Company that makes virtualization software; publicly traded subsidiary of Dell
POPULARITY
Categories
In the security news this week: UK government rolls out passkeys to 20 million users Phishing-resistant authentication and replay resistance Passkey adoption, device security, and user acceptance EU Cyber Resilience Act guidance, scope, and compliance CRA vulnerability disclosure and reporting requirements The real cost of cyberattacks and cybersecurity spending Cyber insurance and improving organizational security Nightmare Eclipse and the release of Windows zero-days Check Point VPN vulnerabilities and perimeter security GitLab security updates and shadow IT Discovering unmanaged GitLab instances Cyberattacks against oil tankers and insider threats VPN patching and implied rules Zero-downtime GitLab updates and version management Running Windows ARM on Apple Silicon with VMware and Parallels Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/psw for all the latest episodes! Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/psw-944
The dominant structural shift outlined is an accelerating concentration of market power and operational control within a handful of large technology companies and platforms, exacerbated by aggressive vendor channel consolidation and a move toward marketplace-based service delivery. This concentration is evidenced by recent actions such as Broadcom's decision to cut roughly 90% of VMware's partners and take top-tier accounts direct, as well as the increasing tendency of hyperscalers and major vendors—including Microsoft, AWS, and Google—to funnel services and resources directly through their own marketplaces and forward-deployed engineering teams. Reports discussed, such as the Omdia Global Partner 1000, reinforce the extent to which the industry has pivoted toward highly scaled players at the expense of smaller channel partners and MSPs.Evidence from the Omdia Global Partner 1000 report demonstrates that the top 30 service partners now generate the same amount of revenue as the bottom 970 combined, with the remaining 970 firms outperforming over a million additional smaller providers. The managed services market was noted at $608 billion—1.5 times the size of the global SaaS industry and all hyperscalers—yet smaller MSPs report decreased growth expectations and declining vendor satisfaction; for example, satisfaction in the UK and Ireland dropped from 37% to 19%. Further, partner programs for generative AI remain underdeveloped, with over 90% at only “maturity 3 of 10,” while 82% of MSPs acknowledge they are not prepared to scale as rapidly as customer demand for AI-driven outcomes will require.Additional developments deepening this concentration include widespread launches of vendor-controlled marketplaces and the growth of token-based consumption models. Companies such as SuperOps, ManageEngine, and Pax8 are positioning their platforms as marketplaces for MSP-delivered AI and SaaS, while Microsoft and AWS continue to expand both their direct-to-customer strategy and investments in pre-sale technical resources. Analysts project that the shift toward token-based billing and variable consumption will disrupt traditional per-user pricing, limiting future margin opportunities and accelerating direct transactional relationships between vendors and end-customers.For MSPs and service providers, these shifts increase dependency on large vendor platforms, raise the risk of abrupt contract changes, and intensify pricing and margin pressure. Traditional models relying on single-source vendor relationships and predictable per-user or per-device billing are likely to be replaced by variable, consumption-based contracts governed by token usage and direct marketplace transactions. Providers must prepare for heightened governance requirements, increased operational complexity in managing multi-vendor and multi-marketplace integrations, and potential threats to their role as strategic intermediaries in client accounts.Supported by: ProofpointGuardzUSecure
In the security news this week: UK government rolls out passkeys to 20 million users Phishing-resistant authentication and replay resistance Passkey adoption, device security, and user acceptance EU Cyber Resilience Act guidance, scope, and compliance CRA vulnerability disclosure and reporting requirements The real cost of cyberattacks and cybersecurity spending Cyber insurance and improving organizational security Nightmare Eclipse and the release of Windows zero-days Check Point VPN vulnerabilities and perimeter security GitLab security updates and shadow IT Discovering unmanaged GitLab instances Cyberattacks against oil tankers and insider threats VPN patching and implied rules Zero-downtime GitLab updates and version management Running Windows ARM on Apple Silicon with VMware and Parallels Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/psw-944
In the security news this week: UK government rolls out passkeys to 20 million users Phishing-resistant authentication and replay resistance Passkey adoption, device security, and user acceptance EU Cyber Resilience Act guidance, scope, and compliance CRA vulnerability disclosure and reporting requirements The real cost of cyberattacks and cybersecurity spending Cyber insurance and improving organizational security Nightmare Eclipse and the release of Windows zero-days Check Point VPN vulnerabilities and perimeter security GitLab security updates and shadow IT Discovering unmanaged GitLab instances Cyberattacks against oil tankers and insider threats VPN patching and implied rules Zero-downtime GitLab updates and version management Running Windows ARM on Apple Silicon with VMware and Parallels Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/psw for all the latest episodes! Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/psw-944
In the security news this week: UK government rolls out passkeys to 20 million users Phishing-resistant authentication and replay resistance Passkey adoption, device security, and user acceptance EU Cyber Resilience Act guidance, scope, and compliance CRA vulnerability disclosure and reporting requirements The real cost of cyberattacks and cybersecurity spending Cyber insurance and improving organizational security Nightmare Eclipse and the release of Windows zero-days Check Point VPN vulnerabilities and perimeter security GitLab security updates and shadow IT Discovering unmanaged GitLab instances Cyberattacks against oil tankers and insider threats VPN patching and implied rules Zero-downtime GitLab updates and version management Running Windows ARM on Apple Silicon with VMware and Parallels Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/psw-944
You know exactly what compounding does to money. Why don't we apply it to our habits? Ryan Hawk is the author of
En uge hvor frygten styrede overskrifterne. Markederne peger nedad hele vejen rundt, den 10-årige rente ligger omkring 5 procent, olien i 100 dollar, og Mads mener, at tech aldrig har set billigere og mere misforstået ud. Vi taler om, hvorfor frygthistorier får lov at køre, og hvad forretningsmodellen er hos dem, der leverer dine nyheder.Makro: ECB hæver renten til 2,5 procent, amerikansk kerneinflation kom ind højere end ventet, og markedet priser nu 90 procent sandsynlighed for en renteforhøjelse på Fed-mødet i næste uge. Det store spørgsmål er Scott Bessents obligationsopkøb, som tredobles fra denne uge. Mads forklarer, hvad Treasury gør, hvorfor renten stiger i en produktionsdrevet økonomi, og hvorfor man ikke skal bette imod et land i rivalisering. Dertil geopolitik: Iran, Svalbard-kablerne, optrapning mellem Rusland og Ukraine, og forhandlingerne med Witkoff og Kushner.Nyhedsrundtur: XPeng starter serieproduktion af humanoide robotter, Nvidia og Figure AI, Samsung Foundry i Texas melder udsolgt på 2 nanometer, Joby flyver taxa i Texas, Apple foldable, The Boring Company henter 3 milliarder dollar til 23 milliarder i værdi, Elon Musk på G20 om AI-vækst og en milliard robotter, EU undersøger Broadcom og VMware, JPMorgan løfter Meta til 820 dollar på Muse-agenten, og Google investerer 15 milliarder dollar i datacentre i Finland.Ugens tema handler om AI i to lag. Først dommedags-tweetet fra Jacob Coxon, tidligere OpenAI og Anthropic, som fik over 100 millioner visninger på et døgn. Mads folder P(doom), alignment, koncentrationsrisiko og regulatorisk capture ud, og forklarer hvorfor udviklingen ikke kan stoppes. Dernæst OpenAI's bevis på Navier-Stokes-problemet, et af de syv Millennium-problemer, løst af 10.000 agenter på 88 timer. Hvad betyder det for hastigheden i alt, og hvad er en voldgrav værd, når viden bliver gratis? Vi slutter med Pluto-porteføljens nye køb i ON Semiconductor, Nvidia og Celanese, og et Oracle-regnskab med omsætning op 30 procent. Denne episode er sponsoreret af Finobo. Få et gratis økonomitjek hos specialisterne i låneoptimering ved at bruge linket:finobo.dk/gratis-oekonomitjek-aktieuniverset/Prøv den nye omlægningsberegner på Finobo.dk/beregner-omlaegningsberegner/?utm_source=aktieuniverset Denne episode er sponsoreret af Beyond11. Stærk nytænkende markedsføring til din virksomhed. Læs mere om hvordan Beyond11 hjælper din digital tilstedeværelse med rent faktisk at bryde igennem. Læs mere på Beyond11.com. Denne episode er sponsoreret af Vipp. Udforsk deres unikke univers af design – fra eksklusive køkkener og møbler til deres særlige guesthouses rundt omkring i verden på Vipp.com. Du kan også blive medejer af en unik bolig på Mallorca gennem Vippresidences.com. Denne episode er sponsoreret af Pluto.markets. Invester i aktier og ETF'er uden kurtage. Læs mere på pluto.markets, og se vores modelportefølje på pluto.markets/aktieuniverset. Skriv os en mail på aktieuniverset@gmail.com, hvis du og dit produkt vil være en del af podcastens sponsorfamilie. Tjek os ud på:FB gruppe: facebook.com/groups/1023197861808843X: x.com/aktieuniversetIG: instagram.com/aktieuniversetpodcast Aktieuniverset modelportefølje:Modelporteføljen samt tilhørende vilkår og disclaimer kan ses på pluto.markets/aktieuniverset. DISCLAIMER:Aktieuniverset indeholder markedsføring af andelsklassen NewDeal Invest, kl n (PMINDI) i afdelingen NewDeal Invest under Investeringsforeningen PortfolioManager. Markedsføringen er betalt af NDIIR ApS, CVR-nr. 43934090, FT-nr. 34183, der er investeringsrådgiver for afdelingen. Mads Christiansen er medejer af NDIIR ApS. Podcasten kan ligeledes referere til andre fonde.Indholdet i podcasten udtrykker alene værternes og gæsters egne holdninger, refleksioner og analyser, og skal ikke opfattes som en personlig anbefaling af bestemte værdipapirer eller strategier. Podcasten skal ikke anses som investeringsrådgivning, da den enkelte lytters finansielle situation, nuværende aktiver eller passiver, investeringskendskab og erfaring, investeringsformål, investeringshorisont, risikoprofil eller præferencer ikke kan inddrages. Det afhænger af den enkelte investors personlige forhold og målsætning, om en bestemt investering eller investeringsstrategi er hensigtsmæssig, og vi anbefaler, at man rådfører sig med sin investeringsrådgiver, inden en eventuel beslutning om investering tages.PMINDI kan findes via Nordnet (nordnet.dk/markedet/investeringsforeninger-liste/18148998-portfolio-manager-new-deal-invest) eller ved at søge på ISIN DK0062499810 hos din egen bank eller handelsplatform, herunder Saxo Bank.PMINDI er kun egnet for investorer med høj risikovillighed og en investeringshorisont på mindst 5 år. Al investering medfører risiko, herunder potentielt tab af kapital. Historiske resultater er ikke en pålidelig indikator for fremtidige resultater, der kan afvige meget eller være negative.Læs central investorinformation (PRIIP-KID) og prospekt for PMINDI med de fulde risikoscenarier på fundmarket.dk/newdeal-invest-kl-n. Overvej risici og fordele nøje før investering.Læs mere om risici på newdealinvest.dk/risici og generelt om investeringsforeningen på newdealinvest.dk.Vil du have en månedlig oversigt over alle positionerne i PMINDI? Så skriv dig op til nyhedsbrevet på newdealinvest.dk/nyhedsbrev. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Podcast: Industrial Cybersecurity InsiderEpisode: The “Don't Touch It” Problem Hiding on Your Plant FloorPub date: 2026-09-09Get Podcast Transcript →powered by Listen411 - fast audio-to-text and summarizationMost plants are running production on infrastructure nobody wants to touch. Somebody installed it years ago, that person is long gone, and the standing rule is to leave it alone so it keeps working.In this episode, Dino sits down with Jeff Slapp, cofounder, CTO and head of produduct development at SteelDome, to talk about what it would take to change that. Jeff has spent almost 30 years building and running data centers, starting with VMware back in 1998, and he admits that until recently he couldn't have properly defined OT, even though control systems, safety systems, and fire suppression were around him the entire time.They dig into why so many manufacturers still have hundreds of standalone HMIs, why a capital project is the real moment to think about security, and why IT/OT convergence rarely shows up in practice the way everyone talks about it. Jeff also walks through what it means to stand up a full production platform, complete with secure remote access, in about 90 seconds instead of nine months.They close on the reality that this is a people problem more than a technology problem, and why AI on the plant floor will only be as good as the foundation it runs on.Chapters:(00:00:00) If technology is not saving time, money, or mistakes, what is the point?(00:01:12) Jeff Slapp's 30-year journey from early VMware to co-founding SteelDome(00:04:35) What a universal infrastructure operating system means for the plant(00:06:24) An IT veteran admits OT was around him the whole time, and he never saw it(00:10:03) Legacy plants, standalone HMIs, and the "nobody touches it" problem(00:13:22) Kasm and secure application delivery: the missing third layer(00:18:04) Time to value: a full production platform in 90 seconds, not nine months(00:21:56) Democratizing infrastructure and where AI meets industrial security(00:25:14) Secure by design: build cybersecurity into the capital project(00:28:38) Asset inventory gaps, the IT/OT convergence myth, and closing thoughtsLinks And Resources:SteelDome WebsiteJeffrey Slapp on LinkedInWant to Sponsor an episode or be a Guest? Reach out here.Industrial Cybersecurity Insider on LinkedInCybersecurity & Digital Safety on LinkedInBW Design Group CybersecurityDino Busalachi on LinkedInCraig Duckworth on LinkedInThanks so much for joining us this week. Want to subscribe to Industrial Cybersecurity Insider? Have some feedback you'd like to share? Connect with us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube to leave us a review!The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Industrial Cybersecurity Insider, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Bob and Eric cover all the highlights from the Explore 2026 in Vegas this year. It was crowded with 4800 attendees and things were busy. Hackathon was twice as big as before, VMware{code}labs were full with Kubernetes and the Hub was crowded and buzzing. VCF 9.1 with integrated VKS and AI was what was happening.
The G7 and CISA prepare for the quantum threat. Nightmare Eclipse drops a CrowdStrike zero-day. The White House's offensive hacking plan raises legal questions. CISA offers a playbook for communicating through cyber incidents. OpenAI puts a billion dollars behind AI-powered defense. Researchers uncover a serious PostgreSQL flaw. Google patches an exploited Chrome zero-day. Broadcom fixes VMware vulnerabilities. Attackers target a WordPress plugin flaw. Lawmakers tell license plate surveillance cameras to “Flock off.” Our guest is Kevin Gosschalk, Founder and CEO of Arkose Labs, discussing his new book, After Bots, which questions the old assumption that automated traffic is inherently malicious. Camouflage for the algorithmic age. Remember to leave us a 5-star rating and review in your favorite podcast app. Miss an episode? Sign-up for our daily intelligence roundup, Daily Briefing, and you'll never miss a beat. And be sure to follow CyberWire Daily on LinkedIn. CyberWire Guest Kevin Gosschalk, Founder and CEO of Arkose Labs, joins us to discuss his new book, After Bots, and why the old assumption that automated traffic is inherently malicious no longer works. Selected Reading G7 urges organizations to prepare for quantum cyber threats (The Record) Analysts: Trump Cyber Program Could Cost Firms Legal Shields (BankInfo Security) Communicating Under Pressure: Best Practices for Service Providers (IC3) OpenAI Pledges $1bn to Bring its AI Cybersecurity Tools to Essential S (Infosecurity Magazine) 12-Year-Old PostgreSQL Vulnerability Enables Database, Server Takeover (SecurityWeek) Google warns of new Chrome zero-day flaw exploited in attacks (Bleeping Computer) VMware Workstation and Fusion Updates Patch Critical Vulnerability (SecurityWeek) Critical Elementor Pro flaw exploited to take over WordPress sites (Bleeping Computer) Flock Cameras Face Removal Nationwide Under New Bill (Newsweek) Prolific Microsoft 0-day hunter drops CrowdStrike Falcon exploit PoC (The Register) This 'Digital Camouflage' Shirt Confuses AI-Powered Surveillance Cameras (404 Media) Share your feedback. What do you think about CyberWire Daily? Please take a few minutes to share your thoughts with us by completing our brief listener survey. Thank you for helping us continue to improve our show. Want to hear your company in the show? N2K CyberWire helps you reach the industry's most influential leaders and operators, while building visibility, authority, and connectivity across the cybersecurity community. Learn more at sponsor.thecyberwire.com. The CyberWire is a production of N2K Networks, your source for strategic workforce intelligence. © N2K Networks, Inc.
Broadcom (AVGO) earnings need to demonstrate sustained AI growth backed by a strong outlook, says Stephanie Walter of HyperFRAME Research. As the Big Tech firm expands its private cloud capabilities, she sees the test in VMware and its productivity and performance. Continued custom AI chip revenue is another factor Stephanie labels as important to bolster the company's software suite. ======== Schwab Network ========Empowering every investor and trader, every market day. Subscribe to the Market Minute newsletter - https://schwabnetwork.com/subscribeDownload the iOS app - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/schwab-network/id1460719185Download the Amazon Fire Tv App - https://www.amazon.com/TD-Ameritrade-Network/dp/B07KRD76C7Watch on Sling - https://watch.sling.com/1/asset/191928615bd8d47686f94682aefaa007/watchWatch on Vizio - https://www.vizio.com/en/watchfreeplus-exploreWatch on DistroTV - https://www.distro.tv/live/schwab-network/Follow us on X – https://twitter.com/schwabnetworkFollow us on Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/schwabnetworkFollow us on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/schwab-network/ About Schwab Network - https://schwabnetwork.com/about
Mark van Oppen is 90 days into the CRO seat at SecureAuth, after four years selling a developer-led product at FusionAuth. He walks through the pre-call research he wants reps doing to connect technical pain to a business number, and why he tells them to be careful about showing it too early. He also covers his three hiring filters, what a muted seller says to a buyer, and what he's doing with the rep at 200 percent of goal who automated his own follow-up.In this episodeWhy Mark calls identity a non-optional problem, and what "critical path" changes about the saleThe step-by-step model for turning an earnings report into a cost per minute and a headcount numberWhy he tells reps not to present that model to a customer straight awayHow he runs the technical-pain-to-dollars conversation inside a one-on-one deal reviewWhy "I'm not technical" and "let me bring in my engineer" are career-limiting in this categoryThe alley-oop between AE and SE, and what twenty minutes on mute tells a buyerEnergy, excellence, experience: his three hiring filters, in that order, and why experience comes lastWhat he's doing with a rep at 200 percent of goal who built his own Claude workflowAbout the guest: Mark van Oppen is Chief Revenue Officer at SecureAuth, which he joined in 2026. He was previously VP of Sales and then CRO at FusionAuth, and before that held go-to-market roles across Blue Box, IBM, Heptio and VMware.Notable quotes"I refer to identity as a non-optional problem.""You're not going to be right, but you're going to be in the right ballpark.""It should not be the seller goes on mute and disappears for 20 minutes."Chapters (approximate)00:36 — Ninety days in, and how the SecureAuth motion differs from developer-led04:04 — Identity as a non-optional problem10:28 — The cost-per-minute homework13:24 — Coaching it inside deal reviews19:09 — Empathy for goalposts that moved23:30 — The AE and SE alley-oop25:42 — Energy, excellence, experience32:31 — The rep who automated his own follow-up38:08 — The next 90 days Support the showThe Cyber Go-To-Market Talk is the show for cybersecurity sales leaders, founders, CROs, and go-to-market operators looking to improve cyber sales performance and build more predictable revenue growth. Hosted by Andrew Monaghan, founder of Unstoppable.do, covering cyber sales leadership, revenue leadership, sales onboarding, forecasting, pipeline generation, and cybersecurity go-to-market execution.Follow me on LinkedIn for regular posts about growing your cybersecurity startupWant to grow your revenue faster? Check out my cybersecurity sales consulting and trainingNeed ideas about how to grow your pipeline? Sign up for my newsletter.
In this episode of Shift AI, Sabina Anja, Chief Technologist at VMware by Broadcom, joins host Boaz Ashkenazy for a wide-ranging conversation on why private, flexible infrastructure is becoming the foundation enterprises need for the agentic era.Sabina makes the case that most infrastructure and security thinking was built for a world where humans approve every step, and that world is already gone. An assistant waits for you. An agent, in her words, gets set loose and just goes. So what happens when nobody notices an agent doing something it was technically allowed to do, but shouldn't have? Sabina has a way of thinking about that question that most infrastructure teams haven't caught up to yet.This episode is for CIOs, CTOs, VPs of infrastructure, platform engineers, and security leaders who are trying to figure out what their environments need to look like before agents are running unsupervised inside them.Chapters[00:00] Welcome and introducing Sabina Anja[00:31] From Belgium to self-taught programmer: Sabina's first jobs[04:29] Why programming hygiene still matters with Cursor and Claude Code[06:24] Virtualization then and now: from vCPUs to vGPUs[08:52] What businesses are really asking for as AI costs spike[10:46] Inside NVMe tiering and the memory crunch[13:28] Private AI and the return of sovereign infrastructure[15:43] Data ownership, geopolitics, and the new value of stolen IP[17:48] Open source, small language models, and fit-for-purpose compute[20:59] Advice for CIOs: build flexible foundations, not two-year projects[24:40] Agents vs. assistants: why blast radius changes everything[27:26] Agentic security, guardrails, and the two words: platform matters, earned trustConnect with Sabina AnjaLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sabinaanja/Connect with Boaz AshkenazyLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/boazashkenazy/Email: info@shiftai.fm
Album 8 Track 19: How Authentic Positioning Drives Success w/Krista PattersonIn this episode of Brands, Beats & Bytes, hosts Darryl "DC" Cobbin and Larry "LT" Taman welcome positioning expert Krista Patterson, Co-Founder and CEO of Positioning Collective.Drawing from her executive tenure at tech giants like Cisco, ServiceNow, and VMware, Krista reveals why systemic business problems almost always trace back to murky positioning.Krista breaks down the distinction between targeting demographics versus targeting mindset, shares deeply personal stories about overcoming career missteps, and discusses managing high-profile partnerships like F1 McLaren. The conversation tackles modern industry shifts, from why communications leaders must question the ecological footprint of AI infrastructure to how Burger King reclaimed its market share through core positioning. Tune in for a masterclass on brand strategy, authentic leadership, and career growth.Don't forget to subscribe, rate, and share with a fellow Brand Nerd!Instagram | LinkedIn
Today’s headline news for Canadian IT solution providers: ePlus acquires Daymark Solutions: The solution provider bought the Boston-area Microsoft cloud partner for roughly $36 million, adding Azure, Microsoft 365, and security capabilities. Daymark ranked No. 41 on CRN’s 2026 Solution Provider 500. ePlus says the deal is the latest in a string of about 30 acquisitions and significantly expands its Northeast footprint. Cohesity expands Aspire Global Partner Program: The data security vendor has added new partner specializations in AI data security, cloud services, and backup and recovery, along with broader rebates and simplified training. Cohesity says the updated program, which took effect Aug. 1, 2026, rewards partner teaming and services expertise. Exclaimer launches MSP Connect for managed service providers: The new global program offers consumption-based billing, self-service provisioning, NFR licensing, and PSA integrations with ConnectWise, HaloPSA, and Kaseya BMS. Exclaimer says the program is designed to remove billing and management friction for MSPs selling email signature management as a compliance and brand-consistency layer. In Brief: IBM Consulting deploys thousands of AI agents: IBM says it has rolled out thousands of AI agents across enterprise security projects, productizing agentic AI for cybersecurity use cases. CrowdStrike warns frontier AI demands “greatest mobilization” ever: Chief business officer Daniel Bernard told CRN that AI-accelerated threats require what he calls cybersecurity’s greatest mobilization, outlining how the company is positioning partners to defend against frontier AI risks. CRN publishes 2026 Fast Growth 150: The annual list ranks solution providers by two-year growth rate. Caylent, EchoStor, and Park Place Technologies are among the top 25 fastest-growing companies. ChannelPro names Top 20 MSPs for 2026: The annual list highlights what the publication calls “bold, relentlessly innovative leaders” in the managed services space. Kaseya embeds agentic AI into MSP service delivery: The IT management platform vendor is bringing autonomous AI agents into its core MSP tools, according to an Aug. 24 report. Read Full Transcript Welcome to The Buzz from ChannelBuzz.ca, I’m Robert Dutt, today is Wednesday, August 26, and here’s what’s happening in the channel today. Solution provider ePlus has acquired the assets of fellow solution provider Daymark Solutions. According to CRN, ePlus announced the deal on Monday, paying roughly $36 million for the Boston-area Microsoft cloud partner. Daymark ranked No. 41 on CRN’s 2026 Solution Provider 500 and brings advanced Microsoft Azure, Microsoft 365, and security capabilities to ePlus. The acquisition is the latest in a string of about 30 deals ePlus has done, and it significantly expands the company’s footprint in the Northeast while deepening its Microsoft cloud services portfolio. For Canadian solution providers watching the M&A market, this deal is worth noting because it shows how midmarket Microsoft cloud practices are becoming acquisition targets as larger VARs look to build density in specific geographies. ePlus said in a statement that Daymark’s team and customer base will be integrated into its existing operations. Data security and management vendor Cohesity has expanded its Aspire Global Partner Program with new specializations, broader rebates, and simplified training requirements. The Aug. 25 announcement adds partner specializations around AI data security, cloud services, and backup and recovery, along with expanded profitability through increased rebates and deal registration protection. Cohesity says the updated program took effect on Aug. 1, 2026, and is designed to reward partner teaming, services expertise, and what the company calls “customer obsession.” The program is global, so Canadian partners are eligible for the new specializations immediately. The rebate expansion is the piece to watch here: Cohesity is moving toward outcome-based incentives that favor partners who wrap services around the platform rather than pure transactional resellers, which mirrors a broader trend across infrastructure vendors. Email signature management vendor Exclaimer has launched a dedicated partner program for MSPs called MSP Connect. The Aug. 19 announcement includes consumption-based billing, self-service provisioning, and direct integrations with ConnectWise, HaloPSA, and Kaseya BMS. Exclaimer is also offering NFR licensing so MSPs can run the platform internally before pitching it to clients. The program is global, so Canadian MSPs are eligible from day one. The pitch here is that email signatures have become a bigger compliance and brand-consistency issue as phishing attacks get more sophisticated, and MSPs can fold Exclaimer into their security and productivity stacks without adding billing complexity. According to Exclaimer, the PSA integrations mean invoice line items and tenant management should live inside tools MSPs are already using. IBM Consulting says it has deployed thousands of AI agents across security projects for enterprise clients. CRN reported the initiative on Aug. 25 as part of Big Blue’s broader push to productize agentic AI for cybersecurity use cases. CrowdStrike chief business officer Daniel Bernard says frontier AI demands what he calls cybersecurity’s “greatest mobilization” ever. In an Aug. 25 interview with CRN, Bernard outlined how the company is positioning partners to defend against AI-accelerated threats. CRN has published its 2026 Fast Growth 150 list, with the top 25 solution providers ranked by two-year growth rate. Caylent, EchoStor, and Park Place Technologies are among the fastest-growing companies. The ChannelPro Network has unveiled its Top 20 MSPs for 2026, an annual recognition of providers the publication calls “bold, relentlessly innovative leaders.” Kaseya is bringing agentic AI deeper into MSP service delivery. ChannelE2E reported on Aug. 24 that the IT management platform vendor is embedding autonomous AI agents into its core MSP tools. Full details and links in the show notes or the blog post. Later today on In The Channel, Red Hat vice president of the global partner ecosystem Kevin Kennedy sits down with me to talk about how the partner business has shifted away from swim lanes, where the VMware modernization opportunity stands for Canadian partners, and what data sovereignty actually means in practice. And if you haven’t heard it yet, yesterday on In The Channel, Cisco Canada president Raj Juneja walked me through the company’s new Sovereign Critical Infrastructure portfolio and what trust-based licensing looks like for partners selling air-gapped infrastructure to Canadian public sector clients. That’s how we’re seeing the headlines today. I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, thanks for listening. Have a great day.
Kevin Kennedy, vice president of global partner ecosystem at Red Hat The channel has fundamentally changed – and for a long time, Red Hat‘s partner program hadn’t caught up. That’s the candid starting point for Kevin Kennedy, who joins In The Channel this week fresh off his appointment as Red Hat’s vice president of global partner ecosystem. Kennedy’s career spans just about every layer of the channel – direct sales at IBM and Xerox, close to a decade at Arrow Electronics, and leadership roles at VCE, Dell EMC, and TD SYNNEX before joining Red Hat in 2022. That perspective shapes how he talks about the shift from a model built on clear “swim lanes” – where resellers, services partners, and software sellers all stayed in their own lanes – to the multi-partner, collaborative engagements that define how business gets done today. “It’s really hard to even define a partner today,” Kennedy says. “We can’t go to market by ourselves any longer.” Red Hat’s program refresh responds to that reality with a bifurcated incentive structure: front-end rewards for individual sellers at the deal level, and back-end incentives for firms making deeper investments in Red Hat competencies. Kennedy is direct about what drove the change: “We were putting all of our rewards around the resell of our products. And that ship had sailed.” The conversation also covers the Broadcom/VMware disruption as a modernization opportunity rather than a rip-and-replace play, where AI realistically fits in the partner revenue picture right now, the evolving role of distribution as an ecosystem aggregator, and – for Canadian partners specifically – the growing urgency of data sovereignty as a go-to-market factor. And Kennedy offers a memorable frame for Red Hat’s long-term platform ambition: “Red Hat inside” – the idea that Red Hat increasingly underpins solutions partners build and customers buy, whether or not the name is on the box. 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 Kevin Kennedy, vice president of the global partner ecosystem at Red Hat. Kevin’s career spans just about every seat in the channel: direct sales at IBM and Xerox; the better part of a decade, on and off, at Arrow Electronics; leadership roles at VCE and Dell EMC; and then about five years running advanced solutions at Tech Data and TD SYNNEX before coming to Red Hat in 2022. That’s a resume that takes you from carrying a bag, through distribution leadership, to vendor-side ecosystem strategy. That full-channel perspective shapes how he thinks about the partner business in ways that are pretty evident in this conversation. Red Hat recently named him the permanent head of its global partner ecosystem, and the word “ecosystem” in that title is deliberate, as you’ll hear. We get into how the partner business has fundamentally shifted from the old swim-lane model to something much more collaborative and complex; what Red Hat is changing in its partner program and why; the VMware modernization opportunity; where AI realistically fits in the partner revenue story right now; and what data sovereignty means for Canadian partners specifically. Let’s get right into it, my chat with Kevin Kennedy. Robert Dutt: Kevin, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it. Kevin Kennedy: Thanks for having me, Rob. I appreciate being here. Robert Dutt: You’ve been in so many different seats facing the channel, from starting in direct sales at IBM and Xerox, to distribution, and now, of course, the vendor side. I’m curious: when you look back at the arc of the channel, as it were, over that time, what’s the biggest way the partner business has changed since you started looking at it and watching it closely? Kevin Kennedy: That’s a great question, because there has been a significant evolution, that’s for sure. I think it starts with the definition of what a partner is. It used to be that you had very clear swim lanes. You had resellers, you had services partners, and you had people who always sold software or people who always sold hardware. Everybody had their individual lanes, and that was predominantly the way the channel made money: through the resale of all those things. If you fast-forward to today, it’s completely different. It’s really hard to even define a partner today. You can’t put them in one camp. Take a larger partner like WWT, for example. It used to be the preeminent reseller for a myriad of OEM lines. Today, that may be just a portion of its business. If you look at its total bottom-line profitability, I would say the vast majority of that comes from the services it offers and the contracts it manages for very large customers. Partners have evolved. We used to be able to go sell something individually. With the complexity that now exists in technology and the solutions that customers are demanding, we can’t go to market by ourselves any longer. We’re forced to collaborate and build relationships outside of our historical domains in order to present a customer with a holistic solution that’s going to drive the outcomes or efficiencies they demand. I think all of that dynamic is great. We talked about multi-partner engagement for decades and couldn’t get it to work because, realistically, we were all competing for the same nickel. If I went into a customer with you, likely one of us would get cut out of that deal or eventually be eased out. Today, that’s not true. We’re really dependent on each other. You bring your strengths to the table, I bring mine to the table, and those combined strengths are what the customer is going to realize. I think that’s the exciting component that’s really changed dramatically, especially over the last 10 years, and even more so over the last five. Robert Dutt: That speaks to the fact that you’re coming in as vice president of the global partner ecosystem, rather than vice president of channel sales or vice president of partner programs. I’m guessing, especially from that latter point about the co-sell and multi-partner arrangement becoming much more accepted and more of a default, that it’s a meaningful and purposeful distinction. What changes day to day when you call it an ecosystem, or when you think of it as an ecosystem, rather than a channel? Kevin Kennedy: I think your point is well made. The title and our nomenclature – ecosystem versus channel, or ecosystem versus partner – are intentional. Again, it goes back to illustrating the necessity of multiple people with varying levels of expertise in a variety of domains. All of them are required to bring a customer a solution and drive an outcome. It actually makes things more complex in some regards. From my lens, at the end of the day, what do we want to sell? We want to sell Red Hat products and our platforms into a customer. In years gone by, that might have been a much more simplistic arrangement. Our sales teams would call on a customer, represent only what we’re good at, and get that deal done. That no longer remains the case. I have to make sure we’re selling the value of Red Hat’s portfolio not just to the customer. I’ve also got to make sure the systems integrator sees how we can bring value to the solutions they’re going to represent to their customer base. I’ve got to represent the value of Red Hat to the hyperscalers – why they should care about us and how we may drive consumption in their marketplaces. I’ve got to bring value to the distributors and explain why they want to put resources around our product portfolio. I need to show them how our portfolio is going to help accelerate some of the more profitable lines they represent. On one hand, the ecosystem model illustrates the necessity for all of us to come together. On the other hand, it invites complexity from a go-to-market standpoint because everybody’s my customer. That’s traditionally been true in distribution, where a lot of my heritage comes from. We used to have the adage that we’re nobody’s customer and everybody’s customer, because I have to constantly sell the value of why we exist and why we should matter to you, and how we can help you be successful. Robert Dutt: That must make it an interesting challenge to structure programs when it’s no longer as simple as, “You are a reseller, therefore you fit in box A.” Now you’ve got to get creative with your programs and incentives in order to keep partners excited about what you’re doing, engaged with your platforms, and recognizing where you’re headed and why that might be valuable to them. Kevin Kennedy: I’ve got to construct a program with incentives that look at presales and the whole customer-management lifecycle. It’s no longer just, “We’ve got a product and a contract for that product that’s going to be sold.” Now I’ve got to think about adoption. I’ve got to think about how we make that product more pervasive through an organization. I’ve got to ensure that everything we said was going to be done when we presented the solution is actually coming to fruition, so the customer sees a return on that investment. If they don’t, I’m going to be a one-and-done. If they do, it’s going to give me an opportunity to have conversations around other things we can bring to bear that might provide similar or even better outcomes than what they did initially with us. Robert Dutt: When you did the program refresh, you said it was built around simplicity, predictability and profitability – three words that come up a lot in channel chief conversations, for obvious reasons. I don’t think those are unique to Red Hat, but along with what you’ve already touched on, what did you see or hear from partners about what they were experiencing that made those changes the priority at this time? Kevin Kennedy: That’s a good question. When I joined Red Hat, I observed that we weren’t necessarily meeting partners where they were. We were still thinking about the way things had been in years gone by. We were typically putting all of our rewards – and, by the way, they were plentiful – around the resale of our products. That ship had sailed. The ecosystem had evolved considerably, but we hadn’t necessarily evolved with it. What we tried to do, especially with the incentives we launched in January, was meet partners where they are. That means we have to bifurcate our incentive structure. We’ve got sellers at those partner organizations, and we need to make sure we’re targeting incentives on the front end, at the deal and transaction level, to get them excited about moving Red Hat products. Primarily, I look at that as a great opportunity for customer acquisition. There are a lot of places where we haven’t been, and those sellers are going to be able to introduce us to those customers. They have respected and long-tenured relationships that are going to help us land our objectives, which is to have the Red Hat portfolio consumed there. Similarly, we’ve got to make sure we’re incentivizing the firms to make the investments necessary to upskill their people and ensure they have the technical requirements and technical capabilities to deliver our solutions. We’re showing them a path from whatever managed services they currently provide in the enterprise to how they can include Red Hat as part of that. That’s going to be accretive to their service capabilities and to their profitability. We’re ensuring that we have both the front end and the back end covered. Again, we’re meeting partners where they are in the market, rather than saying that we only care about what they’re going to do for us from a product standpoint. We recognize that services are probably the most profitable component of their business. How do we translate the sale of our products into an increase in their services business, which is going to be accretive to their overall profitability? Robert Dutt: The nice part about that approach, even if you are coming from playing catch-up a little bit, is that there isn’t quite as much need to educate or incentivize partners to come around to where you’re going. You’re setting it up based on where they’re at today. Kevin Kennedy: Exactly. Recognizing that partners need a lot of hand-holding and a lot of our Red Hat engagement isn’t necessarily true. In many cases, partners have a level of sophistication that’s beyond what we would even address in a traditional enablement program. Now it’s about leveraging all those skills and competencies and translating them into what that means for Red Hat and how that accelerates adoption of our portfolio. From a partner standpoint, what does our portfolio mean to them in terms of plugging into what they’re already doing from a go-to-market standpoint? It puts more bullets in the gun when they’re talking to a customer. Robert Dutt: One of the areas of opportunity right now has to be the whole Broadcom-VMware situation, which has created a lot of disruption for partners, customers and pretty much everyone. Red Hat is obviously positioned well in that space, but capturing the opportunity through the channel is different from simply having the right technology on the shelf. How are you helping partners have that conversation with customers, especially those who are frustrated and interested in other options but aren’t necessarily ready to make the big jump? Kevin Kennedy: When the whole Broadcom situation first transpired, I think we all saw it as a generational opportunity to make a land grab. We all had varying degrees of success. And when I say “we all,” I don’t just mean Red Hat, but others that play in this space as well. Where we’ve seen a tremendous acceleration in our opportunity is by changing the conversation. When we go out with one of our partners and talk to customers about what they’re doing from a virtualization perspective, it’s no longer simply about moving off VMware onto Red Hat, for instance. It’s about modernization. It’s about making sure that the customer is prepared for its technology journey – moving from virtualization and modernizing its data centre toward the AI conversation that I’m sure we’ll get to in a moment. Red Hat and our partners can help customers on that journey and accelerate it without requiring a rip-and-replace approach or a complete transformation of their entire infrastructure. They can leverage the things they may do with us today to move off VMware and into a more modernized, virtualized, containerized and Kubernetes-based environment. That prepares them to take the next step into AI. It’s not a step back. It’s not a step sideways. It’s a step forward from their initial investment with us. Robert Dutt: It is 2026, and we’ve been talking for 12 or 13 minutes now, so I am legally required to ask an AI question at this point. You’ve been pretty straightforward in saying that virtualization, automation and hybrid cloud are still the real revenue drivers, while AI is more of a near-future opportunity. I respect that honesty, and I think it probably maps closely with what partners are telling you about where they are today. But where does that leave the partner who’s getting pressure from customers to have an AI story right now? Do you lead with the infrastructure story, or do you lead with AI and then backfill toward virtualization, automation and hybrid cloud? Kevin Kennedy: I think we lead with the hybrid modernization and automation play first, and then segue into the AI discussion. Part of what we’ve seen over the last year, especially, is the need to separate AI reality from AI hype. Everybody talks about AI, and I think the pockets of success have come from partners who are listening to customers and giving them the counsel and advice that they don’t need to boil the ocean. Let’s start with some very specific processes that the customer could look to automate by leveraging AI technology and Red Hat technology. Then the customer will be able to see an immediate win and a return on that initial investment. From there, we can see where to grow. For most customers, it’s not too different from us as consumers. We think of AI and ChatGPT, and all of these things where we’re going to be able to ask a whole bunch of questions and get smart answers back to help inform us about where to go. For a lot of customers, that’s debilitating. They don’t even know where to start. The whole thing is a massive labyrinth of issues they’re trying to sort through. Every partner that can go in and provide consultative advice – saying, “We don’t need to look at everything. Let’s start with some very direct things that you say require a lot of manual intervention or take up a lot of cycles” – can leverage AI technology to circumvent a lot of that. They can make processes that took weeks or months translate into hours or minutes. What productivity increase do you see as a result? That’s an immediate win and a return on the initial investment. I think the partners that understand what collaboration looks like in this space are also going to be successful, because AI forces us to talk to others and play well with others. Even for us, we’ve enjoyed a lot of recent announcements around collaborative partnerships with NVIDIA, Dell, Cisco and others. We’re doing these things together. It’s not because we each woke up one day and said, “I really want to build a partnership with NVIDIA,” or, “I really want to build a better partnership with Cisco.” We were forced to have those conversations because of the outcomes customers expect. We realized that while we have a really important and robust piece of the solution, it’s only a piece of the pie, and the customer wants the whole pie. How do we orchestrate and architect it together so that we collaborate and go to the customer together and say, “Here’s what we can do for you. Here’s your whole pie”? Robert Dutt: You spent years on the distribution side, as you said earlier. A lot of your career was spent there. Now you’re managing some of those same companies, or the companies they’ve become over time, as a vendor. I’m curious: has your background in distribution changed what you actually ask of distributors, or what you think vendors typically ask of distributors but either shouldn’t or should ask more of? Kevin Kennedy: I tell anybody who wants to be involved in the ecosystem that if you’ve worked in distribution, that’s your MBA of channel engagement. You learn so much because, when I was at TD, for instance, I was doing business with every major OEM in the world, each with different expectations and demands. I was running a business on basis points. Understanding how to get the greatest efficiencies in the sales model and how to reap the greatest amount of profit in order to continue investing in the business prepared me better for the ecosystem role I have today. Even when I got to Red Hat, I think the way we leveraged distribution was much more traditional. We appreciated distributors for the financial piece they brought to the equation. That continues to be a critical thing that distribution adds to technology in general: they’re a financial backbone for a lot of the investments we’re all making. But distributors were also viewed as providing logistics and operational efficiencies. While that’s still part of what they do, it’s just a small part of what they do today. I look at distributors as aggregators. We talked about how one, two, five or seven partners may touch every transaction a customer buys. There’s no better place to bring all of that together than within distribution. Distributors have developed their own great level of sophistication. They’ve got technical expertise across multiple vendor lines. They’ve made tremendous investments in AI on their own, and they have specialists who are trained, competent and capable. I’m leaning on them to do a lot of the enablement for me. When I look at how we go to market with all these different partner types – whether it’s hyperscalers, OEMs, GSIs or ISVs – I can go to distribution, which is also doing business across all those same partner types, and say, “How do we work more effectively together to develop a really cohesive go-to-market strategy?” The distributor is the aggregator. It can go to the partners we all share in common – the WWTs, CDWs, Softchoices and Mobias of the world – and say, “How can you bring all this together for us to present to these partners, so they can go talk to a customer and have a holistic solution to put in front of them?” Distributors represent that capability for me. We’re leaning in hard with distribution, certainly on the legacy and traditional things they bring to bear, but more importantly on the forward-looking investments they’re making in their own enterprises that are going to help accelerate partner adoption of our solutions. Robert Dutt: Close to home, data sovereignty is a major issue for Canadian organizations right now. Between government guidance and some muscle being put behind that, there’s a growing concern about where data resides and the whole CLOUD Act question. Do you see that showing up in partner conversations in Canada, and how does Red Hat’s story change in that context, if it does? Kevin Kennedy: It’s a prevalent and very relevant conversation today in Canada, certainly in EMEA and APAC – essentially everywhere outside of the United States. It’s forced us to re-evaluate how we’re going to market in those environments. It changes the perspective on simply talking about the hyperscalers. It changes the perspective on what a sovereign cloud looks like and who the players are. It’s introducing us to players in spaces such as telecom, where telcos are now looking more like the sovereign cloud providers of the future. How do we build a secure solution, working on a public cloud, private cloud or sovereign cloud provider, that will be required – especially in government and GOE spaces – and provide them with the opportunities they’ll need in the future? It started to emerge perhaps at the end of last year, but it’s now a massive topic of conversation with us, and I think that’s going to continue. When we talk about AI, this is going to be a big component as well. How do we protect this data, and how do we have it reside in a secure environment that’s critical to government agencies and how they operate every day? Robert Dutt: Do you see Red Hat partners as having a major untapped or under-realized opportunity right now? Kevin Kennedy: I still think virtualization is a major, major untapped market. We’re hot on the customer-acquisition trail. Traditionally, we’ve grown through established customer relationships that have been great to us over the years. We’ve made mutual investments in those relationships, and we’re certainly going to continue that. But we’ve got to find new business. I think AI is the accelerant in that. It gives us a forum for conversations around what we’ve built. Anybody who has made an investment in our core portfolio has a springboard to get to where they want to go relative to AI. The partnerships I referenced with NVIDIA, Cisco, Dell, HPE and others are great catalysts for opening discussions with customers who perhaps didn’t know Red Hat before. I sometimes think about it this way – and this is probably an oversimplified way to put it – but for years we all bought laptops that ran on Intel chips. “Intel Inside” was a great marketing ploy for a whole host of reasons. I kind of see Red Hat that way a little bit: Red Hat inside. We’re going to be the underpinning of a lot of solutions that customers are going to buy in the future. They may not even know that Red Hat is running in there, and I’m not sure that we care. We want to be that secure platform that provides mobility from the cloud to on-premises environments, with seamless motion back and forth. We want to provide the level of security that’s going to be required, whether that’s in a sovereign environment or in our current state, where data security is the utmost concern. We want to be the underpinning that allows all that stuff to run effectively and efficiently, and gives customers portability and an open concept. Whether or not the customer actually knows Red Hat is there, I’m not sure that matters that much to us from the customer lens. It matters more in terms of how we’re going to work with some of the other partner routes we’ve talked about, especially given the ecosystem discussion. Robert Dutt: I’m curious what you’d like to see partners doing more, better or differently for the benefit of Red Hat, yes, but especially for their own businesses and where the business is going. Kevin Kennedy: I want to be a catalyst for them to sell autonomously. I think OEMs have often seen themselves in an outsized role when it comes to going to market with partners. We’ve acted as though partners need us in order to deliver the solution, or need a Red Hat badge in order to get validated by the customer. Certainly, there may still be an element of that, but I’ve found that partners’ customer relationships and the trust they’ve already earned with those customers supersede our need to be necessarily involved. I’m looking at ways to pour gasoline on that fire. How can I get out of the way and let partners move at a quicker pace than they may have in the past? Certainly, we’re part of the solution. We want to make sure partners have everything necessary, whether that’s training, enablement, demo equipment, proofs of concept or executive briefing centres – whatever they need to ensure they have the utmost confidence to position a solution that contains Red Hat products in the best light with the customer. But we know partners don’t need our help to have that sales conversation. They don’t necessarily need our help to deliver the services after the sale, to do the migration or to provide managed services, because they already have that expertise. We just need to make sure they feel confident that they can incorporate us into that motion. That’s really my focus, even from an ecosystem program standpoint. I want to put the incentives in a place that accelerates all the things partners are already good at and simply includes us in that motion. Robert Dutt: It sounds from those last couple of answers that you’re quite happy being the underpinning, the foundation behind either the customer solution or the partner’s sales motion. How does that shape what you’re focused on personally and program-wise in terms of what partners can expect from you and from Red Hat over the balance of the year and beyond? Kevin Kennedy: My mantra has been to do more with less. What I mean by that is that the partners who already fit the profile I’ve been describing – those with core competencies and skills, strong market presence, tremendous customer relationships, and investments in upskilling their people with the technical and sales expertise to represent Red Hat well in the marketplace – are the partners I want to invest in to a high degree. The partners who may traditionally have just wanted to put our logo on their website and clicked through to become a partner because they wanted to resell or perform more fulfilment activities – that’s great, and I still want to welcome those partners. But those are not the partners around whom I’m going to build programs or in whom I’m going to invest heavily. They’re not the partners where I’m going to continue putting direct resources side by side with them to win in the marketplace. I want to go deeper and wider with fewer partners who have the investments and skills necessary to bring customers the outcomes and efficiencies they’re looking for. Robert Dutt: That’s a great place to leave it. Kevin, thank you very much for taking the time. Kevin Kennedy: Thank you for having me. It’s been a great time, and I appreciate the opportunity. Robert Dutt: There you have it, Kevin Kennedy from Red Hat. I’d like to thank Kevin for his time today. He’s someone who has thought seriously about how this business actually works from multiple vantage points, and that comes through. Thanks for listening as well. A couple of things I’m taking away from this one. The “Intel Inside” framing that Kevin used – the idea that Red Hat is increasingly going to be the underpinning of solutions that customers buy and partners build, without necessarily being the name on the box – is a significant strategic statement. It’s a bet that being foundational is worth more than being front and centre. It’s worth watching how that plays out for partners who are building practices around Red Hat technology, or potentially are. And the ecosystem-versus-channel distinction doesn’t come off as just a title change. When you’re talking about a single customer engagement that might bring together a cloud provider, a services integrator, a software specialist and a reseller, all at the same table, the question of how you build a program and reward structure around that is unsolved across the industry. Red Hat is working on it, but so are a lot of other people. For Canadian partners specifically, the data sovereignty conversation is one to pay attention to. Kevin was candid that it’s reshaping how Red Hat thinks about going to market outside the United States, and the Canadian regulatory environment is only going to make that more pressing over the next few years. If you found this useful, please follow or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. We’re on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube and most major directories. Ratings and reviews are always appreciated. Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.
What separates a productive sales team from one buried in operational work? For Srinivas Bandi, it comes down to eliminating the endless toil that keeps sellers away from actually selling. In this episode of Hunters and Unicorns, Simon Kouttis and Ollie Kuehne sit down with Srinivas Bandi, Co-Founder and CTO of Aurasell, to explore how AI is reshaping the modern go-to-market stack and changing how sales teams work. They discuss why most sellers spend less than 25% of their time selling, how AI agents can automate everything from prospecting to forecasting, and why the future of sales is about letting humans focus on high-value conversations. The conversation also explores AI-native software, data ownership, the fragmentation of today's GTM stack, and why companies need to focus on business outcomes rather than simply adding more tools. In this episode: • Why sales reps spend less than 25% of their time selling • How AI can move selling time from 25% to 75% • Why the future of sales is AI agents + human conversations • The problem with fragmented GTM stacks and 50+ tools • Why high-fidelity data is becoming a competitive advantage • How AI is changing product development and customer success • Why speed and execution are becoming critical moats • What the future of the GTM stack could look like About Srinivas Bandi Srinivas Bandi is the Co-Founder and CTO of Aurasell, with previous leadership experience at VMware, Nutanix, and Harness. He has spent his career building enterprise technology and scaling products across cloud, infrastructure, and AI. Subscribe to Hunters and Unicorns for conversations with the leaders building, scaling, and transforming high-growth technology companies. About Our Sponsor: Big thanks to Aurasell for sponsoring this episode. Aurasell is an AI-native GTM platform that replaces the 15+ disconnected tools your sales team is juggling — prospecting, deal management, forecasting, and coaching all in one place. Available as a layer on your existing Salesforce or HubSpot, or as a standalone AI-native CRM. https://www.aurasell.ai/ #HuntersAndUnicorns #SrinivasBandi #Aurasell #SalesAI #AIAgents #GTM #B2BSales #SalesLeadership #RevOps #RevenueGrowth #ArtificialIntelligence Timestamps: 0:00 — Trailer 1:09 — Welcome & Introduction 2:17 — Career — VMware to Nutanix to Harness 6:02 — Identifying a Company's Real Moat 9:09 — Creating Real Differentiation in a Crowded Space 15:38 — What Drew Him to Solving This Problem 20:28 — Building for the Future With Aurasell 26:33 — The Nutanix Product & Its Impact 30:41 — Balancing Customer Feedback With Product Vision 35:14 — Staying Ahead When Innovation Moves Fast 38:51 — Will the Founder Profile Change in the AI Era 41:34 — The Future GTM Stack 44:33 — Will AI Make the Market Too Noisy 47:35 — How the Seller Profile Will Change With AI 49:31 — Could Salespeople Ever Be Fully Replaced 52:02 — Aurasell's Impact on Sales Rep Productivity 56:04 — Is Customer Success Being Replaced by AI 58:02 — Closing
Medusa's reach grows. Cl0p expands its victim list. The DOJ charges 17 alleged Iranian hackers. CISA sounds the alarm on four exploited vulnerabilities. TWINLOOT hides in plain sight inside Microsoft 365. Maria Varmazis shares the latest from the space-cyber realm as Ukraine strikes Russia's satellite nerve center. The FDA considers guardrails for AI medical devices. Expired credit cards get an unexpected second life. A disgruntled contractor heads to prison. Dave Bittner sits down with Brian Vecci, Field CTO at Varonis, at Black Hat USA to discuss how AI is calling your security bluff. Highway hijinks meet high-tech hardware. Remember to leave us a 5-star rating and review in your favorite podcast app. Miss an episode? Sign-up for our daily intelligence roundup, Daily Briefing, and you'll never miss a beat. And be sure to follow CyberWire Daily on LinkedIn. CyberWire Guest At Black Hat USA, Dave Bittner sat down with Brian Vecci, Field CTO at Varonis, as they discussed how AI is calling your security bluff. If you enjoyed this conversation, be sure to check out the full interview here. Selected Reading CISA: Medusa ransomware hit over 500 critical infrastructure orgs (Bleeping Computer) US charges Iranians for sprawling hacking campaign on government agencies, universities (The Record) Cl0p Ransomware Group Names Over 40 Victims of PTC Windchill Campaign (SecurityWeek) CISA Urges Immediate Patching of Exploited Microsoft, VMware, Apple Vulnerabilities (SecurityWeek) New TWINLOOT Malware Steals Windows Passwords Via Fake Lock Screen (Hackread) Ukraine says it hit Russian rocket centre linked to Starlink-style network (CNBC) FDA Weighing Possible Regs for GenAI Medical Devices (GovInfo Security) Expired credit cards revived by researchers to make unauthorized payments (The Register) Prison for data analyst who tried to extort $2.5 million from his employer (Bitdefender) ‘The Worst I've Ever Seen': Cargo Thefts Have Turned Violent in Pursuit of AI Hardware (WIRED) Share your feedback. What do you think about CyberWire Daily? Please take a few minutes to share your thoughts with us by completing our brief listener survey. Thank you for helping us continue to improve our show. Want to hear your company in the show? N2K CyberWire helps you reach the industry's most influential leaders and operators, while building visibility, authority, and connectivity across the cybersecurity community. Learn more at sponsor.thecyberwire.com. The CyberWire is a production of N2K Networks, your source for strategic workforce intelligence. © N2K Networks, Inc.
Andrew Pla sits down with TJ Turner at Microsoft's TechMentor conference @ Microsoft HQ in Redmond, Washington, for a conversation about PowerShell, career growth, and the parts of working in IT that don't show up in the documentation. TJ traces his path from infrastructure through K-12, finance, and retail to his current role as a Cloud Evangelist at TD SYNNEX, along with his early days using PowerShell v2 and v3, competing in the Scripting Games, and helping start the Philadelphia PowerShell User Group. They also dig into real-world automation wins, including a PowerShell workflow that helped validate thousands of systems before a holiday weekend, plus burnout, community, asking for help, and what years of broken demos and IT mistakes can teach you about staying prepared and learning to adapt. Key Takeaways: · What got you here won't get you there. TJ's career moved from hands-on infrastructure into distribution, cloud, and technical evangelism, and none of those moves were necessarily part of the original plan. Staying open to new roles, skills, and opportunities has been a big part of that growth. · PowerShell changes how you think, not just how you work. TJ shares examples of using PowerShell to validate thousands of systems, automate VMware update workflows, and collect detailed system state information. Over time, that automation mindset became part of how he approaches problems, even as his career moved beyond day-to-day infrastructure work. · Community and communication are technical skills too. Whether it's recognizing burnout, asking for help, meeting someone at a conference, or admitting you don't know an answer during a presentation, the ability to connect with other people can have just as much impact on your career as knowing the technology. Guest Bio: TJ Turner is a Cloud Evangelist at TD SYNNEX, one of Microsoft's largest distributors in the CSP and partner channel. His background is in infrastructure, with experience spanning K-12, financial services, retail, and other enterprise environments. TJ got started with PowerShell during the v2 and v3 era, competed in the Scripting Games, and helped found the Philadelphia PowerShell User Group. Today, his work includes Azure, Microsoft 365, security, GitHub, DevOps, and helping partners grow their businesses. Resource Links: · TD SYNNEX Microsoft Partner Programs: https://www.tdsynnex.com/na/us/Microsoft/ · PDQ Connect PowerShell Scanner: https://www.pdq.com/powershell-scanner/ · PDQ PowerShell Scanner Blog Post: https://www.pdq.com/blog/the-powershell-scanner-has-arrived-in-pdq-connect/ · PDQ Community PowerShell Scanners Repository: https://github.com/pdqcom/PowerShell-Scanners · TJ Turner on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/search/results/people/?keywords=TJ+Turner+TD+SYNNEX The PowerShell Podcast on YouTube: https://youtu.be/ce9vxdkzDbo
Technovation with Peter High (CIO, CTO, CDO, CXO Interviews)
What separates an exceptional executive from an outlier founder? For Sequoia Capital partner Bogomil Balkansky, learning the difference required recalibrating his own definition of talent. In this episode of Technoventure, Peter High speaks with Balkansky about how Sequoia evaluates founders when there is little data to rely on, why intuition matters in early-stage investing, and what his experiences at VMware and Bebop taught him about building enduring companies. They also explore the evolution of Wiz, AI's impact on cybersecurity, and why the companies that define a technology era may not be the ones that first blaze the trail. You'll hear: What makes a founder an “outlier” Why great employees do not always become great founders How Balkansky approaches high-stakes, one-way-door decisions Why startups should earn the right to become platforms How AI could create a new generation of cybersecurity champions Listen to the full conversation for an investor-operator perspective on founders, markets, risk, and building through disruption.
In this episode, we welcome Ernie China, who recently joined Everpure after a decade at VMware and Broadcom. Ernie brings deep expertise in the virtualization ecosystem and offers a unique perspective on the industry landscape during this pivotal time. Our conversation serves as a warm introduction to Ernie and sets the stage for a broader discussion on the challenges and opportunities facing IT teams today. The core of our discussion explores the current state of virtualization, particularly how enterprises are reacting to the recent changes following the Broadcom acquisition. Ernie explains why customers are feeling significant turmoil as they navigate shifts from perpetual licenses to subscription models. They discuss the common struggle many organizations face, describing a transitional phase where leaders are weighing whether to stay the course with their existing VMware investment or explore alternative hypervisors and container based strategies. Finally, we highlight Everpure's commitment to supporting customers throughout this transition. Everpure remains fully invested in the VMware ecosystem while providing a robust foundation for those looking to modernize their infrastructure through containers or other hypervisors. We make a compelling case for why IT leaders must elevate data management as a strategic priority, ensuring that decisions about performance, security, and efficiency are made long before infrastructure choices are finalized. To learn more, visit: https://www.everpuredata.com/solutions/virtualization.html Check out the new Everpure digital customer community to join the conversation with peers and Everpure experts: https://purecommunity.purestorage.com/ 00:00 Coming Up 00:29 Intro to our Guest 04:32 Inside the Broadcom Transition 09:11 Stats of the Episode on Virtualization Trends 15:10 Alternative Hypervisors and Options 19:50 Dual Strategies 24:50 Data Management is Imperative 27:44 Hot Takes Segment
When mid-air Wi-Fi scares meet massive enterprise AI investments, IT teams are forced to rethink both security and cloud strategy. On this episode of the Tech Field Day News Rundown, hosts Tom Hollingsworth and Alastair Cooke break down a fake Wi-Fi network detected on a Delta flight post-DEF CON that temporarily shut down inflight internet. They also explore NetApp acquiring JetStream Software to ease VMware cloud disaster recovery, along with NVIDIA releasing open-source tools like Nemotron 3.5 Lightning and NeMo Switchyard to cut enterprise AI costs. IBM and Together AI are building a $240 million AI cluster on IBM Cloud, Sectigo launched its Orchestration Gateway to automate certificate renewals before TLS lifespans drop to 47 days, Blumira introduced the Hearth AI security command center, and the FBI teamed up with Huntress to patch thousands of compromised Microsoft Exchange servers using an attacker backdoor.This and more on the Tech Field Day News Rundown with Tom Hollingsworth and Alastair Cooke. Tech Field Day is part of The Futurum Group. Time Stamps: 0:00 - Cold Open1:18 - Welcome to the Tech Field Day News Rundown2:17 - NetApp Buys JetStream to Expand VMware Disaster Recovery5:07 - Delta Flight Wi-Fi Targeted by Hackers After DEF CON8:11 - NVIDIA Pushes Open AI With New Models and Routing Tools11:00 - Sectigo Automates Certificate Management as Renewal Windows Shrink14:33 - IBM and Together AI Strike $240M NVIDIA Infrastructure Deal16:55 - Blumira Launches AI Command Center for Cybersecurity19:55 - FBI and Huntress Used Hacker Backdoors to Disrupt Silk Typhoon26:07 - The Weeks Ahead: Upcoming Tech Field Day Events29:13 - Thanks for Watching the Tech Field Day News RundownThis and more on the Tech Field Day News Rundown with Tom Hollingsworth and Alastair Cooke. Follow our hosts Tom Hollingsworth, Alastair Cooke, and Stephen Foskett. Follow Tech Field Day on LinkedIn, on X/Twitter, on Bluesky, and on Mastodon.
SANS Internet Stormcenter Daily Network/Cyber Security and Information Security Stormcast
Apple Patch Summary / Postscript https://isc.sans.edu/diary/Apple%20Patches%20Everything%20%28July%202026%29/33196 IPMI Admin Password Hash Leak https://lavahq.io/research/bmc-exposure-alert Patches for VMWare https://support.broadcom.com/web/ecx/support-content-notification/-/external/content/SecurityAdvisories/0/38017 OpenWRT Patch, odhcpd vulnerability CVE-2026-53921 https://github.com/openwrt/odhcpd/security/advisories/GHSA-7fwx-hhrg-3496 My Upcoming Classes https://www.sans.org/profiles/dr-johannes-ullrich
The Senate confirms Jay Clayton to lead ODNI. A new CISA framework highlights critical infrastructure isolation capabilities. OpenAI's rogue agent breached more than just Hugging Face. The average cost of a data breach continues to rise. Indirect prompt injection proves irresistible to cyber criminals. Broadcom patches multiple VMware products. ShinyHunters claims responsibility for Ernst & Young's recent breach. Our guest is Sean Zadig, CISO at Yahoo, discussing the impact of AI on the defense side. These aren't the droids you're looking for. Remember to leave us a 5-star rating and review in your favorite podcast app. Miss an episode? Sign-up for our daily intelligence roundup, Daily Briefing, and you'll never miss a beat. And be sure to follow CyberWire Daily on LinkedIn. CyberWire Guest Today we are joined by Sean Zadig, CISO at Yahoo, discussing the impact of AI on the defense side without all the hype in either direction, what is a CISO actually doing about it. Selected Reading Senate Confirms Jay Clayton to Lead U.S. Intelligence Community (The New York Times) China and Iran Are Already Inside US Grids: CISA Demands Tested Isolation Plans (Tech Times) OpenAI's rogue agent compromised a customer at a second tech firm, executive says (Reuters) Anatomy of a Frontier Lab Agent Intrusion: A Technical Timeline of the July 2026 Incident (Hugging Face) The Average Cost of a Data Breach Rises to $5 Million (Infosecurity Magazine) USSPACECOM Issues Space Warfighting Environment 2040 for Joint Force Space Operations (ExecutiveGov) THE SPACE WARFIGHTING ENVIRONMENT 2040 Framing the Future for the Joint Warfighter (U.S. Space Command) Notes from Underground: Adversarial Prompt Injection (Proofpoint) Critical VM Escape Vulnerability Patched in VMware ESXi (SecurityWeek) ShinyHunters Claims Ernst & Young Hack (SecurityWeek) America bans imported robots due to supply chain and security risks (The Register) Share your feedback. What do you think about CyberWire Daily? Please take a few minutes to share your thoughts with us by completing our brief listener survey. Thank you for helping us continue to improve our show. Want to hear your company in the show? N2K CyberWire helps you reach the industry's most influential leaders and operators, while building visibility, authority, and connectivity across the cybersecurity community. Learn more at sponsor.thecyberwire.com. The CyberWire is a production of N2K Networks, your source for strategic workforce intelligence. © N2K Networks, Inc.
This week, Microsoft is betting big on AI-driven cybersecurity, there's another sophisticated attack targeting Microsoft 365 users, VMware has lost yet another large customer, and we'll cover all of the latest enterprise IT news you need to know from the past week. Reference Links: https://www.rorymon.com/blog/microsofts-ai-security-push-hotel-wi-fi-attacks-tpm-comes-to-kms/
The episode reveals infrastructure dependence and vendor consolidation risks in the IT channel, illustrated by Broadcom's abrupt closure of the VMware Cloud Service Provider (VCSP) program. This move eliminated license access for numerous MSPs, disrupting established practices reliant on VMware platforms and forcing providers into accelerated, unplanned migrations. The event highlights the vulnerability of service provider business models when built on external vendor programs without autonomy or long-term contractual assurance. The most consequential development discussed is the forced transition experienced by Valor C3 Data Centers after Broadcom shut down the VCSP program on October 31, 2025. According to Justin Fox, this action imposed a non-negotiable deadline and provided no grandfathering, causing hundreds of MSPs to lose access to essential licenses. Valor allocated several hundred hours to research and migration planning, citing costs between $200,000 and $300,000 per site for new landing zone infrastructure, not including increased hardware prices driven by AI market demand. Decisions centered on reducing repeat vendor risk, balancing reuse of existing hardware, and evaluating alternatives such as full open source OpenStack via Platform9. Supporting developments point to broader changes in the virtualization market post-Broadcom. Justin Fox noted that, while Proxmox and Hyper-V are common destinations for displaced VMware users (especially in small, single-tenant environments), larger service providers prioritize native multi-tenancy, platform flexibility, and hardware independence—criteria that led Valor to OpenStack. The importance of ecosystem compatibility, operational simplicity, and readiness to pivot away from vendor-managed solutions was elevated against the background of supply chain disruptions and rising hardware costs. For MSPs and IT leaders, these circumstances clarify the need for robust vendor risk assessment and contingency infrastructure strategies. Reliance on proprietary vendor programs presents exposure to sudden policy changes, price escalations, and contract terminations. Transitioning to open platforms can reduce repeat risks, but does not eliminate dependency—especially when managed open source solutions have their own governance and continuity considerations. Clear communication with customers, careful management of migration costs, and ongoing evaluation of vendor relationships are required to avoid operational shocks and revenue disruption in an increasingly consolidated channel environment. Supported by: Pax8 ScalePad
This week, we discuss Bun's move to Rust, OpenAI hunting for revenue, and Stripe's bid for PayPal. Plus, Coté's Dad wisdom. Watch the YouTube Live Recording of Episode 582 Runner-up Titles Turn off my dog Dad Wisdom Amazon subscription and let it fly Dad box Talking about modernization Skin in the game The ivory tower of “Things Actually Work in the Real World” Business fortnight No SegwaysBanking works everywhere else in the world, not America Rundown Rewriting Bun in Rust OpenAI OpenAI's No. 2 Executive to Step Down in Latest Leadership Shake-up OpenAI's Chief Futurist Is Leaving the Company AI Devices Are Coming. Will Your Favorite Apps Be Along for the Ride? OpenAI Executive Kevin Weil Is Leaving the Company OpenAI power consolidates under co-founder Greg Brockman ahead of prospective IPO Barret Zoph is out at OpenAI again after just five months Apple sues OpenAI, accuses ex-employees of stealing trade secrets OpenAI Appears to Be Missing Its Sales Goals by a Vast Margin Stripe, Advent make $53 billion takeover offer for PayPal, sending stock soaring Relevant to your Interests SpaceX, AI Bubble Fears, and The Age of the Trillion-Dollar, Zero-Profit Company Microsoft Frontier Company: AI engineering that amplifies and protects your intelligence Building a CLI for all of Cloudflare California founder fired for ignoring his company's own return-to-office mandate Samsung chip division's single-year profits beat its past 40 years of profits, combined Did a lottery winner become "the company of the future"? Power company hikes data center bills by 30%, cuts residential electricity costs by 1.3% Where AI Works: Slack is the Conversational Interface for Headless AI Salesforce MCP Servers: AI, Data & Analytics for Tableau & Data 360 in Slack IBM and Red Hat launch Lightwell to defend open-source code from AI attacks Infoblox acquires Kentik, adding network observability to its DNS and DDI platform Apple 'Hide My Email' Vulnerability Reveals Peoples' Real Email Addresses House passes bill to make daylight saving time permanent United Airlines' new upsell: Keeping other travelers out of the middle seat Linux creator Linus Torvalds puts foot down on anti-AI comments 1Password now lets Claude sign in to websites without seeing your passwords 1Password and Anthropic Bring Secure Credential Access to Claude forum, an accountable orchestrator for AI agents Google continues its renaming streak by turning NotebookLM to Gemini Notebook 'Pretty revolting': LG's TV are getting huge backlash from users due to installing software What is a micro-retirement? Inside the latest Gen Z trend You paid me, a long-time Linux user, to use Windows 11 exclusively for a month China delivers a one-two punch to America's AI dominance Can Lenovo's World Cup AI Moment Cement Its Enterprise PC Dominance? AI Coding Tools Deliver Speed but Not Business Value Unless Wrapped in Process: China's Moonshot in Talks on Pre-IPO Funds at $50 Billion Value OpenAI and Hugging Face partner to address security incident during model evaluation AI won't fix your broken culture, but you can fix your broken culture Oracle Is Now Down 28% in a Month. Will the 52-Week Low of $132 Hold or Fold? IBM stock craters 23% after issuing second-quarter earnings warning Sheetz is quitting VMware, migrating 11,000 virtual machines Meta in Talks to Lease Computing Power to Anthropic in Potential $10 Billion Deal AWS cloud lead Dave Brown heads to Meta - report - DCD Amazon senior cloud executive departs after 18 years Meta Caps Internal AI Token Spending After Costs Approach Billions in 2026 Meta Compute Launch Sends AI Compute Stocks Tumbling Globally Agentic ransomware for automated database extortion Dark-Moon: Autonomous AI pentesting engine Sponsors Signadot: making sure AI-written code actually works. Nonsense Messi Beats Ronaldo in 2026 World Cup Password Breach Data Rankings United Airlines' new upsell: Keeping other travelers out of the middle seat Yes, you can now order DoorDash from the command line House passes bill to make daylight saving time permanent Listener Feedback Biogen hiring Associate Director, Enterprise Architecture in Triangle, NC Tim releases a font for developers whose close-up vision isn't what it used to be The Java Story | Official Trailer | Full Film Coming July 17th Conferences DevOpsDays Graz, Sept 4-5, 2026 Cloud Foundry Summit, Sept. 21st to 22nd, Heidelberg, Coté speaking. DevOpsDays Rockies, Sept. 22 – 23, 2026, Discount Code: 26DODSWEDEFTALK WeAreDevelopers NA, Sept 23-25, 2026, Discount Code: DEVPOD26 25 Free Tickets DevOpsDays Dallas, Sept 28-29, 2026 DevOpsDays Vilnius, Sep 30 - Oct 1, 2006 DevOpsDays Istanbul, Oct 24th, 2026, Coté keynoting. VMware User Group, Orlando, Oct 20-22, 2026 Cloud Native Denmark, Nov 19th, 2026, Copenhagen, Coté keynoting. SDT News & Community Join our Slack community Email the show: questions@softwaredefinedtalk.com Free stickers: Email your address to stickers@softwaredefinedtalk.com Follow us on social media: Twitter, Threads, Mastodon, LinkedIn, BlueSky Watch us on: Twitch, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok Book offer: Use code SDT for $20 off "Digital WTF" by Coté Sponsor the show Sponsor more podcasts with Failover Media Recommendations Brandon: entogo — Type a keyword. Go anywhere. 28 Years Later, The Bone Temple Matt: Vacation, not micro-retirement Coté: Wolf Hall books.
In this episode of Future Finance, host Paul Barnhurst and co-host Glenn Hopper are joined by guest Alex Brower, co-founder and CEO of QFlow.ai, to explore why forecasting problems often begin with the data layer. They discuss data plumbing, semantic alignment, Model Context Protocols (MCPs), vibe coding, and how finance and go-to-market teams can work from shared definitions to improve forecast quality and analysis.Alex Brower is the co-founder and CEO of QFlow.ai, helping finance and go-to-market teams connect data, improve forecast accuracy, and boost analyst productivity by up to five times. He previously led finance and marketing at high-growth tech firms like AppTelligent (acquired by VMware) and Cloud Academy (acquired by QA).In this episode, you will discover:How data hygiene and shared definitions improve forecastingWhy unified data alone does not solve business alignment issuesMCP vs semantic layers for reliable analysisThe risks of untested AI-generated analysisWhy AI cost and governance matterAlex explains how QFlow helps companies prepare data, run planning workflows, and turn analysis into board-ready stories.Follow Alex:Website: https://qflow.ai/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexbrower/Follow Glenn:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gbhopperiiiFollow Paul:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thefpandaguyFollow QFlow.ai:Website - https://bit.ly/4i1EkjgFuture Finance is sponsored by QFlow.ai, the strategic finance platform solving the toughest part of planning and analysis: B2B revenue. Align sales, marketing, and finance, speed up decision-making, and lock in accountability with QFlow.ai. Stay tuned for a deeper understanding of how AI is shaping the future of finance and what it means for businesses and individuals alike.In Today's Episode:[00:00] – Introduction[02:15] – Data & Forecasting Challenges[06:43] – MCP vs Semantic Layers[09:55] – AI Coding Risks[15:52] – QFlow Data Preparation[18:10] – Planning & Business Insights[20:51] – Closing Thoughts
Join us as Faye Ellis breaks down what responsible AI actually looks like in practice on Amazon Bedrock - live demos included, straight from her prep for the AWS Generative AI Developer Professional certification. Faye walks through the NIST AI risk framework's core characteristics of trustworthy systems, then demos two hands-on builds: a RAG pipeline using S3 Vectors as a low-cost knowledge base, and Bedrock Guardrails blocking financial advice, prompt injection attacks, and sensitive information in real time. You'll learn the difference between prompt engineering and guardrails, how contextual grounding checks catch hallucinations before they reach a user, why data cleaning and deduplication matter as much for cost and sustainability as for bias, and what Faye wishes she'd known going into one of AWS's hardest professional-level exams. Timestamps 0:00 Welcome & Introduction 9:28 What Makes an AI System Trustworthy - The NIST Framework 15:19 Famous AI Failures - From ChatGPT Code Leaks to Biased Systems 22:56 Building RAG with Bedrock Knowledge Bases and S3 Vectors 26:29 Live Demo - Setting Up RAG with S3 Vectors 31:19 Prompt Engineering and Bedrock Prompt Management 34:46 What Are Bedrock Guardrails and How They Work 41:22 Live Demo - Blocking Financial Advice, Jailbreaks, and PII 53:00 Preparing for the AWS Generative AI Developer Professional Exam 59:04 Resources and Wrapping Up How to find Faye: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fayeellis/ https://app.pluralsight.com/profile/author/faye-ellis Links from the show: https://aws.amazon.com/bedrock/ https://skillbuilder.aws/ https://aws.amazon.com/certification/
Join us this week for a Tech Leaders Podcast Special, where Gareth sits down with Barry Pilling, Principal ITAM Consultant and VMware Specialist at bedigital to discuss the latest developments in the ongoing Tesco VS Broadcom court case. On this episode, Gareth and Barry discuss updates to the case, Broadcom's wider business strategy, and the possible impact on future customer-vendor relationships across the industry. Timestamps: Trial date set, and Tesco's amended claim (1:32) Is Broadcom market dominant? (5:10) Trial timetable and legal strategies (9:31) The Broadcom business model (13:41) The broader impact on customer/vendor relationships (16:08) Broadcom's 1 year offer, and Computacenter's involvement (21:04) Key takeaways (25:37) https://www.bedigitaluk.com/
This week's full broadcast of Computer Talk Radio includes - 00:00 - Nerd News, Human Edition - Amazon Leo, data centers, RAM pricing, Vmware, licensing - 11:00 - Listener Q&A - cloud, training - Rita asks of organizing cloud files, Tom on helping train family - 22:00 - Cleaning out space on your iPhone - Keith gives great tips on cleaning out storage space on iPhone - 31:00 - Marty Winston's Wisdom - Mark covers Keychron mouse and Asus Zenbook 316S laptop - 39:00 - Scam Series - Resume Siphon - Benjamin warns of Resume Credential Verification Siphon Scam - 44:00 - Keske on CAD and CAI - Steve covers Computer Aided Instruction and also CAD - 56:00 - Dr Doreen Galli - Dunning Kruger - Whisper reports on fleet electrification, XR, licensing trends - 1:07:00 - Listener Q&A - upgrading devices - Mark on when device is dead, Dana on planning upgrades - 1:16:00 - IT Professional Series - 388 - Benjamin covers myth of fully AI driven automated workplace - 1:24:00 - Listener Q&A - iPhone albums - Holly asks why phone keeps making photo albums vs hers
This week, Microsoft has just released the biggest Patch Tuesday in its history with 570 security vulnerabilities fixed, AI is forcing IT teams to rethink how quickly they deploy updates, and we're seeing yet another reminder that patching isn't always straightforward when one Windows update is already being blocked on some Dell systems. We'll also look at new attacks targeting password manager users, another major third-party breach, more fallout from Broadcom's VMware strategy, some interesting AI news from OpenAI and Anthropic, and much more. Reference Links: https://www.rorymon.com/blog/a-record-breaking-570-flaws-and-microsoft-wants-you-to-patch-faster/
Future Finance host Paul Barnhurst and co-host Glenn Hopper are joined by Alex Brower, co-founder and CEO of QFlow.ai, to unpack why forecasting often breaks down even when teams have plenty of data. The discussion focuses on how finance and go-to-market teams can work from shared inputs, improve planning accuracy, and use AI without losing the structure needed for reliable decisions.Alex Brower is the co-founder and CEO of QFlow.ai, helping finance and go-to-market teams connect data, improve forecast accuracy, and boost analyst productivity up to five times. He previously led finance and marketing at high-growth tech firms like AppTelligent (acquired by VMware) and Cloud Academy (acquired by QA).In this episode, you will discover:Fix data plumbing before system consolidation.Use data dictionaries for consistent definitions.AI helps, but semantic logic is still needed.Vibe coding can create hidden costs if untested.Start with key unanswered questions, then plan solutions.Alex shares lessons from leading finance, operations, and marketing teams at high-growth companies, including what he learned from living the forecast tension on both sides of the table.Follow Alex:Website: https://qflow.ai/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexbrower/Follow Glenn:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gbhopperiiiFollow Paul:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thefpandaguyFollow QFlow.ai:Website - https://bit.ly/4i1EkjgFuture Finance is sponsored by QFlow.ai, the strategic finance platform solving the toughest part of planning and analysis: B2B revenue. Align sales, marketing, and finance, speed up decision-making, and lock in accountability with QFlow.ai. Stay tuned for a deeper understanding of how AI is shaping the future of finance and what it means for businesses and individuals alike.In Today's Episode:[00:00] – Trailer[03:44] – Finance-to-marketing journey & QFlow's solution[07:10] – Data plumbing vs. alignment[11:37] – MCPs, AI, and logic layers[14:50] – Risks of vibe coding & maintainability[21:56] – How QFlow handles data, planning, and storytelling[30:57] – Alignment before strategy & reducing fact-hunting[35:39] – Where CFOs/FP&A should start modernizing[44:03] – Closing & sponsor sign-off
Is your IT strategy quietly giving up control? This week on the Tech Field Day News Rundown, Tom Hollingsworth and Alastair Cooke examine VMware's rising costs and lock-in risks, AI-driven cybersecurity, the escalating open-versus-closed model race, and the strain AI data centers place on local infrastructure. They also explore concerns around AI providers retaining business knowledge, reported source-code leaks, intellectual property, and how organizations can preserve options before vendor dependence becomes urgent.This and more on the Tech Field Day News Rundown with Tom Hollingsworth and Alastair Cooke. Time Stamps: 0:00 - Cold Open0:27 - Welcome to the Tech Field Day News Rundown1:28 - VMware Pressure Is Mounting Depite Choices5:37 - Cribl Acquires CardinalOps to Bring AI Agents Into Security Operations8:17 - Reflection AI Locks In $1B+ Nebius Deal10:22 - Apple Sues OpenAI, Alleging Trade Secret Theft in AI Hardware Push15:01 - New York Pauses Major Data Center Projects Amid AI Power Concerns18:08 - Satya Nadella Warns Companies: AI Can Cost You More Than Money21:18 - Anthropic Moves to Remove Leaked Claude Code as Copyright Debate Intensifies27:54 - The Weeks Ahead: Upcoming Tech Field Day Events29:41 - Thanks for Watching the Tech Field Day News RundownFollow our hosts Tom Hollingsworth, Alastair Cooke, and Stephen Foskett. Follow Tech Field Day on LinkedIn, on X/Twitter, on Bluesky, and on Mastodon.
Join us as John Mark Troyer and Rakesh Gupta break down what AI observability actually means once agents leave the demo and hit production - and why the old playbook for monitoring doesn't cut it anymore. John Mark and Rakesh walk through why errors and latency are just the starting point for agents, how quality became a much harder thing to measure once bots went from answering questions to taking autonomous action, and why token-based costs are creating a confusing new economics problem for engineering teams. You'll learn the difference between online and offline evals, why a new engineering role has emerged just to build testing harnesses for agents, how trace data works differently when every prompt is its own trace, and what teams are doing to catch prompt injection and other AI-specific failure modes before they become expensive mistakes. Timestamps 0:00 Welcome & Introduction 3:20 Full Disclosure - Observe, Snowflake, and How This Conversation Started 7:07 From Developer Concerns to Boss's Boss's Boss - Spending Out of Control 8:29 What Actually Gets Measured - Errors, Latency, Quality, and Cost 10:30 The Casino Chip Problem - Confusing Token Pricing Models 13:47 Defining Quality When the Task Itself Is Nebulous 18:41 The New Role - Engineers Who Just Build Testing Harnesses 22:00 Non-Determinism and Why Testing Agents Is Expensive 32:10 Trace Data, Tool Calls, and What Observability Tools Actually See 55:08 Prompt Injection, Zero-Width Characters, and Real World Failures How to find John Mark: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnmarktroyer/ How to find Rakesh: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rg0/ Links from the show:
Les modèles d'IA de la semaine : LeanStral 1.5, Nano Banana et PhotoQuilt, avec aussi GLM 5.2 et la détection de textes IA. Microsoft Ion, sujets spatiaux, visas américains, VMware, batteries, les choix sur le 6 GHz pour les prochaines générations de wifi et de la 6G, robots compagnons et agents IA. Me soutenir sur Patreon Me retrouver sur YouTube On discute ensemble sur Discord Modèles de la semaine Leanstral 1.5, Nanobana Lite, Photoquilt et une question d'Equilibre. GLM et sa sélection d'index. Les IA se reconnaissent entre elles. The Flintstones : comment se débarrasser d'Elias ? Comme l'acide Chlorhydrique, Aion dissout les OS. Piles Incluses Rocket Lab rachète Iridium, pendant que Starmind s'éveille… The land of the (less and less) free. Tout le monde veut quitter Broadcomm, qui aurait pu préVMWare ? La seconde vie des batteries. Qui gagnera la bataille du 6 Ghz ? I'm a Barbie girl, in a Barbie world ! Vinton Cerf à la retraite. Il était temps. Enfin un PC que vous aurez les moyens d'assembler ! Participants Une émission préparée par Guillaume Poggiaspalla Présenté par Guillaume Vendé
Join us as Bob Belderbos breaks down how to actually learn new skills and languages in a world where AI can write the code for you before you've even finished the thought. Bob shares why he taught himself Rust the hard way, how keeping deliberate friction in your learning process protects you from skill atrophy, and why AI is incredible at explaining concepts but dangerous as a crutch for understanding them. You'll learn the difference between using AI to explain versus using it to do, how to structure a project-based learning path with tests as your guide, why coding autocomplete might be quietly hollowing out your skills, and how his Python and Rust cohorts are teaching professional engineers to use agents without losing ownership of their code. Timestamps 0:00 Welcome & Introduction 1:09 Bob's Background - From VBA to Python to Rust 4:39 Why Learn Rust When Python Already Works 11:43 AI as a Learning Assistant vs. a Socratic Teacher 12:30 The Slot Machine Problem - Agents and Skill Atrophy 17:24 Working Outside Your Expertise - The Fast LED Story 27:02 Structuring Prompts That Actually Teach You Something 33:56 Teaching Agentic AI in Production - The Expense Classifier Cohort 36:07 Autocomplete, Copilot, and the Line Between Helping and Hollowing Out 44:03 AI Slop, Coauthorship, and the Anti-Slop Engineer 53:49 What's Next - Rust, Haskell, and Bob's Upcoming Cohorts How to find Bob: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bbelderbos/ https://belderbos.dev/ Links from the show:
Unfortunately, there are some audio issues this week. I was unable to remedy them but will make sure they are sorted next week but on this week's episode: Microsoft is cutting nearly 5,000 jobs, with Xbox among the businesses being restructured — and employees here in Ireland are also being impacted. Meanwhile, Anthropic's once-hyped Claude Fable model is back, but users say the new guardrails have made it almost unusable for some coding tasks. And T-Mobile is trying to move tens of thousands of virtual machines away from VMware while fighting Broadcom in court over support. Plus, 81 million login attempts hit Microsoft 365 accounts, critical UniFi vulnerabilities need patching, and Microsoft is preparing to enable Windows backup by default for some enterprise devices. All that and much more, coming up on this week's 5Bytes Podcast. Reference Links: https://www.rorymon.com/blog/microsoft-cuts-4800-jobs-claude-ai-backlash-t-mobiles-great-escape-from-vmware/
There's a problem that's bugged the database industry since the 1980s: you run an expensive query over millions of rows, cache the result, and then a single new row arrives. Logically that's one small update, but most engines throw the cached answer away and recompute everything from scratch. Some will handle changes incrementally, but only for "simple" queries - and the rules for what counts as simple are arbitrary and brittle. So can you incrementally maintain *any* SQL query, no matter how complex? For decades the answer was no. Then an award-winning paper called DBSP proved that the answer is yes - all queries are simple enough.Joining me to explain how that works is Lalith Suresh, CEO of Feldera, the company built on top of DBSP. We start with the problem itself, then trace how a group of VMware researchers arrived at it from the unlikely direction of Kubernetes and network control planes. Lalith walks through Z-sets, the weighted data structure that turns database changes into something you can add and subtract, and the four DBSP operators - including one borrowed straight from digital signal processing - that let you compile any SQL program into an incremental version deterministically. Along the way we get into which operations need state and which don't, how the delta join falls out for free, building a standalone query engine with its own storage layer and Calcite front-end, backfills as the real Achilles heel, and how this all differs from stream processors like Kafka Streams and Flink.If you've ever fought with materialized views that won't refresh, watched a nightly batch job recompute three years of data to capture last night's changes, or you're just curious how one elegant bit of maths unifies batch and stream processing, Lalith has some genuinely satisfying answers. There's an MIT-licensed open source edition and a sandbox at try.feldera.com if you want to play along.---Support Developer Voices on Patreon: https://patreon.com/DeveloperVoicesSupport Developer Voices on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@DeveloperVoices/joinFeldera: https://www.feldera.com/Feldera Sandbox (try it online): https://try.feldera.com/Feldera on GitHub (open source): https://github.com/feldera/felderaDBSP Rust crate: https://crates.io/crates/dbspDBSP Paper - "Automatic Incremental View Maintenance for Rich Query Languages" (VLDB 2023 Best Paper): https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.16684Mihai Budiu - "Streaming Queries Without Compromise" (Current 2024): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cn1Yaxwl6x8Mihai Budiu - DBSP talk at CMU Database Group: https://db.cs.cmu.edu/events/dbsp-incremental-computation-on-streams-and-its-applications-to-databases/Differential Dataflow: https://github.com/TimelyDataflow/differential-dataflowApache Calcite (Feldera's SQL front-end): https://calcite.apache.org/Kafka Streams: https://kafka.apache.org/documentation/streams/Apache Flink: https://flink.apache.org/ksqlDB: https://ksqldb.io/Apache Spark: https://spark.apache.org/Snowflake: https://www.snowflake.com/Databricks: https://www.databricks.com/Kris on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/krisajenkins.bsky.socialKris on Mastodon: http://mastodon.social/@krisajenkinsKris on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/krisjenkins/
Join us as Du'An digs into the real mechanics of running AI locally and in production - from GPU memory math to multi-agent architectures, observability, and the economics of self-hosted inference. Du'An walks through how model weights and KV cache compete for GPU memory, why continuous batching matters when you have more than a handful of users, and how agent architectures like single-agent, workflow, graph, swarm, and supervisor patterns each solve different problems. You will learn how to instrument your agents with Langfuse for observability and cost tracking, when to use Ollama versus vLLM, how prompt caching can cut provider costs by up to 75%, and why GPUs should never sit idle. Episode two of three - the next episode covers deploying at scale. Timestamps 0:00 Welcome & Introduction 1:47 Du'An's New Role at Akamai Cloud 3:10 Data Privacy and the Case for Self-Hosted AI 7:21 Anthropic and OpenAI as the New Cloud Layer 12:48 Local Models for Specific Use Cases - Cancer Detection Example 15:02 GPU Memory Math - Weights, KV Cache, and Context Windows 19:32 Continuous Batching and GPU Time Slicing 20:03 Observability with Langfuse - Live Demo 27:44 Agent Architectures - Single Agent, Workflow, Graph, Swarm, Supervisor 36:36 Token Economics, Prompt Caching, and GPU Cost Planning 45:32 Ollama vs vLLM - Prototyping vs Production How to find Du'An: https://duanlightfoot.com https://www.linkedin.com/in/duanlightfoot/ Links from the show: https://langfuse.com/ https://github.com/akamai-developers/akamai-workshop-solution-architect-agent https://amzn.to/4bvHn1p https://vllm.ai/
Platform engineering forms the foundation for developers to build on, and you shouldn't be surprised that folks from VMware have been thinking about platforms for a long time. In today's episode, sponsored by Broadcom, Ned and Kyler discuss the current state and future of platform engineering with guests Jad El-Zein and Myles Gray. They cover... Read more »
Platform engineering forms the foundation for developers to build on, and you shouldn't be surprised that folks from VMware have been thinking about platforms for a long time. In today's episode, sponsored by Broadcom, Ned and Kyler discuss the current state and future of platform engineering with guests Jad El-Zein and Myles Gray. They cover... Read more »
Platform engineering forms the foundation for developers to build on, and you shouldn't be surprised that folks from VMware have been thinking about platforms for a long time. In today's episode, sponsored by Broadcom, Ned and Kyler discuss the current state and future of platform engineering with guests Jad El-Zein and Myles Gray. They cover... Read more »
Join us as Thorsten breaks down how everyday people - small business owners, retirees, hobbyists, and anyone who isn't a developer - can use AI to get real things done without writing a single line of code. Thorsten runs an AI roundtable for small and medium businesses in Germany and shares hands-on use cases from his own life and clients: a family recipe database built entirely on a mobile phone, 13 months of fitness data analyzed into actionable coaching, a personal AI project manager that reads his calendar and meeting transcripts, and real-world implementations for a dental practice and a tax advisory firm. You will learn how to think about AI as a team you never had, why prompts are the new apps, how to handle privacy and data regulations, and how to start this week with just one task. Timestamps 0:00 Welcome & Introduction 5:17 Who Is Thorsten and What Is Normal People AI 8:51 The Recipe Database Use Case 16:46 Fitness Tracking and Personal Coaching 22:27 Building an AI-Powered Personal Project Manager 34:23 Using Fireflies and MCP for Meeting Intelligence 41:14 Real Business Use Cases - Dental Practice and Tax Advisory 44:27 Privacy, GDPR, and When to Use Local Models 47:06 Getting Started - One Task This Week How to find Thorsten: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hoegertn/ Links from the show:
Most enablement teams can tell you how many people sat through a course, but not whether any of it moved the business. In this special Content to Close episode, Erika Robertson, Director of Enablement at Citrix, walks through how she proves enablement is worth the budget by starting with the end in mind. Erika is certified through the ROI Institute and uses the Phillips ROI methodology from Jack and Patty Phillips, which she contrasts with the Kirkpatrick model most L&D and enablement teams default to. She explains how she builds the measurement plan before any content exists, so she can go back to stakeholders and say, this is how I will show you it worked. She covers identifying the metric category or bucket first, then finding a baseline like average deal size or sales cycle time for a group before a program runs, aligning instructional strategies to the business outcomes that matter, and her discipline that if something cannot be measured or will not move the business, it is probably not worth the investment. If you have ever struggled to connect your enablement work to real business results, this conversation gives you the framework.About ErikaErika Robertson is the Director of Enablement at Citrix, where she supports internal go-to-market teams, partners, and customers. She thought she would become a teacher coming out of college, then found her way into training adults instead, and has spent almost her entire career in enablement inside software companies including Cisco, SAP, and VMware. She holds a master's in instructional technology and is certified through the ROI Institute in the Phillips ROI methodology. She is passionate about enablement, go-to-market enablement, and instructional design, and about staying true to those principles even as AI changes the work.Show NotesConnect with Erika on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/erikajrobertson/ROI Institute (Phillips ROI methodology, founded by Jack and Patty Phillips)Text us what you think about this episode!
On this week's show special guest co-host Rob Joyce joins Patrick Gray and James Wilson to discuss the week's cybersecurity news. Rob served as an advisor to Donald Trump during his first term as president and also served at NSA for 34 years. While at the agency, Joyce led Tailored Access Operations (TAO), and later became NSA's Director of Cybersecurity. They cover: The surprisingly well done Fortibleed campaign Stolen Klue OAuth tokens lead to Salesforce data theft OpenAI wants to patch the planet runZero gets acquired by Accenture, congrats HD Moore! Much, much more! This episode is also available on YouTube. Show notes FortiBleed campaign used custom FortiGate sniffer to steal credentials | BleepingComputer FortiBleed: Fortinet device credential compromise expands into broader credential-attack guidance | unit42.paloaltonetworks.com Cybercriminals allegedly hacked tens of thousands of Fortinet firewalls used by major companies all over the world | TechCrunch Security Klue OAuth breach linked to 'Icarus' Salesforce data theft attacks | BleepingComputer Polymarket (@Polymarket) on X | X (formerly Twitter) The Korean telecom giant at the center of Anthropic's Mythos controversy | wrd.cm Beyond Fable: Can a Local LLM Replace Cloud AI for Security Code Reviews - SRLabs Research | SRLabs OpenAI Launches Full-Scale Effort to Patch Open-Source Bugs as It Takes on Anthropic's Mythos | wired.com Sponsored: Trail of Bits and OpenAI patch the planet | Risky Bulletin Intel agencies: Frontier AI models will reshape cybersecurity faster than expected | cyberscoop.com Embedding Forbidden Text in Spyware to Discourage AI Analysis | Schneier on Security A new unpatchable flaw in Apple chips opens the door to an iPhone jailbreak | TechCrunch Security USB worm spreads crypto-stealing malware via Windows shortcut files | BleepingComputer Android verification is coming: Google confirms timeline and supported app stores | Ars Technica California water utility probes breach claim by Iran-linked actor | Cybersecurity Dive Suspected cyberattack triggers false emergency alerts across parts of Brazil | The Record Tesco moving 40,000 server workloads off VMware amid Broadcom's "abusive conduct" | Ars Technica Trump directs federal agencies to protect US data from quantum threats | therecord.media Accenture shells out $4.18B on three companies in big industrial cybersecurity push | cyberscoop.com
Is Enterprise Tech Becoming Too Expensive to Maintain? From Ireland's staggering €1 billion Microsoft licensing renewal to Tesco's risky, high-speed migration away from Broadcom and VMware, the cost of enterprise infrastructure is reaching a breaking point. In this episode, we break down the upcoming Windows 11 26H2 release, Microsoft's newest Recycle Bin and Word automation bugs, and the controversial Wi-Fi location tracking feature returning to Teams. If you want to stay ahead of the enterprise IT curve, make sure to hit subscribe! Reference Links: https://www.rorymon.com/blog/tescos-risky-vmware-exit-irelands-e1-billion-microsoft-bill/
This week's episode covers a series of cybersecurity stories, including a researcher's discovery of vulnerabilities in FIFA's World Cup platform that could have enabled unauthorized administrative access and even the ability to alter live broadcasts. The team also discusses the risks of large-scale identity verification data exposure, supply chain attacks impacting the scientific research community, ongoing fallout from Broadcom's VMware acquisition, and legal challenges from major organizations facing rising VMware costs. Along the way, the hosts share commentary on AI-related security concerns, access control failures, and the broader impact of vendor decisions on enterprise security.Join us LIVE on Mondays, 4:30pm EST.A weekly Podcast with BHIS and Friends. We discuss notable Infosec, and infosec-adjacent news stories gathered by our community news team.https://www.youtube.com/@BlackHillsInformationSecurityChat with us on Discord! - https://discord.gg/bhis
Join us as Dave walks through what it actually takes to build custom AI agents from scratch - not theory, but real projects he has shipped for his family, his work, and his community. Dave shares how he used Kiro and Claude to solve real problems: normalizing flood-damaged library inventory data, automating AWS well-architected review collateral, building a room-cleaning task agent for his 12-year-old, planning family menus with Apple Calendar integration, and post-processing live concert recordings. You will learn how agents reason and take action, when to reach for a Kiro power versus a simpler automation, how MCP servers connect agents to real-world tools, and practical strategies for keeping agents accurate without burning through tokens. Timestamps 0:00 Welcome & Introduction 7:57 Dave's Background and How He Got Started with Agents 13:00 The Library Flood Story - First Real-World Agent Use Case 16:00 AWS Well-Architected Review Automation 17:09 What Are Kiro Powers and MCP Servers? 22:13 Kiro Pricing and Bedrock Integration 28:13 Live Demo - Room Cleaning Agent with AWS Rekognition 41:24 Family Meal Planning and Apple Calendar Integration 44:27 Automating Live Concert Recording Post-Processing 52:31 Getting Started - Dave's Recommendations for Beginners How to find Dave: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dave-stauffacher/ Links from the show: https://kiro.dev/
AI infrastructure is breaking the old data center model.In this episode of Liftoff with Keith, I sit down with Lukas Gentele, CEO & Co-Founder of vCluster Labs, to unpack what it really takes to operate GPU infrastructure at scale in 2026.As AI workloads explode and neoclouds race to meet demand, Lukas and his team are building the operational backbone for modern AI clouds — from managed Kubernetes and tenant isolation to automated node provisioning and GPU lifecycle management.We discuss:Why traditional data center assumptions are collapsing under AI pressureWhat's fundamentally changed since the VMware eraHow an early partnership with CoreWeave shaped vCluster's trajectoryAnd the one mistake AI cloud operators are making right now that could hurt them over the next 18 monthsIf you care about AI infrastructure, GPU economics, hyperscaler strategy, or building category-defining platforms — this conversation is essential.Sponsor Info: We are strategic business advisors with decades of leadership experience and a proven track record of driving businesses' growth. We specialize in creating custom-tailored strategies to introduce your company, drive growth, build leadership teams, and ensure companies implement appropriate compensation programs. Our mission is to utilize our expansive network to benefit your company https://www.compass-strategic-advisors.com/ Connect with Lukas Gentele: Website: https://www.vcluster.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gentele/ Subscribe for more founder insights and hit the bell for notifications! Follow us on our channels for exclusive startup content and behind-the-scenes insights from interviews like this one. Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3cFpLXfYvcUsxvsT9MwyAD?si=f5a14e779777487d Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/liftoff-with-keith-newman/id1560219589 Substack: https://keithnewman.substack.com/ Newman Media Studios: https://newmanmediastudios.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/liftoffwithkeith For sponsorship inquiries, please contact: sponsorships@wherewithstudio.comFrom the Host: A special shout-out to our Great Host of the Ignite Studios: https://www.ignitegtm.com/ and Producers of AI Infra5 @Plug and Play World, HQ in Sunnyvale, CALiftoff is sponsored by a strategic consulting firm and the M&A specialists at Compass Strategic Advisors - https://www.compass-strategic-advisors.com/ and The GTM Firm - https://www.thegtmfirm.com/