Channel Digest: Steadying the ship
This week's Channel Digest shines the spotlight on the companies shoring up their operations in a choppy economy
This week the channel has (tentative) reasons to celebrate as the UK market registered a rebound – if only in name. Figures by the ONS state that the economy grew 0.6 per cent January through March, the fastest in over two years.
The news is positive, but no one is pushing the boat out quite yet. Instead, channel businesses are shoring up operations, diversifying across markets and generally prepping for a period of sustained instability.
This week, we ran a deep dive on Crayon's early successes selling generative AI. CEO Melissa Mulholland delved into the firm's services proposition and the client needs that Crayon has been responding to.
Oh, and she had some very complimentary things to say about former UK MD Hayley Mooney, who left amicably last month to return to her alma mater, Bytes.
For some companies, shoring up has meant elevating top performers. This week, Node4 announced that star cadre, Hannah Birch, will move into the role of group MD, recognising her leadership of the digital business and successful integration of recent buyouts.
The MSP announced several changes at the top, all with the aim of stepping confidently into its next stage of growth.
On the distie front, Infinigate put out a business update detailing its growth plans ahead of its results announcement, expected early June.
Europe is slowing down for the Switzerland distie, but the Middle East was a bright spot. As Infinigate doubles down on its €5bn revenue target by FY2027/2028, find out where the firm will focus investment here.
Upstream, the busy moving execs like chess pieces around a board.
Alongside a muted Q3 announcement this week, Cisco's valuation was buoyed by a change in president.
The networking giant has moved Gary Steele from the role of executive vice president and general manager of Splunk to a new position as president of go-to-market while EVP and chief customer and partner officer Jeff Sharritts will leave the networking giant after more than 20 years there.
To find out how Cisco is shifting its GTM strategy, click here.
Finally, AWS is bringing in Matt Garman into the CEO seat, after the current CEO, Adam Selipsky, announced his departure.
Selipsky's tenure saw the cloud hyperscaler grow into a $100bn revenue run rate behemoth, so Garman will have some big shoes to fill. Read CRN's analysis of what this is likely to mean for the channel, here.
In cyber-security, this week we covered ESET's global summit in Bratislava. The end-to-end security vendor, which considers itself "Europe's best kept secret" in cyber, is making a concerted appeal to the channel under UK country head, Matt Knell. To find out what partners thought of its numerous announcements, click here.
As always, thank you for reading CRN.