HPE Thursday named TD Synnex & Ingram Micro its two global distribution partners. HPE said it will lead to a unified distribution model and help give channel partners simplicity, consistency, and dedicated HPE enablement resources. Details @crndotcom.bsky.social tinyurl.com/3rhsjsuh

Cisco at its 3Q26 financial conference call unveiled <4,000 layoffs as part of a restructuring move aimed at shifting resources to continue investments in strategic areas like advanced AI, security, and quantum networking tech. Details @crndotcom.bsky.social tinyurl.com/7cjnxy3n

Veeam CEO Anand Eswaran told @crndotcom.bsky.social that data security, privacy, compliance, governance, & resilience need to be together in a single "data AI trust layer" sitting between data/analytics and AI models/platforms. Guess what Veeam unveiled today at VeeamOn 2026. tinyurl.com/3bdjsymk

ServiceNow launched a 100-day AI guaranteed delivery program aimed at streamlining AI adoption, fostering ecosystem collaboration, and simplifying integration across multiple platforms w/ its AI Control Tower and partner initiatives. Details @crndotcom.bsky.social tinyurl.com/z7whc2we

NetApp has a new channel chief w/ the hiring of former long-time Microsoft channel exec, Alvaro Celis. He has a history of working w/ software, cloud, and AI. Celis expands the channel role formerly held by Jenni Flinders who left in December. Details @crndotcom.bsky.social tinyurl.com/2p8ywa2h

ServiceNow intro'd its Now Australia release which brings enterprises major AI capabilities including AI Control Tower for controlling agents from any app and ServiceNow Otto, a unified AI experience for every person and across every workflow. Details @crndotcom.bsky.social tinyurl.com/5ftxnf7z

Global IT solution provider DXC Technology Wednesday unveiled DXC Oasis, the company’s new intelligent orchestration model for its managed services business that combines human expertise with agentic AI. Details @crndotcom.bsky.social tinyurl.com/5dz2hm83

AWS' fast growth is driven by demand for AI, enterprise cloud, and innovations like Bedrock and Kiro. Amazon Pres/CEO Andy Jassy discussed 1Q26's fast-growing AI revenue, Trainium/Graviton chip advances, AWS advances, and more. Details @crndotcom.bsky.social tinyurl.com/2wd8pr33

Commvault is marking its 30th anniversary as a leading data protection/management provider across on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments. CEO Sanjay Mirchandani talked with me about FY26 financials, AI, and rumors that it is for sale. Details @crndotcom.bsky.social tinyurl.com/2yynef2j

MSP Integris this week unveiled itslatest acquisition of a fellow MSP, continuing its move to build what CEO Rashaad Bajwa termed the world’s largest SMB-focused SMB. Its acquisition of First Focus also gave it its first int'l footprint. Details @crndotcom.bsky.social tinyurl.com/4rsy96s6

Intel achieved its blockbuster first quarter by selling pricier CPUs and raising prices in the face of pent-up demand from AI data centers and internal supply constraints. www.crn.com/news/compone...

Montana has a plan to effectively neuter Citizens United through ballot referendum. And now, Hawaii is following suit with a new bill in its state legislature that would do the same. Here's what you should know about the plans, and how they could be replicated where you live.

SAP partner Bristlecone is plannning new investments and its first acquisitions to expand its supply chain biz and broaden its product and service offerings, addressing supply chain challenges for Fortune 1000 companies. Details @crndotcom.bsky.social tinyurl.com/4mr2bbtv

Watch ProPublica's @jenafifield.bsky.social on PBS News Hour below and read her recent investigation with @dougbockclark.bsky.social into the Trump White House's efforts to exert influence over local elections here:

The UAE invested billions in the Trump family’s cryptocurrency ventures. But the UAE is now facing an economic downturn due to Trump’s war on Iran. In response, Trump may grant the UAE a financial bailout from the U.S. What might Trump get in return? A bigger boost to his net worth? Hello?

ServiceNow Chairman/CEO Bill McDermott said the company's recent acquisitions of Moveworks, Armis, and Veza are boosting the company’s conversational AI, AI security, and AI governance. Details @crndotcom.bsky.social tinyurl.com/5a8dxjyw

Vast Data closed its $1B Series F funding round, giving it a $30B valuation and a massive foundation for its AI industry strategy to move beyond its storage roots integrating databases, compute orchestration, and agentic workload tools. Details @crndotcom.bsky.social tinyurl.com/d6x2cmzc

In February 1777, General George Washington ordered the first mass immunization campaign in American history by mandating that his troops be inoculated against smallpox. He protected the Continental Army from an epidemic that was deadlier than British forces. 249 years later, we have this idiot.

Mark Morgan, a 22-year-plus @ScanSource vet, last month became president of the distributor’s specialty tech biz with a mandate to get its IT solution providers and communications agents to expand their capabilities beyond their legacy focuses. Details @crndotcom.bsky.social tinyurl.com/3h4vsszx

Economic disruptions and the Iran war are not slowing down Wipro’s big AI push, Srini Pallia, CEO and managing director of Wipro, told financial press and analysts. Despite these headwinds, he said, IT spending has shown resilience Details @crndotcom.bsky.social tinyurl.com/mryue2vp

Top execs talked with @CRN about @Lenovo's Infinidat acquisition, including why it took so long for Lenovo to make a serious enterprise storage play to why fast-growing Infinidat wanted to sell at a time its tech is in high demand for use in AI workloads. tinyurl.com/2hbxpjau

Commvault, a leading provider of data protection and data management tech, has received inquiries from private equity companies and strategic buyers, including major software company investor Thoma Bravo, according to Reuters. Details @crndotcom.bsky.social tinyurl.com/5n85vw9b

General Informatics’ recent acquisition of fellow MSP IMS Solutions Group not only expands its customer and geographic base, but brings a business that complements the AI strategy GI has been developing for at least three years, CEO Don Monistere told @crndotcom.bsky.social. tinyurl.com/2h36rxx7

It took over a year from the time Lenovo said it would acquire Infinidat, but the deal is closed and Lenovo finally moves from its SMB storage focus to selling high-performance enterprise storage to match its enterprise server business. Details @crndotcom.bsky.social tinyurl.com/ut9b6mfd

Check out my Q&A w/ Nasuni CEO Sam King. Of course, we talked about this week's new product offerings. But our focus was on how Nasuni became an AI data foundation via its cloud-native unstructured data management and security capabilities. Details @crndotcom.bsky.social tinyurl.com/4reye43d

Nutanix Tuesday intro'd an agentic AI platform, solidified new partnerships with storage vendors Everpure and NetApp, and planned to migrate customers from arch-rival VMware by giving channel partners multi-tenant environments. Details @crndotcom.bsky.social tinyurl.com/9a2xe9jj

Naitiv was co-founded by three members of major ServiceNow partner Thirdera, later acquired by Cognizant, along with an insurance expert to bring AI initially to the insurance industry but eventually to a wide swath of the ServiceNow market. Details @crndotcom.bsky.social tinyurl.com/mpvbr7br

LogicalisUS CEO Jon Groves, in an exclusive meeting with @crndotcom.bsky.social, outlined his plans for turning his company into an AI-first solution provider. tinyurl.com/z5c7nkad

Your April Fools' Day Reminder that trickle-down economics is the greatest trick of all. It's nothing more than a cruel hoax designed to enrich corporations and the super-rich at your expense. Don't fall for it.

Had a nice conversation with TD Synnex CEO Patrick Zammit where we discussed the company's record 1Q26, the first time for breaking out Hyve numbers, inflation, shortages, and the impact of the Iran War. Details @crndotcom.bsky.social tinyurl.com/42pb3raf

Montana — yes, deep red Montana — has a plan to effectively neuter Citizens United. No Supreme Court ruling or constitutional amendment needed. This is no joke. Here's how it works. www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1fP...

Xerox Monday appointed Louie Pastor as its new CEO after Steve Bandrowczak stepped down. Bandrowczak during his 3.5 years as CEO oversaw the Lexmark and ITsavvy acquisitions, and signed a $450M private equity investment in the company. Details @crndotcom.bsky.social tinyurl.com/5x35ztn3

News that a couple universities w/ links to the Chinese military have acquired or are looking to acquire Supermicro servers with Nvidia A100 GPUs comes in the wake of U.S. DoJ action against smuggling servers with more advanced GPUs. Details @crndotcom.bsky.social tinyurl.com/yc6zzyxp

Nvidia told @crndotcom.bsky.social that, "Despite several efforts, the would-be smugglers failed to clear our diligence process and did not receive GPUs from us." This after a 2nd DoJ indictment in 2 weeks for attempts to smuggle @supermicro-smci.bsky.social servers w/ Nvidia GPUs to China.

Sherweb Wed. got a C$125M / US$90.5M investment despite being a profitable cloud distributor. CEO Matthew Cassar discussed the investment, as well as the importance of AI and cloud for SMB MSPs and the impacts of U.S. trade disruptions. Details @crndotcom.bsky.social tinyurl.com/yc6eu4bf

At this week’s HP Imagine 2026, HP Inc. is showing how its commercial workstations, mobile PCs, LaserJet printers and software help businesses meet new workforce challenges around AI, cybersecurity, and the need for collaboration. Details @crndotcom.bsky.social tinyurl.com/mr42dz3s

A Supermicro co-founder and two others allegedly shipped servers U.S.-made servers with Nvidia GPUs via a 3rd-party to end customers in China in violation of U.S. laws aimed at preventing the export of sensitive tech to that country. Details @crndotcom.bsky.social tinyurl.com/35z3yws9

While Nvidia took center stage at Nvidia GTC 2026, its tech partners showcased enterprise AI innovations aimed at leveraging Nvidia’s latest technologies to address growing AI workload demands and redefine industry standards. Details @crndotcom.bsky.social tinyurl.com/4mxjvc62

MSP platform developer ConnectWise Tuesday said that earlier versions of its ScreenConnect remote support and access tool could allow unauthorized actors to misuse it for session authentication. It was the 2nd ScreenConnect issue in < 1 year. tinyurl.com/347y4dd2

Access to data prepped for use in AI training, inference, and so on helps ensure storage systems aren't bottlenecks to full GPU and AI app performance. @crndotcom.bsky.social looks at 13 storage vendors that brought their best AI offerings to NVIDIA’s GTC conference. tinyurl.com/5a49ybx2

Hammerspace_Inc is looking to grow its presence with partners & customers that need to prep data for AI inference apps. Co-founder and CEO David Flynn, in an exclusive interview with @crndotcom.bsky.social, discussed Hammerspace’s expanded relationship with @nvidia. tinyurl.com/3e3zxw6s

IT distributors are ready to meet new challenges channel partners face with AI and agentic AI and the emergence of a new class of partners dubbed frontier partners, said Frank Vitagliano, CEO of the Global Technology Distribution Council (@GTDC_org). Details @CRN tinyurl.com/bdf8sdk2

IT distributors/vendors looking for success in the fast-moving world of AI will need to connect with a new breed of channel partner not focused on selling tech. Tiffani Bova called them "frontier partners," and talked about their impact. Details @crndotcom.bsky.social tinyurl.com/2wz5ufdn

Wow. Two Friday the 13ths in a row. Is that particularly bad luck or what?

IT solution provider EchoStor Tuesday unveiled the acquisition of Pennant Networks, a fellow solution provider and MSP with a focus on the life sciences vertical. I had a nice talk with the leaders of the two organizations about the deal. Details @crndotcom.bsky.social tinyurl.com/2kw8tped

I had a wide-ranging conversation with NetApp CEO George Kurian where he provided insights into the memory and storage component shortages, AI, cloud growth, and even the current Mideast war. Details @crndotcom.bsky.social tinyurl.com/2xy85jkc

The U.S. subsidiary of Swedish multinational networking and telecom company Ericsson Monday sent notices to California and Texas state officials to report that private information of some of its employees and customers was breached. Details @crndotcom.bsky.social tinyurl.com/4rn9uhhp

AI-based service intelligence is key to increasing the efficiency of managing service tickets as MSPs start using agents powered by intelligence with information from their knowledge base, previous tickets, and real-time events, Thread said. Details @crndotcom.bsky.social tinyurl.com/3nm83tjt

The richest man owns X. The second and third richest men control Google. The fourth richest man owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. The fifth richest man owns The Washington Post. And now the sixth richest could soon take over both Paramount and Warner Bros. See the problem here?