Podcasts about MDF

Jim and Chris discuss listener emails on whether Social Security should be compared to an annuity, Rule of 55 distribution rules, using period-certain annuities during the delay period, QLAC timing and taxes, and using a SPIA for Minimum Dignity Floor coverage. (5:20) The guys address a listener's objection to describing Social Security as an annuity and whether that comparison is accurate. (32:00) A listener seeks clarification on Rule of 55 distributions after receiving conflicting information about whether plan-specific rules matter. (38:45) Georgette asks whether a 10-year period before her mortgage is paid off can be treated like a delay period and covered with a period-certain annuity. (51:30) Jim and Chris answer a question about whether QLACs can be purchased for a spouse from an IRA, how QLAC timing can be structured, and how payments are taxed. (1:13:45) George wonders whether relying on excess RMDs or purchasing a qualified second-and-survivor SPIA from IRA funds is a better way to support long-term MDF coverage. The post Social Security, Rule of 55, QLAC Timing, SPIAs: Q&A #2623 appeared first on The Retirement and IRA Show.

In this week's show we do a review of the WiiM Amp Multiroom Streaming Amplifier but first,  we read your emails and take a look at the week's news. News: Tubi Will Stream The 2026 FIFA World Cup For Free Roku launching new creator-driven content channels, hub Disney+ to join Hulu in streaming top music festivals Streaming Bundles Offsetting Rising Subscription Costs WiiM Amp: Multiroom Streaming Amplifier As you know Ara just completed a set of speakers built from salvaged MDF and brand new components from Dayton Audio. The speakers sound excellent and will end up being a part of Ara's whole home audio system in Tennessee. The only issue is that these speakers are passive and need an amplifier. So to drive them Ara is using the WiiM Amp Streaming amplifier which runs for about $300 at Amazon. This WiiM amp is an all-in-one device that combines a high-quality streamer, ESS Sabre DAC, and Class D amplifier into one cool looking box. It's perfect for "just add speakers" simplicity with great performance, especially at this pricepoint.  Key Features Power Output: 60W  8 ohms DAC: ESS Sabre ES9018 HyperStream, supports up to 24-bit/192kHz hi-res audio Streaming & Connectivity: AirPlay 2, Chromecast, Spotify Connect, Tidal Connect, Amazon Music, Qobuz, DLNA, Bluetooth 5.1 (two-way), Wi-Fi, Ethernet Inputs: HDMI ARC (for TV), optical digital, analog RCA line-level, USB-A (for local files/drives) Outputs: Speaker binding posts, subwoofer RCA (with adjustable crossover) Controls: WiiM Home app (iOS/Android), included remote, voice control (Alexa built-in, works with Google/Siri) Other: 10-band graphic EQ + parametric EQ, room correction options, multi-room grouping with other WiiM devices, gapless playback Setup Setup was straightforward and took about ten minutes including the firmware upgrade done through the WiiM Home App. For Ara's setup it was, plug in power and connect the speakers and join the wifi network which was done through the WiiM Home app. Ara is not using a subwoofer but one can be added by using the sub out RCA connection. You can adjust the crossover in the app. The app is where you can select EQ, source, and do your multi-room configuration.  There is only one physical control that controls volume and doubles as play/pause. HDMI ARC makes it an excellent TV audio upgrade with minimal hassle. No complex wiring or external DAC needed. More on that in a bit. Sound Quality The WiiM Amp delivers clean, lively, and detailed sound at a reasonable price. It offers good clarity, solid bass control via the sub out.  Distortion is very low even at high levels of volume. We are not saying that using these with some KEF or SVS Towers is the way to go, but for small-to-medium spaces, or desktop setups, it sounds surprisingly good. Add to it that it can make any speaker work with Apple Airplay or Google Cast Audio and you have a relatively inexpensive way to build out a wireless whole home audio system.  The HDMI ARC support makes this a cost effective way to add a 2.1 speaker system to your TV. In this case the center channel is split evenly between the left and right speakers giving the perception that the audio is coming from the center, provided the speakers are not separated from the TV by a large distance.  We have a listener named John who is using the Wiim Amp Pro ($379 from Amazon with no Airplay support) in this manner with an SVS subwoofer and his quote is, "It's been working perfectly".  The only issue he had was with the EQ calibration. When it was set to cut and boost frequencies he would get audio dropouts. He did some experimenting and found that if he only cuts frequencies and does not boost them, the audio dropouts stopped.   Cool Features That Make It Worth $300 All-in-One Versatility — Streamer + DAC + amp in one small box (about the size of a small Mac mini).  HDMI ARC + Sub Out — Turns any TV into a better-sounding system and easily adds a subwoofer with crossover control. Advanced App EQ & Room Tools — 10-band graphic + parametric EQ plus presets let you fine-tune for your room/speakers. Multi-Room & Ecosystem — Group with other WiiM devices for whole-home audio; excellent service integration (Spotify/Tidal Connect, AirPlay 2, etc.). Other Extras — USB playback, two-way Bluetooth, and voice control,  Summary The WiiM Amp is an outstanding budget streaming amplifier that offers a lot of versatility, ease of use, and surprisingly good sound for the money. It's ideal for anyone wanting a simple, music or TV audio setup without complexity or high cost. While we don't recommend it for big rooms, it's perfect for desktop and bookshelf use, especially if you want to use Airplay 2 or Google Cast Audio. With all that said, Ara will probably never use the app again and simply connect to it via the Airplay 2 from his Mac and iOS devices.   

Brians Questions: Hi guys! Long time listener, first time question-asker! Thanks very much for the show. I've been listening for a few years now and love the no-nonsense, down to business approach of your show. I am a hobby woodworker, but have begun to get a few paying projects, which have been really fun and rewarding. One of the things that has forced me to do, as opposed to  things I make for fun, for myself, or for gifts, is to do more design and modeling up front. I've gotten proficient enough with Fusion 360 to be able to create a 3D model that I can use to visualize for myself or show a client, and have most of what I need to build. What I've discovered about Fusion is that you can model a HUGE amount of detail. I've found that modeling detail down to the rabbits, dados and understanding and determing the detail of each joint to be very helpful. I recently built a few large cabinets out of plywood using rabbet and dado joinery. I did not go to the trouble of actually modeling each rabbit and dado. When I was buidling it, I wished I had. A while back I built a cabinet from plans and they modeled ever rabbit, dado, hole... and I found it to be very helpful. I was also thinking that modeling all that might take alot of time and not be worth the effort. All of that is just an example for context. My question actually is, How much detail do you go into when you model/design your own pieces and what are some of the reasons you do the level of detail you do? Thanks again for the great podcast an I'm excited to hear your answers! Jeff I just got into a shop with power for more than lights for the first time in several years, and I dug out several routers that I couldnt say no to, even though I was exiled to hand tools at the time. Between those and the ones I had before, I've probably got a half-dozen of various sizes; enough, I think, to leave a couple in permanent setups. Just wondering, how many routers do you guys have, and how do to maximize their utility in your own work flows (with permanent setups, favorite jigs, etc)? Scott Guys Questions: Hello from Alabama, I am in the planning stages of building a dispenser for boxed wine. I have some highly figured walnut that I would like to use for the side panels.  However, the pieces I have are fairly thin. I am considering using 1/4 inch plywood as a core between 2 pieces of the thin walnut for each panel to prevent warping in the future. The plywood that I have on hand is currently somewhat warped itself. My question is: If I use this plywood as a core and apply sufficient clamping pressure during the glue up, should this panel remain flat? Or would you use MDF or HDF instead? Also, would you recommend any other glue rather than water resistant PVA? Thank you all for doing the Podcast. Woodshop Life is the BEST woodworking podcast out there, and I appreciate each of you for taking time out of your busy schedules to provide this service to all of us. Juston (Wild Chicken Woodworks) 1) I just drove down to Mississippi and met an old friend for the first time (if he's listening, he'll know who he is) to buy a Vacupress and associated gear. In this stuff, there was a flitch if cherry veneer (it was curled like a plane shaving from wing rolled, but appears really smooth, as in not wrinkled) and several starter packs of 3 sq/ft of some exotics (specifically satinwood, zebrawood, and rosewood, if interested). I'm super excited to put my first pump to work and have grand aspirations of  masterpieces with figured exotics, but in the meantime, I don't know where to start. Do you guys have any recommendations? What were your first veneer projects? Scott Huy's Questions: Hi guys, thanks for your responses to my drum/belt sanding and tenon cutting questions a few months back. Here's a hopefully fun one to think about: what is a tool that is no longer made or is no longer “in style” that you either can't imagine working without or wish you had acquired when it was more readily available? Why? I always love hearing and learning about those “forgotten” tools and techniques that at some previous time were a normal part of the craft. Thanks! Michael Hello Gentlemen, I am a hobbyist woodworker, with a small shop nestled in the corner of my 2 car garage.  I've been using a DeWalt contractor table saw for the past 12 years, and have gotten good enough results with it that I've never bothered to upgrade to anything bigger.   However, the thing that bothers me most about this saw is the virtual lack of dust collection.  Even though there's a dust collection port on the back under the blade, most of the dust drops straight to the floor.  And I'm sick and tired of having to shop vac my entire garage after making even just a couple quick cuts.  I think it's time to invest in something that can manage dust a bit better.   My question is: what brand/model of table saw would you recommend that is  (1) easily mobile  (2) doesn't take up a large footprint, and  (3) has the best dust collection?   Because my shop is small, I do not have an actual dust collector.  I've been using a 6.5 horsepower shop vac with a dust separator for all these years, and would prefer to stick with this setup for now if possible.  Can you explain the pros and cons of using this setup with a table saw versus using an actual dust collector?  If I need an actual dust collector to get the results I'm looking for with the new saw, what kind would you recommend to keep the cost and footprint low? Oh, and hopefully the saw would be under $1500, but could possibly stretch to $2000 as long as all the requirements are met. Thanks for your help, and thanks for providing the best woodworking podcast on the planet! Best, Matt  

In this episode, we examine the RadioShack Retro Turntable (Model 4001797), a $129.99 belt-drive player that aims to balance vintage aesthetics with modern connectivity. The unit plays all three standard speeds—33 1/3, 45, and 78 RPM—and accommodates records up to 12 inches, making it compatible with most collections including older shellac formats. It features dual built-in speakers for immediate playback, though serious listeners will likely take advantage of the RCA outputs to connect to external audio systems. The turntable's standout feature is its bidirectional Bluetooth capability, allowing users to either stream audio to the turntable or send vinyl playback wirelessly to Bluetooth speakers. Additional connectivity includes a 3.5mm AUX input and headphone jack. Housed in an MDF case with a PVC vinyl finish and transparent dust cover, the turntable occupies a 15.75" x 14.17" footprint. At this price point, it positions itself as an accessible entry point for vinyl newcomers or a convenient secondary setup, offering out-of-the-box functionality without requiring immediate additional investment in external speakers. Follow AndroidGuys(X) Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/androidguysInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/androidguysTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@androidguysofficialYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@AndroidGuyscomOfficialWebsite: http://www.androidguys.comFollow Scott WebsterInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/scottwebsterFollow Luke GaulInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/lukegaul

Del 18 al 22 de este mes, la institución local recibirá anotaciones para los talleres de "Confección de juegos infantiles en MDF" y "Desarrollo de emprendimientos". Néstor Sandoval, director del centro, destacó que la propuesta busca generar nuevas herramientas laborales y proyectos independientes.

What's up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Elizabeth Dobbs, AVP of Marketing Technology, Data and Growth at Databricks.(00:00) - Intro (01:18) - In This Episode (01:47) - Sponsor: Knak (02:55) - Sponsor: MoEngage (04:16) - Why Velocity Beats Permanence in Marketing Data Architecture (12:00) - Why Databricks Embedded Data Engineers Inside Marketing (15:02) - Inside Databricks' 3 Marketing Ops Agents (18:56) - How Databricks Built an AI Analyst That Marketing Teams Actually Trust (26:13) - How Agent Tagatha Cut Months of Manual Content Tagging to Hours (30:07) - Sponsor: AttributionApp (31:09) - Sponsor: GrowthLoop (34:48) - How Agent Atlas Replaced the Rules-Based Segmentation Wheel (39:28) - Why Marketers Don't Care Whether You Call It an Agent (43:32) - How to Get Data Warehouse Access When Your Team Doesn't Own It (48:36) - What Databricks Is Actually Testing for in Marketing Hires Now (54:04) - What Gives Liz Energy Outside the Office Summary: Elizabeth Dobbs spent 6 years at Databricks doing something most marketing leaders only talk about: building the data infrastructure before deploying the AI on top of it. She's shipped 3 production agents (Marge, Tagatha, and Atlas) and she'll tell you exactly what broke first and why the team kept going anyway. You'll hear how a marketing lakehouse becomes the foundation that makes every agent actually work, why the agent label debate is a distraction, and what Liz is genuinely testing for in marketing interviews now that AI-polished resumes all look the same in Greenhouse. If your AI ambitions are running ahead of your data foundation, this episode is going to reorder your roadmap.About Elizabeth DobbsElizabeth Dobbs is the AVP of Marketing Technology, Data and Growth at Databricks, where she leads the team responsible for the company's full marketing stack, including data engineers and data scientists embedded directly in marketing. Promoted to AVP in February 2025 after more than 5 years building Databricks' marketing data infrastructure from scratch, she architected the company's marketing lakehouse and deployed 3 production AI agents serving the entire marketing org. Before Databricks, she spent nearly 7 years at Khoros in a series of marketing operations and demand generation leadership roles, including Chief of Staff to the CMO.Why Velocity Beats Permanence in Marketing Data ArchitectureIf you work at a company called Databricks, you assume the marketing data is fine. The word "data" is literally in the name. When Elizabeth Dobbs was interviewing 6 years ago and someone in sales ops told her straight up that the data was a complete mess, she thought they were being politely humble. She took the job. She found out they meant it.What she encountered fit the startup playbook exactly. Agencies hired for agency's sake because headcount was thin. Systems that barely talked to each other. Stacks of what she calls "human middleware," people spending their days manually bridging gaps the infrastructure couldn't close. Databricks was probably no worse than any other high-growth startup at that scale. But fixing it meant accepting something most marketing teams resist: building for permanence is a waste of energy.When Liz and her team sat down to fix things, they made a call that runs against how most marketing orgs are wired. They stopped trying to build the perfect foundation. At 1,000 people, you might get away with it. At 10,000, perfection is a distraction. By the time you finish, the company has changed shape again. So they optimized for velocity. Centralized data imperfectly. Built shared definitions that not everyone followed consistently. Accepted the bubblegum-and-duct-tape reality. And they stayed intentional about exactly 1 thing: knowing which decisions you cannot walk back.The one-way door framework is how they sorted the rest. Some decisions hurt to make but compound over time. A marketing lakehouse, all first-party data in 1 governed and catalogued place, is the example she keeps returning to. There is no SaaS tool you would buy, no agent you would deploy, that wouldn't benefit from having that foundation underneath it. That makes it a no-regret decision even when it's brutal to build. The other category, the rip-and-replace bets, is where you move fast and hedge. Agents might automate an entire workflow in 18 months. They might not be ready. You place smaller bets there and iterate. What you don't do is apply the same level of commitment to decisions that actually shouldn't last.6 years later, the core of Databricks' marketing stack looks a lot like it did when Liz started. LeanData. Familiar prospecting tools. The same basic webinar infrastructure. The vendors who survived are the ones who grew alongside the team, who stayed flexible as Databricks scaled well past what their standard playbook assumed. In a market that treats every tool as disposable, the ones that last are the ones that earned it. The companies that build durable AI systems in marketing will be the ones who made the unsexy architectural call first and let everything else follow from it.Key takeaway: Before committing to any AI agent or new platform, split your roadmap into 2 categories: one-way doors and reversible bets. A centralized, governed marketing data layer goes in the one-way door category. Pour resources into it without condition and treat every setback as a speed bump. For everything else, including which agents you deploy and which tools you layer on top, move fast, hedge small, and iterate. Run that filter on your next planning cycle and you'll stop debating tools and start building the foundation that makes all of them actually work.Why Databricks Embedded Data Engineers Inside MarketingMarketing ops leaders who don't have embedded data engineers spend a lot of time explaining to others why they can't move faster. Liz's team has data engineers and data scientists who report into marketing, not into a central IT org. Most people assume she fought for it. The actual story is less dramatic and more instructive.It came from 2 leaders giving the team room before they could prove the full return. Her CMO Rick and CCIO Mike Hamilton were direct about it: we have our own fires, you know enough to be dangerous, you know where the lines are. File Jira tickets if you need something outside your lane, but otherwise go run. That kind of organizational trust is rare. What made it stick was showing the velocity difference on something concrete. Bring in 1 or 2 data engineers with actual marketing domain experience, and the speed gap becomes obvious. Marketing data has its own rules. MDF means different things to different teams. ROAS has regional variations. Pipeline attribution is a political minefield. Someone who has lived in that domain moves 10 times faster than someone learning it in place.That observation turns out to apply directly to the agents Liz's team built later. You spend months onboarding a new hire with marketing domain context. That person leaves before the investment fully pays off and you start over. Agents don't do that. You train them, you give them the context, they hold it. What Databricks figured out with internal resourcing, they've since encoded into how they think about deploying AI. The parallel is direct and Liz draws it explicitly: the reason domain knowledge matters for people is the same reason it matters when you're configuring an agent.The team that resulted from this structure is part of why Marge, Tagatha, and Atlas were even possible. You can't build a marketing lakehouse without engineers who understand what the data is supposed to represent. You can't deploy an agent ...

Weniger ist mehr – Nachhaltig Wohnen mit modularen MöbelnWas brauchen wir wirklich, um gut zu wohnen? In dieser Folge der Sonderreihe „Nachhaltig Wohnen" von Green Voices spricht Nike mit Julia Haneke, Gründerin des Berliner Möbelunternehmens Stocubo, über Minimalismus, modulares Wohnen und bewussten Konsum.Julia erklärt, warum flexible, modulare Möbel nicht nur praktisch, sondern zutiefst nachhaltig sind: Sie wachsen mit dem Leben mit, von der ersten Studentinnenwohnung bis zur wachsenden Familie, und ersetzen den ständigen Neukauf durch kluge Erweiterbarkeit. Bei Stocubo werden diese Möbel aus FSC-zertifiziertem MDF lokal in Berlin handgefertigt, das Holz stammt aus nachhaltiger Forstwirtschaft in Nordrhein-Westfalen, und jedes Jahr werden tausende Bäume für Wiederaufforstungsprojekte in Brandenburg und im Harz neu gepflanzt.Im Gespräch geht es darum, worauf man beim Kauf nachhaltiger Möbel achten sollte, warum kurze Lieferwege und regionale Produktion so entscheidend sind, wie stocubo durch konsequente Auftragsproduktion überflüssige Lagerbestände und Verschnitt vermeidet, und wie das modulare System Reparatur und Upcycling ganz einfach macht, ohne das ganze Möbelstück entsorgen zu müssen.Eine Folge für alle, die verstehen wollen, wie nachhaltige Möbel wirklich entstehen und wie man sie ein Leben lang gut behandelt.Diese Sonderfolge von Green Voices ist mit freundlicher Unterstützung der IKEA-Stiftung entstanden. Green Voices ist der Podcast von Studio36 für nachhaltiges Leben, gesellschaftlichen Wandel und starke Ideen.Alle News & Infos zum Podcast: Website Studio36: https://studio36.berlin/podcasts/green-voices/Instagram Studio36: https://www.instagram.com/studio36.berlin/LinkedIN Studio36: https://de.linkedin.com/company/studio36berlinInstagram Nike Wessel: https://www.instagram.com/nike_wessel/ Stocubo Website: https://www.stocubo.de/de/Stocubo Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/stocubo/LinkedIn Julia Haneke: https://www.linkedin.com/in/julia-haneke-25224b69/Danke, dass du bei dieser Folge zugehört hast!Wir freuen uns, wenn ihr den Podcast teilt und uns eine Bewertung gebt. Um keine der neuen Folgen zu verpassen, aktiviert die Glocke und folgt uns auf Instagram. Schickt uns Liebesbriefe, Feedback und Anfragen an: info@studio36.berlin Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Frances Edmonds, head of sustainable impact at HP Canada For Canadian IT solution providers, sustainability has always been something to think about – eventually. Frances Edmonds says the clock is running out on “eventually.” Edmonds is the Head of Sustainable Impact at HP Canada, a two-time Clean50 award winner, and one of the most recognized voices in the country at the intersection of technology, procurement, and environmental responsibility. On this episode of In The Channel, she makes the business case for why Canadian MSPs and resellers need to be fluent in sustainability today – and what being fluent actually looks like in a sales conversation. The data from HP’s own Amplify Impact program is striking: over 70% of partners who lead with sustainability report winning new business as a result, and self-assessment scores among participating partners have improved 59% since 2021. But the more urgent signal is in the procurement numbers. The Canadian Collaboration for Sustainable Procurement represents organizations with $105 billion in combined spend – and among them, OECM (the Ontario Education Collaborative Marketplace) is already applying a 12% weighting for ESG criteria in bid documents, scored at both the OEM and channel partner level. That’s not a coming wave. It’s already in the water. Edmonds also makes a compelling case on the AI front: Edge AI carries an estimated 90% lower environmental impact than Cloud AI – a stat with real implications for how MSPs frame hardware refresh conversations with clients who have sustainability or data sovereignty mandates. Resources mentioned in this episode: HP Amplify Impact program OECM – Ontario Education Collaborative Marketplace Bob Willard’s Sustainability Advantage – free tools for sustainability planning Climate Fresh training – available through HP Amplify Impact CBSR – Canadian Business for Social Responsibility 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. We talk a lot on this show about the “how” of the channel — how to build a practice, how to manage a migration, how to secure a client. Today we’re looking at a different kind of how: how to win deals in an environment where your customers care as much about your carbon footprint as they do about your hourly rate. My guest today has been living this story for 30 years. Frances Edmonds is the Head of Sustainable Impact at HP Canada, and she’s one of the most recognized voices in the country when it comes to the intersection of technology and sustainability. HP’s own data shows that over 70% of partners who lead with sustainability are seeing measurable impact on their win rates. What does that actually look like for a Canadian MSP in 2026? We’re going to dig into the shift in procurement rules, including some hard numbers on ESG weighting in Canadian bid documents, and why the rise of Edge AI might actually be the biggest sustainability story of the year for the channel. Let’s get right into it — my chat with Frances Edmonds. Frances, thanks for taking the time. Frances Edmonds: You’re very welcome. Robert Dutt: You sit in a unique place in that you’ve been focused on sustainability for a while now — long before it was a mainstream business conversation. Can you give us the quick picture of what your role is at HP Canada today, and how that has evolved as the story has evolved over time? Frances Edmonds: Sure. My title today is Head of Sustainable Impact — that’s the name of our sustainability program. And I practice what I call CSR 2.0: corporate social responsibility 2.0. I spent the first half of my career really getting HP Canada to the point where we could call ourselves Canada’s most sustainable technology company — you can find all the proof of that at hp.ca/sustainableimpact. Then we took a look around and said: sustainability from a business context in Canada isn’t really advancing. We’ve got a few leaders, but the vast majority of Canadian businesses aren’t doing very much — including our channel. So we thought: how do we change that? In a capitalist economy, the demand signal for sustainability performance in suppliers comes at the ballot box of procurement. About eight years ago, we switched our strategy to focus on how do we change how Canada buys. That’s really my job today — to encourage everyone in the industrial economy to add sustainability into their procurement criteria and decision-making, so there’s an incentive for all companies to step up and do more. Robert Dutt: Is that all? Frances Edmonds: [laughs] Well, on top of all the other things we do to maintain being Canada’s most sustainable technology company. But I don’t do this alone — sustainability is a team sport. We require all players to come to the table and bring their relative strengths. One thing we’re doing right now: we’re onto our fourth cohort working with a nonprofit called CBSR, Canadian Business for Social Responsibility. We teach sustainability professionals at some of Canada’s largest companies — Walmart, Canadian Tire, the banks, insurance companies — how to work alongside their procurement teams to implement sustainable procurement. We partner with nonprofits like Green Economy Canada, CBSR, other industry associations, and customers and partners to drive the change that’s necessary. Robert Dutt: You mentioned there’s still a need to mature how organizations across Canada are approaching this. The Amplify Impact data shows that 70-plus percent of partners report winning new business by leading with sustainability — that’s a striking number. When a Canadian MSP or reseller is actually leading with sustainability in a sales conversation, what does that look like in the room? Frances Edmonds: It really depends on who the customer is. Some customers have sustainability goals, but the people the MSP is actually talking to don’t know that — there’s often a gap between what the corporation is committed to and what the people doing the buying or the IT implementation are aware of. So you have to do your research: understand where the customer is coming from, what the opportunity is, and then align what the MSP and the OEM are doing on sustainability with the customer’s actual pain points. Do they have difficulty managing products at end of first life — the most common issue? Do they understand where their security vulnerabilities are? If you think about managing print, for instance — you’d normally do a print assessment and find printers 15 or 20 years old sitting on the network. That’s a huge security vulnerability that nobody’s really paying attention to. Helping customers with pain points like that — showing them the opportunities, whether it’s getting value back from end-of-first-life equipment to help fund new purchases, or moving into buying as a service — that’s really the sweet spot for both an MSP and a customer to maximize their sustainability performance. Robert Dutt: Is this primarily a large enterprise and government discussion today, or is it moving into the mid-market and down into SMB? A lot of partners are working with smaller businesses who may not have a strong sustainability mandate at the top of their priority list. Frances Edmonds: I think it’s quite spotty, honestly — I see bid documents from across the country in all sectors of the economy, so it’s hard to generalize. One advantage small businesses have is that they’re often purpose-driven, and the owner can make a decision quickly. “I’m buying from a company that puts ocean-bound plastics into their products” — and that’s a faster decision than getting a university to change its procurement policy, which can take three years of approvals. What I am seeing that’s changed over the eight years I’ve been working in this area: before, people didn’t really understand the link between sustainability and procurement. Today they understand it, and the people who want to do it differently often just have inhibitors in the way — or they default to “this product’s carbon footprint is two kilograms less, so I’ll buy it.” That’s not really how sustainable procurement works. You need more information to make a well-rounded decision. Sustainable procurement is still about getting the best value for the goods and services you’re buying — but now you’re also looking at the most sustainable or circular option from the most sustainable or circular supplier, in alignment with your own organization’s goals. And governments, whose sustainability goals range from zero poverty to life below water and everything in between, have a tremendous opportunity to practice this. Robert Dutt: You’ve spoken before about sustainability scoring in RFPs and procurement documents. Where does that stand in Canada right now — is this something MSPs need to be ready for today, or is it still a coming wave? Frances Edmonds: There’s always opportunity for competitive advantage because each customer has a different focus — whether it’s bridging the digital divide in Indigenous communities, disability inclusion, or a dozen other areas. But let me give you some numbers. The Canadian Collaboration for Sustainable Procurement just issued their latest annual report. They represent broader public sector organizations with $105 billion in combined spend. Twenty-seven members have sustainable procurement embedded in their policies. Fourteen have a dedicated full-time person working on it. And one of the best examples to date: OECM, the Ontario Education Collaborative Marketplace, publicly states that they’re applying a 12% weighting for environmental, social, and governance items in bid documents — scored at not just the OEM level, but at the channel partner level as well. Robert Dutt: So if I’m a partner who wants to get ahead of this — with so many angles and approaches to consider — what’s the minimum literacy they need to have in a procurement conversation today? What should they know cold? Frances Edmonds: The universal language is carbon. What are your carbon emissions? How are you working to reduce your carbon impact? That question is coming in some form from customers, regardless of sector. We know our products are carbon-intensive: 80% of a notebook computer’s carbon impact is determined before it ever reaches the customer — it’s in how it’s built. So understanding where carbon sits in the system, and how customers can help reduce it, is the first place to start. Through the Amplify Impact Program, HP offers a wide range of training — from basic 101s all the way through to what we call Climate Fresk. That’s a three-hour workshop that helps a group understand the interconnectedness of climate change and what they can do about it. We deliver it to partner leadership so they can understand how important this is to their business. We’re actually running one next week, and partners are welcome to attend. Robert Dutt: For a partner who’s hearing this and thinking “I’m interested, but where do I start?” — what are the tools and resources inside Amplify Impact that are actually moving the needle? Frances Edmonds: The Amplify Impact Program basically took 80 years of HP’s expertise in sustainability leadership, put it into a web-enabled system, and made it available to partners for free. Everything a partner could possibly need is in there. If you’re not in the program yet, I’d strongly encourage you to join — it’s free and straightforward to get started. You sign a pledge to commit to the program, then complete an online self-assessment. With AI enhancements, it benchmarks you against your peers worldwide and gives you a customized action plan to improve your scores. The results have been meaningful: since we launched in 2021, self-assessment scores globally have increased by 59%. Partners redo the assessment annually, and we’re seeing steady progress. In Canada specifically, we’ve seen over 6,000 sustainability courses completed by partners and employees — which tells you the interest is there at the individual level. For anyone outside the Amplify Impact Program, Dr. Bob Willard at Sustainability Advantage offers a whole suite of high-quality tools for free. That’s another strong place to start. Robert Dutt: How has the partner conversation in Canada on this evolved over the last five years, and where does it need to go next? Frances Edmonds: Let’s look at the economic situation partners are in today. Prices are going through the roof, availability is constrained. What does a logical customer do in those circumstances? They start thinking about buying for durability and longevity — and that leads right into the “as a service” conversation. This is about deepening relationships with your customers. Customers don’t want a one-time fix anymore — they need a partner at the table. And selling as a service, with a longer and deeper customer relationship, is where the market is going. We’re moving away from selling boxes to selling services, and sustainability is just another one of those services that’s part and parcel of that shift. I always think of security and sustainability as two sides of the same coin. That’s what customers need — and we can deliver both. Robert Dutt: Security as a service is certainly well-established. Where do you see sustainability as a service in terms of maturity and adoption? Frances Edmonds: Within the Amplify Impact Program, for instance, if a partner wants to measure and manage their carbon footprint, HP has negotiated a globally discounted rate for partners to acquire a software-as-a-service tool to do exactly that. They become carbon-literate in a hands-on way and understand how to report on it to their own stakeholders — employees, investors, customers, whoever. In some cases, we even allow partners to use MDF to pay for that software. We’re essentially paying them to get started with carbon management. Robert Dutt: I have to ask about AI — it’s the conversation everyone in the channel is having right now. There’s a real tension between the push to build AI infrastructure, which is enormously energy-intensive, and sustainability goals. How should partners be navigating that for their clients? Frances Edmonds: Great question. Let’s start with the distinction between cloud AI and Edge AI. Edge AI — which, in a country of small and medium businesses like Canada, is where AI is really going to drive productivity — is estimated to have greater than 90% lower carbon impact and to be more secure than cloud AI. So we’re already on a winner there, assuming we can get AI-enabled devices into the right businesses. At its simplest: most tech people don’t actually know the relative carbon footprint of doing a Google search versus running a generative AI query. Can we just educate people to use the right tool in the right place? Don’t burn your carbon budget on something where a Google search would do. When you get into the ethics of AI use broadly, that’s a much longer conversation — and I’d like to see a lot more guidance documentation coming out on that front. Robert Dutt: That’s quite telling — that much lower footprint at the edge also speaks to what solution providers control, and brings in data sovereignty, security, many different factors. Frances Edmonds: Exactly. Security is the other piece — and they really go hand in hand. Robert Dutt: One last question: what’s the one thing you wish more MSPs and resellers understood about sustainability that they’re currently either getting wrong or overlooking? Frances Edmonds: Even when partners have made real investments in becoming more sustainable — gone through the training, completed the program — I don’t think they’re maximizing that return on investment by actually selling with sustainability. And I think it often comes down to the people taking the education not being the people making the go-to-market decisions. But as we see this shift into selling as a service, I think it will come along with it naturally. If you think about WXP — HP’s Workforce Experience Platform — there’s sustainability built right into it alongside security. The opportunity to delight customers with sustainability is real, and it’s not hard to do. It’s really just about making sure everyone knows, understands, and can connect it to what the customer actually needs. Robert Dutt: Some great advice in there. I appreciate you taking the time to share where things stand and where you see them going. Frances Edmonds: Thank you. From Canada’s most sustainable technology company — listed as one of the top 100 most sustainable corporations worldwide — this is near and dear to my heart. We’re here to make a difference, and this is one of the ways we do that. Robert Dutt: Brilliant. And it’s a conversation HP Canada has been having consistently for a while now — so it’s clearly not just an Earth Month thing. There you have it — Frances Edmonds from HP Canada. I’d like to thank Frances for her time today. It’s rare to talk to someone who can bridge the gap between high-level environmental goals and the gritty reality of a municipal RFP response, and I think she gave us some real clarity on where that line is being drawn right now. And as always, I’d like to thank you for listening. My big takeaway from that conversation is that sustainability is becoming a hard technical requirement, much like security. When you hear that organizations like OECM are moving toward a 12% weighting for ESG in their procurement documents — that’s not a nice-to-have anymore. That’s a gating factor. If you’re an MSP and you aren’t literate in this space, you’re essentially spotting your competitors a 12-point lead before the conversation even starts. I also found Frances’s point about Edge AI particularly striking. The idea that processing at the edge carries 90% less carbon impact than the cloud is a powerful narrative for partners — especially when you layer in the data sovereignty benefits we discussed. It’s a rare triple-win of performance, privacy, and planet that fits perfectly into the AI PC refresh cycle we’re seeing right now. If you enjoyed this episode, please make sure to follow or subscribe to In The Channel on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your shows. Ratings and reviews are always hugely appreciated — they really do help other Canadian channel pros find the show. Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.

Doug Houghton, director of global channels at Alkira There’s a line from this episode that’s worth leading with: “Networking is not sexy until it doesn’t work.” That’s Doug Houghton, Director of Global Channels at Alkira, and it’s a pretty concise summary of why his company exists. Alkira was founded by the team behind Viptela – the startup that essentially created the SD-WAN category before being acquired by Cisco. The lesson they carried out of that experience is that SD-WAN, for all its promise, still ran into the limits of underlying infrastructure. You ended up with disparate networks, latency constraints, and complexity that didn’t disappear – it just moved somewhere else. What they built in response is Network Infrastructure as a Service (NIaaS) – a cloud-native, consumption-based global backbone that abstracts multi-cloud connectivity into a single managed plane. The pitch to partners is concrete: consolidate 50 physical firewalls into virtualized functions, reduce total cost of ownership by 40-70%, and do it without a rip-and-replace cycle. The timing matters, and Houghton is direct about why. AI workloads – distributed large language models, agentic workflows reaching across multiple clouds simultaneously – demand a level of network elasticity that legacy infrastructure simply wasn’t designed for. Alkira’s argument is that they’re the smooth road that makes AI-driven infrastructure actually work in practice. For Canadian partners, Alkira has real resources on the ground: a solution architect based in Toronto, a dedicated channel account manager, and publicly referenceable Canadian customers including contact center provider ContactPoint 360. The Connect Partner Program, launched in March 2026, puts approximately 20 percent total margin on the table across base discount, rebates, MDF, and POC SPIFFs – with average initial deals around $500,000 USD and typical expansion of 4x in year one. Canadian partners interested in the conversation can reach the team at partners@alkira.com. 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. If you were around when SD-WAN was the big disruptive idea in networking – the promise of simplifying branch connectivity, cutting costs, getting smarter about traffic – you probably also remember it didn’t quite deliver everything it promised. Not because the technology was bad, but because the underlying network architecture couldn’t keep up. You still ended up with complexity. It just moved somewhere else. That problem is essentially the founding insight behind Alkira. The company was built by Amir Khan and Atif Khan, the same team behind Viptela, the startup widely credited with creating the SD-WAN category before Cisco acquired it. What they learned in that experience is that SD-WAN, without a proper global backbone, just creates a different set of headaches. So they started fresh and built what they call NIaaS – Network Infrastructure as a Service – a cloud-native, consumption-based approach that abstracts the complexity of multi-cloud connectivity into something you could stand up, as my guest today puts it, with just a username and a password. The timing is not accidental, because what AI demands from a network – elasticity, low latency, the ability to reach distributed workloads almost anywhere instantly – is exactly what legacy infrastructure wasn’t built to handle. My guest is Doug Houghton, Director of Global Channels at Alkira. Doug has been in the channel a long time, knows the technology in a way that might genuinely surprise you coming from a channel chief, and has a lot to say about what it all means as a real business opportunity for Canadian VARs and MSPs. Let’s get right into it, my chat with Doug Houghton. Doug, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it. Doug Houghton: It’s my pleasure. Thank you for having me on today, Robert. Robert Dutt: So you were part of the team that built up the SD-WAN market at Viptela back in the day. What did you learn there that told you the next big thing was going to be NIaaS, and why now? Doug Houghton: First off, that’s a great question. I felt a bit like a passenger in a car racing a thousand miles an hour when we were doing software-defined wide-area networking. What we learned was that without organizing your cloud infrastructure properly, your cloud bill gets ridiculously large – especially if you keep your control element decoupled from your data plane in the cloud with all these workloads churning. But what we really learned, and what’s applicable to what we’re now doing at Alkira, is that SD-WAN truly did deliver on its core promise. It allows customers to influence traffic based on link quality and improve the user experience. If you’re on a phone call and it starts to get goofy, you can move over to a better-performing link in real time without dropping the call. That’s powerful. And the same with data traffic. What I hadn’t fully thought through was what happens as global companies start to adopt SD-WAN and disaggregate across locations in Southeast Asia, China, Latin America, and everywhere else. The latency back to the control element isn’t easy to contend with. So you ended up with organizations making decisions that effectively created four separate, disparate networks for latency purposes. And that was not part of the original promise. What we learned was that you need a global backbone that’s high throughput and low latency. The edge can still be SD-WAN – there are real things in SD-WAN that people still want, whether that’s WAN optimization, deduplication, caching, policy-based routing, forward error correction. All of that still has practical application, and site-to-site communications are still needed in many use cases. But Alkira was built inside the cloud first, employing the same principle of decoupling control plane from data plane for scale. By abstracting the cloud infrastructure, we were able to remediate the latency that those four geographically dispersed networks created. We’re the global backbone – that middle mile with high throughput and low latency – and then you connect these clusters of SD-WAN networks together and all of a sudden the promise of SD-WAN gets a lot more consumable. You have a singular network managed from a singular control plane and element management orchestrator, and you can still get all the benefits of SD-WAN at the local sites. Robert Dutt So in plain language, a Canadian MSP or VAR is used to selling network hardware or managing someone else’s infrastructure. How is selling, deploying, and managing NIaaS different from what they’re already doing, and what makes that distinction important? Doug Houghton: Let’s take a half step back and talk about what NIaaS actually is. It’s Network Infrastructure as a Service. What Alkira does is abstract the cloud infrastructure and build a routed overlay on top of it. We think of it as a virtualized colocation facility that connects and normalizes communications across your entire network. For managed service providers and service providers, our solution accelerates bringing their customers to cloud applications, cloud workloads, storage, and everything else the cloud promises. The way I explain it to my mom – and I’ve told this joke once already today because I’m sitting in a partner’s office right now – is this: if you went to Russia, Japan, Argentina, and San Francisco all in one day and had to transact in each place, and you could speak the native language in each one, that would be ideal. What we focused on was normalizing communications regardless of the cloud service provider, colocation provider, data centre – private or public – or whatever type of router is at the branch office. As an MSP or service provider that comes in, what we give to our customers and partners is a username and a password. That lets you come in and – for your old-school folks in the audience – essentially etch-a-sketch your network together. You can turn a couple of knobs, and it’s not that we’ve cranked the amp up to eleven, we’ve just removed all the numbers and automated everything. It just knows what you want to do. It’s a routed BGP overlay with the control plane abstracted from it, so the forwarding plane can route around things like the CrowdStrike outage, or losing an AWS region – which happens more frequently than AWS would like to admit – or any cloud service provider incident. The multi-cloud reality has accelerated adoption, but it presents a new problem: you’ve got an AWS expert on staff, but you don’t have an Azure, GCP, OCI, or Alibaba Cloud expert. Those are all different languages. When I tell my mom that we normalize the communications between all the assets in the network and make it easy to connect to all of them, she gets that. For the MSP looking to monetize something new or add another revenue stream, we offer a couple of compelling things. In the middle of our stack, we place a solution inside the cloud – sitting in a VPC, VNet, VCN, or Google VPC – right in the middle of all the cloud, SaaS, and WAN workloads. We’ve pleased a lot of customers by lowering total cost of ownership through the consolidation of network services they already have in their environment, in the form of virtualized network functions. Take a Palo Alto firewall deployment – say you have fifty Palos out there, all talking to Panorama, with a security engineer managing policy centrally. Instead of having fifty firewalls on the ground, you consolidate them. You go from the ground – five to ten milliseconds to the nearest public cloud PoP – hop onto the Alkira fabric, and terminate that traffic on a virtual port on our exchange point. In the middle of that exchange point, sitting in a VPC or VNet, you place a Palo Alto virtualized network function. You get the IP address of the Panorama server, and if you didn’t tell the security engineer anything had changed, they would not know. The form factor changes, but not how they interact with Panorama, how they build policy, or anything about how they secure the traffic. That remains exactly the same. We virtualize the instance and place it on a global high-throughput, low-latency backbone inside our exchange point. We deploy exchange points in HA pairs, anywhere from 100 Mbps to 40 Gbps. The customer or service provider consumes one, and we maintain the other on their behalf – because every thirty days we’re fixing bugs and doing maintenance. We swing production workloads to the backup, do the work on the primary, then reverse the order, all while keeping these customers up and running. Because we’re delivering this as a service, it has to always be on. One of the most important architectural decisions we made from the start was ensuring those two exchange points are always running active-active in a full mesh configuration, buttressed by hundreds of other exchange points globally distributed – all synchronized and aware of each other’s states. Robert Dutt: You’ve said that legacy networks can’t handle what AI demands, specifically in terms of elasticity. Can you unpack that a little? When an MSP’s customer starts deploying language models or agentic workflows, what is it that actually breaks? Doug Houghton: Good question, and I’ll give you an honest answer. I’ve started to fall in love with Claude – I think it’s one of the coolest things in the world. I can do all sorts of creative things with it. But Claude isn’t talking only to me. He’s a bit of a flirt – he goes to a lot of different places to get knowledgeable about various things and produce the outcomes I’ve asked for. And those other places are where you run into problems. I used to say the three biggest AI providers are GCP, AWS, and Azure. That’s still largely true. But the likes of Anthropic and other AI labs are distributing LLM workloads everywhere. Without the right network underneath that, it’s like buying the hottest car and driving it down a pothole-filled road. What we offer is a high-throughput, low-latency, elastic network. If you need to turn it up in a heartbeat, you can. We helped complete the S&P Global and IHS Markit merger network integration in about a tenth of the time they expected, because we’re natively segmented. Think about those two networks as large datasets that AI agents need to access. You have to secure the traffic, and you need it to be elastic – able to reach anywhere, instantly, to produce the outcome the agent was asked for. The ability to go anywhere on a road that’s smooth as glass, in the hottest car possible – that’s what we offer. Our network infrastructure solution is an abstraction: a forwarding plane that goes everywhere, and your imagination is really the only limitation. Speed, elasticity, and securing access – even for agentic, self-directed workflows – it’s still a critical element. And nobody – I said this earlier today, so I’ll say it again – networking is not really sexy until it doesn’t work. If I have to get in and route-peer and manually configure transit gateways, I’m going to punch myself in the face repeatedly. I just don’t want to do it. It slows everything down. I can automate it with Terraform, sure. But I want to consume it now. I want to prompt it now. I want the outcome now. Robert Dutt: You’ve launched Alkira NIA, your AI co-pilot and network infrastructure assistant, along with an MCP server last year. It’s interesting – you’re essentially putting AI on top of the infrastructure that’s enabling AI. What does NIA actually do for an MSP’s day-to-day operations? Doug Houghton: Maybe I have a limited imagination, but I still use it like a utility. NIA is great because it allows you to search through all our documentation in a more organized way. We have amazing documentation – there’s a lot of it – and when you’re looking for a specific configuration or something captured in a knowledge base, that tool is really useful. But continuing the utility theme: how do I do something? If I want to create a micro-segment to distribute to a bunch of business units, or build an isolated Layer 3 routing table and get it to various business units, and then set up billing with specific billing tags for each segment – I know how to do that because I’ve done it many times. But a new user may not. You can use the NIA agent to search the documentation, search previous implementation notes, best practices, all of that. That’s real value. But you can also ask it something like “why is the sun bright” and it won’t return the answer you expect. I’ve done that too. Robert Dutt: Let’s talk about the Connect Partner Program and the economics. You’ve got the Partner Profit Stack – tiered margins, quarterly rebates, MDF, SPIFFs, the Connect Pipeline Fund. It’s a full toolkit, and it’s stuff partners have seen before. What’s the real math? What does a Canadian MSP at the Premier tier actually walk away with on a typical deal after they’ve done the work? Doug Houghton: Usually about nineteen percentage points – maybe a little more. On the pre-sale side, when we get into a POC, our Premier partners can earn a $1,000 SPIFF. We close about 85% of our POCs, so there’s real value in that. Add in the rebates and MDF access, and the total haul is closer to 20% on each deal. Worth mentioning: we’ve been a 100% channel company since May 2022. My partner David Klubinoff, my technical counterpart – we worked together at Viptela and we started the Alkira channel together. It took a couple of weeks to convince our CEO that going 100% channel was the right call. I think he’s a believer now. We’ve driven significant revenue for the company, and our partners are our thought leaders – out in the market talking about our solution and solving customer problems. I was in Chicago yesterday doing a technical enablement session with thirty-plus SAs and SEs. We had the classic SD-WAN questions, and a lot of questions about segmentation and M&A. There’s enormous consolidation happening in insurance, healthcare, and other sectors, and the overlapping IP address problem that comes with mergers is something MSPs face all the time. We’ve entirely simplified that. You build a NAT policy right in the solution and the overlapping IP issue is resolved within an hour. In the case of S&P Global and IHS Markit, they thought their merger network integration was going to take a couple of years. The issue was largely the overlapping IP addresses – IHS couldn’t talk to the HR applications at S&P, and vice versa, plus all the other interdependencies. You need a fast way to solve the overlapping IP problem before you can even get to the real work. That’s been a core design element of our solution from the very start: take care of the small things, and people can move faster and get to market faster. Our biggest MSP – and this is a publicly referenceable customer – is CEDA, a French-based organization that provides managed network services to 95% of the world’s airlines. For them, it means being able to turn up a new customer faster, connecting on-premises assets to their control elements so they can begin actually managing that network. Speed, and the efficiencies and cost reductions that come from it – that’s what it does for all MSPs. If you’re consolidating fifty firewalls into virtualized functions, you’re making a good commission, getting MDF support, quarterly rebates, and a SPIFF when you engage us collaboratively on a POC. All of that happens at an accelerated rate. I’ve been screaming from the mountaintop about our solution for about four years. Invariably, you’d walk into a room, say “Hi, I’m Doug Houghton from Alkira,” and they’d say “Who?” That’s starting to happen a lot less, which is a genuinely nice thing. Over the last twelve to twenty-four months, the business has grown exponentially, the diversity of our partner ecosystem has increased, and partner margins have been very healthy. The tiered structure was really about celebrating partners who have invested in us. Honestly, I’m waiting for the day my boss tells me to stop incentivizing partners – because when that happens, I’ll know we’ve hit the apex. Our partners will be generating so much revenue that someone gets uncomfortable with what we’re paying out. I can’t wait for that day. Some of the more interesting things in the program came from actually listening. I went around and talked to a bunch of partners about their ideal partner programs and built from there. And one of the realizations – I thought it was significant – was what we were actually doing on the post-sale side. We white-glove every implementation right now, because it’s critically important to us. We haven’t lost a customer, and we intend to keep it that way. But that doesn’t scale forever. So the question became: why don’t we help our partners productize the post-sale work? We built a product catalog, a pricing calculator, and a new partner portal we’re about to release, with its own AI agent for searching market assets. The product catalog was a light bulb moment. We pay healthy margins on the pre-sale side at every tier of Alkira Connect. But we had never touched the post-sale side at all. We’re largely automated and NIaaS is as simple as possible to consume – a username and a password. My thirteen-year-old could configure a network, and she’s really smart. But there’s still some implementation work. You still need to build policies in Panorama. There’s still DDI work. There are still services that partners can benefit from – and all partner types, MSPs, VARs, master agents, sub-agents, service providers, now have a post-sale commission opportunity. Robert Dutt: You mentioned services – you’ve got services attach plays around modernization assessments, segmentation design, migration sprints. Starting from zero, how long does it realistically take a partner to get their first deal with those services attached through the door, and what does the ramp look like? Doug Houghton: There’s a lot in that question. Let’s take a half step back. We have virtual sales and go-to-market training – three modules – and then five or six technical training modules. We’ve got a lab-in-a-box environment, foundational and advanced technical training, and DDI training. Partners typically start there. Then we run regular in-person and virtual sessions – one partner has regular office hours with me, my SE counterpart David, or our architect Christopher Arenas, and we just invite partners to come and ask questions. Getting partners genuinely comfortable with the technology is the most important thing we do, because nobody goes out and sells anything unless they’re confident they can explain how Alkira solves their customer’s problem. That’s what I’m doing in Chicago today. Our customers tend to be fairly large. We’ve got our first Fortune 10 customer now. The more complex the network, the larger and more global the deployment – multiple countries, security vendors, firewalls, DDI providers, load balancers, service providers, colos. We sit right on top of all of that. The average sales cycle is about 190 days – a little over six months. A newly enabled partner might encounter an M&A overlapping IP use case, recognize the problem, and say “I think we can solve this with Alkira.” They go through a POC together with us, the customer commits, and that first deal closes around 190 days. A little class week: it’s actually 190 and a half. The average deal size is about $500,000 USD. We then see significant expansion: typically 4x growth in the first twelve months after the initial close, and around 8x in the second twelve months. Real incentive to stick with it. We’re loyal – if the customer doesn’t kick the partner out, we go to bat with that partner on every expansion deal. We land, then expand, with the same partner. BNSF, one of our other public references, has expanded several times to address more and more use cases. The solution gets sticky and customers are genuinely surprised by how easy it is. On the post-sale side, we come in and help with implementation, especially early on. But we’re reaching the point where more capable partners can handle it themselves. We’re building a post-sale certification for Alkira right now. In the meantime, we ride shotgun through the first couple of implementations – virtually in Slack or in person – until partners are fully up to speed. All partners have access to our Slack channel, along with our entire solutions architecture and SE staff. One partner working on a Fortune 10 engagement has a great habit of putting a subject header in Slack and starting a conversation. He’s been on services at this customer for three or four months – a significant engagement. He’s the one who originally described the network as a “spaghetti mess,” which I still chuckle about. I actually built the product catalog based on those Slack headers – pulled them together, socialized them with a group of partners, got input, and built from there. To directly answer your question: you’ve got to get through that first deal, and we’re going to ride shotgun with you through the first couple of implementations. The partner learns, gets comfortable, can monetize it, and can deliver independently from there. We have no illusions about going back to being a direct company after May 2022. It’s ride or die – 100% channel, and we enable our partners to solve their customers’ problems and support them while they do it. Because our partners have been our biggest growth engine. Robert Dutt: You’ve talked about a goal of doubling revenue through partners. What does the ecosystem look like when you get there? This sounds like it could primarily be a GSI or large integrator play, given the customer complexity you’re describing. Or do you genuinely see a path for mid-market MSPs and VARs to build a meaningful NIaaS practice? Doug Houghton: Another tough question. Yes, I do have GSIs as partners. We have a fairly robust and diverse partner ecosystem, and we see small shops rising up while larger shops are moving a bit more slowly, honestly. We’re still in that brand awareness honeymoon period – people are realizing our technology is compelling, getting themselves enabled. Some large partners we’ve recently brought on are still ramping. The biggest and most established organizations aren’t yet as capable as they will be, but we’re working diligently on that. Some of our smaller partners, on the other hand – I’m thinking of a friend of mine in Utah who is just an absolute champion. He knows our solution better than almost anyone. He closed six or seven deals in the past year, supported the implementations, did it largely on his own, because he’s curious, motivated, read all the documentation, and has been through full implementation cycles with us. He works at a ten-person shop. They just happen to have really good customers, and he knows the solution cold. So we’re at different stages with different partners in terms of maturity. The answer to your question is genuinely both. The small shop in Utah and the large national partner dedicating more resources as they see more customer problems Alkira can solve – we see wins across both. In the networking space, a six-month sales cycle is about as fast as it gets. I’m giving you a username and a password and you’re going in and connecting all of a customer’s assets together. The path exists for partners of every size. Robert Dutt: You’ve called out Canada specifically in your expansion plans, alongside the UK, EU, and the Middle East. What does that look like operationally – localized support, a Canadian channel team – or is it more of a global platform available to Canadian partners? Doug Houghton: Let’s talk personnel. We have a dedicated rep in eastern Canada, based out of New Hampshire, and a brilliant solutions architect just outside of Toronto. We’ve got a channel account manager – very capable teammate of mine, Savannah Stone – and the entire global solutions architecture staff accessible via Slack. We recently closed a very significant logo in Canada – a large insurance company – and our publicly referenceable Canadian customer is ContactPoint 360, a contact centre and BPO provider. They wanted to connect their Latin American operations back to Canada and couldn’t find an effective way to do it without us. We route them through the US West region, and the results have been excellent. We’ve also added CDW Canada as a partner, and I’ve got a value-added distributor that helps with field events. It’s not a massive footprint yet – it’s a bit of “they come first, then we build” – but there is a tremendous amount of opportunity in Canada and in Latin America that I’m genuinely excited about. Nobody’s told me no yet on spending budget, so here we go. A great story on the Canadian side: a gentleman named Chris Thelosinos, an architect and consultant who works with others in our space, is a member at a wine shop in Toronto. During the Toronto International Film Festival last year, we hosted a wine event right next to TIFF. I don’t drink alcohol, so it was entirely about the conversations for me – and I had the best time. We had significant customers come out, and the demand for simplicity, ease of implementation, and everything Alkira does well was just as strong in Canada as anywhere else. The market need is real. We talk about global backbone as a service all the time. Connecting China to San Francisco carries a distance and time tax, but it’s easy to configure. For organizations navigating geopolitical complexity around China access, or needing GPU connectivity in and out, we just abstract the Azure and AWS mainland China instances. They operate the same way as their Canadian or US equivalents. And you can consume it pay-as-you-go – stop using it, stop paying for it. That’s a compelling model for MSPs looking to grow into different regions. Robert Dutt: Last question then. For that Canadian MSP who’s listened to this and is thinking, “This sounds like a real opportunity” – what’s the one thing you’d want them to take away and act on? Doug Houghton: I’d ask them to go to partners@alkira.com and send us a note. And I will ply them with all sorts of content – videos, learnings, deal registration information, everything they need to get started in the space. Tongue in cheek, and also completely seriously: partners@alkira.com. If you’re looking to grow your business as a managed service provider – managed network, managed security, managed load balancing, managed DDI, managed connectivity – we’re a really great place to start. Because it’s never unpopular to walk into a customer and solve their problem quickly and say, “I can help you with X, Y, and Z, and I can do it in the next couple of hours – and that’s going to drive a total cost of ownership savings of 40 to 70%.” Nobody ever kicks you out of the office when you say something like that. Robert Dutt: Amazing. Doug, I appreciate you taking the time. Thank you very much. Doug Houghton: Robert, thank you for the engaging conversation. I hope your listeners get some good stuff out of it. Robert Dutt: There you have it – Doug Houghton from Alkira. I’d like to thank Doug for his time, and honestly for being one of the more entertaining guests I’ve had on in a while. “Networking is not sexy until it doesn’t work” is a line I’m going to be thinking about for a while. Thanks to you for listening as well. If this conversation sparked something – whether it’s curiosity about NIaaS, the AI infrastructure angle, or what roughly 20% total margin on a $500,000 average deal could do for your business – Doug made it easy for you to take the next step. Drop a note to partners@alkira.com. That’s the front door. And from what I heard today, they will absolutely get back to you. Here’s the thing that stuck with me most in this conversation: the argument that the AI moment isn’t just a software or services play. It’s going to force a reckoning with network infrastructure that a lot of organizations have been deferring for years. The partners who treat that reckoning as an opportunity rather than a fire drill are probably going to look very smart in about three years. If you’re finding the In The Channel podcast from ChannelBuzz.ca useful, the best thing you can do is follow or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. We’re on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and most major directories. And if you’re enjoying the show, ratings and reviews are genuinely appreciated – they help other people in the Canadian channel find us. Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.

Benjamin Yerushalmi, senior vice president of partners and alliances at OutSystems OutSystems launched its redesigned Elevate partner program in late February – a ground-up rethink that moves away from volume-based incentives toward a point-based earned level model weighted toward AI credentials and delivery outcomes. To walk through what changed and why, I spoke with Benjamin Yerushalmi, OutSystems’ senior vice president of partners and alliances and a three-time CRN Channel Chief, who came to OutSystems from Automation Anywhere and before that spent seven years at Salesforce building global alliance teams. That arc across three major technology waves gives him an interesting vantage point on what actually gets partners to invest – and how the pitch changes when you’re not working for a juggernaut. The most substantive part of the conversation is about where the services work is moving. Ben describes a clear shift toward front-end advisory – design, architecture, change management, understanding how AI agents will function alongside people – and away from pure back-end implementation. Partners are also doing more objection handling earlier in the cycle, including making the case against what Ben calls “vibe coding tools.” His line: you’re using a vibe coding tool, you’re gonna get vibe code. We also got into the Elevate mechanics: the Elite Delivery Partner credential (earned per individual, not per organization, which changes the calculus for smaller shops), how OutSystems is weighting points toward Agent Workbench and ODC to drive partner behavior toward newer AI products, and Ben’s framing of the competitive landscape as convergence and coexistence rather than zero-sum competition with Microsoft, ServiceNow, and Salesforce. OutSystems is an enterprise play, and not every shop in our audience is landing these deals. But the conversation about where partner economics are heading in the agentic AI era applies well beyond any single vendor’s program. 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. My guest today is Benjamin Yerushalmi, senior vice president of partners and alliances at OutSystems, the enterprise low-code and AI development platform. Ben is a three-time CRN channel chief who spent the last decade-plus building partner ecosystems at Salesforce, Automation Anywhere, and now OutSystems – three companies that each represent a different wave of technology transformation, from cloud CRM to intelligent automation to what’s now being called the agentic AI era. OutSystems recently launched Elevate, a ground-up redesign of its partner program that shifts the incentive model away from volume and toward outcomes, customer satisfaction, and AI credentials. Now, OutSystems may not be a name that’s top of mind for a lot of solution providers in our audience, but the conversation we had touches on questions that are very much in play for every partner right now. What does an agentic AI engagement actually look like from a services standpoint? How is the work shifting from implementation to advisory? And what do you do when a customer asks why they shouldn’t just use a vibe coding tool instead? Let’s get right into it. My chat with Ben Yerushalmi. Robert Dutt: Ben, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it. Ben Yerushalmi: Thank you for having me. Robert Dutt: The last time we spoke, you were at Automation Anywhere – it was their event in Austin a couple years ago. Before that, you were with Salesforce, now OutSystems. Three very different platforms, but in all of them you’ve been building or revamping a partner ecosystem around a technology wave. What’s the thread that connects those experiences for you? What have you learned about what actually works when you’re asking partners to bet on something, especially when it’s early innings of that particular wave? Ben Yerushalmi: Great question. It’s interesting, because three very different experiences. When you’re with a company like Salesforce, Salesforce is a juggernaut in a lot of respects. There are a lot of partners who are very invested in your success. They’ve got big business units, big practices, and there’s a clear ROI. Salesforce is creating a lot of demand in the market. When you’re with a mid-sized software company like Automation Anywhere or OutSystems, the challenge is still the same – you have to present them with a reasonable business case for investing in your technology and then going to market with you. Because you don’t have a shiny blue cloud on your business card, I think it’s a much bigger challenge. You have to do things like build a partner program that’s designed for growth, build a partner program with clear benefits to the partners about how they’re going to lean in, why they’re going to lean in, how they’re going to engage with your brand. It is a slightly different challenge – or a vastly different challenge. And when you’re with the smaller companies, the need to move fast is so urgent, especially where we are right now in this market with AI impacting everything we do. Messaging is changing, the go-to-market models are changing, the expectations of our customers are changing. Building a program that can be flexible, fast-moving, and built for growth is just super critical. Robert Dutt: OutSystems has been around for 25 years now, but Elevate feels like a pretty significant rethink of how you engage partners. I suspect your previous answer may have covered some of the territory, but what was broken – or not working well enough – about the old model that made you say, “All right, fresh sheet of paper, let’s do something new here”? Ben Yerushalmi: Look, nothing was broken. We had a functioning partner program that evolved over time, and none of the iterations it evolved through looked like the market we’re in today. We really needed to take a step back and strategically look at the program, think about what needed to be built in that could move at the pace of the market and give the ecosystem the things it was going to need to grow. For example, if you look at the old program – big emphasis on new logos, big emphasis on partners that had the implementation skills. Both super important, but only a fraction of how our partner ecosystem adds value to our brand, to our customers, and in the things they do to drive outcomes. We really had to reposition the program. First, pivot everything toward AI – everything from how we measure financial impact, to how we reward training and enablement, to how we measure CSAT and outcomes. Everything had to shift to AI. We also had to acknowledge all of the different ways that partners add value. Not just sourcing new logos, but co-sell, resell, managed service, MSP, ISV – and not just new logo acquisition, but growth in our existing accounts. Partners source business in our existing accounts. Partners are the best set of people to go in – especially when they apply their AI expertise, their industry expertise – and really grow our footprint at those accounts and truly drive outcomes and value for our customers. We had to acknowledge that. We also had to think about what we could build into the program to incent our ecosystem to be thinking about industries, to be thinking about agentic solutions, and to drive that behavior. Robert Dutt: One of the things that jumps out about Elevate is the shift toward earned levels based on outcomes and customer sat rather than just volume. That’s a trend we’re seeing across the industry. But it does raise the question: does that model inherently favor larger partners who can invest in multiple certifications and have that CSAT infrastructure, or is there a path for smaller partners as well? Ben Yerushalmi: There is. We have a number of examples of smaller-scale partners that have achieved some of the higher levels in the program. We also have examples of smaller partners who are on path to achieve Elite Delivery Partner status – because it’s not one credential per person. One person can have multiple credentials across the different disciplines. It doesn’t necessarily favor large partners. Now, when we launch Global Strategic – which would be a tier sitting above Platinum – that may, just because of sheer scale, favor larger partners. That said, our company is going to run on the strength of our Silver partners, our Gold partners. It truly takes partners across all of those levels to build a healthy go-to-market. I’m not terribly concerned about where smaller partners are going to find their place in the program. The other thing – and I’ve gotten a lot of questions about this – the Premier level in the old program basically maps to Gold in the new program. Platinum is effectively the level above that for partners to strive for. Robert Dutt: You’ve weighted agentic AI credentials pretty heavily in the point system, for obvious reasons. How are you credentialing something that’s that new and that quickly evolving? What does an agentic AI competency look like for a partner today versus what you expect it to look like a year from now? Ben Yerushalmi: You tell me what the market’s going to look like a year from now. What we’re doing right now is putting emphasis on our AI-built components. For example, Agent Workbench is going to carry a higher number of points in the program than O11. ODC is going to have a higher number of points than O11. As we continue to release additional AI-built products, we’ll continue that over-weighting. It’s simple – it’s trying to encourage a behavior. Staying at pace with the market is a massive challenge. One of the things we need to make sure is that as fast as we’re moving, as fast as our messaging evolves to meet the demands of the market, our partners have to come along with us. Partner enablement is one of the most important things we’re going to do this year – around messaging, around hands-on product enablement on all of the innovation we’re bringing to market. Because we want to encourage partners to go out and get those credentials, we’re putting the weighting in the program. It’s also a faster path to up-leveling within the program. Retooling all of your practitioners is something we need all of our partners to do – it’s a big undertaking. Robert Dutt: Everyone in the industry is talking about agentic AI. You touched on the role of Agent Workbench and how it’s a core piece for you. Curious what you’re hearing from a partner economics standpoint – when a partner takes on an agentic AI engagement, what does that actually look like? Is it a dev project, a consulting engagement, something that becomes a managed service? What are you seeing as the motion for partners today? Ben Yerushalmi: That’s a great question. We’ve historically had – maybe a small army, but a really great ecosystem of – partners with strong technical skills that did a really great job of implementing. We were a leader in the low-code space, implementing rapid application development and doing great things for our customers. We had a lot of folks that were really strong on the back end of a project, on the implementation side. What we’re seeing now with agentic is that there’s a lot more work for partners on the front end – on the design, on the architecture, on thinking through the downstream change management implications, the way agents are going to have to work within the current corporate and IT environment. Just to use the most common example: if you’ve got an agent working alongside humans with humans in the loop, that impacts how an organization functions. You need to be thinking through those things on the early side of these engagements. So we’re seeing a shift to more work on the front end, because you’re not just thinking about how do I architect the solution and how do I build it – you’re thinking about all of the downstream impact on how an organization functions. We’re also seeing a lot more experimentation. What can these tools do? What can these agents really do? Our partners are being asked what the best technology is. Our partners are being asked to evaluate us alongside other technologies. We’re seeing competition from all directions, and our partners really need to understand how to sell the value of our platform and handle a lot of the objection handling earlier in the cycle. Why can’t I just use a vibe coding tool, for example, versus Mentor or Agent Workbench? We always go back to the platform messaging – if you’re using a vibe coding tool, you’re going to get vibe code. At the end of the day, you still need a platform that takes care of governance, security, privacy, compliance. But our partners are being asked all those questions up front. There’s a lot more advisory that now goes into any level of engagement. Robert Dutt: Along the same lines but with a slightly different take – where are you seeing partners actually generating revenue with agentic AI today, versus where is it still more of “we see the opportunity, we’re investing, and expect the payoff in a year or so”? Ben Yerushalmi: Look, I think the end state for a lot of this is envisioning multi-agent systems operating within our customers’ technology and corporate environment. We are starting to see that emerge, and we’re starting to see our partners build multi-agent workflows – not just one-offs. These are starting to look like repeatable solutions, which is really great. Think about areas like claims processing – that’s one where you see a lot of examples. You’re starting to see people build claims assessment agents, claims orchestration agents, claims adjudication, and these are repeatable solutions. You’re also starting to see a lot of things, especially on consumer-facing apps, where digital agents are handling a lot of the customer interface. Those are things that are repeatable and can be used across industries. You’re starting to see really interesting things with voice-enabled agents. I listened to a demo just today where it was every bit as good as talking to a human – a natural language conversation, all built on the core components of OutSystems, and it can be used across industries. You’re also starting to see complex industry use cases. As we go to market in finance, in manufacturing, in public sector, we’re seeing our partners bring repeatable solutions for a joint go-to-market. In addition to the things we’re building, we’re starting to see our partners lean into those industries, bring those repeatable solutions, and color outside the areas where we’re investing so we can cover off other industries. We’re also launching a program within Elevate that contains the framework for industry-focused go-to-market programs. Robert Dutt: A bit earlier, you mentioned there is a space and a motion for the smaller deep-dive specialist kind of partner to succeed with you. Given that a lot of our audience – especially here in Canada – is smaller solution providers, MSPs, VARs, people who live in the Microsoft ecosystem and serve the mid-market, can you elaborate on what makes for a successful partner for OutSystems in that space? What are the common threads you see, and what do those partners typically get out of it? Ben Yerushalmi: One of the things we’re seeing is partners investing in getting the Elite Delivery Partner status. Before, we just had Delivery Partner – a fairly low threshold. Now we have the Elite Delivery Partner threshold, which is an indication to our customers that our partners, big and small, know our platform every bit as well as our professional services team. Reaching EDP is something that can be done by large and small partners alike, and that’s where we’re going to tend to recommend partners who have achieved those higher levels. Those are the partners that will likely get subcontracting work from us – that becomes super important. It also doesn’t take a large partner to invest in an industry solution. You need to be thinking about the demands of the market you want to serve and where you want to make those investments. It doesn’t take a large partner to offer a managed service. Those are all things that drive faster time to market and faster time to value for our customers. Having a niche in a market where you can sell is also important, because financial impact is a big component of how you level up in the program. We have small to mid-sized partners that have achieved the top tier. You need to be thinking about the buckets of contribution – co-sell, resell, anything adding financial impact, new logos, credentials, CSAT, program track. All of those buckets contain a lot of different areas to earn points for partners that don’t have a giant GSI logo. It was really designed for partners of all sizes. Silver, Gold, even Bronze partners are adding a ton of value to our customers. Our sellers recognize who they need to align with in a given market. We’re also putting tools in the hands of our PAMs and sellers so they can understand the capability, capacity, and competency of every partner in our ecosystem – who knows how to sell our platform, who has flawless delivery, who has expertise in a given industry or geo or domain – so that we can really arm our sellers with the information they need to align with the right partner. Robert Dutt: For a partner who’s living in that Microsoft-centric world and has started delivering Power Platform to their customers, what’s the conversation? Is there a both/and at different tiers of the market, or do you see OutSystems occupying a fundamentally different space? Ben Yerushalmi: Great question. Look, just about everywhere I’ve worked, I’ve competed with Microsoft – I’ve never worked for Microsoft. They’re a great company. Here, as at Automation Anywhere, the question of how we compete with Microsoft has come up. I think at the end of the day, it’s going to be co-opetition in a lot of ways, because there is room for coexistence at a lot of our customers. If you step back and look at the competition – from vibe coding tools to a lot of the traditional players – I think where we all converge is around agentic. The Gartner BOAT quadrant – Business Orchestration and Automation Technology – came out about nine months ago. It has the automation players, the low-code players, some of the big ISVs like Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Microsoft, and the process orchestration players like Pega and Appian – and where we all converge is around agentic. I need to be able to compete and win against each one of those players and understand exactly how I’m going to do that. But I also have to understand that in any enterprise architecture, we’re going to need to coexist. We have partnerships with a number of the companies we compete with in that quadrant. I always want to win when we’re going toe to toe, but the right solution for a customer may have one, two, or more of those players in a given solution. There are some great companies in that mix, and we’re going to need to work alongside them. Robert Dutt: You’ve now built partner programs across cloud CRM, RPA, and low-code/agentic AI – three waves of technology. If you had to tell a solution provider today where to place their bets for the next three to five years in terms of building a practice and generating new service revenue – not necessarily OutSystems-specific, but across the industry – what would you tell them? Ben Yerushalmi: Flexibility has to be inherent in everything people do. The ability to move at speed and adapt has to be critical. Every company is under pressure to do something with AI – not I think, I know. So people who are investing need to be thinking about skating to where the puck is going. I woke up too early this morning and was reading the news, and there was a fully AI-enabled humanoid robot at the White House. You see stuff like that and you think, where is all of this headed? But you know there is a world of changing work patterns, a world where AI touches every aspect of everybody’s job. You’ve got to think about the technologies that are going to help companies get to that clearly agentic future. And at OutSystems, we obviously believe we are well positioned to tackle that challenge. But you also have to think about this: it’s not just having those hands-on keyboard skills anymore. Customers want people who can take them on that journey. They want partners who can help them think about what are the high-value use cases, how are we going to architect that into our existing enterprise architecture, how are we going to build the applications – and then also manage all of the downstream implications and continue to evolve what we’ve built. Because if you look at a lot of the technologies out there today, they’re cool, they’re exciting, but the second you roll them out, you’re creating technical debt. You need to be making bets in platforms that are going to evolve with the market. Robert Dutt: Last question. A year from now, what does success look like for Elevate? What’s the number or the outcome that tells you this worked? Ben Yerushalmi: What we rolled out in February was half of the vision. There’s still a lot coming. Working through the roadmap of additional elements to Elevate is going to be really important – everything from how we leverage MDF and rethink that model, to how we rebuild our resell model to promote growth in the market, to continuing to stay ahead of the enablement challenge. But if I step back – when I originally talked about Elevate, it was about building a program built for growth. As we continue to be a partner-first organization, success looks like seeing partners successful in the program, being able to level up to wherever they want to be contributing, having partners invest in solutions that drive faster time to value for our customers and really help them move into this agentic future, and having our partners clearly driving successful outcomes with AI and agentic for our customers. At the end of the day, it’s not about Elevate partner program success. It’s really about OutSystems, and OutSystems customer and partner success, that matters. If we can sit quietly in the background and see our partners successful, see us continue to grow, and see our customers realize amazing agentic outcomes on our platform – that’s success. And then I can just sort of ride off into the sunset. Robert Dutt: Sounds like a plan – although it sounds like you’ve already got phase two well in mind, so I don’t think you’re riding off any time soon. Ben, thank you for taking the time. I appreciate it. Ben Yerushalmi: Thank you. Robert Dutt: There you have it, Ben Yerushalmi from OutSystems. I’d like to thank Ben for his time – and I thought it was a pretty candid look at how a vendor thinks about structuring a partner program in a market that’s moving as fast as this one. And I want to thank you for listening, as always. A few things that stood out for me from this conversation. First, the shift Ben described from partners doing mostly back-end implementation work to doing a lot more on the front end – design, architecture, change management, helping customers think through how AI agents are actually going to work alongside their people. That’s not unique to OutSystems. If you’re a solution provider building any kind of AI-adjacent practice right now, that front-end advisory is where the value is moving, and it’s a different set of muscles than a lot of partners have built over the years. Second, his point about the Elite Delivery Partner credential being something an individual can earn – not something that requires organizational scale – was worth paying attention to. As the industry moves toward outcome-based partner programs – and it is, across the board – understanding which programs are genuinely accessible to smaller firms and which just say they are is going to be a real differentiator in where you invest your time. And third, the convergence point. Ben talked about the Gartner BOAT category putting low-code vendors, automation vendors, process orchestration players, and the big ISVs like Microsoft, Salesforce, and ServiceNow all in the same quadrant. His argument is that agentic AI is the thread that ties them all together. Whether that’s true or just convenient framing, it’s worth thinking about – because wherever you sit in the channel, you’re going to be navigating that convergence whether you planned on it or not. If you’re enjoying the ChannelBuzz.ca podcast, you can find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and most podcast directories. Ratings and reviews are always appreciated – they do help people find the show. Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.

Frank Vitagliano, CEO of the Global Technology Distribution Council Every few years, someone announces the end of distribution. Direct sales was going to kill it. Then e-commerce. Then cloud. Then hyperscaler marketplaces. And yet here we are. Frank Vitagliano is CEO of the Global Technology Distribution Council, the industry consortium representing 21 of the world’s leading technology distributors, collectively responsible for more than $180 billion in annual IT sales. He spent more than 30 years in the channel as a vendor executive at IBM, Juniper Networks, and Dell – where he served as VP of Global Distribution Sales and Strategy – and as president and CEO of solution provider Computex Technology Solutions, before taking the helm at GTDC in 2019. In this episode, Vitagliano talks about why distribution keeps enduring through waves of disruption that should, on paper, have displaced it. His framing: distribution has evolved from what he calls “bank and warehouse” into the orchestrator of the IT ecosystem – the entity that connects vendors, solution providers, and end users in ways that no single vendor or hyperscaler marketplace can replicate on its own. He also gets into what distribution’s digital platform investments actually change – including GTDC’s recent research showing that 86% of suppliers are using or evaluating digital platforms – and why Vitagliano believes AI-enabled opportunity identification is “the game changer” that will define distribution’s next chapter. Vitagliano also draws on his vendor-side experience to explain what he wasn’t getting from distribution at Dell, and why platforms and data are finally closing that gap. This episode pairs with our solo essay on why reports of distribution’s demise have always been overstated. Read Full Transcript Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca and your host for the show. If you caught my recent solo episode on why reports of distribution’s demise have always been overstated, you know this is a topic I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. Distribution has survived every wave of disruption the IT industry has thrown at it – direct sales, e-commerce, cloud, marketplaces – and it keeps evolving. I want to explore that further, and I couldn’t think of a better person to do that than my guest today. Frank Vitagliano is CEO of the Global Technology Distribution Council, the industry consortium representing 21 of the world’s leading technology distributors, collectively responsible for more than $180 billion in annual IT sales. Frank has been in the channel for more than 30 years, holding senior executive roles at IBM, Juniper Networks, and Dell, where he served as VP of Global Distribution Sales and Strategy. He’s also been on the solution provider side as president and CEO of Computex Technology Solutions. He’s a member of the IT Industry Hall of Fame, and he’s one of the few people who’s seen distribution from every angle – vendor, solution provider, and the advocacy side. We talk about why distribution keeps enduring, what it actually does that’s harder to replicate than it looks from the outside, how digital platforms are fundamentally changing the distributor’s role, and what the next chapter looks like. Let’s get right into it. My chat with Frank Vitagliano. [Music] Robert Dutt: Frank, thanks so much for taking the time. It’s nice to catch up with you. Frank Vitagliano: Hi, Rob. Good to see you again. Robert Dutt: I guess to throw it open – you’ve changed roles since last we spoke, and I know you’re well-established at GTDC now, but because it’s an industry organization for distribution, can you tell us a little bit about the mandate of GTDC and what you guys are focused on over there? Frank Vitagliano: Absolutely. So GTDC has been around for quite some time. It stands for Global Technology Distribution Council – it kind of doesn’t exactly roll off your tongue – and it was established more than 20 years ago by some of the major distributors. Initially, the idea was to educate the financial community on the role and value of IT distributors, and this was before they were all public companies. There were a lot of questions about what do they do, how do they do it, why are they needed. For the first five or six years, GTDC focused on educating that group. After most of them went public, it wasn’t really necessary, because companies certainly did a better job of talking to the financial community themselves through earnings calls. So we pivoted to focusing on the supplier community and educating them on the role and value of distribution. You might think, why does the supplier community need to be educated on distribution? A couple of reasons. One, as you know, Rob, every day there are more players coming into the space, particularly in the cybersecurity area. You can’t count the number of cybersecurity vendors out there, and typically they’re all started by and run by very smart technical folks who really don’t know that much about taking a product to market. So that’s one reason. And the second group that continually needs a refresher is the broader vendor community, because most vendors rotate their people through a number of jobs. You start in direct sales, then you move to channel, and you don’t really understand distribution because it tends to be the least well understood aspect of channels. A lot of people view it as a cost element rather than a value driver. We’ve got about 21 members globally representing more than $180 billion of IT sales annually, so all of the major distributors are part of GTDC. We run three big conferences a year – one in Europe, one in Asia, one in North America. We do a lot with research and content – we had a particularly good year last year and released four strong papers on topics important to the vendor community. I do a podcast series every three weeks with members of the ecosystem. And we have global relationships with major data companies – IDC in North America, Context and Nielsen IQ GFK in Europe – where we collect POS data from distributors weekly and compile it into reports that the vendor community uses to track market share and pricing. So those are the major aspects of who we are and what we do. Robert Dutt: You sit in an interesting place. You’ve done the vendor side with Dell, IBM, Juniper. You ran a solution provider business at Computex. And now you lead the organization that represents and promotes the world’s largest distributors. Pretty rare trifecta. I’m curious how each of those vantage points shaped the way you think about distribution’s role today. Frank Vitagliano: That’s an excellent question, and it was actually one I had to answer when I first took the role at GTDC, because most of the folks previously involved in running the organization had worked in distribution, and I never have. But I had the advantage of working extraordinarily closely with distributors over the years. Back in my IBM days – and this is way in the way-back machine – I was involved in the early days of authorizing distributors to sell IBM PCs. It goes back that far. I understood early on the value they provided in getting a vendor’s product to market. Back then, you could argue it was a bank and a warehouse, which is how a lot of people still think about distribution. But it continued to evolve from a bank and a warehouse to a support mechanism that included pre-sale, post-sale, and solution support, to where it is today – a completely digitized route to market that I think orchestrates the IT ecosystem, because distribution sits right in the middle of it. Upstream is the vendor community, which I view as partners with distribution, and downstream are the customers, the solution providers. The second thing you mentioned is that I spent a couple of years running a solution provider, so I was a customer of distribution, not just a partner. It’s really something to have that perspective, because I thought I knew a lot about what distribution did, but I learned a lot more as a customer. And the last thing I’ll mention is that I have watched distribution evolve over the last 40 years – from a bank and a warehouse to what they are today. It’s incredible what they’ve been able to do to keep pace with technological changes and changes in how people buy technology. And they’ve continued to do it while maintaining the core function that a lot of people still consider critically important: help me get my product to market. That evolution has made me genuinely passionate about what they do and how they’ve done it. And it’s continuing now as they evolve into this new digital world with platforms and AI. Robert Dutt: In the time that I’ve covered the channel space, there’s always been a case being made for “well, this is finally the end of distribution” – it was direct sales, e-commerce, cloud, marketplaces, and yet here we are. You’ve touched on the nature of distribution’s evolution. What was the key through-line in that? What is it that distribution was able to do that allowed it to adapt through those waves of change? Frank Vitagliano: I think it’s one thing primarily. They listened very well to their customers – the solution providers – in terms of what they needed, and they listened and collaborated very well with the suppliers. At the end of the day, that’s the most important aspect of what they’ve been able to do. As the technology shifted – from hardware to services to SaaS, to the changing business models in terms of how products are delivered – they’ve been able to watch the evolution, watch the requirements, and adapt. The platforms that are now being built started probably six or seven years ago with very significant investments in an environment where, as you know, it’s a tight margin model. We’re not talking about hundreds of millions of extra dollars for investment. But they started making these major investments because they saw the requirements, and their customers pulled them in that direction. Another great example is that four or five years ago, the supplier community started pushing consumption models. And distributors have done an amazing job of combining their core capabilities – what they’ve been doing well for 40 years – with investments in key areas that keep them relevant. As for the disintermediation discussion, we’ve been hearing that forever. We heard it with the transition from hardware to software to SaaS. We heard it in the cloud transition. Now we hear it with hyperscalers. And the reality is it hasn’t happened. It won’t happen. You can go look at the earnings of the major distributors in 2025 and say, well, that certainly isn’t a business being disintermediated. That’s a business that’s thriving. And the secret is they’ve done an excellent job of understanding what’s required with their core constituency – the vendor community upstream and their customers downstream. Robert Dutt: One thing I’d add, maybe more from a solution provider point of view, is that a lot of the disintermediation predictions were tending to describe distribution as a transaction – the bank and the warehouse, a single point in the supply chain that can be removed. But there’s more to distribution than that transaction. There’s the ecosystem side – the way distribution has made itself stickier through things like partner communities. Can you talk about what distribution does that’s harder to replicate than simply having a bank and a warehouse? Frank Vitagliano: Absolutely. About three or four years ago, we started talking about distribution as the orchestrator of the ecosystem. You can look at that and say, okay, that’s a catchy marketing term, but what does it really mean? What it means is that there needs to be somebody within the IT ecosystem that connects all the pieces, and distribution is the logical point for that. When I do presentations about what distribution does, I can put up a chart with an enormous number of activities, and typically people’s eyes start to glaze over. But what I tell people is: these are all the activities that are part of getting a solution – not a product, but a solution – from the suppliers involved. And typically there are four or five vendors in every solution. It isn’t as simple as putting a PC on someone’s desk anymore. It’s way more comprehensive when you include all the technology, including the whole cybersecurity conversation. Distribution has the ability to do that, and has been doing it in a multi-vendor world since day one. Then when you look at the customer side – and this is the piece I really learned when I became a customer of distribution – there’s a whole set of capabilities around end user experience. Whether it’s managing the myriad of subscriptions that are out there, the typical solution provider today – whether it’s an MSP, a professional services organization, or the hybrid organization that I ran, with hardware, managed services, and professional services all combined – when they look around for who can help them, distribution becomes the natural spot. Vendors are very focused on training solution providers to sell their specific product, not necessarily to sell a complete solution. So partners turn to distribution for that, including now for AI guidance – how do I deal with it, what areas should I focus on, how do I train my people, how do I educate my customers. And then you add the communities. Distributors support partner communities that let a small solution provider in Canada, for example, punch way above their weight – accessing capabilities they couldn’t afford on their own because the distributor and the community members are supporting them. Really big deal. Robert Dutt: Let’s talk about some of the recent research. Your report found that 86% of suppliers are either using or actively evaluating digital platforms for transactions, lifecycle management, and analytics. That feels like a pretty fundamental shift in what distribution even looks like day to day. What does that transition mean in practice, and what does a distributor’s digital platform need to do that a vendor or a marketplace can’t? Frank Vitagliano: There are three things it does – and they’re well on the way to doing all three, although the third one is still a bit in transition. The first is that the platform provides an incredible productivity enhancement to just doing business. The basics – getting a quote, getting an order through the system, figuring out the right solution. There are studies showing that in some cases what used to take four hours is now taking 30 to 40 minutes. The productivity gains are significant enough on their own that vendors who have committed and built the appropriate API integrations will tell you it’s worth the engagement for that reason alone. The second thing is that distributor marketplaces are multi-vendor marketplaces. You don’t get that when you’re dealing directly with a vendor – you get their marketplace. Maybe some ancillary support, but it’s not a true multi-vendor, compatibility-tested marketplace. It’s the same with the hyperscalers. Hyperscalers have done a fabulous job and collaborate very well with distribution, but at the end of the day, a hyperscaler is a direct vendor – the same category as an IBM, a Juniper, a Dell. They have more capabilities than a single-vendor marketplace, but they still can’t match the breadth of a distributor marketplace when it comes to multi-vendor compatibility testing, subscription management, training, and services. So it’s not instead of – it’s in addition to. Hyperscaler marketplace, great. Vendor marketplace, great. Distributor marketplace can provide all of that plus. The third thing – which I believe will ultimately be the big differentiator – is this: if you ask any solution provider what the number one thing is they want from distribution, they tend to overlook the basics distribution already provides and say: I want distributors to help me drive sales. I want them to help me identify and close opportunities. AI-enabled opportunity identification, based on years and years of history and data, is providing that in ways that weren’t possible five years ago, two years ago. When you can go to a partner and say: three years ago you sold this configuration to these customers, and those customers now need an upgrade or new security features – here’s the customer, here’s the opportunity, here’s how we can help you close it – that’s the game changer. And it’s starting to happen. Robert Dutt: You hit on a key point there, which is the scale piece. Everything they do, they do at scale. And one of the reasons some of what distribution does gets taken for granted is they’ve been doing it for a long time at scale extraordinarily efficiently – because with a one to two percent net margin model, you don’t have a choice. Frank Vitagliano: Exactly. You can’t run a one to two percent net business and not be able to do it efficiently at scale. The margins aren’t big enough to survive any other way. That’s right. Robert Dutt: We’ve talked about the changing nature of distribution over the decades. When you were on the vendor side building distribution strategies, what did you expect or want from distributors that you weren’t always getting? And has anything changed about what vendors should be expecting today versus ten years ago? Frank Vitagliano: Back then, I was getting the basics – no debate there. What I wasn’t getting, and what I think we now have the opportunity to get, is leverage from data. I’ve been working with distributors for 40 years, so they’ve got 40 years of information. And in many cases, the distributors knew the end users that product was going to – it would go through a solution provider but ship directly to an end user. All that data existed, but we were never able to harness it to get what I needed for opportunity identification. I got inside sales support, both technical and to some degree sales. I got outside sales teams supporting opportunities. But I wasn’t getting the insights I really needed to figure out how to grow to the next level. I was getting the support I needed. I wasn’t getting the sales capabilities I needed. That was always the gap. So when we’d design programs and allocate MDF dollars to distribution, I’d fund inside sales heads focused on IBM, Juniper, or Dell. But the outcome I was looking for was increased volumes, increased opportunities, increased sales. I took for granted that if I brought distribution an opportunity, they’d support it flawlessly and at scale – no question. But I wanted them to bring me opportunities. And I’m not saying it didn’t happen, because it did – but it wasn’t completely consistent or transparent. It required effort. What’s happening now with AI-supported platforms, you have the ability to do that in a way that wasn’t possible before. Smart people are designing these platforms in conjunction with the supplier community and customers, and it’s happening. That’s a huge deal. Robert Dutt: One of the things I keep thinking about with distribution in a country like Canada is that it plays differently here. Part of that is the geography – huge country, relatively few major centres spread throughout. But there’s also Canadian-dollar credit, local peculiarities in terms of language – you have to parler français to be successful in the Quebec market – and different regulatory considerations. How do you see distribution’s role being amplified in markets like Canada versus larger, more centralized markets like the US? Frank Vitagliano: That’s one of the real values the global distributors provide – they have experience dealing with markets beyond their home territory, and they bring that cross-border understanding wherever they operate. One of the papers we did last year talked about how to build a distribution strategy for the vendor community. If you’re a supplier thinking about Canada, what do you think about? How many distributors do I need – one, three, twelve? We go through this in the paper, which is available on our website. You think about the TAM of the market, the geography, where you need warehousing to reach major markets effectively. You think about whether you need global players, what combination of local players – because every market has what we call local heroes who are really strong within their community. And then domain specialists – do you need a cybersecurity-focused distributor in addition to your broadline relationships? A lot of vendors think the more distributors they have, the more business they’ll generate. That’s not true. More distributors fighting with each other becomes a cost issue for the vendor and a margin issue for everyone. Building a thoughtful distribution strategy is genuinely important – and the nuances of a market like Canada are exactly the kind of thing that gets missed by vendors who don’t think it through. Fortunately, it’s all laid out in the paper for those who want the framework. Robert Dutt: My last question. We’ve talked about being at the early stages of the platform evolution and where it has the potential to go. If we’re sitting here again in five years, what does distribution look like? And what should partners and vendors be paying attention to right now? Frank Vitagliano: Good question. When I first took the job at GTDC in 2019, right before the pandemic, I was hearing all this discussion about disintermediation – hyperscalers were coming into play, cloud was a big deal, SaaS transition was accelerating. I took the job thinking: I don’t believe distribution is going to get disintermediated, but let’s go do a study. So we did Distribution 2025 – a five-year view of what we thought would happen. It turned out to be pretty accurate. A big part of that was validated by the pandemic, which made the value of distribution extraordinarily obvious. At the beginning of 2025 we did Distribution 2030, and we laid out what we see ahead. Clearly, a fully functioning AI-supported platform will be in place in five years. Not 86% of vendors – every vendor will be utilizing it. There will be major cybersecurity enhancements, and major opportunity identification scenarios where vendors will really begin to get that level of sales support from distribution with the existing basics still covered. I also see the enhancements creating stickiness. Today, any customer can work with any authorized distributor. The question is: how do you make your services sticky enough that they become primarily focused on one or two distributors rather than spreading everything around? Same on the supplier side – vendors will narrow to a smaller subset of distributors who can provide the level of service and platform integration they need. I don’t think it ever becomes exclusive, because most folks will view that as too risky. But it’ll certainly be a lot more thoughtful than “let me just sign up as many distributors as I can.” And I see potential for additional consolidation in the distributor market, particularly in Europe and Asia – not so much in North America, where five or six distributors already represent 90% of the business. But globally, I think we’ll see that over the next few years. Robert Dutt: Fun to have a talk about the ever-evolving nature of distribution. I appreciate your time, Frank. Frank Vitagliano: Rob, thank you for the platform. I love talking about it, as you can probably sense, because I’m genuinely passionate about what they do. I think distributors have done an excellent job over the years of doing what they needed to do to support existing business, while also making the investments required to ensure they weren’t left behind – they weren’t the Blockbuster or the Kodak of the IT space. You could argue that could have happened. But it isn’t happening. And it goes back to the number one point I made: they’re listening to their customers and their suppliers. Robert Dutt: It certainly has not happened. Frank, thank you. Enjoy the talk. Frank Vitagliano: Thanks, Rob. [Music] Robert Dutt: There you have it. Frank Vitagliano from the Global Technology Distribution Council. I’d like to thank Frank for his time and a really candid conversation. It’s not every day you get someone who sat on the vendor side, the solution provider side, and the industry body side, willing to talk openly about what distribution gets right, what it hasn’t always gotten right, and where it’s headed. A couple of things that stood out to me. Frank’s point about distribution evolving from what he called a bank and a warehouse into an ecosystem orchestrator – that’s not just branding. When you think about what it takes to stitch together multi-vendor solutions, handle consumption models, manage renewals, and now use AI to identify opportunities that individual vendors and solution providers can’t see on their own, that’s a fundamentally different value proposition than moving boxes and extending credit. And his candor about what he wasn’t getting from distribution when he was on the vendor side at Dell, and how platforms and data are finally closing that gap – I thought that was a really honest moment. The other thing I’d flag is his point about stickiness – the idea that vendors are going to narrow their distribution relationships and go deeper with fewer partners. That has real implications for solution providers too, in terms of which distributors they’re aligned with and what platforms they’re investing in. If you haven’t already, check out my solo episode on why distribution endures. It sets up a lot of the themes Frank and I explored here, and the two episodes work well together. If you’re enjoying In The Channel, I’d appreciate it if you’d follow or subscribe. You can find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and most podcast directories. And if you have a minute to leave a rating or a review, that goes a long way to helping other people in the channel community find the show. Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.

In Case You Missed It for the week of April 13, 2026, for Canadian IT solution providers – and the final episode of ICYMI before The Buzz launches April 20: Cisco compute prices jump April 18 – and it’s not just Cisco. WBM Technologies’ April 2026 procurement update flags list price adjustments taking effect April 18 on Cisco compute hardware, driven by ongoing memory market volatility. HPE saw 24-30% list price increases in March alone. HP, Intel, AMD, and Fortinet have all announced increases of their own. SK Group’s chairman says the memory shortage could last until 2030. WBM’s recommendation: pull purchases forward now, and lock in any Cisco compute quotes before April 18. AWS begins paying partners direct cash for managed services – but requires revenue tagging by summer. In its most significant partner program update in years, AWS announced it will pay cash benefits to partners for delivering managed services – a first. A new Partner Revenue Measurement system uses resource tagging to attribute partner-generated revenue, even on AWS-booked deals. By end of 2026, all AWS programs will depend on this measurement; partners are asked to adopt it by July. The update also includes a revamped agentic AI-powered Partner Central hub (cutting admin time 30-40%), an AI Assessment Fund, and a new Greenfield Program for net-new customer incentives. Full CRN breakdown of all eight new AWS partner programs. Nutanix delivers complete agentic AI platform at .NEXT – and a Toronto partner wins the Americas. Nutanix used its .NEXT 2026 conference in Chicago to announce the Nutanix Agentic AI solution – a full-stack platform for building and operating AI applications on Nutanix Cloud Platform across hybrid multicloud environments. Currently in early access; GA expected H2 2026. Expanded hardware ecosystem integrations with Cisco, Dell, AMD, NetApp, and Lenovo were also announced. Toronto-based Arctiq took home the 2026 Americas Reseller Momentum Award, recognized for exceptional growth and technical depth in the Nutanix ecosystem. Canada’s unicorn list is longer – and more established – than you think. Various trackers now count 30-35 Canadian tech unicorns, including channel-familiar names like 1Password ($6.8B valuation) and eSentire. The list is a useful reality check on the depth and maturity of the Canadian tech ecosystem – and a handy reference when making the case that buying Canadian is a genuinely viable option across a wide range of technology categories. This is the final episode of In Case You Missed It in its weekly format. Starting April 20, In The Channel launches The Buzz – three things Canadian IT solution providers need to know, every weekday morning at 7 a.m. ET. Read Full Transcript Hello and welcome to In Case You Missed It from ChannelBuzz.ca, your weekly roundup where we pull the signal from the noise and bring you the stories that matter most to Canadian IT resellers and MSPs. I'm Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca, and your host for the show. And this one is a bit of a milestone, because it’s the last one – at least in this format. Starting Monday April 20th, In The Channel is launching The Buzz, a daily five-minute briefing every weekday morning with three things you need to know. Same editorial commitment, sharper cadence. More on that at the end. But first, we’re going out on a full week of genuinely important news. Let’s get right into it. Lead story this week has a hard deadline attached to it, so let’s not bury the lede. Cisco is implementing list price adjustments on April 18th – that’s a week from this Saturday – and those adjustments are focused primarily on compute hardware. The reason, as WBM Technologies laid out in their April 2026 procurement update, is the ongoing volatility in the memory market and broader cost pressures hitting the global IT supply chain. And Cisco is just one data point in a picture that WBM’s Director of Strategic Procurement, Ashley Schell, paints pretty vividly in their latest update. HPE saw a 24 to 30 percent increase in list prices in March alone. HP is raising prices by at least 10 percent on personal systems and Poly products, effective April 1st. Intel and AMD have both confirmed CPU price increases for OEMs. Fortinet is implementing monthly price increases averaging around 10 percent. Lenovo is warning that custom orders are being pushed out by 20 weeks or more on certain configurations. And Dell has cut quote validity to 14 days. The driver, as we’ve been tracking all year, is AI data center demand consuming memory capacity at a scale that’s pulling supply away from traditional commercial and channel products. Industry forecasters are now talking about this continuing well into 2027, and the chairman of SK Group – one of the largest memory manufacturers in the world – said this week that the shortage could last until 2030. WBM’s recommendation is clear: if you have upcoming technology requirements, evaluate opportunities to pull those purchases forward now. If you have Cisco compute quotes in flight, get them locked before April 18th. And take a hard look at the rest of your pipeline – the rolling increases across vendors are not slowing down. Shifting gears – this week AWS dropped its most significant partner program update in years, and for MSPs in particular, it changes the financial equation. For the first time, AWS is paying direct cash to partners for delivering managed services. Not credits, not MDF – cash. AWS VP of Partner Core Julia Chen told CRN that AWS data shows MSP-supported customers demonstrate 3.4x higher cloud spend, 58 percent better retention rates, and 5.1x customer growth. The message is: managed services creates better customer outcomes, and AWS is starting to reward that directly. But the bigger structural shift underneath this is what AWS is calling Partner Revenue Measurement. It’s a resource tagging system where partners tag workloads inside customer environments – so AWS can track and credit the revenue associated with partner-delivered work, even when the AWS seller is the one who books the deal. Chen was direct about the timeline: by the end of 2026, all AWS programs will depend on this measurement system, and she’s asking partners to have it in use by July. The full update includes eight major changes – but the other headline items are: a revamped Partner Central platform with agentic AI that AWS says can cut admin time by 30 to 40 percent, a new AI Assessment Fund to help partners fund the initial risk of AI proof-of-concept engagements, a new Greenfield Program for incentivizing net-new AWS customer acquisition, and an upgraded AI Competency framework based on real outcomes rather than just credentials. For Canadian MSPs on the AWS path: the program is getting more generous. But it’s also getting more measurement-driven. If you want the cash, you need to tag your work. Nutanix held its annual .NEXT conference in Chicago this week, and the headline announcement was what Nutanix is calling a complete platform for the agentic AI era. The Nutanix Agentic AI solution – first teased at NVIDIA GTC back in March – is now in early access, with full general availability planned for the second half of this year. It’s a full-stack platform designed to let enterprises build and operate AI applications on Nutanix Cloud Platform, integrating compute, storage, networking, and Kubernetes across hybrid multicloud environments. The timing of Nutanix’s broader pitch is not accidental – “run anything, anywhere, on whatever hardware you’ve got” is a message that lands differently in a market where HPE list prices just went up 30 percent in a month and Cisco compute is about to get more expensive. The company is explicitly positioning itself as the flexible infrastructure alternative for customers simultaneously reassessing their VMware dependency and trying to navigate a constrained supply chain. The partner ecosystem angle at .NEXT was notable too – this is the first year with more than 100 partners at the event, and Nutanix announced a significant expansion of its hardware ecosystem, adding or deepening integrations with Cisco, Dell, AMD, NetApp, and Lenovo. And for some Canadian content: Toronto-based Arctiq took home the 2026 Americas Reseller Momentum Award at .NEXT, recognized for exceptional year-over-year sales growth, customer success, and expanded technical certifications across the Nutanix platform. Arctiq has had a busy year on the M&A front as well – they announced acquisitions of both Verinext and Shadow-Soft in recent months, building out their hybrid cloud, security, and observability capabilities. A Canadian partner winning a global award on a stage like this is always worth noting. Well done, Arctiq. For our closer this week – a bit of perspective on the Canadian tech ecosystem. Various trackers now put the count of Canadian tech unicorns – companies valued at a billion dollars or more – somewhere between 30 and 35 depending on your source. And when you look at that list, a couple of things stand out. First, you’ll find companies we cover regularly in a channel context. 1Password is sitting at a $6.8 billion valuation. eSentire is on the same list. These are not scrappy newcomers – these are mature, established companies with deep enterprise footprints and real track records. The unicorn label sometimes makes everything sound like a startup story, but what this list actually tells you is that the Canadian cybersecurity sector in particular has been compounding quietly for a long time. Second, it’s a useful reference point. The next time someone frames Canadian tech as a branch plant, or treats buying Canadian as a compromise – this list is your answer. Thirty-plus billion-dollar companies across security, fintech, SaaS, and infrastructure. Worth bookmarking. And that’s a wrap – on this episode, and on the In Case You Missed It format. I want to take a genuine moment to thank you for tuning in to ICYMI over its run. The goal was always the same: surface the stories that actually matter for Canadian IT resellers and MSPs, connect the dots across a noisy week of news, and give you something you could act on. I hope it’s done that. Looking back at the arc of just the last few weeks – the Broadcom deadline forcing VMware decisions, the memory shortage turning into a full-scale supply chain crisis, agentic AI moving from vendor talking point to actual shipped product across Ingram Micro, AWS, Rewst, and now Nutanix – it’s been a genuinely consequential stretch of time for this industry. Lots to keep track of. That’s not slowing down. Which is exactly why we’re evolving the format. Starting Monday April 20th, In The Channel is launching The Buzz – a daily five-minute briefing published every weekday morning at seven a.m. Eastern, covering three things Canadian IT solution providers need to know that day. Same editorial standards. Tighter format. Every morning. I’d like to thank you for your support of In The Channel and ChannelBuzz.ca. You can find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and most podcast directories – and if the show has been useful to you, a rating or a review always helps more people find it. Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.

Send us a text and chime in!Salt River Project (SRP) has awarded the Mule Deer Foundation (MDF) 0,000 to expand forest restoration efforts in Prescott National Forest. The funding will support the next phase of the Upper Verde Watershed Project, a collaborative restoration effort led by MDF in partnership with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service and the Arizona Game and Fish Department. MDF and SRP share similar goals to improve watershed health, reduce wildfire risk, and enhance habitat on national forest lands that serve wildlife and hold critical water resources for the greater Phoenix area. “This project represents the type of collaborative conservation work needed to address wildfire...   For the written story, read here >> https://www.signalsaz.com/articles/500k-boost-for-prescott-forest-restoration/ Check out the CAST11.com Website at: https://CAST11.com Follow the CAST11 Podcast Network on Facebook at: https://Facebook.com/CAST11AZFollow Cast11 Instagram at: https://www.instagram.com/cast11_podcast_network

Gareth Pettigrew, founder of Pettigrew Communications I’ve thought about doing an episode like this for a while, but I kept bumping into the same problem: the “so what” question. Why should a 15-person MSP owner, already wearing six hats, care about communications? Gareth Pettigrew cracked that code in about 30 seconds. As the industry moves from search to chat, non-paid citations and earned media are proving to be critical to how large language models answer queries and surface companies. If you’re not showing up in that landscape, you’re increasingly invisible in ways that didn’t exist two years ago. Gartner is projecting PR budgets to double over the next year. The ground has shifted. Gareth spent years leading partner communications for Cisco and Okta, and what always stood out to me is that he genuinely understands the partner business – not just the vendor talking points. He’s now launched his own consultancy, Pettigrew Communications, offering fractional senior comms leadership and project-based consulting for companies across the channel. In this conversation, we dig into why PR isn’t what most partners think it is anymore – it’s not press releases and pitching journalists. The media landscape has changed dramatically with AI, and the real opportunity for small partners is in thought leadership, LinkedIn engagement, and building an externally wired narrative that positions you as a trusted voice in your niche. Gareth offers a three-week roadmap: week one, listen to the industry conversations and identify one or two niches you can credibly insert yourself into. Week two, build your story – one page, three to five core messages. Week three, identify ten influencers to follow. Then activate on LinkedIn by commenting meaningfully for a month before posting your own perspectives. We also talk about common mistakes – like treating PR as a marketing tactic or relying on internally oriented messaging – and what success actually looks like when you’re starting from zero. This is the first in a planned series. Future episodes will go deeper into messaging, LinkedIn best practices, crisis communications, and more. 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. My guest today is Gareth Pettigrew. Gareth spent years leading partner communications at Cisco and most recently at Okta, and he’s now launched his own consultancy, Pettigrew Communications, offering fractional comms leadership to companies across the channel. I’ve known Gareth for a long time, and what’s always stood out to me is that he genuinely understands the partner business – not just the vendor talking points, but how partners actually operate and communicate day to day. I’ve wanted to do an episode on communications and PR for partners for a while now, but I kept bumping into the same problem: I couldn’t crack the “why should a 15-person MSP care about this” question in a way I thought would actually land. And then I talked to Gareth, and he cracked it in about 30 seconds. We’re going to get into why communications matters more right now than it ever has, why it doesn’t have to be the heavy lift you think it is, and Gareth’s going to give you a practical, week-by-week roadmap for getting started – even if you have zero budget and zero comms experience. This is also the first in what we’re planning as a series. Gareth and I are going to go deeper on specific threads in future episodes – things like crisis communications, LinkedIn thought leadership, working with your vendor’s PR team – so think of this one as the foundation. Let’s get right into it, my chat with Gareth Pettigrew. Robert Dutt: Gareth, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate you joining us. Gareth Pettigrew: Glad to be here, Rob. Robert Dutt: I thought of you to have this conversation because we’ve sat down at many conferences and with many vendor execs when you were running comms around the world, one might say. You know, channel leaders from Cisco and even after you’d moved off the partner beat specifically, I think you always did a really good job of, when talking to us on the channel side, framing up the partner side of the conversation in a way that leads me to believe that you’ve got a pretty good grip on what a lot of these guys are doing, which I think is really important for this conversation. This is something that I’ve thought about doing for a while, doing an episode like this, but I kept bumping into the same problem. Basically the “so what” problem. Why should I care about communications as a 15-person MSP owner? Then when we did our pre-call to discuss the possibility of doing this and where it could go, you kind of cracked that code in about 30 seconds. So let me put it right to you. For that 15-person MSP kind of partner who’s listening to this, they’re busy, they’re wearing six hats. They own marketing. They oversee sales. They probably do HR. They have a business to run. Why should communications be on their radar right now, and what’s changed that makes that even more urgent than you would have said a few years ago? Gareth Pettigrew: Fundamentally, in a word, like almost everything right now, it’s around AI. And perhaps not intuitively, it appears that PR is emerging as one of the big winners of AI. Maybe not for the reasons you think, though. Number one is that non-paid citations, and specifically earned media, are proving to be incredibly important in terms of the LLMs answering their questions. So as the industry shifts from search to chat, we’re seeing PR be much more important in terms of that overall mix. The second thing, and this will resonate with a lot of people, is the amount of AI slop that’s out there. And Rob, as a journalist, I see you laughing. What we see is a lot of content being created, but it’s all generic crap. It’s all the same. What happens is that damages trust, damages customers’ belief in executives, in companies. So increasingly we’re seeing companies, and especially it’s happening a lot at the higher end of the market, executives are really investing in human communicators to help them break through the slop and stand out. So that’s the real reason for why now. I will say though, Rob, I think at the end of the day for PR, you need two ingredients. You need a story and you need a storyteller. And one of the things, why I’ve always been partner-focused, it wasn’t just because I liked the channel. It was self-interested as well, in that I found some of the best storytellers in the industry weren’t the vendor executives, they were the partner executives. So I’ve always been stunned that more partners don’t lean quite heavily into comms as a real big part of their new biz and their marketing mix. A lot of them are really well positioned to raise their awareness through communications. Robert Dutt: So tell me a bit about that. I’m curious what you’ve seen. What sets apart those partners who you’ve sat there and thought, “You know what, you could be doing my exact role here and telling this story.” What is it, and particularly what separates those who do it really well and those who just kind of either go through the motions or leave it on the table, as it were? Gareth Pettigrew: And let’s be clear, everyone isn’t a great storyteller. But what I’ve seen is that in the partner communities, we’re rife with the type of personalities that make for great storytellers. A lot of those people with entrepreneurial spirit who are very proactive sellers, they spend their day not talking to engineers and vendors and all of that stuff, but they spend their day talking to customers. So they know what’s top of mind for their customer. Often with vendor executives, that’s one of the biggest challenges. It’s pivoting from that internal orientation to an external orientation. And a lot of partners are already there. So I’ve really seen some come across consistently. I’ve seen partner executives be on the level with my top executives at the vendor, or even better. So they’re in a great place. Robert Dutt: So for the partner who’s hearing this and thinking, “Okay, I get it. That’s cool. I can tell my story and I understand the customer’s viewpoint, so I should be able to put it in their words and their thoughts. But I don’t have the budget and I definitely don’t have a comms person, nor is that on my roadmap of my next few hires.” I think a lot of people still picture PR as press releases and pitching journalists, and that feels like a lot of work. How would you position what communications actually looks like today for a company at that kind of 15-person size? Gareth Pettigrew: I think the biggest blocker to companies getting involved in PR is they’ve got a legacy idea of what PR is. PR equals press release. That’s 15, 20 years ago. The reality is, especially over the past year and now with AI, we’ve seen the media landscape change absolutely dramatically. The media business model has been disaggregated with Google and others blowing up the advertising business model. And we’ve seen a decrease in some ways in terms of the number of journalists that we have out there. But an increase in some other mediums – things such as podcasts, things such as Substack. We see much more new media, much more niche media. And that’s in the traditional, what we call the earned space. We’ve also seen the social media rise. We’ve seen the advent of owned media, be that executives taking a thought leadership stance on LinkedIn or X as it may be, or in terms of their newsrooms. A lot of vendors do this. They turn their newsrooms into actual content destinations to get their story out there. And finally, there’s a lot of paid options, right? Whether that’s traditional publications offering paid events, paid content, or paid influencers. If we think about political conventions or Apple events, it used to be media dominating the front row. Those are all influencers now. So with that in mind, with the landscape changing, that means there’s a flywheel of options to get your message out there. But that also changes your tactics. And I’d strongly recommend for any partner getting involved, don’t try to boil the ocean. Let’s really make sure you pick one thing, pick two things. Let’s do it well. And if it works for you, then you start to lean in and invest more. Then maybe you bring in the consultant. Maybe you think about hiring a multimedia kid right out of PR or journalism school. Maybe you look to get a freelance journalist to help you write some articles for your website. So there’s definitely a strategy you can follow as a big partner organization. We see Worldwide Technologies and others really investing aggressively in some of these things. But for smaller organizations as well, especially if you’re a strong storyteller. Start small, pick your battles. Robert Dutt: What do you find are some of the common, especially for that smaller partner, some of the common places to start? If you were sitting down with that 15-person MSP, no budget, no comms person, just saying, “All right, I want to give this a shot.” What are the first and second things to think about? Gareth Pettigrew: Let me give you a bit of a roadmap in terms of how I do it. The first thing I’d recommend is let’s think about your story. The single biggest mistake that most technology companies make is that they’re internally wired. “What do we want to talk about?” You’ve got to flip that orientation. So it’s, what are the industry conversations – maximum two conversations – that you can insert yourself into? I would spend your first week listening to the conversations out there. Be honest with yourself. How can we insert ourselves into this conversation? Be very specific in terms of what that conversation is that you want to insert yourself into. Are you a security partner? Is it about securing AI agents? It could be whatever niche you’re in. Be very prescriptive with what that conversation you’re going to insert yourself into. Second week, build out your story. Most companies don’t spend enough time on their story. One page, three to five messages. Build out your messages, build out your bullet points, your sound bites. That’s going to be your foundation. You don’t have to say the exact same thing every time, but you have to know what your general storyline is. It doesn’t mean you’re repetitive, but you do know where you’re going to play and what you’re going to say in general. The final part of that, week three, think about the influencers that you’re going to follow. Pick 10 influencers for that conversation. Who are the journalists? Who are the industry analysts? Who are the vendors in the industry that you admire the most, that have the best perspective? And then finally, let’s activate. We’re going to start on LinkedIn. The first thing you’re going to do is comment. Spend maybe a month not even posting, just commenting. Block 15 minutes, twice a week. Comment on others in a meaningful way. Think about your narrative, focus on your conversation, and then start getting out there with some of your own perspectives, your own posts. You’ll be able to find your niche. Just get started on LinkedIn. That’s the path I would take if I’m a partner and I just want to get my toe in and see how it’s going. Robert Dutt: That makes sense. And by meaningful, I presume you mean something that is not directly self-promotional when you’re commenting, but adding value into the conversation in a way that maps to those messages that you’ve laid out. Gareth Pettigrew: It’s externally wired. Don’t talk about your products. Don’t talk about any of those things. Talk about you as an industry expert. What’s your perspective on this protocol? What’s your perspective on a new product that one of your vendors is putting out there? What’s your perspective on a controversial topic that’s come up? Get your perspective in there. You are not selling. You’re thinking of yourself more as a consultant, not a salesperson. That’s an important flip that needs to take place. The difference between PR and marketing – PR is that thought leadership. It’s very much that top of funnel. You’re about raising awareness. You’re about getting yourself in the door. It’s not the middle or lower part of the funnel in which you’re actually actively selling to that prospect. It’s about raising awareness. Robert Dutt: On the marketing side, I think a lot of partners are used to the idea of leaning on, borrowing from, adopting from vendor resources, MDF-type stuff. Is there a similar motion that can be applied on the communication side, wherein I can take some stuff that my vendors are producing anyway and repurpose or reuse? Gareth Pettigrew: Absolutely. That’s where a lot of the partners may also find where those narratives are that may well fit. Some vendors do it better than others, let’s be honest. Some are very self-promotional. I think you want to stay away from those. But yes, follow those executives. Follow the social handles of your vendors. When you’re at the events, introduce yourself to the PR people. I’ve got to tell you, when I was at Cisco, when I was at Okta, I always had my handful of partners who I knew I could always go to if I needed them to talk to a journalist. One of them, and we’re talking Canadian here, Kent McDonald over at Longview Systems was always one of my go-tos. When I was at Cisco, I knew I could send Kent a text and Kent would always give a great quote. He’d always be responsive. He’d always be friendly. He’d always be positive. That’s one of the other things. Once you build up that thought leadership muscle, don’t be shy about introducing yourself to the PR person. Give them your card. When they call, just be responsive. Robert Dutt: And similarly, I guess there’s an opportunity to not necessarily cold-call a tech journalist such as myself, but think about the niches that your customers are in and reaching out to the journalists who are covering that, establishing yourself as someone that they can go to. Let me tell you, I’m always looking for that Kent McDonald or those other partners who are available, have a take, and can riff with you. It’s something that my peers are certainly looking for. Gareth Pettigrew: I completely agree. But the way to make sure that you’re not cold-calling that journalist is you’re very targeted. Remember when we said identify your conversation and then identify who’s really influential in that conversation? Figure out who those journalists are and comment regularly. And then once they start responding to you a little bit, after a while, maybe you DM them and say, “Hey, by the way, if you’re ever writing a story, I’m happy to chat with you.” I think that’s, as a DIY PR practitioner, how I would approach that. Robert Dutt: So as you start doing this, how do you know it’s working? What does success look like when you’re starting from zero and you don’t have the luxury of an agency sending you a monthly report on what you did, how it hit, where it appeared, those kinds of things? How do I measure what I’m doing? Because obviously that’s something that’s important to partners on anything they’re doing. Gareth Pettigrew: Well, Rob, let’s assume if we’re talking to that 15-person MSP who’s just getting started, primarily your impact is going to be on LinkedIn. And really, LinkedIn is an engagement platform. You want to go in and measure your engagement and see how that’s increasing on a monthly or quarterly basis. The one thing I will say, and I’ll pass on this fabulous little piece of advice – or this story – it starts to become self-evident as well, in that you can have those quantitative measures, but also qualitative. When I started working with Okta, the country manager was a guy who became a good friend of mine, Dan Kagan. I remember our first meeting, we sat down and said, “Okay Dan, one of the things we regularly need you to do is we need you to be engaged on LinkedIn. We’re going to need you to post once a week or once every couple of weeks, and we’re going to have to have you go in and comment.” He said, “Guys, listen, I love this idea, but I’m not going to have time to do it. I’m working 50 hours a week. I’ve got a young family. I can’t make this happen.” After two months, he’s pinging us once a week if we haven’t got anything out. And the reason for that is he’s getting inbound recognition. He’s getting people pinging him saying, “Hey, could you speak at this conference?” “Hey, I saw what you said.” When you talk to CTV News, when you post it on LinkedIn, it becomes somewhat self-fulfilling in that it really is a strong funnel to help build your awareness. So that’s one of the things I’ve seen. There’s the quantitative and the qualitative, but it is important to measure your rhythm. Robert Dutt: We’ve talked about what to do as easy first steps. I’m curious, as you’ve been through this exercise or seen others go through this exercise, what’s a common mistake that organizations, particularly smaller organizations, make when they start to pay attention to comms? Maybe a well-intentioned first step that backfires or ends up being a waste of time? Gareth Pettigrew: Rob, I think the couple of mistakes that I see companies make in this – and by the way, this isn’t just on the partner side, this is all across. Number one is they view PR as a marketing tactic. And ultimately, PR and marketing – there’s a big gray area in between, increasingly right now – but they do have different centers of gravity. Marketing, for the most part, is about demand generation. And PR, its center of gravity is about awareness, building awareness and managing reputation. So while there is an overlap, they’re not the same things. And when you look to apply a marketing lens to a PR strategy, that results in you being typically very internally oriented. “We have a new product, we’ve got to launch a product.” Well, the media landscape has changed. There aren’t many, if any, journalists, certainly not in Canada, that really write on product anymore. So that’s part of the challenge, when you view through a marketing lens. The second one that’s related is executive skin in the game. If you’re going to do this, the executives need to get involved. It’s not something you punt over to your marketing team. Marketing should be an incredibly close partner of comms, but the executives need to have skin in the game as well. Executives are going to be the ones that are out there, the thought leaders. If you get to the point of having spokespeople, they’re going to be the spokespeople. So marketing is a partner, but they can’t be the single driver. And we talked about internal versus external orientation. Being externally wired is absolutely essential, both in terms of your story but also your strategy. Those, Rob, would be the biggest hurdles that I see. Robert Dutt: This is a topic that we could probably go off in many different directions for hours, but I’m respectful of people’s time who listen to this podcast. So let me end it with this. We’ve covered the basics of it, the “what to do” as those first steps, and given some good actionable advice, I think. If we were to keep going and do this on a regular drumbeat and discuss aspects of communications, what are the threads that you think matter most for this audience? Where would you go next in terms of topics? There are so many different things I think we could pull on, but I’m curious what you see as the next steps, or maybe step two for a partner organization. Gareth Pettigrew: In all honesty, if we were to think about future podcasts here, Rob, I think about, let’s dig a little deeper in terms of how you actually architect that externally wired narrative. How do you identify that conversation? Be a little bit more prescriptive. What does a messaging house look like from a PR standpoint? How do media messages differ from marketing messages? That would certainly be one. For me, I’m a storyteller at heart. It should start with the story. But then I think digging a little bit deeper into, “What are some best practices in terms of building up your thought leadership on LinkedIn? How can you, as an executive, up your game? What are the pragmatic steps? What are five things you can do to become a better LinkedIn thought leader?” I think, Rob, those are a couple that I’d start with, but then I’d love to hear from the audience, from some partners out there. What are those challenges that they would love some help solving? Robert Dutt: Brilliant. And that’s not even getting into potentially crisis communications, internal communications, any number of different aspects of this dialogue. I think we’ve set the stage nicely and I thank you very much for taking the time, Gareth. I know you’re setting up your own shop and just getting started with Pettigrew Communications. Do you want to share a little bit about what you’re doing and what the goal is there? Gareth Pettigrew: Absolutely. So Rob, I’m a Canadian boy. Raised in Toronto and I live on Vancouver Island. I’ve spent the last 20 years inside big tech, working with Cisco, working with Okta, and really I’m looking to bring some of that expertise to smaller companies or to tech communications firms. So it’s time for a new chapter, Rob. I’m very lucky. I found a profession I absolutely love, but I needed a little bit of a different rhythm. We’ve heard from Gartner that with the focus on AI putting a bit of a tailwind towards PR, the anticipation is that over the next year, PR budgets are going to double. So hopefully it’s a good time to get into this. And I’m really excited to work with a lot of different companies and help them fix some of the things that we talked about here. I’m very passionate about it, excited to get started, and it should be fun. Robert Dutt: Brilliant. And anytime you’re entering into a market that’s doubling in the course of a year, that’s probably a good sign. Gareth, I appreciate you taking the time. Let’s chat again soon. Gareth Pettigrew: Thanks, Rob. Take care. Robert Dutt: There you have it, Gareth Pettigrew from Pettigrew Communications. I’d like to thank Gareth for his time, and honestly, for making the case I’ve been trying to make to this audience for years, better than I ever could. The idea that earned media is now one of the primary ways that AI and large language models surface information about your company – and that if you’re not showing up in that landscape, you’re increasingly invisible – I think that reframes this whole topic from “nice to have” to “you’re leaving real business on the table.” And Gareth’s three-week roadmap for getting started – listen, build your story, find your influencers, then show up on LinkedIn – is about as actionable as it gets. No budget required, no agency required, just intentionality. We’re going to keep going with this. Gareth and I are planning deeper dives on specific topics – messaging, LinkedIn best practices, crisis comms, and more – and we’d love to hear from you on what communications challenges you’re facing in your business. Drop me a line, I’m easy to find. Thanks as always for listening. If you’re enjoying In The Channel, you can find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and most podcast directories. A rating or a review goes a long way if you have a minute. Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.

Matt reconnects with longtime industry friend Mike Thompson, now at Sesimi, for a wide-ranging conversation on sales, storytelling, creative automation, AI, family, and the human side of career pivots. Mike joins on the road from Houston and shares what life looks like eight months into his new role at Sesimi. The conversation explores how he approaches conference networking at scale, why relationship-based selling still wins in a noisy AI-fueled market, and how hyper-personalized outreach can cut through when generic automation fails. Matt and Mike also dig into what Sesimi actually does — from creative automation and brand compliance to co-op and MDF management — and why that matters for distributed brands, dealer networks, franchise systems, and partner ecosystems trying to move faster without losing control of their identity. Beyond the tech and go-to-market talk, the episode turns personal. Mike reflects on leaving New Hampshire after 42 years so his daughter could live in a climate better suited to her health, what that leap of faith changed for his family, and why support, resilience, and perspective matter more than ever. They also talk about the renewed value of the trades, the limits of AI in brand and creative work, and why human differentiation may matter even more in the years ahead.

If everything in your shop ran perfectly, you'd never actually get better. Think about that for a second. Today on Talkin' Shop, Brandon Bombardo and Nick Peters dig into a topic every business owner deals with but nobody really talks about — inconvenience. The delays. The missed deadlines. The customer who changes the scope at the last minute. It all feels personal in the moment, but the truth is, it's just part of running a real business. Brandon got the idea for this episode from his own experience with a travel insurance headache. He was told his refund would take six weeks instead of seven days. Instead of blowing up on the phone, he stayed calm, explained his situation, and the rep expedited the whole thing. That one conversation became the blueprint for this entire discussion — how you respond matters way more than what happened. The guys talk about why expecting a frictionless path is one of the fastest ways to create stress you don't need. Machines break down. Suppliers miss ship dates. Employees make mistakes. None of that means your business is failing. It means your business is real. The shops that stay steady through those moments are the ones still standing five and ten years from now. They also share practical ways to handle disruption — normalize it so it doesn't hit so hard, build flexibility into your schedule, keep your ego out of it, and focus on the quality of your response instead of trying to control things you can't. Before all that, the guys answer three listener questions: why manual tool calibration beats electronic switches for MDF doors, how to choose between cabinet software like Mozaik and Cab Builder, and how CNC equipment financing actually breaks down. Spoiler — a ShopSabre machine works out to about $25 an hour. Good luck finding an employee for that. Bottom line: inconvenience isn't blocking your progress. It's usually a sign that progress is happening. Changes will not happen without inconvenience. Episode Chapters: [00:00] – Intro & Banter: Skiing Adventures with Nick [04:16] – Customer Questions Segment [04:24] – Q1: Why Not Use a Tool Measure Switch on MDF Doors? [06:42] – Q2: Should I Choose Mozaik Over Other Software? [08:38] – Q3: Financing Advice for First-Time CNC Buyers (Dan from Red Barn Custom Cabinetry) [14:52] – Main Topic: Inconvenience in Business [15:36] – The Myth of the Smooth Path [18:05] – Why Expecting Frictionless Operations Creates Stress [22:41] – Sorting Real Problems from Minor Inconveniences [25:01] – Emotional Discipline During Disruption [27:05] – Inconvenience as the Price of Progress [30:48] – Practical Strategies for Navigating Inconvenience [32:30] – Real Story: Travel Insurance and the Power of Staying Calm [36:10] – Long-Term Thinkers vs. Short-Term Reactors [37:42] – Hockey Parenting Update: The Pool Noodle Follow-Up [39:35] – Key Takeaways & Motivational Quote [41:00] – Closing Thoughts & Call to Action Check out all of our equipment at https://www.shopsabre.com/ Follow us for daily CNC content Facebook:  https://www.facebook.com/shopsabre Instagram:  https://www.instagram.com/shopsabre Twitter/X: https://x.com/ShopSabreCNC TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@shopsabre LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/shopsabre-cnc/ Like and Subscribe to our YouTube channel for more CNC router and CNC plasma cutting machine tutorials, DIY project builds, and more. We feature cutting in different materials such as wood, plastic, aluminum, and other various steels. For over 20 years, ShopSabre CNC has provided businesses and hobbyists with the best CNC machines at the best value. By focusing on unbeatable customer service and high-quality products built in the USA, we've grown from a single machine built at home to one of the most trusted CNC machine manufacturers in the country. Since building our first machine two decades ago, we now have over 10,000 CNC routers, plasma, and laser engraving machines in a wide variety of industries in over 40 countries. Our success is a result of our commitment to developing a better way to build CNC machines and support our customers. ShopSabre CNC  www.ShopSabre.com 21673 Cedar Ave, Lakeville, MN 55044 800-493-6021

Pierres Become Ant Man and Steve Wrestles With WoodBig Thank you to our New Patreon Scott Walker  thanks very much Scott for your great Support. Scott was gifted his Patreon by his Wife. Its the ideal gift for your loved ones !!!Big thank you to all our Patreons and a Huge thanks to all out Top tier PatreonsJim @the.accidentalwoodworker, Alister Forbes @thelionthornmaker, Georgios Petrousis @menios_workshop, Chris @back.to.the.workshop. Mat Melleor @Makermellor, André Jørassen, Toni Kaic @oringe_finsnickeri, Thor Halvor @thwoodandleather, Neil Hislop @hbrdesigns, Mike Eddington @geo.ply, @jespermakes both on YouTube and instagram, Tor @lofotenwoodworks, Thomas Angel @verkstedsloggbok. Jason Grissom @jgrissom and also on Youtube . P-A Jakobson @pasfinsnickeri Tim @turgworks, John Mason @jm_woodcraft_scotland, Martin Berg @makermartinberg, Nick James @nickjamesdesign and and on YouTube at  Nick James Furniture Maker. Preston Blackie @urbanshopworks and also on YouTube at Urban Shop Works, Kåre Möller @kare_m, Arne @mangesysleren, Marius Bodvin @mariusbodvin & @arendalleather, Richard Salvesen @salvesendesign, Bjorn from @interiormaker.b.hagen. Roger Anderson @rvadesign182. And  Ola Skytteren @olaskytterenIf you want to support  the Show and listen to the aftershow we have a Patreon page please click the link https://www.patreon.com/user?u=81984524We also have a discord channel that you can join for free the link is in our instagram Bio. We would love to see you there.Our Obsessions this weekSteve @stevebellcreates obsession this week I watched a YouTube video by Connor Coghlan called Making a chair again Episode 1 And he takes the idea of making a cut in a piece of paper and folding it and it makes a great interesting shapeand so he see the same with some thin MDF and it reacts the same as the paperer do he plans to take this idea forward and make a product it was fascinating Pierre @theswedishmaker Pierres obsession this week is tThe video By Alexandre Chappel and the Gridfinity he is accused of stealing its a great watch go take a lookIf you have any questions or comments please email the show at threenorthernmakers@gmail.com

Season four is officially here and the guys are kicking things off in the best way they know how — a little food talk, a lot of woodworking problem solving, a full round of rapid fire trivia, and some genuinely useful shop and business tips sprinkled in for good measure.The guys open with the new season four title theme, which is TV show names, and they could not have picked a better opener than Desperate Hardwoods. Things get comfortable fast with a crockpot recipe conversation that includes Ross pulling up his bourbon bacon baked beans recipe live on the podcast, Colton reminiscing about bachelor cooking survival mode, and Jess drawing a hard line in the sand against baked beans entirely. The white chicken chili and buffalo chicken dip crowd will feel very seen.The real meat of the episode is a full woodworking consult where Jess walks Ross and Colton through a seriously complex ten foot soft maple table build with serpentine ends, tapered angled legs that kick out one degree in both directions, and the question of how to get the aprons to land cleanly against a conical leg. Ross comes in with the key insight of scribing and notching into the back of the leg rather than trying to shape the apron to meet it, which Jess admits he never would have thought of on his own. There is also a solid conversation about internal cross bracing strategy for a table that long, and why notching and interlocking beats pocket screws every single time.After the build talk the guys cover the Graco Ultra QuickShot airless sprayer. It runs on a standard Dewalt battery, barely drinks power on a full day of spraying cabinet enamel, and the low pressure tips mean almost no overspray. Ross also explains the grounding wire mystery, which has everything to do with static discharge.Then it is trivia time covering questions from previous episodes including what hardwood baseball bats are traditionally made from, what MDF stands for, the Japanese wood charring technique Shou Sugi Ban, and what Lignin actually is and why it matters for steam bending. Colton takes the season win at 25,902 to Ross at 23,099. The circular saw inventor Tabitha Babbitt gets her moment, invasive buckthorn turns out to be workable hardwood, and the African wood Iroko somehow leads to a Woody Allen detour nobody was ready for.The snugits at the end are worth sticking around for. Jess breaks down BannerBuzz.com for vehicle decals, sharing how he wrapped his dumpsters for around twelve hundred dollars with full color outdoor graphics that would have run six thousand through a traditional sign shop. Colton makes the case for carrying two mechanical pencils with different lead widths in your apron. Ross rounds it out with the FastCap Pro Carpenter tape measure, which has a built in pencil sharpener and a dry erase side panel for writing measurements before you lose them walking back to the saw.Season four is off to a strong start. New episodes, shorter run times, and the same three guys who clearly enjoy giving each other a hard time while actually knowing what they are talking about.Find more at BeatAroundTheBench.com and follow Jess, Colton, and Ross on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok.Tags: woodworking podcast, Beat Around the Bench, season four, serpentine table build, tapered table legs, soft maple table, @Graco QuickShot sprayer, Shou Sugi Ban, Janka hardness rating, woodworking trivia, BannerBuzz decals, FastCap tape measure, woodworking tips, furniture building, woodworking podcast 2025, JessBuildIt, ColtCrit, R&C Woodworking

Welcome, intrepid podcast traveller - good to have you with us. Let Pete regale you with tales of a near-death experience involving a 25-minute walk, getting a blister while dodging a man carrying a slab of MDF, and fancifully thinking about taking up boxing. We've all been there.Elsewhere, Luke continues to beat Pete at chess and will not let him forget it. Plus, retro video games we'll never finish, debating whether Pete Hegseth's bench press is impressive and Luke witnessing a catastrophically cringe question asked in front of a thousand people. Send us your latest stories, questions and comments here: hello@lukeandpeteshow.com. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Send a textWe break down why acronyms help experts move fast and why they lock out newcomers. We map old and new ICT terms, show how meanings shift across trades, and share a free handbook and simple rules to write clear, usable documents.• barriers created by acronym-heavy talk• MDF and IDF history and current TR and ER terms• bonding and grounding updates including TMGB to PBB and TBB IBC to BBC• multiple-meaning acronyms like AP, CO, DAS, RFI, FTP• documentation best practice: write full term, add acronym, then use• efficiency vs inclusion when speaking to mixed audiences• regional and cross-discipline differences and how to navigate them• free resource: ICT Terminology Handbook and why to share it• encouraging questions and private, kind correctionsGo to Google, type in ICT Terminology Handbook. Download it and send that web link to a peer, an installer, or an apprentice so they can learn it.Support the showKnowledge is power! Make sure to stop by the webpage to buy me a cup of coffee or support the show at https://linktr.ee/letstalkcabling . Also if you would like to be a guest on the show or have a topic for discussion send me an email at chuck@letstalkcabling.com Chuck Bowser RCDD TECH#CBRCDD #RCDD

If you would rather not listen to the guys’ banter about Jacob's upcoming move to Iowa, Jim’s garden planning, and a listener correction about the word “imbibe” you can skip ahead to (33:30). Chris's SummaryJim and I are joined by Jacob Vonloh as we discuss using Buffered ETFs prompted by a Morningstar article titled “Buffer ETFs Are Not for Everyone.” We explain how defined outcome ETFs use options to provide an explicit amount of loss protection over a given period while limiting potential gains, and we outline why these products are generally suboptimal for long-term investors. We then connect this to investment positioning, focusing on risk capacity, distribution planning, and why dollars assigned to delay-period Minimum Dignity Floor and Go-Go spending may require a degree of principal protection. Jim's “Pithy” SummaryChris and I are joined by Jacob Vonloh as we take a listener-submitted Morningstar article—“Buffer ETFs are not for Everyone”—and use it to kick off what is going to be a series on principal protection. Morningstar does a very good job in this article laying out what it likes about buffered products, and it also makes some excellent points on where these types of products would fit and where they don't fit. They're not for everybody, but they could be of interest in certain cases, in a certain application, and we're going to share how we use them. What I want to do in this series is broaden the conversation. Buffered ETFs are just one type of principal protected product. There are multiple tools in that category, and we're going to walk through where they fit into distribution planning. As you transition from accumulation into what I call the Venn diagram phase, and ultimately into distribution, you have to stop thinking of your portfolio as one big portfolio and start thinking in terms of smaller portfolios—investment positions—based on assigned spending. Dollars earmarked for a legacy position can be invested aggressively. Dollars earmarked for immediate spending—like the Go-Go reserve or the reserve for your MDF—need a degree of principal protection. This ties directly into the Secure Retirement Income Process and the See Through Portfolio and how we navigate asset positioning in retirement. Show Notes: Morningstar Buffered ETFs article The post Using Buffered ETFs: EDU #2607 appeared first on The Retirement and IRA Show.

On this week's show we discuss the details of Ara's new home's layout offering his perspectives on his choices for network, home theater, whole home audio and smart home functionality.  We also read your emails and take a look at the week's news. News: Kodak Luma 500 - Review Launch date, channel list for YouTube TV sports plan revealed Sony, the pioneer of Blu-ray Disc recorders, to pull plug on sales Price concerns remain the leading reason for streaming cancelations Other:  IKEA Smart Home Without Dirigera: Homey Pro, Home Assistant, HomeKit, Google, Alexa & Aqara Ara's New Home Design (Network, Smart Home, and AV) Last week Ara was out in Franklin TN meeting with electricians and security contractors to prewire his house with everything he needs to make adding smart home devices and A/V a snap. So what did he do? But first an email from longtime listener Jorge Beltran with some recommendations. Jorge's email  Guys: I am listening to the latest episode on a train delay in freezing NJ.  I heard the question about sound bar vs 3.1 system vs full surround. I advocate that if money permits and a remodel situation allows it, I would significantly recommend trying to install 5.1, 7.2, or you name it. I have a full theater with 11.2 in the basement that we enjoy and I adore. But we keep watching more and more in the family room next to the kitchen for whatever reason.  And I do enjoy a lot having a surround setup there too and kept adding to it (it was pre wired on a remodel). There was a high WAF in that room, so I went with in-walls for fronts and in-ceiling for rear surround and a couple more for front ATMOS.  Yes, the surrounds and ceiling speakers are not at the ideal locations but they really, really add to the experience, even for the super bowl ambiance.   A friend of mine just upgraded his whole house and used KEF on-walls, very thin, good looking, placed a bit higher and almost looked like a decoration in a more contemporary home.  The wife gave them a big approval.  I checked after looking at my wife's face but are out of my price range. For you Ara, another friend, a latin party guy, installed 6 speakers on vaulted ceilings in the family room next to a kitchen and surrounded by windows, and they work really great. Thus, my vote for Ara is to add ceiling speakers on his vault for surround effects.  Ask the builder to wire them and box them out like a traditional speaker and place them on the rafters.  You build so many speaker boxes already, this one can be made of MDF.  Even better, build your own speaker out of parts, install it on the rafters just below the sheetrock, add a grill and you have the best sounding and looking in-walls ever. Last one, a builder friend just added in walls / in ceilings that go behind the sheetrock.  I have not seen them yet.  No excuses gents. Sending a CafPow for the extra spackle. Jorge Ara's Setup Wifi and Network decision - Ubiquiti Dream Wi-Fi 6 $350 & Ubiquiti Networks UniFi 7 Pro Access Point (POE) $180 Cameras, doorbell, motion sensors - Aqara 4MP Camera Hub G5 Pro PoE  $190 & Aqara Smart Doorbell Camera G410  $130 & Aqara Presence Sensor FP2, mmWave Radar Wired Smart Motion Sensor $58 Light switches - Lutron Caseta Original Smart Dimmer Switch Kit w/ Hub $115. I am only having the company install one or two, I will do the rest as I learn our new routine and decide which switches need automation. I will make use of lamp modules as I prefer those types of lights to recessed lights.  Whole Home Audio - Ara to build/buy speakers and connect to the network via ethernet cables using WiiM Amp: Multiroom Streaming Amplifier $300 TV and Home Theater - For the family room I will use a large format TV with a soundbar. Right now I am leaning towards Sonos Beam Gen 2 and their wireless subwoofer (Sonos Sub 4 $760). For my theater in an upstairs den I will do a traditional setup with atmos. It will consist of an UST, Receiver, and 7.1.2 speakers. Eventually I will build out a more formal theater in the basement. If I live long enough LOL No traditional Cable RG6

Andy Marsee, general manager for the Intel Partner Alliance Late last year, Intel announced the latest revisions to its Intel Partner Alliance program, reducing the number of partner tiers and roles and aiming to make things a bit more simple. In this edition of the podcast, we're joined by Andy Marsee, general manager for the Intel Partner Alliance, to talk about what's going on in the chipmaker's partner programs.  We discuss: the background of the unified Intel Partner Alliance program and the feedback the company has received from partners over recent years; the main goals of revamping the Partner Alliance; simplifying the number of partner tiers and roles in the program and designing the transition; the expanded role of distribution in the new partner program; maximizing partner profitability under the new program; how Intel has updated its Partner Showcase so more partners can run storefronts; how the company is looking to improve the number of leads it delivers to partners; changes to MDF in ease of use and both benefits and requirements; new types of partners Intel is working with; a shift to outcomes-based messaging and marketing at Intel; the role of software development across the Intel channel community; and where Marsee sees the next steps for Intel Partner Alliance. All that and more in this edition of the ChannelBuzz.ca Podcast.

Meanwhile, over in Burbank, a caller wants to put in a door that leads from his living room to his garage conversion and needs Dean’s expert design advice on placement and construction. A caller in Texas lives in a house that's just three years old, but the furnace has fungus! What can he do to remedy that? To more on copper pipes, one listener is wondering how a soft-water system can impact copper piping? When doing a bathroom remodel, is there such a thing as cabinets that aren't MDF but also not expensive, custom-made cabinetry? See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In the season premiere of season 8, w34z3l breaks down the concept of minimum defense frequency, with an emphasis on how MDF can lead to inappropriate defense frequencies in certain spots. GTO solutions frequently involve defense frequencies that violate MDF, suggesting such lines allow us to be auto-exploited. And yet GTO solutions are generally understood as being unexploitable. This episode reconciles this apparent contradiction, and explains how you can construct practical defense frequencies in common situations.   **RELATED LINKS** · Upgrade To PRO Now: https://redchippoker.com/pro-membership · The Exploitative Edge (Book): https://redchippoker.com/the-exploitative-edge - Exploitative Poker Strategies Beyond GTO: https://youtu.be/_Jx3YAf3y1E?si=WRvj4dotH5SPeogi - Defending Yourself Correctly In Poker: https://redchippoker.com/correct-poker-defense/   **JOIN US ON DISCORD** Join our free poker Discord today: https://redchippoker.com/discord

All sorts of setbacks can come up during your career. You narrowly miss landing your dream job. You get put on a project you don't love. You have a horrible manager. You go through a round of budget cuts. You have a family emergency come up. You have a sudden health issue. Or you realise you've taken the wrong job. We all experience disappointments, stressors, or unexpected twists and turns in our career that test our resilience, patience, and fortitude. Career setbacks can't be avoided. No matter how well you plan things out, stuff comes up, and your ability to navigate and manage those setbacks will make the difference between you getting stuck in a rut or bouncing back to find a better way forward. In this episode of the Career Relaunch® podcast, Ben Kuhl, a sports and events hospitality management professional turned woodworking, shelf-making craftsman shares his thoughts on his shift from white-collar to blue-collar work, and I also share some thoughts on the hidden blessings behind career setbacks.

Entz Géza művészettörténész és Nyáry Krisztián irodalomtörténész, kommunikációs szakember egyaránt részt vett a Ceauşescu-diktatúra idején a romániai magyarságot segítő akciókban. Az egykor az MDF-kormány idején a Határontúli Magyarok Hivatalát vezető Entz és a Demszky Gábor SZDSZ-es budapesti főpolgármesternek dolgozó Nyáry Nemzet a hátizsákban – Titkos erdélyi segítőakciók a Kádár-korszakban című új Válasz Offline kiadványunkban páros interjúban idézték fel a rendszerváltás előtt történteket, ezért voltak a lap bemutatójának vendégei.

⭐ PROMO PACKAGE — TSP #2340Guest: Oksana BuchananTime: 10 AM EasternTitle Suggestion:“Dark Fleet, Crystal Gate, & Telepathic Disclosure – Oksana Buchanan | TSP #2340”

Is buying an American-made CNC router just about patriotism, or is it a smarter move for your bottom line? In this episode of Talkin Shop, Brandon and Nick break down why domestic machinery is the superior choice for small and medium-sized shops focused on long-term profitability and growth. We dive past the slogan to discuss the real-world impact of quality control, parts availability, and reliable support on your business's success. The guys also tackle a rapid-fire Q&A session covering essential topics for shop owners. They discuss the best software workflows for designing MDF doors, the specific advantages of using manufacturer financing over traditional bank loans, and a critical warning about waiting until 2026 to make your equipment purchase. With vendor price increases on the horizon, waiting could cost you more than just time. Whether you are looking to upgrade your capacity or invest in your first CNC machine, this episode explains why "cheaper" import options often cost thousands more in downtime and rework. Tune in for actionable advice on scaling your shop with intention. Timestamps: [00:00] - Welcome & Intro to American-Made CNC Routers [00:53] - Introducing Nick Peters & Weather Banter [02:36] - Thanksgiving Wishes & End-of-Year Insights [05:35] - Q1: Designing MDF Doors with Software [07:33] - Q2: Financing Options vs. Your Bank [11:20] - Q3: Why Not Wait Until 2026? [13:44] - Defining American-Made: Quality & Support [17:04] - Benefits for Small Shops: Precision & Productivity [24:34] - Risk Reduction, Versatility & Maintenance Ease [30:05] - Employee Loyalty & Scaling Your Business [35:17] - Debunking Objections to American-Made CNC [39:47] - Partnership with ShopSabre & Final Thoughts Check out all of our equipment at https://www.shopsabre.com/ Follow us for daily CNC content Facebook:  https://www.facebook.com/shopsabre Instagram:  https://www.instagram.com/shopsabre Twitter/X: https://x.com/ShopSabreCNC TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@shopsabre LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/shopsabre-cnc/ Like and Subscribe to our YouTube channel for more CNC router and CNC plasma cutting machine tutorials, DIY project builds, and more. We feature cutting in different materials such as wood, plastic, aluminum, and other various steels. For over 20 years, ShopSabre CNC has provided businesses and hobbyists with the best CNC machines at the best value. By focusing on unbeatable customer service and high-quality products built in the USA, we've grown from a single machine built at home to one of the most trusted CNC machine manufacturers in the country. Since building our first machine two decades ago, we now have over 10,000 CNC routers, plasma, and laser engraving machines in a wide variety of industries in over 40 countries. Our success is a result of our commitment to developing a better way to build CNC machines and support our customers. ShopSabre CNC  www.ShopSabre.com 21673 Cedar Ave, Lakeville, MN 55044 800-493-6021

This Episodes Questions: Brians Questions: Hey all, great podcast, thank you for doing what you do. What are some favorite Christmas gifts to make with scrap wood? Specific context for me:  been woodworking for a while, hobbyist, been giving gifts to people for years and now I've lost track of who has gotten what.  Just trying to get some ideas for this year.  Time is easier to give to a project than money.  I also like the lathe for scrap projects.  Have found a good glue up can make a good looking bowl. Follow up/more specific questions: What are some favorite scrap wood projects that are not kits from Rockler (or similar companies)? Other than a bowl, what are some other gifts that can come off the lathe? What are some non kitchen items to make from scrap wood?  (I believe I've given too many cutting boards, charcuterie boards, cooking utensils over the years).  Jim Hello friends,  I haven't submitted a question in a hot minute, as the kids say, but I finally have a good one for you and it's regarding something I'm truly stumped about. After hitting you guys with question after question about, "How do I do _______ without a jointer or planer?" I finally got myself a thickness planer. It's louder than all hell, and it's nothing fancy, but I'm glad I have it.  There's only one issue that I'm having with it, and I can't figure out what's causing it. When I'm getting ready to Mill down some stock, I first set the height of the planer blades so they aren't taking off any material at the start. The depth of cut indicator is at "0". I'll even send the board through with the blades at this height sometimes just to make sure the gauge is accurate. I then lower the blades by 1/64", aka a quarter turn of the handle. I send the piece of stock through, it takes off some material, whatever. So far, so good. Here's what's throwing me off: after I've fed that board through the planer, I can feed that same board right back through, with the blades still set at the same height, and the planer will take off about the same amount of material, from the sound of it. This doesn't only happen on a second pass, either. I can feed the same board through the planer six, seven, or eight times, without adjusting the cutting depth, and the planer continues to remove material at each pass. Unless I'm missing something about how planers work, I would think that the material should have been planed down to thickness on the first pass. I can't figure out why it continues to remove material after multiple passes when I haven't changed the settings. This happens to me every time I use my planer. Not sure if this is relevant but I have a Ridgid #R4331 planer. I also attached a link to a very loud video demonstrating this phenomenon. Thank you in advance for your help and expertise, and thank you for continuing to take the time to put out this phenomenal woodworking podcast. I hope your projects are doing well, and I hope you're doing even better. Sincerely,  Zachary T Owens Guys Questions: Hello, Thank you for the great podcast and for answering my questions. I have a question on using Transtint dye. I heard Guy and Huy mention they use it. Not sure about Brian. Anyway, I screwed up 2 projects when trying to apply it. In both cases I mixed it into Zinser Sealcoat shellac. Firs time applied with foam brush on elm. The second time wiped on on maple plywood. In both cases, the color was very inconsistent. I ended up throwing away the plywood and sanding the elm back to bare wood.  My question is, is it ok to add Transtint dye to shellac? If so, what could be my problem? More importantly, can you tell me the process you follow to apply Transtint dye? The dye I was using is Transtint Dark Walnut. Max I have owned my Sawstop cabinet saw for nearly a year now and I have consistently been impressed with the quality of the machine. One thing that has bugged me since I got the saw is the occasional binding I get when I do a rip cut especially. I have meticulously aligned the fence with the blade/miter slots and with a dial indicator jig to be parallel. I thought it may be internal stresses in the wood but I have the same issue ripping plywood or MDF. I finally figured out the problem. I am using Freud thin kerf blades which have a kerf of 0.091" inches according to the manufacturer. My riving knife is a few thousands thicker than this . Sawstop offers a thin riving knife but I have seen mixed opinions and wanted to get your guys' take on it since I know at least one or two of you have the Sawstop cabinet saw. Have you ever had this problem? Thanks! Adam Huys Questions: Dear Woodshop Life Podcast Senseis, Thank you again for your awesome podcast.  New listener.  Finally finished all podcasts and now going back and listening to them all again. This is my second question submitted in the past few months. Just as I prefaced in my last question/submission, I am in the process of setting up my workshop in a one car space of a three car garage. One of the first things I built in my current workshop was a miter saw station using 2x4's and plywood.  I'm glad I used relatively inexpensive materials, because after only a few months I realized that I allocated too much space to an immobile monolith in my small workshop. I plan to build a mobile miter saw station with collapsable wings to replace my current miter saw station.  The wings when extended will support longer material and when folded will create a smaller footprint. I recently watched Guy's video entitled “Build This Small Sturdy Workbench” on his YouTube channel.  The base of the workbench gave me an idea for the base for my miter saw.  I'll add retractable casters to make it mobile. I want to buy a hollow chisel mortiser for this and future projects.  Based on my budget of $600, I think that limits me to a benchtop model.  Are there any benchtop hollow chisel mortisers in my price range that you might suggest? Thank you again for the great podcast and thank you in advance for your advice. Best, Darryl Noda (Wildfield Workshop) I discovered your podcast earlier this year and have now gone back and listened to the entire back catalog while making sawdust in the shop. I appreciate all the knowledge you are sharing with the entire woodworking community. A question I have recently started thinking about is what would happen with my workshop if something happened to me. I have invested a considerable amount of money in tools from a Sawstop, Laguna Pflux dust collector and Harvey router table, to planes, chisels, and way too many Woodpecker tools. But neither of my kids nor other family members are interested in woodworking, and they wouldn't know what to do with a workshop full of tools. Have you made plans for how to sell or donate your tools? I have created a Will and Trust for my house and financial assets, but I think having a solid plan for the Workshop would be very helpful for my family, but I don't know where to start. Any ideas for community groups that could be donated to, or how the tools could be sold to the right audience? I happen to live in the Indianapolis area as well, so any specific suggestions would be welcome, as well as general ideas.Kevin

AI adoption is accelerating among small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs), with 87% of executives believing it will transform their operations within a year. However, only 29% feel their teams are prepared to implement AI effectively. This gap highlights a significant challenge for organizations that have invested in AI without seeing tangible returns. Anurag Agarwal, founder of TechAisle, emphasizes that while there are pockets of ROI in sectors like retail and healthcare, many SMBs struggle with data readiness and understanding their business processes, which hinders effective AI integration.The conversation also delves into the evolving relationship between vendors and partners, particularly regarding market development funds (MDF). Traditional MDF models are becoming obsolete as partners demand outcome-based funding, training, and co-development opportunities. Research indicates that 83% of MSPs prioritize investments that enhance capabilities and drive customer success. This shift reflects a broader trend where partners seek to align their funding requests with measurable business outcomes rather than activity-based metrics.Additionally, the episode addresses the concept of "platform inshittification," where dominant vendors may degrade user experiences to extract more value from partners and customers. This raises concerns for MSPs reliant on these platforms, as they may face risks such as reduced margins or direct competition from vendors. Agarwal advises MSPs to define their value beyond mere access to tools, positioning themselves as business efficiency consultants who can integrate various solutions to meet customer needs.For MSPs and IT service leaders, the implications are clear: they must enhance their own capabilities in data management and business process understanding to effectively leverage AI. Furthermore, as vendors shift towards outcome-based funding models, MSPs should prepare to present clear business plans that demonstrate how investments will lead to measurable results. This proactive approach will be essential for maintaining competitive advantage in a rapidly evolving technology landscape.

Overview: In this episode of the SMB Community Podcast, hosts Amy and James discuss strategies for IT professionals to finish the year on top, including sales tips, inventory reduction, and tax advantages through IRS Tax Code Section 179. They also delve into the feasibility and future of humanoid household robots, debating their practicality and cost. Additionally, they touch on industry news such as the rising dominance of AMD processors, recent Microsoft 365 outages, and the importance of outcome-based funding over traditional MDF. The episode wraps up with details on an AI class and an upcoming Mastermind event in Newport Beach. --- Chapter Markers: 00:00 Introduction and Greetings 01:03 Weather and Seasonal Changes 02:07 MSP Question of the Week: Finishing the Year Strong: Tips and Strategies  08:07 The Future of Household Robots 14:15 Business and Tech News Highlights 25:58 Upcoming Events and Courses 27:53 Conclusion and Farewell --- New Book Release: I'm proud to announce the release of my new book, The Anthology of Cybersecurity Experts! This collection brings together 15 of the nation's top minds in cybersecurity, sharing real-world solutions to combat today's most pressing threats. Whether you're an MSP, IT leader, or simply passionate about protecting your data, this book is packed with expert advice to help you stay secure and ahead of the curve. Available now on Amazon! https://a.co/d/f2NKASI --- Sponsor Memo: Since 2006, Kernan Consulting has been through over 30 transactions in mergers & acquisitions - and just this past year, we have been involved in six (6). If you are interested in either buying, selling, or valuation information, please reach out. There is alot of activity and you can be a part of it. For more information, reach out at kernanconsulting.com

In this conversation, Bruce and Mark share humorous anecdotes about towing mishaps and creative vehicle solutions, delve into home improvement projects including kitchen renovations and DIY tasks, and reflect on family moments during hunting trips. They discuss the challenges of installing sinks and cabinets, the intricacies of tile work, and the importance of future-proofing home improvements. The conversation is filled with practical tips, personal stories, and insights into the world of DIY and home renovation. Mark's YouTube Channel: http://youtube.com/gunflintdesigns Bruce's YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/bruceaulrich DIRTtoDONE on YouTube: http://tinyurl.com/DIRTtoDON Become a patron of the show! http://patreon.com/webuiltathing OUR TOP PATREON SUPPORTERS -Scott @ Dad It Yourself DIY http://bit.ly/3vcuqmv -Ray Jolliff -Deo Gloria Woodworks (Matthew Allen) https://www.instagram.com/deogloriawoodworks/ -Henry Lootens (@Manfaritawood) -Chris Simonton -Maddux Woodworks http://bit.ly/3chHe2p -Bruce Clark -Will White -Andy @ Mud Turtle Woodworks -Monkey Business Woodworks -Rich from Woodnote Studio -AC Nailed It -Joe Santos from Designer's Touch Kitchen & Bath Studio -Chad Green -Trevor -Mark Herrick @ Empty Nest Woodworks New:  -Richard Bristow Support our sponsors: TOOL CODES: -MagSwitch: “GUNFLINT10" -SurfPrep: “BRUCEAULRICH" -Starbond: “BRUCEAULRICH” -Brunt Workgear: “GUNFLINT10” -Rotoboss: “GUNFLINT” -Montana Brand Tools: “GUNFLINT10” -Monport Lasers: “GUNFLINT6” -Stone Coat Epoxy: Gunflint -MAS Epoxy: FLINT -YesWelder: GUNFLINT10 -Millner-Haufen Tool Co: “ULRICH20” for 20% off -Camel City Mill: GUNFLINT10 -Arbortech Tools: “BRUCEAULRICH” for 10% off -Wagner Meters: https://www.wagnermeters.com/shop/orion-950-smart/?ref=210 ETSY SHOPS: Bruce: https://www.etsy.com/shop/BruceAUlrich?ref=simple-shop-header-name&listing_id=942512486 Mark: https://www.etsy.com/shop/GunflintDesigns?ref=search_shop_redirect We are makers, full-time dads and have YouTube channels we are trying to grow and share information with others. Throughout this podcast, we talk about making things, making videos to share on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, etc...and all of the life that happens in between.  CONNECT WITH US: WE BUILT A THING: www.instagram.com/webuiltathingWE BUILT A THING EMAIL: webuiltathing@gmail.com BRUDADDY: www.instagram.com/brudaddy/ GUNFLINT DESIGNS: https://www.instagram.com/gunflintdesigns

Sunlight changes everything. We kick off with a real project that turned a dim great room into a bright, open space by swapping a standard door for full glass, adding a 10-by-6 quad window, and installing an 8-by-12 slider with screens for a cross-breeze you can feel. The secret wasn't just picking pretty glass—it was structural discipline. We brought in an engineer, sized LVLs correctly, and worked to the inch so the spans carried safely and cleanly.From there, we pull the curtain back on builder grade versus custom grade. “Builder grade” isn't a dirty word, but it can hide weak links like finger-jointed studs or MDF outside. We share the exact questions to ask about floor lumber grades, shingle brands, and warranties. On roofing, we compare standing seam metal with Kynar or Valspar finishes against exposed fastener panels that fade, and explain why today's premium shingles deliver serious wind performance and algae protection for less money. Pro tip: never use button-cap fasteners under metal roofing underlayment unless you want the caps to telegraph through the panels.If you're hunting older homes, we offer a quick triage: read the foundation, then price the heavy hitters—electrical, HVAC, and insulation. For windows, don't default to full replacements. Investigate sash swaps, reglazing, or sash kits that preserve frames and cut labor. On HVAC, we decode SEER and explain why the jump from 14 to 21 rarely pays for itself. Your smartest investment is the envelope: spray foam where it counts, diligent air sealing, and right-sized equipment. Mini splits shine in garages and bonus rooms, but only after you insulate.We also touch on a rumored national housing emergency and what real relief might look like for first-time buyers. If you care about better light, stronger structure, and upgrades that actually return value, this one gives you a roadmap—without the hype. Enjoy the show, explore resources at thecarolinacontractor.com, and hit the Ask The Contractor button with your questions. If you learned something useful, subscribe, share with a friend, and leave a quick review to help others find the show.

The podcast discusses the current state of AI adoption among Managed Service Providers (MSPs) and the challenges they face in delivering measurable results to clients. Despite significant investments in AI, many enterprises report no new revenue from these technologies, leading to a growing skepticism about their practical value. MSPs are now under pressure to bridge the gap between vendor promises and client realities, focusing on specific workflow use cases that can demonstrate tangible benefits. The conversation emphasizes the importance of understanding client workflows and integrating technology in a way that enhances human productivity rather than replacing it.Ryan Morris, a channel strategist, highlights the cyclical nature of technology adoption, comparing the current AI landscape to previous technology trends like the dot-com boom and cloud computing. He notes that while the tools for implementing AI have become more user-friendly, the challenge remains in effectively integrating these tools into existing business processes. The discussion also touches on the need for MSPs to evolve from traditional roles to become more strategic partners, guiding clients through the complexities of AI implementation.The podcast further explores the trend of vendor consolidation in the tech industry, particularly with Kaseya's acquisition of Inky. This move signals a shift towards integrated platforms, but Morris argues that the best-of-breed approach is still relevant, especially for MSPs who prioritize flexibility and risk management. He explains that while vendors may push for comprehensive solutions, MSPs are cautious about committing to a single vendor due to concerns about vendor lock-in and the need for reliable service delivery.Finally, the conversation addresses the changing landscape of market development funds (MDF) in the channel. Traditional MDF programs are viewed as outdated, with partners now seeking outcome-based funding and support for solution development. This shift reflects a broader desire for meaningful collaboration between vendors and partners, focusing on integrated campaigns that drive measurable results rather than simple marketing reimbursements. The podcast concludes with a call for a more strategic approach to channel development that prioritizes long-term partnerships and shared success.

Jay Potter was born without a fear of failure. The son of an accomplished engineer, he owned his own company at 15. He has an independent spirit, risk taker at heart, obsessed with true significance! Listen to his story behind ECOR, his company that successfully converts ag waste to building materials with an emphasis on circularity. Of significance, ECOR produces sheets of MDF (recycled wood particles) that eliminate toxic binders. Jay is deeply motivated to solve problems of inefficiencies. Jay's turning point to ECOR occurred when he had lunch with Ray Anderson, founder of Interface. He heard Anderson's Mission Zero environmental vision. This was the moment of truth when Jay realized the economic and moral potential of sustainability. Hear Jay's story of aligning his core values into an enterprise which eventually evolved to his creation of ECOR. ECOR is the next unicorn with actual pre-booked business north of $500 million. To invest, please contact www.ecorglobal.com. Talk to Jay today at jaypotter@ecorglobal.com or call 858-472-0239. Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/success-made-to-last-legends--4302039/support.

In this episode, we tune into the audio from a special webinar from the Myotonic Dystrophy Foundation (MDF) about exercise for people with Myotonic Dystrophy (DM). Join Dr. Andy Rohrwasser- MDF Chief Scientific Officer, Dr. Donovan Lott- a PT and PhD at University of Florida and specialist in muscular dystrophy, and cardiologist Dr. Matt Wheeler as they explore the latest research on movement and exercise in this population. Stay tuned for a Q&A at the end as the experts answer questions from the DM community.   A special thank you to the Myotonic Dystrophy for sharing this content with our special interest group! For questions about this podcast, please contact neuroddsig@gmail.com.  See the full webinar video here: https://www.myotonic.org/digital-academy/stump-doctor-exercise-dm-2025-myotonic-dystrophy-motion-awareness-month  Access the MDF Exercise Guide here:  https://www.myotonic.org/sites/default/files/pages/files/MDF_Exercise-Guide-for-the-Community_1_21.pdf  For a quick look, check out the MDF's Infographic on Exercise: https://www.myotonic.org/sites/default/files/2024-07/MDF_Exercising-with-Myotonic-Dystrophy_Infographic.pdf  Show notes available: https://app.box.com/s/yhuzygfl6ekyv7trw832f89w37g6izxs

AI's increasing demand for memory and storage is leading to a significant pricing crisis in the hardware market, with projections indicating that this situation could persist for the next decade. Analysts and manufacturers are warning of impending shortages of NAND and DRAM, essential components for solid-state drives and memory. The price of NAND Flash has already surged by over 100% in just six months, and DDR4 memory products are expected to rise by up to 43% in the third quarter of 2025. This crisis is largely driven by major AI projects, such as OpenAI's Stargate initiative, which could consume a staggering 40% of global DRAM output.Despite broader economic challenges, the tech sector is experiencing a rebound in hiring, particularly in Silicon Valley, where AI companies are driving a resurgence in the office market. Job postings for software developers, cybersecurity engineers, and AI engineers have seen notable increases, even as the private sector overall lost jobs. The demand for tech talent remains high, with international tech workers still viewing the U.S. as an attractive destination. This shift contradicts earlier predictions that AI would lead to widespread job losses, instead highlighting a transformation in workforce dynamics.The podcast also discusses a significant shift in the perception of market development funds (MDF) among channel partners. Traditional MDF programs are becoming obsolete, with partners now prioritizing outcome-based funds and training that enhance capabilities and align with customer success. This change reflects a broader trend in vendor-partner relationships, where partners seek strategic alliances focused on measurable outcomes rather than outdated financial support for marketing activities. The evolving landscape emphasizes the need for specialization and collaboration to thrive in the current market.Finally, the episode touches on the concept of "inshittification," particularly in relation to Amazon's declining customer-centric approach as it prioritizes profits over user experience. This trend raises concerns about the future of online commerce and the trustworthiness of platforms. Additionally, the discussion includes insights on employee satisfaction post-IPO, the evolution of AI technology at Notion, and the challenges faced by OpenAI as it navigates financial losses. These topics prompt critical reflections on vendor relationships, the impact of public offerings on innovation, and the readiness of clients for advanced AI systems. Four things to know today00:00 AI Boom Sparks Global Memory Shortage, Driving Decade-Long Hardware Price Surge04:23 AI Fuels Tech Hiring Surge as U.S. Job Market Splits in Two07:14 MDF Is Dead: Partners Demand Outcome-Based Funding and Strategic Enablement10:10 Amazon's Enshittification, IPO Fallout, and OpenAI's Struggle — Strategy Lessons for IT Providers This is the Business of Tech.    Supported by:  https://getflexpoint.com/msp-radio/https://scalepad.com/dave/ Webinar:  https://bit.ly/msprmail

This episode is all about case study in circularity and a group of people turning waste into useful materials for the built environment. Daniel Dinizo and Charmaine Cu-Unjieng of NaturLoop are bringing a new bio-based product to market that transforms waste coconut husk into a material that's something between MDF and a particle board.For us, this presented a chance to talk about how sustainable materials are developed, the challenges of bringing them to market and how responsible businesses can approach supply chain development (the big challenge now). As professionals who work with LCAs, EPDs, and carbon calcs all the time it was refreshing to get into a product that will have an impact that can be accounted for in human terms, as well as the usual economic and environmental terms. They're also fundraising right now, so here's the pitch from Charmaine.NaturLoop at the Final Stage of Pre-Seed Funding"NaturLoop, the Swiss–Philippine climate-tech startup behind Cocoboard, is at the final stage of its pre-seed round. Cocoboard is the first industry-ready fibreboard made entirely from coconut husk waste and natural adhesives—a truly biocircular material. Featured at Interzum Cologne 2025, Cocoboard embodies the shift in construction and furniture toward biocircularity—no longer a trend but the future of materials. Europe's sustainable furniture market is set to more than double to $42.6 bn by 2032, with consumers paying around 10% more for sustainable products. NaturLoop is closing its round soon, inviting strategic investors to co-build a climate-positive business that reduces deforestation and uplifts poor coconut farmers—making the industry more future-proof."Notes from the showCharmaine Cu-Unjieng on LinkedinDaniel Dinizo on Linkedin NaturLoop on Linkedin The NaturLoop websiteA short film about Cocoboard®An investor CTA from CharmaineAn example of Cocoboard in use as a speaker box for a Schwab System**SOME SELF-PROMOTING CALLS TO ACTION**We don't actually earn anything from this podcast, and it's quite a lot of work, so we have to promote the day jobs.Follow us on the Zero Ambitions LinkedIn page (we still don't have a proper website)Jeff and Dan about Zero Ambitions Partners (the consultancy) for help with positioning and communications strategy, customer/user research and engagement strategy, carbon calculations and EPDs – we're up to all sortsSubscribe and advertise with Passive House Plus (UK edition here too)Check Lloyd Alter's Substack: Carbon UpfrontJoin ACANJoin the AECB Join the IGBCCheck out Her Retrofit Space, the renovation and retrofit platform for women**END OF SELF-PROMOTING CALLS TO ACTION**

Dávid Ibolya előbb ügyvédként, majd politikusként a rendszerváltás utáni magyar közélet egyik ismert szereplője volt: 1998 és 2002 között igazságügyi miniszterként dolgozott az első Orbán-kormányban, majd 1999-től 2010-ig vezette a Magyar Demokrata Fórumot (MDF), amelynek mérsékelt, de határozottan konzervatív irányvonalát képviselte. Parlamenti képviselőként és pártelnökként kiállt a jogállamiság és a politikai párbeszéd fontossága mellett. Ennek ellenére politikai pályafutása az MDF 2010-es parlamentből való kiesésével és az azt megelőző, a párt identitását megbontó döntéseivel, különösen Bokros Lajos EP-listavezetővé jelölésével ért véget. A párton belüli megosztottság, a támogatók elvesztése és a választási kudarc nyomán Dávid Ibolya lemondott, ezzel végleg távozott a közéletből. De 2006-ban Dávid Ibolyát még a politikai aktivitás jellemezte. Például a 2006-os választások után meghívta az MDF székházába az ellenzéki pártok képviselőit és a frissen megválasztott miniszterelnököt, Gyurcsány Ferencet, hogy megismerkedhessenek a kormány reformelképzeléseivel. Ez a találkozó egy olyan korszakot idéz, amikor a politikai szereplők még egyeztettek, és a közérdek felül tudott emelkedni a pártpolitikai szembenálláson. Az interjú, amely ezen alkalommal készült Dávid Ibolyával, már-már történelmi dokumentumként idézi meg a politikai kultúra egy rég letűnt korszakát.Hogyan támogathatja a munkánkat? - Legújabban már a Donably felületen is támogathat bennünket, itt ÁFA-mentesen segítheti munkavégzésünket: https://www.donably.com/friderikusz-podcast - De lehet a patronálónk a Patreon-on keresztül is, mert a támogatása mértékétől függően egyre több előnyhöz juthat: https://www.patreon.com/FriderikuszPodcast - Egyszerű banki átutalással is elismerheti munkavégzésünk minőségét. Ehhez a legfontosabb adatok az alábbiak: Név: TV Pictures Számlaszám: OTP Bank 11707062-21446081 Közlemény: Podcast-támogatás Ha külföldről utalna, nemzetközi számlaszámunk (IBAN - International Bank Account Number): HU68 1170 7062 2144 6081 0000 0000 BIC/SWIFT-kód: OTPVHUHB Akármilyen formában támogatja munkánkat, nagyon köszönjük!Kövessenek, kövessetek itt is:youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/FriderikuszPodcastFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/FriderikuszPodcastInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/friderikuszpodcastAmazon Music: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/a159b938-d63e-4927-9e9b-bea37bc378d3/friderikusz-podcastSpotify: https://spoti.fi/3blRo2gYoutube Music: https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLu6L9HlV4-KuNOYy_rS97rP_Q-ncvF14rApple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3hm2vfiDeezer: https://www.deezer.com/hu/show/1000256535

3d printed terrain might be trendy right now, but let's not forget about the tremendous benefits of MDF buildings and scenery - especially as this medium has been levelled up recently at Warbases, who now run a pre-coloured range. They also run the fantastic Bifrost Miniatures range and there's loads of fun to be had in there, from giant Ettins to Haggisnadoes. Also mentionedQuestion of the monthThe Fundamentals of Tabletop Miniatures Game DesignBaron's war novelsOathsworn Miniatures

After over a year we are BACK recording for the Normalizing Millions podcast! In this episode Taylor shares 3 different ways she sets goals so she can have fun selling her offers and not get lost in stress and pressure. If you loved this episode please leave a 5 star review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Bonus points if you share this episode on your stories and tag me OR just send me a simple DM telling me how this episode landed. I'd love to hear from you! Keep learning from Taylor Lee: Join Million Dollar Frequency for BTS audios every single week on how I am creating 10K weeks on repeat: thetaylorlee.com/frequency Join Grown Woman Business for a taste of MDF but ALSO a 9 training immersion that takes you through how I create 50K months without pushy sales, fake perfection in my content, bro marketing strategies, chasing money over prioritizing delivery, etc. If you've been finding yourself kind of bored and disconnected from the coaching industry but also know this is what you are meant to do you feel lit up and inspired as soon as you dive into these audios: https://www.thetaylorlee.com/offers/68z3KzN6 $500K Year Blueprint where I show you exactly what I would do step by step to set myself up for a half a million dollar year (focusing on offer suite, sales strategy and mindset). $55 experience: https://www.thetaylorlee.com/offers/LzAQBHWD/checkout Or get it all and 1:1 daily support where I turn your mind scramble into cash inside The Frequency Room: thetaylorlee.com/the-room

This week John Kruse talks to  1.  Diana Burns with TerraCycle about their recycling partnership with Mountain House freeze dried foods. 2.  Trevor Hubbs with the Mule Deer Foundation talks about their Bucks Beyond Borders membership drive where one lucky person who joins MDF is going to win a guided 5-day deer hunt in British Columbia 3.  Richard Simms with Scenic City Fishing Charters out of Chattanooga, TN tells you about the multi-species fisheries they have available there and shares a current fishing repot. 4.  Finally, Byron Velvick with Livingston Lures talks about their unique lures, his new podcast, Fish Tails and about a brand new app to help you catch more fish called "Captain Livingston"   www.americaoutdoorsradio.com   

This week we discussed elections in Poland , organ donors, geo engineered soil, Dangers of MDF and more   #poland #awakening #spain   About my Co-Host: Arnold Beekes Innovator, certified coach & trainer and generalist. First 20 years in technology and organizational leadership, then 20 years in psychology and personal leadership (all are crucial for innovation). ============ What we Discussed:   00:00 What we are discussing in this weeks show   01:50 The A.I. Job Apocalypse Is Here07:00 The Polish Elections 08:55 Patriotic Strike 11:05 Whats the Truth with the Liverpool driver 12:10 Geo Engineering the Soil 14:30 Jeremy Clarkson Farm and the Council isues 16:45 Why the Farmers are in decline 17:20 Dead Internet Theory 20:05 The Annoying Re Capcha to enter a Website 21:05 Chat GPT Free to all in UAE 22:40 Lunchclub is probably using your conversations for Ai 23:05 Ai and Healthcare 25:15 Ai Not complying to Shutdown 27:30 Not selling Land to Mining Company 29:20 Trumps plan for No TAX to $150K 31:00 Music Eases Pain 33:10 Free Dry Cleaning 35:45 Fake Lab Meat Banned in Italy 37:30 Is MDF Safe? 39:15 Dangers of Weight Loss Drugs 42:35 Fact or Fake 45:35 Is it good that most are using Ai for Content Creation 47:00 Did you know you are an Organ Donar in Most EU Countries ==================== How to Contact Arnold Beekes:   https://braingym.fitness/   https://www.linkedin.com/in/arnoldbeekes/ =============== Donations ⁠⁠ https://www.podpage.com/speaking-podcast/support/ ⁠⁠ ------------------ All about Roy / Brain Gym & Virtual Assistants at https://roycoughlan.com/ ------------------

This week we discussed elections in Poland , organ donors, geo engineered soil, Dangers of MDF and more #poland #awakening #spain About my Co-Host:Arnold Beekes Innovator, certified coach & trainer and generalist. First 20 years in technology and organizational leadership, then 20 years in psychology and personal leadership (all are crucial for innovation).============What we Discussed: 00:00 What we are discussing in this weeks show 01:50 The A.I. Job Apocalypse Is Here07:00 The Polish Elections08:55 Patriotic Strike11:05 Whats the Truth with the Liverpool driver12:10 Geo Engineering the Soil14:30 Jeremy Clarkson Farm and the Council isues16:45 Why the Farmers are in decline17:20 Dead Internet Theory20:05 The Annoying Re Capcha to enter a Website21:05 Chat GPT Free to all in UAE22:40 Lunchclub is probably using your conversations for Ai23:05 Ai and Healthcare25:15 Ai Not complying to Shutdown27:30 Not selling Land to Mining Company29:20 Trumps plan for No TAX to $150K31:00 Music Eases Pain33:10 Free Dry Cleaning35:45 Fake Lab Meat Banned in Italy37:30 Is MDF Safe?39:15 Dangers of Weight Loss Drugs42:35 Fact or Fake45:35 Is it good that most are using Ai for Content Creation47:00 Did you know you are an Organ Donar in Most EU Countries====================How to Contact Arnold Beekes: https://braingym.fitness/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/arnoldbeekes/===============Donations ⁠⁠ https://www.podpage.com/speaking-podcast/support/ ⁠⁠------------------All about Roy / Brain Gym & Virtual Assistants athttps://roycoughlan.com/------------------

Trevor Hubbs from the Mule Deer Foundation jumps on to chat about mule deer, threats they face, and the great work MDF is doing to ensure a prosperous future for these amazing critters. Habitat, overpasses, funding, and the new Blacktail Deer Foundation, he migrates through interesting information you'll want to know.As always, we want to hear your feedback! Let us know if there are any topics you'd like covered on the Vortex Nation™ podcast by asking us on Instagram @vortexnationpodcast

From mouldy bread to athlete's foot, fungi don't exactly scream “home improvement.” But what if this misunderstood kingdom is the secret to the sustainable materials of the future?Listener Alexis - definitely not a gnome - wants to know how much of our homes we could build with fungi. Professor Katie Field describes how the mushroom is the just tip of the iceberg - it's the network of thread-like filaments called mycelium where fungi really do their best work. Architect Phil Ayers explains how fungi, like yeast in bread, can bind waste products into firm, MDF-like blocks. And while we're not constructing skyscrapers with mushrooms just yet, it turns out fungi-based materials are already making waves in interior design. Think sound-absorbing wall panels or insulation that's both eco-friendly and chic.And here's a cool one: mushroom leather! Using discarded stalks from mushroom farms, one company is crafting strong, flexible material for trainers, handbags, and even car dashboards. Move over, cows - mushrooms are pushing their way up.Oh, and NASA? They're dreaming big with fungi too - to grow habitats in space. From mould...to the moon! Contributors: Katie Field - Professor of Plant-Soil Processes at the University of Sheffield Phil Ayres - Professor of Biohybrid Architecture at the Royal Danish Academy Patrick Baptista Pinto - co-founder of Really Clever Maurizio Montalti - Co-founder and Chief Mycelium Officer of SQIM / MOGU Lynn Rothschild - Senior Research Scientist at NASA Ames research centreProducer: Ilan Goodman Executive Producer: Alexandra Feachem A BBC Studios Audio Production

This Episodes Questions: Brian's Questions: I'm preparing to build a set of kitchen cupboards from white oak.  The style will be Mission, with some Frank Lloyd Wright Prairies Style touches.  I have several questions.  I have a question about milling lumber.  There seems to be a trade-off: keep the boards long and you need to joint more off to get a flat face, hence the risk of falling below your desired thickness.  But cut the boards to length first and you have to allow for more cut-offs on the ends to remove planer snipe.  How should I think about this?  In general, do the three of you cut longer boards to length for parts first and then plane and joint?  Or do you joint and plane the boards whole (mine are 6' to 8') and take the perhaps larger losses to thickness but avoid multiple areas of planer snipe?   I know that much depends on the boards, but I'd be interested in your general approaches.  Darrin    Hey guys I absolutely love the podcast, amd have already learned a lot. I recently have decided to do this for more than a hobby. I have been doing small or easier projects like cutting boards and tongue and groove ceilings. I have been wanting to start building entry level tables and furniture but keep psyching myself out of it. How did you guys build up the confidence to move on to more advanced projects? And did you guys get discouraged or frustrated at the beginning? Thank you David Caraway Guy's Questions: Thank you all for such a great show!  I'm an amateur woodworker working out of a 550 square foot two-car attached garage.  We keep two cars in the garage, so all my equipment is on mobile bases. My question has to do with shop climate control.  I live in southern Indiana, with hot muggy summers and cool-to-cold winters.  The garage is insulated, including the door, and sits under a conditioned bonus room, but the garage itself is not heated or cooled.  Although it never freezes, for a few of the coldest winter weeks, it will be in upper 30s.  Mostly it's at least 45 degrees. I'm contemplating installing a 1 ton/12,000BTU mini-split for heating and cooling, DIYing installing it for less than $1000.  I'm trying to decide if it's worth it, basically for the few hottest and coldest weeks.  I can also migrate easily to my unfinished basement in the coldest weeks for glue-ups and finishing.  I wouldn't want to run the mini-split all the time, and often I am only out in the shop for short bursts, so pre-heating or pre-cooling seems wasteful.  $1000, plus the energy to run the mini-split, could buy plenty of other woodworking equipment and supplies.  If this were your shop, what would you do? Thanks, Kyle Kramer Always a pleasure listening to your podcast.  Thank you for your knowledge and insight. I am planning to rip the carpet off my Stairs treads and somehow get a relative match to my wood flooring either upstairs and downstairs.  Assuming the exact color isnt important in my question. The treads are likely just pine but I haven't pulled the carpet yet to find out.  My thought was to veneer the treads.  Then I would most likely us a transtint dye to reach the color and finish off with shellac washout and water based poly for durable finish.  Is this a good approach or destined for failure? Thanks for your time. Josh Huy's Questions: Thanks for the great podcast. I have learned a lot from all the great content you put out. I really appreciate your advice and perspective. I have a couple questions I was hoping you could answer. My second question is about compositing saw dust. My wife likes to garden and keep a compost pile. We use saw dust and wood shaving to balance the moisture of the compost pile. I occasionally use MDF and plywood  and I am wondering if all the bad stuff in those materials are bad to use in the compost. I guess I'm pretty sure they are not good. I've heard that most of those chemicals breakdown form the heat of the compost but I am skeptical of that. I use an oneida dust separator. Do you think it is worth trying to partition two dust bins, one for raw wood and one for everything else? Do you think a blast gate under the separator would accomplish that or would it mess with the air flow of the separator? Thanks. Keep up the great work. Jon Moch A lot of people talk about spraying water on wood when changing sanding grits, to raise the loose fibres and get a smoother finish. I have taken to spraying isopropyl alcohol (I think you would call it rubbing alcohol) between grits. I can spray it quite heavily and have it evaporate within a minute so I can continue sanding without having to wait. I doubt I'm the first person in the history of woodworking to think of this (I'm no rocket scientist, Huy), but I never hear of anyone else doing this. That makes me think there may be a good reason to not do this. So what do you blokes reckon? Is there a reason why I shouldn't be doing this, apart from water being free and alcohol being expensive? FYI, I usually work in recycled jarrah (an ultra hard Western Australian wood) and finish with Tung oil when using the alcohol Thanks fellas, love your work! Jim

This Episodes Questions: Brians Questions: I am making a toy box for my grandson out of white oak. The dimensions will be 38” width, 18” depth, and 30” high. The front will be 4/4 quarter sawn, while the back and sides will be 4/4 flat sawn lumber. I plan to attach the front and sides, and the back and sides via dovetails. Since quarter sawn wood will move less than flat sawn, should I be concerned about the wood moving at different ratios?  Also, can you recommend hinges that will prevent the top of the toy box from crashing down on my grandson's fingers? Mike My question concerns the router table that I built myself out of out of MDF and 2x4s last year. I'm pretty satisfied with it overall. I am by no means an expert, but I'd have to say having the router in a table seems to be roughly 1,000% more effective than using the router freehand. Having said that, I've been struggling with the fence, especially When I'm trying to edge join a board. My approach for securing the fence has been to clamp down each end of it with a trigger clamp, placing an additional clamp on the support frame or what have you at the rear of the router table. I've included a picture of my setup for this as well for clarity's sake. Here's the problem I'm running into: I position the fence, clamp it down, then check it again to make sure it hasn't come out of alignment. When I initially begin running boards over the router table, it works great. However, before too long, sometimes as soon as the second board, I find the fence is no longer properly aligned. When I check it I always find that the fence has shifted back towards the far end of the router table, usually by a 32nd of an inch or so. As you are all aware, this small difference has a pretty significant impact on how my boards come out, particularly when edge joining. My assumption is that this shift is due to my exerting pressure against the fence while feeding material through to keep the work piece tight against it. Do any of you have any suggestions regarding how I can secure my fence more effectively? Part of me wonders if I am just applying too much sideways pressure to my work pieces, but I also feel like I am applying just enough pressure to keep it from wandering away from the fence when passing the bit. Zach Owens Guy's Questions: I'd also like to hear about your process for organizing your shop space and how often you revisit the layout of your shop. As a follow-up to each question, I'd be curious if organizing and maintaining a shop are aspects of woodworking that you enjoy? Or loathe? Or maybe just tolerate? Marc I think there is a good question about red vs blue. red corner is woodpeckers, the YouTube influencers certified measuring and layout tools. Then there's the poor humans with affordable blue corner igaging. I believe woodpeckers is rated in their accuracy to .002 inch and igaging is .002 inch. So, I wonder if that .001 would make my skills somehow greater?? I think honestly that having a set of tools that I can use without each being a different measurement, as tape measures often would be. I also think about cost, even with a higher shipping fee due to my location I nearly outfitted my shop with all the marking and measuring tools at roughly $300 instead of $300 for one ruler or square. Thanks for the ongoing pod cast hope you all have a great year. Paul Mitchell Huy's Questions:  On the face of wood, there is clearly a right and wrong direction to plane. Going the wrong direction causes gouging, chipping, and/or a time tough pushing the plane across the wood. How do you tell the correct direction to go with the plane, without having to risk messing up the piece by potentially going the wrong direction across the face of the wood with your plane? George  I just made my first attempt at cutting dovetails for a small box with dividers that my wife asked me to make her for work. I cut them using a router table that I made just for the occasion. It went fairly well, meaning that they all fit and there aren't any unsightly large gaps. Starting with test pieces was definitely the way to go. I did have one issue, however. I'm not sure what the appropriate name for the different pieces of a dovetail are, but when I was cutting the female pieces I kept running into an issue where the router bit would jerk the work piece away from the fence, resulting in a somewhat crooked portion in my otherwise straight dovetail cut. I tried feeding the work piece into the bit from each side to see if one direction worked better than the other, but that didn't seem to help. I know that typically the recommendation is to make several shallow passes, but obviously this is not possible with a dovetail. Do you have any guesses as to what I might have been doing wrong? Should I have been pushing the work piece more firmly against the fence? Thanks in advance for your answers and insight. Can't wait to hear your next episode. Sincerely,Z achary T Owens  

This Episodes Questions: Brians Questions: Hello Guy, Huy, and Sean, I have two questions. 1) I'd like to hear your thoughts on your workshop maintenance routines. Are there yearly, monthly, project-ly routines to the maintenance and cleaning you do in your shops? Marc What are your woodworking goals for 2025? Brian Guys Questions: Hey Guys,  First, thanks for the fantastic podcast.  I always enjoy  listening to you gents so much so that I've managed to get through the entirety of your past episodes. A little background: I work in a small space and am consider going with a combo jointer - planer can leave me some room for something else. I am not a a professional woodworker but an enthusiastic hobbyist.  Right now I have a bench top 10" jointer (I definitely understand why Guy pretty much hates these things) and a DeWalt 735 planer.  I'm happy with the DeWalt, but the jointer can get finicky if it's moved or looked at. I believe I heard in a past episode that Huy is using a Hammer A3-31 jointer-planer combo.     Huy - are you in fact using a Hammer combo machine?  And if so, are you happy with it?   Is the fence pretty solid?  If you were to buy again, what else would you consider?  My other option is maybe a non-combo mid-price point  Powermatic or Grizzly jointer.  Any other brands to consider?  It's a tough choice - spend more money but use less space or spend less money and use up more of that limited space.  Would appreciate hearing from each of you on this topic.  Apologies for my long winded questions,  but this feels like a big decision.  Thanks again for the excellent show. Ron As always thank you for the podcast and sharing your knowledge.  This one may be mainly for Guy as I know he's a proponent of the Lamello Zeta P2.  Like Huy I'm a bit of a tool junkie, and can't pass up a new one.  I was never happy with my old Porter Cable biscuit Joiner, so I gravitated to the Domino DF500 which has been a great tool.  I came across a deal where someone was selling a complete Zeta P2 system so I picked it up.  I've watched a number of the videos guy posted using the Zeta P2 and so far she seems like a great machine, but now I have some questions that I was hoping you could point me in the right direction: 1)      Is there any reason to keep my old Porter Cable Biscuit joiner?  2)      I have the knock down domino accessories that I've used on some builds in the past.  Do you have a guide line or any thoughts on when you would use the Domino vs. the Lamello? Thanks again, Doug Huy's Questions: Hello gentlemen, since you have been asking for questions, here are some for you regarding tools for projects, projects for tools, and tools AS projects. First, tools for projects. Thinking back my early days in woodworking, there were many times when I would have an idea for a project that exceeded the capabilities of my limited tool collection. Some of these were a basic as ripping a board or making an accurate cross cut. I managed to get by with the most basic table saw that I could afford and an old circular saw. Since a lot has changed in the 30 years since I started, like track saws and set-ups like MFT and Kreg's table setups, what would you guys recommend for the basic tools for someone starting out? Second, projects for tools. As I started to improve my skills as a woodworker and more tools became available, I felt the need to add tools to my shop. To help justify the purchases, I found myself coming up with projects that would be easier if I had that "special tool/bit/blade."  Have you every made a project specifically designed to justify a tool purchase, or is it just me? If so,  what was the project and what was the tool? Third, tools AS projects. A few years ago I started to get more into hand tool woodworking after inheriting some of my grandfather's collection. I also began frequenting a couple of used tool stores in Maine while on vacation where I picked up some vintage panel saws and most of a Stanley 78 rabbet plane. With some cleaning and sharpening I began to really appreciate the use of hand tools and began looking for a used router plane. I don't know if it was just the area that I live in (New England), but there are very few used router planes to be found, and the few that I did find were almost as much as a new one. Determined to add a router plane to my arsenal I went online, found multiple different options for making my own, and then settled on the Paul Sellers' kit for the hardware and using hickory and cherry for the base. I found out to be a very fun project that taught me some new skills, and I use the tool very frequently. Have you guys done similar projects to make a useful tool that also improved your skills? Thank you for you time. Joshua The Black Dog Woodworks Hello again gentlemen.  You guys are the best at answering questions.  My third question involves making two 11" by 11 3/4" panel doors that slide left and right in a groove cut into the top and bottom of the frame.  The door panels are made of 1/2" MDF but with a 3" wide piece of Poplar that is glued to the top and bottom ends of the MDF.  This is to allow for cutting the rabbet into wood instead of MDF.  The rabbet will slide in upper and lower grooves in the frame. I created my own veneer of Walnut in the front face and Poplar in the back face because I'm cheap and the back won't show.  Both veneers are 7/64" thick and the long grain runs left to right (same direction of the door travel).  I used Titebond Veneer glue and glued both faces at once. I sandwiched the assembly between two pieces of plywood and clamped and weighted the whole thing. After 24 hours, I removed the clamps and saw that the panel had cupped in the direction across the grain (the same as a 12" wide board would cup).  I don't understand why it cupped as I thought MDF wouldn't allow that to happen.  I did use too much glue on the walnut side as there was a lot of squeeze-out.  I backed off the amount of glue on the Poplar side.  Was the veneer too thick?  Should I have ran the back face veneer perpendicular to the front face instead of in the same direction?  Did the two 3" wide Poplar pieces somehow contribute to the cupping?  I am waiting on doing the second door panel until I hear your opinions on this. Thank you for a great podcast.  I hope you all keep it going. Anthony