiah Jenson]: First of all, a clear thing with partners is they have a level of customer understanding – or I often say they have a level of customer intimacy that I could never replace and don’t intend to. So partner-branded services really helps us service the customer faster with a very valuable piece of that equation, and that’s the partner. So allowing a partner to take first-call support, first-call services, and to be able to capitalize on that customer knowledge and that depth of history and customer intimacy that they have – what we have found is that just produces a better customer outcome. So E+ in North America is one of those first partners that has taken advantage of this, and we’re really just enthused and excited about what’s coming through at the customer level. That’s the piece that I want to put front and center – customers have a need for a faster answer, a faster path to resolution, and partners are part of that. And so this acceleration of this program is really helping. From a Canadian standpoint, look, who knows more about the Canadian market than a Canadian partner serving a Canadian customer and understanding their requirements? I often say Canadians have forgotten more about Canada than I’ll ever know, and I have a tremendous amount of respect for that. So the opportunity to deploy that knowledge front and center with a customer – no better opportunity. And it plays especially important, I think, in a market like Canada where there are so many differences regionally. In any large market there are regional differences, but there are real and meaningful differences here. [Robert Dutt]: Yeah, I mean, let’s not pretend that the United States and Canada are identical, because they’re not. There are nuances, there are real and meaningful differences. [Jeremiah Jenson]: And whether that’s compliance or any other kind of nuance, those differences are real at the customer level. And so the opportunity for partners to service customers with that level of knowledge – whether that’s compliance or regional nuance – that speaks to the power of the channel. And it’s phenomenal to see this announcement come to life and see partners taking advantage of it. [Robert Dutt]: So how quickly do you anticipate it expanding to a broader number of potential service provider partners who are in that partner-branded services mode with you? [Jeremiah Jenson]: I think it really is incumbent upon us to be very deliberate about what we build with our partners. I think in the past, sometimes partners get very focused on what can I sell today. And I think the opportunity with partner-branded services is how can we build something that outlasts all of us? How can we build a foundation of services? Because once you have that services capability and once you are effectively taking that first call and you are not only the provider but you are the solution – you are the solution for when things need to be fixed – that stickiness becomes very real. So we have to really think about what do we want to build? What is the services capability that we’re building together? And from that, that will create the pace at which we grow. But there are very large partners, very sizable MSPs, as well as what I would call MSPs who have very specialized capability that want to take advantage of this. [Robert Dutt]: Moving on to storage – you’ve got the 15% front-end takeout rebate on top of existing rebates for competitive storage displacement. That’s a notable number. How should a Canadian reseller read that? I’ve heard that it runs at least through calendar year, but is this a period-based incentive or is it a signal that HPE is ready to play offense on storage for the long haul? [Jeremiah Jenson]: It’s the latter. We are very much on the front foot when it comes to our storage portfolio. The product is fantastic. The storage portfolio specifically is in a place that I’ve never seen it before in decades of history. And that’s phenomenal. And the results we have seen over the past several quarters – it has been several quarters of really good growth and great success here in North America. And now is the time to pour gasoline on that fire. So this is a signal of not only our existing success, but how can we be even more on the front foot and take that to our partners who want to lean in with us. Now is the time to lean in with storage and our hybrid cloud offerings and really accelerate – how we go and acquire new customers and grow that base for the future. There’s a phenomenal opportunity with our product, but there’s a bigger opportunity in what customers are demanding, and we have the right product to meet it. [Robert Dutt]: So November 1, one experience. That’s a big promise. We’ve got one portal, one deal registration system, one development fund. There’s a lot in there. For a partner who’s been managing different login credentials and different MDF processes, what’s actually noticeably different on November 2 in terms of their relationship and running their business with HPE? [Jeremiah Jenson]: Yeah. I mean, I say this a lot because it’s real – I spend an inordinate amount of my time thinking about how do we simplify? How do we make ourselves easier to do business with? And so one experience is really about making it easier for partners to engage, to move faster, and to grow at an accelerated rate. And it matters because partners want speed, but speed comes from consistency and getting rid of some of the administrative overhead that is in place. So this is all about reducing friction in the places where partners feel it the most. Having to log out of one website and into another – common tools, common onboarding processes, contracting, deal flow, deal registration, things along those lines. This is really all about making it easier for partners to engage and easier for us to do business together. It pains me and keeps me awake at night if they’ve got to log into multiple websites – it’s just time. It’s impacting the time in which we can get to customers and service customers. So that’s what they should expect: a common set of tools, common contracting, common deal flow, easier to engage, and moving faster with HPE. [Robert Dutt]: We’ve heard that this is going to be AI-enabled in terms of the partner portal and partner tools and experiences. Can you tell me a little bit about what that means today, as well as – without giving away too much of the secret sauce – what you’re thinking about in terms of what AI-enabling the partner experience is going to look like for your partners in the long run? [Jeremiah Jenson]: Yeah, I mean, we’re a leader in the AI market and we have a long history of drinking our own champagne, as we talked about earlier. And so there’s an opportunity to deploy some of our AI tools in customer- and partner-facing experiences – whether that’s websites and things along those lines. As an example – and I don’t have a very explicit example in terms of this specific process – but one of the mental models that we have is: sometimes you’ve got to send an email to an email alias when it’s a repetitive process, things along those lines. Agentic AI and the AI tools and infrastructure that we produce for customers every day can help solve those questions immediately. So how do we put some of our AI tools into that workflow and solve at pace and do things much, much faster – so we’re not waiting on someone to type up a response from some anonymous alias. And while that’s a very basic example, you begin to think about other opportunities in terms of repetitive processes that drive partners crazy. How can we simplify and make things move faster? [Robert Dutt]: Yeah, I was going to say – it may be a basic example, but you can imagine how that multiplies over time and over opportunities and over deals when it’s repeated again and again. [Jeremiah Jenson]: It’s really about solving real problems. We can talk high and mighty and pie in the sky and AI this and AI that, but it’s really about what, at the end of the day, some human sitting in front of a desk is experiencing. It’s solving real-world problems with technology and capability. And it’s that real-world approach to the business that we’re taking. [Robert Dutt]: On the distribution landscape – we heard recently you’ve named TD SYNNEX and Ingram Micro as the two globals with local augmentation. Obviously those two are very strong players in the Canadian market. But how does distribution look now in Canada, and how do you see it looking in terms of additional niche or boutique players to round out the strategy? [Jeremiah Jenson]: So distribution is a core part of how we go to market and a core part of our overall channel strategy. The global announcement of Ingram Micro and TD SYNNEX – of course they’re both headquartered here in North America and we do a lot of business with them, and we’re excited about the plans that we have together. Stay tuned. You’ll see additional announcements in terms of how we think about that landscape and how we’re accelerating with our other distribution partners. So more to come there in the very near term. [Robert Dutt]: All right. A teaser. I love that. Last one for me. There’s a lot in these announcements and partners are going to be reading a lot of headlines, listening to a lot of stuff – probably have already, as they’re listening to this. But what’s the one big thing you would most want a Canadian partner – reseller, MSP, wherever they fit in the equation – to actually understand and act on from what HPE is announcing at Partner Growth Summit? [Jeremiah Jenson]: I’ll answer it this way – just who I am as a person, just my personal hobby. I love long-distance trail running. I’m an ultramarathoner. And I always think about: can I run one more mile? And I’m not saying that everybody should go out there and sign up for a 50-mile or 100-mile race, but I do think about, can I run one more mile? And so to bring that back to what is my ask of whether you’re an MSP or partner or something along those lines – with a portfolio of our size, what’s one more thing that you can take to your customer? Is that data center networking? Is that moving from Juniper into the wireless space with some of our Aruba products? Is that compute? Is it that I’ve sold storage, but now I want to talk about data protection with Zerto – can I do one more? And so as we think about Discover and the announcements we’ve made this week and the momentum we have with our portfolio, that’s what I want to ask. Can you do one more? What is that one more thing that we might be able to do together that will help you grow your business, help your customer solve another business problem, and help us accomplish our mutual goals? [Robert Dutt]: All right. I think that’s a reasonable ask. I appreciate you taking the time. Once again, thanks for walking us through some of the details of what was announced at Partner Growth Summit, and have a great rest of the week. [Jeremiah Jenson]: Always good to talk to you, Rob. Thanks. [Robert Dutt]: There you have it – Jeremiah Jenson, vice president of North America Channel and Partner Ecosystem at HPE. I’d like to thank Jeremiah for his time and for a pretty candid look at how HPE is thinking about the partner community as these organizations – HPE and Juniper – settle into one. Thank you for listening. There’s a lot to process in these announcements, but the thing I keep coming back to is the frame that Jeremiah closed with – the “one more mile” idea. He’s an ultramarathoner, and the ask he’s making of the Canadian channel isn’t to boil the ocean. It’s to ask yourself if there’s one more HPE product that belongs in front of your customers. Data center networking if you’re already doing compute. Zerto if you’re already doing virtualization. Partner-branded services if you’re an MSP looking to own more of the customer relationship. One more mile, compounded across a partner base, is how the power of one actually becomes real. We’re going to have a lot more from HPE Discover through the rest of the week, including an on-site recap coming later. So keep an eye on your feed. You’ll find the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and most of the major podcast directories. And if you’re finding the show useful, a rating or a review genuinely helps other people in the Canadian channel find us. Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.

Outcome-based managed security and attached vendor warranties are driving a new form of coverage-based vendor lock-in for MSPs and IT service providers. Vendors such as Intezer and SPECTRA are introducing performance guarantees, SLAs, and cyber resilience warranties that require MSPs to fully standardize on their architectures. This evolving model shifts accountability for enforcement and risk management from the individual MSP to the vendor's operating model, thereby altering the independent role of the MSP within client environments. A notable example is Intezer's Amplify Partner program, which asserts that its platform can process 100% of security alerts while escalating fewer than 2% for human review—claims the company frames as outcomes rather than product specifications. SPECTRA's use of certification-linked warranties, distributed via Ingram Micro, establishes channel-distributable assurance products with explicit conditions attached at every level. According to a Check Point report, while 77% of organizations report having adopted AI for cloud security, only 26% feel capable of enforcing those strategies, revealing a gap between security intent and operational ability. This structural shift is further illustrated by Merlin Cyber's FedRAMP managed service offering, Lumen's MDR enhancements targeting mid-market MSPs, and Trustlogix's addition of intent-based authorization controls. The FBI's announcement regarding Microsoft 365 OAuth token hijacking and recent vulnerabilities in widely used platforms like ConnectWise Automate underscore the real-world risks of automation platforms being targeted. These developments collectively point to growing operational complexity, rising compliance burdens, and the need for MSPs to separate their commitments from upstream vendor claims. For operators, the trend demands increased scrutiny of warranty terms, claim denial conditions, and SLA language before making any client-facing assurances. MSPs risk absorbing liability if they repeat vendor marketing claims without contractual clarity or operational control. Effective governance now requires independently produced, audit-ready evidence that documents compliance and enforcement separate from vendor portals. As assurance sales proliferate, the operational gap between acting as an underwriter versus a reseller will drive market differentiation, affecting both pricing structures and eligibility for vendor-backed coverage. 00:00 Channel-Ready Security 03:41 Policy vs. Reality 05:59 MFA Isn't Enough 09:12 Why Do We Care?    Supported by:  ScalePad Moovila   

Ingram Micro is moving its employees to downtown Buffalo this morning. President of Ingram Micro North America Bill Brandel tells us what led to the move.

Authorities pursue Black Basta. British authorities launch a new national service to fight fraud and cybercrime. LinkedIn private messages get infected with RATs. Researchers uncover a new malicious extension that intentionally crashes the browser. Ingram Micro discloses a ransomware-related data breach. A Jordanian man pleads guilty to selling stolen access to corporate networks. Business Breakdown. Tim Starks from CyberScoop discusses Sean Plankey's renomination to lead CISA.  Grave oversight in the funeral biz.  Remember to leave us a 5-star rating and review in your favorite podcast app. Miss an episode? Sign-up for our daily intelligence roundup, Daily Briefing, and you'll never miss a beat. And be sure to follow CyberWire Daily on LinkedIn. CyberWire Guest Today we are joined by Tim Starks from CyberScoop as he is discussing Sean Plankey's renomination to lead CISA. You can use Tim's take on it here.   Selected Reading Police raid homes of alleged Black Basta hackers, hunt suspected Russian ringleader (The Record) UK launches landmark 'Report Fraud' service to tackle cybercrime and fraud (The Record) Linkedin Phishing Campaign Exploits Open-Source Pen Testing Tool to Compromise Business Execs (Infosecurity Magazine) Fake ad blocker extension crashes the browser for ClickFix attacks (Bleeping Computer) Ingram Micro reveals ransomware attack hit 42,000 people - here's how to find out more (TechRadar) Jordanian Man Pleads Fake ad blocker extension crashes the browser for ClickFix attacksGuilty to Selling Stolen Logins for 50 Companies (Hackread) CrowdStrike agrees to acquire SGNL for $740 million and Seraphic for $420 million. (N2K Pro) Exclusive: Funeral Industry Faces Security Gaps as Top Firms Lack Key Certifications (The Chosun Daily) Share your feedback. What do you think about CyberWire Daily? Please take a few minutes to share your thoughts with us by completing our brief listener survey. Thank you for helping us continue to improve our show. Want to hear your company in the show? N2K CyberWire helps you reach the industry's most influential leaders and operators, while building visibility, authority, and connectivity across the cybersecurity community. Learn more at sponsor.thecyberwire.com. The CyberWire is a production of N2K Networks, your source for strategic workforce intelligence. © N2K Networks, Inc. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode of DisrupTV, hosts Vala Afshar and R “Ray” Wang sit down with three leaders shaping the next era of AI, intelligence, and personal branding. Benji Hutchinson, CEO of Babel Street, breaks down the world of mission-grade risk intelligence—how it's used in national security, why dual-use AI matters, and why fewer than 30% of Fortune 2000 companies truly understand it. Mukund Gopalan, Global Chief Data Officer at Ingram Micro and AI150 executive, shares how the company is building an “AI factory” to industrialize intelligence, improve data quality, empower employees, and drive real business transformation. Goldie Chan, branding strategist and author of Personal Branding for Introverts, reveals why introverts have unique leadership superpowers and walks through her signature 5Cs framework for building an authentic and sustainable personal brand. If you're interested in AI, cybersecurity, enterprise transformation, or modern leadership, this is an episode you won't want to miss.

From aspiring fine artist to co-founding a groundbreaking media company and advising Fortune 500s, Cynthia Nelson's journey is one of resilience, reinvention, and relentless curiosity. With more than 25 years leading at the intersection of capital, innovation, and culture, Cynthia has proven herself a powerhouse in entrepreneurship and growth strategy.Her story begins in the unlikeliest of places: a receptionist desk at a computer repair shop in the mid-80s. From there, she witnessed the tech industry's birth, climbed the ranks at Ingram Micro, and navigated the turbulence of early startups, including a devastating betrayal by a business partner. But rather than stepping back, she leaned into every challenge, becoming one of the few Latina women to raise $15 million in private equity and ultimately selling her company Todobebé after a decade of pioneering media, parenting content, and cultural storytelling.Cynthia shares the pivotal lessons that fueled her success, from the importance of listening deeply to your customers, to the courage of saying “yes” to unfamiliar challenges, to the discipline of surrounding yourself with advisors who tell you the hard truths. She reminds us that entrepreneurship is not just about scaling fast, but about staying grounded in what people actually need, not just what founders imagine.Her reflections stretch beyond business into the deeper realities of being a woman in leadership: the sacrifices, the biases, and the double standards that continue to shape the funding landscape. Yet Cynthia's approach is one of fierce generosity, mentoring other women, championing female investors, and encouraging founders to build smarter, more sustainable businesses.This is a story of grit, creativity, and impact, and a masterclass in building with purpose. Tune in to hear Cynthia Nelson's remarkable journey and her wisdom for the next generation of women entrepreneurs.Chapters 

What if the key to unlocking peak performance is not pushing harder but mastering the art of mental focus and well-being? I traveled to LA to be at Mastery Labs to unlock the secrets of high performance with Michael Gervais, a renowned expert in mindfulness and psychology. This is our annual Holiday episode of Ultimate Guide to Partnering and my gift to you, our amazing listeners, followers, and community. Michael shares how mental training can revolutionize personal and professional approaches to challenges, from his roots in elite sports to shaping corporate cultures. He explores the pivotal moments that sparked his passion, revealing how psychological skills like confidence and focus can be trained to thrive in any environment. This episode highlights actionable strategies for balancing well-being with ambition, applying insights from sports to business, and using mindfulness to direct focus effectively. With stories ranging from surfing competitions to Microsoft's cultural transformation under Satya Nadella, Michael offers a holistic perspective on performance psychology and sustainable success. Thank you for supporting Ultimate Partner and the Ultimate Guide to Partnering Podcast. Please tell your friends, subscribe, and leave us up to a 5-star Review, as it helps us get more amazing guests.

Chris and Hector break down the ransomware attack on Ingram Micro, exposing how a missing MFA on a VPN led to a massive breach. They also dig into the Department of Defense's new CMMC rules and sound off on Microsoft's $30 charge for Windows 10 security updates. Join our new Patreon! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.patreon.com/c/hackerandthefed⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Send HATF your questions at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠questions@hackerandthefed.com

998: How are executives creating value from AI investment? In this Technovation episode, we feature a panel from our most recent Metis Strategy Summit where Metis Strategy's Chris Davis moderates a panel on how companies can unlock real value from their investment in AI with AMD CIO Hasmukh Ranjan, Palantir CIO Jim Siders, and Ingram Micro CTO Dham Pathervellai. The panel shares bold strategies for AI adoption, including AMD's “Four A's” maturity model, Palantir's mandate to scale lean with high impact, and Ingram Micro's marketplace revolution powered by GenAI. With an emphasis on data ownership, productivity KPIs, and shifting product development mindsets, this conversation offers a playbook for turning AI talk into measurable impact. Key themes include: AMD's assist-to-autonomous AI framework and data-centric strategy Palantir's edge IT model and shift to generalist engineering teams Ingram Micro's GenAI integration and “Come as you are” partner model Rethinking productivity, talent models, and data governance for AI scale

When Ingram Micro Got TestedSanjib Sahoo, President of Ingram Micro's Global Platform Group, was already preparing to lead under pressure—long before the headlines.Before the headlines.Before the cyberattack.Before the world was watching…When we recorded this conversation, none of us knew what was coming. But what Sanjib shared then feels even more powerful now.You'll hear the bold transformation he's driving inside a $48B tech giant that touches nearly 90% of the world's population—and the personal transformation leaders must go through to meet the moment.“Doubt isn't the enemy,” he told me. “It's often the proof you're doing something meaningful.”He doesn't interpret fear as a sign to back down—but a signal you're on the right track...And when the pressure hits, how do you stay grounded—especially when everyone's watching to see if you'll crack or lead?This isn't a crisis interview.It's a real, unfiltered look at what leadership actually takes—when everything's on the line.Recorded before the headlines.Proven after.

Segment 1: Interview with Monzy Merza - There is a Right and Wrong Way to use AI in the SOC In the rush to score AI funding dollars, a lot of startups build a basic wrapper around existing generative AI services like those offered by OpenAI and Anthropic. As a result, these services are expensive, and don't satisfy many security operations teams' privacy requirements. This is just the tip of the iceberg when discussing the challenges of using AI to aid the SOC. In this interview, we'll dive into the challenge of finding security vendors that care about security, the need for transparency in products, the evolving shared responsibility model, and other topics related to solving security operations challenges. Segment 2: Topic Segment - How much AI is too much AI? In the past few weeks, I've talked to several startup founders who are running into buyers that aren't allowed to purchase their products, even though they want them and prefer them over the competition. Why? No AI and they're not allowed to buy. Segment 3: News Segment Finally, in the enterprise security news, We cover the latest funding The Trustwave saga comes to a positive end Android 16 could help you evade law enforcement Microsoft is kicking 3rd party AV out of the kernel Giving AI some personality (and honesty) Log4shell canaries reveal password weirdness Denmark gives citizens copyright to their own faces to fight AI McDonald's has an AI whoopsie Ingram Micro has a ransomware whoopsie Drama in the trailer lock industry All that and more, on this episode of Enterprise Security Weekly. Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/esw for all the latest episodes! Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/esw-415

Ingram Micro suffers a ransomware attack by the SafePay gang. Spanish police dismantle a large-scale investment fraud ring. The SatanLock ransomware group says it is shutting down. Brazilian police arrest a man accused of stealing over $100 million from the country's banking system. Qantas confirms contact from a “potential cybercriminal” following its recent customer data breach. The XWorm RAT evolves to better evade detection. Cybercriminals ramp up fraudulent domains ahead of Amazon Prime day. Apple sues a former engineer allegedly stealing confidential data. Our guest is Rob Allen, Chief Product Officer at Threat Locker, discussing why 'Default Deny' could be the Antidote to Security Fatigue. AI image editing blurs the evidence.  Remember to leave us a 5-star rating and review in your favorite podcast app. Miss an episode? Sign-up for our daily intelligence roundup, Daily Briefing, and you'll never miss a beat. And be sure to follow CyberWire Daily on LinkedIn. CyberWire Guest On our Industry Voices segment, we are joined by Rob Allen, Chief Product Officer at Threat Locker, discussing From Noise to Control: Why 'Default Deny' Is the Antidote to Security Fatigue. If you want to hear more from Rob or Threat Locker, you can listen to them here. Selected Reading Ingram Micro outage caused by SafePay ransomware attack (Bleeping Computer) Police dismantles investment fraud ring stealing €10 million (Bleeping Computer) SatanLock Ransomware Ends Operations, Says Stolen Data Will Be Leaked (Hackread) Police in Brazil Arrest a Suspect Over $100M Banking Hack (SecurityWeek) Qantas Contacted by Potential Cybercriminal Following Data Breach (Infosecurity Magazine) Arbor Associates reports data breach exposing patient information (Beyond Machines) XWorm RAT Deploys New Stagers and Loaders to Bypass Defenses (GB Hackers) Amazon Prime Day 2025: Deals Await, But So Do the Cyber Criminals (Check Point) Apple Accuses Ex-Engineer Of Stealing Vision Pro Secrets, Silently Accepting Job At Snap Inc., And Covering His Tracks By Wiping Data From Work Laptop (WCCF TECH) Cops Use ChatGPT to Edit Drugs Bust Photo, Goes Horribly Wrong (PetaPixel) Audience Survey Complete our annual audience survey before August 31. Want to hear your company in the show? You too can reach the most influential leaders and operators in the industry. Here's our media kit. Contact us at cyberwire@n2k.com to request more info. The CyberWire is a production of N2K Networks, your source for strategic workforce intelligence. © N2K Networks, Inc. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices