The doom-sayers appear to be wrong about AI leading to job losses, with government figures showing that UK businesses are using the technology to automate roles and support staff, not replace them.

New data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) suggests that firms are far more likely to use AI to improve operations than they are to reduce staffing levels.

Researchers found that, when asked how AI was being used internally, the most frequent answer was 'improving business processes', particularly among organizations with more than 50 employees.

AI adoption among UK businesses with 10 or more employees has almost tripled since late 2023, rising from around 12% to 35%. Larger organizations are leading the way, with 49% of those with 250 or more employees saying they use at least one AI system, compared with 28% of businesses with nine employees or fewer.

Notably, fewer than 10% of firms have reduced employee headcount as a result of AI, according to ONS figures.

But they're not taking on extra staff either, which is a problem. Just 1% of the smallest businesses and 1.2% of the largest businesses report increasing headcount as a direct result of AI. Around half of businesses report no change at all.

UK firms ramp up AI skills training

Businesses mostly said they were integrating AI skills into their workforce through training or reskilling existing staff.

Over 60% are doing so to reduce barriers to AI expertise within their workforce, and around 40% of medium- to large-sized businesses report integrating AI skills through training.

According to Fasthosts, which has analysed the data, fears that workers across multiple industries will be replaced may be unfounded.

"Economists are pushing to distinguish between task automation, where AI automates specific activities, and job automation, where an entire role disappears," the researchers said.

"Current evidence suggests that the former is occurring much faster than the latter, for example with tools such as AI receptionists which can step in by picking up routine enquiries when staff are unavailable. AI is primarily being used to automate repetitive tasks within existing jobs, rather than eliminate roles altogether."

Long-term gains

The World Economic Forum (WEF) predicts that technological change could create 170 million jobs while displacing 92 million by the end of the decade, resulting in a net increase of 78 million jobs.

As ITPro recently reported, UK firms specifically view AI as a long-term growth driver when it comes to jobs.

Analysis conducted by Box found 65% of business leaders expect their overall headcount to increase in the next three years, with just 14% expecting numbers to decrease.

Of those using agents, only 8% said the technology was eliminating existing roles. If anything, it was creating demand for new AI-focused expertise.

Nearly half are hiring ‘AI agent operators’, for example, with 32% adding ‘workflow automation specialists’.

Other key areas such as security and compliance, governance, and ethics all recorded significant AI-focused job growth.

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It might not have the draw of the recent FIFA World Cup, but esports has a global, and growing, following.

Research suggests the global esports market is worth some US$5bn, according to data firm Statista. This is growing steadily, with some analysts predicting that the sector will reach US$10bn by 2035.

At the same time, the number of esports players is significant: Statista predicts 925m users by 2030. In the UK, trade body UKie values the sector at £111.5m.

UKie's figures date from 2019, though, so are certain to underestimate both the value and levels of participation in esports, not least because of increased uptake of gaming during the Covid-19 lockdowns.

In the game

Esports, or competitive video games, are not new. According to UKie, the first “esports” event was the Atari Space Invaders Tournament, back in 1980; 10,000 dedicated fans took part. Since then, the trade body says, esports has become the world’s fastest-growing entertainment sector.

This makes esports an important industry in its own right. Saudi Arabia usually hosts the Esports World Cup (exceptionally, this year’s tournament was moved to Paris). The Kingdom has put esports at the centre of its Vision 2030 strategy for economic diversification, with the sector expected to employ 39,000 people by the end of the decade.

Closer to home, British Esports has built a 15,000 sq ft arena and the National Esports Performance Campus in Sunderland. Clearly, there is more to esports than playing Call of Duty in a darkened basement.

And, while the direct economic impact of esports – from games development, tournaments and events and even merchandising – is significant, there is another reason it is attracting attention. Esports is gaining recognition as a way to develop digital skills. And organizations are starting to view gaming, and especially esports, as a way to attract and retain talent.

British Esport cites figures from the Government’s Department for Culture, Media and Sport stating that 80% of advertised jobs now need digital skills. At the same time, the digital skills gap is costing the economy £63bn a year. And, despite a cooling market in some areas of the technology sector, employers still struggle to attract digital talent.

Military first

One of the earliest sectors to recognize this is defence. Esports in the UK armed forces has developed largely from the ground up. But the activity now has official backing, with esports facilities on RAF stations and Army barracks and even an esports suite on HMS Prince of Wales.

In 2024, the MOD recognized esports as an official, military sport. Last year, the MOD’s Cyber and Specialist Operations Command worked with the British Esports Federation to deliver a defence and industry tournament, the International Defence Esports Games (IDEG). This will be open to military personnel from Allies and partners around the world, in due course extending to veterans, cadets and players in the defence industry. The inaugural IDEG Finals will take place in Sunderland this October.

The connection between esports and workplace skills in the military is a direct one. As the MOD states, fast responses and hand-eye co-ordination, honed by competitive gaming, are essential for troops operating drones.

But, the MOD says, esports develops other key skills, such as cyber awareness, decision-making under pressure, and leadership.

This, of course, is not new.

“For centuries we’ve used ball games like rugby and football to develop teamwork, hone mental and physical fitness and build resilience," said Lieutenant General Sir Tom Copinger-Symes, at the time Deputy Commander of UK Cyber & Specialist Operations Command.

"We’ve also used games to discuss ethics - how to win, but win well. That’s increasingly relevant in a world of AI and autonomous drones on the battlefield. Esports perfectly complement these games in preparing us for 21st Century security challenges."

And it is those “soft” skills that make esports a valuable tool for business too.

Business next

Esports can, and possibly should, be part of any business’ digital skills toolkit. And using esports to develop teamwork and communications is in many ways more practical than physical sporting leagues.

“Gaming generally is a good way of getting people to learn. It taps into a human love of play and collaboration,” Adam Waters, director of AI culture and gaming at BFBS, the forces’ broadcasting and media charity, told ITPro.

“It doesn’t have to be a competitive Call of Duty league, which is what many think of when it comes to esports.” BFBS recently launched its own esports Pro League for the wider forces community, with an emphasis on casual gaming.

Waters is also seeing defence companies standing up esports teams to play alongside service personnel. “Esports itself is something more companies seem to be formally getting involved in,” he says.

“Something I’m seeing in a lot of organizations is a need for technical skills combined with emotional intelligence or ‘people skills.’ People who game in teams should look at developing these.”

One advantage of esports is the way it is built around teams, with teams competing in leagues based around individual games. This allows players to gain skills, not just from play, but from managing teams or even running tournaments. The broader emphasis on teamwork is one reason the military and cadet forces value esports.

Professional skills

Learning to develop professional and organizational skills through esports goes alongside leadership and communication skills. But the way esports fosters a sense of inclusion is also important, according to George Osborn, author of Power Play and Editor of Video Games Industry Memo.

“Outside of a handful of direct links between playing games and developing a useful professional skill, such as using a controller and becoming a drone pilot, esports develop similar soft skills to sporting activities,” he told IT Pro.

And businesses can also build esports into social activities, brand building and potentially, recruitment. Skilled workers might be more attracted to a workplace that reflects their interests, and esports can be part of that.

But Osborn cautions that enterprises need to be aware of cultural nuances around esports, and understand that building a community takes time.

Some esports, he says, are more commercial in nature; for others they are driven by the local gaming culture. Some games, such as fighting games, are even “properly countercultural”, he warns, and might not lend themselves to a corporate endeavor.

“Take baby steps to understand these things, align around communities that can work with you, and provide long-term support to a sector that is still finding its feet,” he recommends.

On the face of it, the channel model is the perfect arrangement. Partners gain access to technologies and revenue opportunities they could never build alone. Customers benefit from top-drawer advisers who can bring together the right solutions for their needs. And vendors get to extend their reach into markets and sectors that would be impossible to serve directly. Everybody wins.

So why is there so much friction in the channel, and why is it seemingly getting worse? A report by the global channel trade association – the GTIA – found that satisfaction with vendor relationships has declined year over year, falling from 39% in 2025 to just 18% in 2026. 

The reasons cited in the report touched on a number of challenges, including the rise of AI. But there are other issues as well, such as the sheer complexity and administrative burden of setting up and maintaining a properly functioning partner program. 

The hidden operational cost for partners

The result is that staff end up spending a disproportionate amount of time running the program rather than working with customers. 

Sales teams are forced to spend time on administration rather than selling. In some cases, people are employed for no other reason than simply to carry out the back-office functions of running a program. 

There are certification and recertification requirements. Time is spent completing mandatory training courses, as well as tracking and maintaining multiple vendor accreditations. 

Then there are the onboarding processes for new vendor relationships, managing multiple partner portals and logins, deal registration administration, and rebate and incentive program management. And let’s not forget the inconsequential task of monitoring program changes, updates, and new requirements. 

The operational cost of running some programs is becoming a real burden. And it’s happening because somewhere along the line, the channel has started to mistake complexity for sophistication. 

In other words, the IT channel has become so focused on complicated products, architectures, services, and business models that it assumes something is better simply because it is more complex.

Little wonder, then, that when the conversations dwell on such matters, they ‘risk turning into therapy sessions about how bad some programs are’.

Clearly, one approach to handle increased complexity is to invest in platforms, processes, and people to handle it. In fact, the channel ecosystem has become so convoluted that an entire specialist software sector has emerged to help vendors manage the process. 

The 2025 Canalys Channels Ecosystem Landscape report found that there are 261 companies – driving $7.46 billion in revenue in 2024 – simply to help companies ‘design, develop, execute and manage a broad channel partner and alliance ecosystem’.

Simplicity is becoming a competitive advantage

The other approach, though, is to make them simpler – something that really hit home during a recent bucket-list trip to Italy. 

Life there moves at a different pace, and it pushed me to reassess how I look at things – not just personally but also in terms of my work with the channel as well. I have to say that it has reshaped my own thinking in terms of making things simpler, clearer and less complicated.  

For me, that means going back to basics. And I think it can be boiled down to four core areas. 

First, vendors need to simplify the rewards and incentives on offer. As we’ve seen repeatedly, complex incentive structures, overlapping programmes, and opaque reward mechanisms tend to create unnecessary administrative effort and uncertainty. In reality, partners should be able to clearly understand how their investment translates into benefits. 

Second, sales enablement needs to focus on capability, not box-ticking compliance. Training, certifications, and specialisations should help partners solve customer problems and grow their expertise, not tie them up in unnecessary red tape.  

Third, there should be a laser-like focus on improving the overall partner experience. Portals, onboarding processes, deal registration systems, and day-to-day workflows shape how partners experience a vendor. As I mentioned earlier, small points of friction can quickly accumulate into a significant operational burden. 

Finally, vendors need to create greater commercial predictability for their partners. After all, they need to make decisions about hiring, training, and business development based on expected returns. Without clear discount structures, transparent requirements, and predictable program rules, how can partners be expected to plan and invest with confidence?  

In fact, I’m so convinced that this is the right approach that I would argue that simplicity is becoming a competitive advantage. After all, partners have finite time and resources to deal with such matters. Vendors that respect those constraints, through clear programs, predictable rewards, streamlined processes, and reduced friction, are much better placed to succeed. 

Knowledge workers are secretly yearning for the days before AI entered the mix, with three-in-ten saying they preferred work before adoption of the technology.

In a survey of office workers by digital transformation firm Adaptavist, 65% said they preferred the pre-AI era and 38% would remove generative AI tools from the world entirely if they had the chance.

Younger workers in particular are among those most frustrated by AI, with 40% of Gen Z and Millennials saying they would scrap generative AI tools, compared with 32% of Gen X and 29% of Boomers.

The findings mark a shift in feelings about AI, the researchers said. While businesses continue to invest heavily in the technology, public concern is growing over its impact on jobs, workplace surveillance, privacy, and security.

Meanwhile, AI has introduced new pressures for workers, eroded the value of skilled work, and left employees feeling less engaged and less valued than before.

"These findings point to an underlying gap we see in most AI implementations," said Neal Riley, AI innovation lead at Adaptavist.

"It is much easier for organizations to focus on adoption metrics – who is using AI, how often they are using it – than it is to measure its impact on the work itself."

Just over three-in-ten (31%) of the workers who said they'd like to get rid of AI said it was because they believed it reduces creativity. Almost as many had ethical doubts, with 29% citing concerns over misuse and 28% worrying about surveillance and privacy.

‘AI slop’ is a leading frustration

Notably, nearly half (46%) said that dealing with low-quality 'AI slop' makes their job feel less meaningful and more repetitive. More than one-third (37%), for example, admitted it has made them less engaged at work overall.

It's not as if workers are seeing the big efficiency benefits often associated with AI, the study found. More than four-in-ten (42%) now spend more time verifying and fact-checking AI output than they actually save by using it.

Almost half said that poor quality AI-generated work is actively slowing down their projects, while 55% believe it is reducing overall team efficiency.

The findings from Adaptavist align with recent research from ISC2, which found nearly two-thirds (65%) of cyber professionals are spending more time deciding whether to trust or act on AI-generated recommendations.

A similar number (63%) said they now find themselves reviewing and validating AI outputs, creating larger workloads and essentially wasting time on a daily basis.

‘AI slop’ has become a recurring buzzword over the last 18 months. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella penned a blog post in January this year calling on the industry to disregard the term.

Yet research shows this is having a direct impact on workplace efficiency and productivity. As ITPro reported in January, analysis from Zapier found employees are working an extra four and a half hours each week cleaning up mistakes.

The consequences of not acting on low quality AI-generated outputs can be grave, the study noted. Respondents reported having had work rejected due to poor AI outputs, while others highlighted customer complaints and even security incidents.

AI is adding pressure

Workers are also feeling pressured, with half believing that their performance is now being compared – fairly or not – to AI-generated output.

Around a quarter are facing intense pressure to improve performance, improve quality, and be more efficient, just to keep pace in a machine-accelerated environment.

Another quarter said they use AI simply to meet workload demands, and 23% rely on the technology to keep up with colleagues.

"By understanding the nature of the work and the different value streams across your business, you can more accurately measure outcomes and impact rather than simply counting actions," said Riley.

"When AI is introduced thoughtfully, with the right guardrails and genuine support for the people using it, it can enhance rather than erode what makes work meaningful and impactful."

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Barracuda Networks has announced a series of enhancements to its Partner Success Program in a move the cybersecurity vendor said will help MSPs and channel partners strengthen expertise and accelerate growth.

The initiative now includes new enablement, marketing, and partner engagement capabilities designed to improve operational efficiency, deepen technical knowledge, and unlock new business opportunities through the BarracudaONE cyber resilience platform.

The update includes expanded demand generation tools, enhanced marketing resources, and partner experience improvements, alongside additional training and certification options via the Barracuda Mastery Program.

In an announcement, Michelle Hodges, senior vice president of global channels and alliances at Barracuda, said the latest enhancements reflect the company’s continued commitment to partner success.

“At Barracuda, our partners are at the center of every decision we make, from product innovation to go-to-market execution," she commented. "We’re creating more opportunities for partners to engage customers, sharpen differentiation and grow their business — and making it easier than ever to do so.”

Expanded partner capabilities

As part of the update, Barracuda is introducing a new through-channel marketing automation platform that features co-branded campaigns, social and email syndication, and turnkey campaign execution to help partners generate demand.

The company also revealed that it plans to launch a Partner Locator tool designed to connect customers with certified partners and help drive high-intent sales opportunities.

On the training front, the Barracuda Mastery Program has been expanded with additional role-based learning, technical labs, and advanced sales and technical badges aimed at strengthening partner expertise and validating specialist skills.

Elsewhere, the company has introduced new role-based experiences and automation within its Partner Portal, including guided onboarding journeys designed to simplify engagement, accelerate time to value, and help businesses scale.

Commenting on the refresh, Sean Furman, president at STF Consulting, said the enhanced program will help partners strengthen their expertise while tapping into new revenue opportunities.

“Barracuda’s expanded training, certifications and partner recognition programs give us the tools to build expertise and stand out in a crowded market,” he explained.

“These investments elevate our credibility as a strategic advisor and translate directly into greater customer value, stronger retention and new opportunities to grow high margin recurring revenue.”

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Google Cloud has recorded its best quarterly growth to date, with earnings reports showing revenue surging 82% to $24.8bn.

Across the wider company, Google-owner Alphabet saw revenue climb 24% to $119.8bn, with income up 30%.

Despite such gains, Google was still on the back foot, with share prices falling 3% after revealing a big boost in capital expenditure and being forced to defend delays to its top-end AI model.

"Q2 was an amazing quarter, with Alphabet revenues growing 24% year-over-year and Google Cloud revenues accelerating to 82% growth, driven by demand for AI infrastructure and AI solutions," said CEO Sundar Pichai in a statement. "It’s great to see wide adoption of Gemini Enterprise, with nearly 90% of the Fortune 100 using it."

"Our AI investments are redefining what’s possible across every part of our business."

Continued capex concerns

After the results were announced, Google admitted in a conference call it will increase its capital expenditure this year, which is largely focused on AI infrastructure spending such as data centers.

Last quarter, that was bumped up by $5bn to an already massive $180bn to $190bn, and it has now been increased to $195bn to $205bn.

Over the second quarter alone, Google recorded capex of $45bn, with most used to boost "technical infrastructure to support our investments in AI," said Anat Ashkenazi, senior VP and CFO, according to a transcript of the conference call.

"The increase in the range is primarily due to an acceleration in the delivery of capacity to meet growing demand," said Ashkenazi, adding that spending would "increase significantly" in 2027.

Google isn’t alone in dealing with surging capex rates. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is projected to spend $200bn and Meta plans as much as $145bn.

These huge outlays have sparked concerns about the cost of AI over the last 18 months, but industry leaders insist it's all part of the process. Pichai compared this stage of AI to the early days of the shift to the cloud.

"I do think it feels like we are in very early innings of what feels like a secular shift across multiple areas in our core information businesses just the possibilities when I see what all you can do with the absolute frontier capabilities, there's still a lot of work ahead to translate all that into experiences for our consumer users," he said, in response to an analyst question.

Ashkenazi added that "while we have increased our capacity quite significantly over the past 3 years, the demand still outpaces that investment."

AI delays

Google Cloud might be flying high, but concerns over AI model-related delays are rising among investors. The firm’s flagship model was once again delayed this week.

The company unveiled Gemini 3.6 Flash and a cyber-focused model, Gemini 3.5 Flash Cyber this week, following the lead of competitors such as Anthropic in the space.

However, Gemini 3.5 Pro wasn’t included in the launch after initially being set for release in June. Google said it would be made available "as soon as it's ready".

"Gemini 3.5 Pro is currently in testing and our team is already building the next generation of models," Pichai said on the conference call. "We have started our most ambitious pretraining run yet for Gemini 4 and are excited by the progress we are seeing at the frontier."

That didn't convince one analyst, Douglas Anmuth from JPMorgan Chase & Company, who asked about Pichai's confidence in keeping Gemini models at the frontier — the front of the pack, the leading edge of AI development.

Pichai defended Google's AI efforts, saying the company was "very committed and very confident of being at the frontier, and, model releases aside, remains a leader on "many attributes" — though he admitted work was needed on coding and agentic coding.

"I am very excited by the progress I'm seeing internally on Gemini 4, and I'm confident that people will be pleased when we are putting it outside," he added.

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When Allbirds, an eco-friendly luxury shoemaker, announced in April it had struck a $50 million (£37 million deal) to become an AI data center provider, its stock surged more than 580% in a single trading session.

Whether things aren't quite working out, or whether you've identified a brilliant opportunity, pivoting into a new space is often the best bet for surviving – and thriving.

The technology industry is rife with reinventions. Take Nintendo, which started out making handmade toys, or Amazon, which was a mere humble bookseller.

Plenty of companies have successfully made a transition from one line of business to another – sometimes unexpectedly, sometimes out of necessity, and sometimes so dramatically we've forgotten their original purpose. Here are some of our highlights.

1. BlackBerry: From phone maker to auto software developer

In February 2016, BlackBerry acquired the U.K. cybersecurity company Encription as it embarked on a dramatic pivot into cybersecurity consulting. It then broadened its horizons to the software space and now, with the QNX operating system, the firm develops critical software and services for more than 275 million cars around the world.

"It's been a large transformation over the course of the last decade as we've divested businesses and really narrowed our focus towards the B2B segments of QNX and Secure Communications," BlackBerry CEO John Giamatteo told Richard Quest in an interview with CNN in January this year.

"So that narrowing of focus has allowed us to simplify, reduce our costs, divest ourselves from subscale businesses, and really put ourselves in a much better position for profitability and long-term growth."

2. Nokia: From paper mill to handsets to next-gen networks

Like BlackBerry, Nokia gained worldwide recognition for its outstanding mobile phones – manufacturing devices from 1982, starting with the Mobira Senator, and now continuing in spirit under the spun-off HMD Global brand.

The origins of the Finnish technology icon, however, stretch back to 1865, when engineer Fredrik Idestam established the company as a paper mill.

It wasn't until a significant merger more than 100 years later — where Nokia, Kaapelitehdas, and Finnish Rubber Works merged to create the Nokia Corporation — that electronics became a key line of business.

Although its reputation faded in the 2000s with the birth of the smartphone — and the eventual sale of its mobile and devices division to Microsoft in 2013 — Nokia continued to make waves under the radar, and under the ground.

It began focusing on networking in 2014 and is now undergoing a major pivot away from sluggish telecom hardware toward AI-native networks, data center networking and 6G tech.

3. Samsung: From groceries to electronics and beyond

Samsung is among the world's most widely known brands and one of the 21st century's biggest technology success stories. The South Korean institution deals in all kinds of goods from fridges to smartphones to laptops to speakers.

In fact, it's hard to find an electronic device that Samsung doesn't manufacture. But the company didn't always start this way.

The company actually started life as a small grocery trading company in 1938, with the 40-employee-strong entity dealing in dried fish, local groceries and noodles. Amazon may have pivoted into this space recently with its Fresh stores, but for Samsung, groceries have always been in its lifeblood.

Samsung didn't enter the electronics industry until the late 1960s, when it started manufacturing black-and-white TVs. It's now a trillion-dollar company that comprises 80 separate companies, spanning construction, financial services, medical services, and many other areas.

In the future, Samsung is hoping to focus on the technologies of tomorrow, including agentic AI and 6G communications.

4. Slack: From gaming to workplace collaboration

Slack is one of the most widely used collaboration platforms on the planet, with the multi-billion dollar business boasting tens of millions of daily users each day.

Well before its massive acquisition by Salesforce for a tidy sum of close to $30 billion (£22.5 billion) – and indeed before it rose to prominence – the company's origins lay in the world of gaming.

When co-founder of photo-sharing site Flickr, Stewart Butterfield, attempted to get his new venture Tiny Speck off the ground in 2009, he developed an internal communications platform to help the team as it was developing its computer game Glitch.

This fanciful 2D MMORPG launched in 2011 and was eventually shut down roughly a year later — with these efforts to make it big in the gaming world ending in tears.

From these ashes, however, Butterfield pivoted the company and instead focused his team's efforts on making their internal communications tools public. Hence, Slack Technologies — and the widely used platform we now know today — was born.

Why Slack? It stands for "Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge". Glitch is long dead, but you can still find a wonderful homage to Slack's origins on its website.

5. YouTube: From dating site to video hosting

The video-sharing platform YouTube has become a giant force in the technology industry, especially since its acquisition by Google, and it's become a hub for businesses across the world.

Millions of users have created businesses using the site, and many existing organizations use the hosting platform as an extension of their own businesses to push video content to billions of viewers.

But before the first video, 'Me at the zoo', was uploaded more than 20 years ago, its founders originally aimed to create a video dating site. The vision, according to co-founder Steven Chen, was to build a platform that allowed people to upload videos of themselves describing their ideal partners.

"We always thought there was something with video there, but what would be the actual practical application?" Chen said at SXSW 2016 in Austin, Texas, according to CNET.

"We thought dating would be the obvious choice."

Writing recently in ChannelPro, Lutz Lambrecht, chief partner officer at SNP Group, observed that strong partnership ecosystems show greater resilience in the face of economic turbulence and market disruption. He highlighted value alignment, versatility, and adaptable technology as key factors that build partners’ and vendors’ resilience.

Lambrecht described how stronger alignment on solution positioning, definitions of customer success, and the measurement of outcomes puts partners in a stronger position to communicate value and build credibility with customers.

The power of partner and provider alignment resonated with me as the CEO of a transatlantic digital agency that aims to help UK and US organizations in the public, private, and membership sectors to navigate cloud, digital, and AI transformation.

Looking for strong leadership

Many of our customers are seeking support to implement generative AI tools within their membership organisations.

Data from the Professional Associations Research Network (PARN) report 2025 [pg33) revealed that members expect their professional body to guide how to safely implement AI, and even which LLMs to select:

• 82% told PARN that they want best practice guides and case studies on AI implementation
• 67% want training on AI
• 64% want their professional body to regulate the use of AI in their profession
• 63% want their professional body to vet and provide access to approved AI tools

There is clearly a chain of trust at work. Members are looking for AI guidance from their professional bodies. In turn, professional bodies seek trustworthy support from their digital platform providers. And, finally, digital platform providers rely upon their technology partners.

Navigating change together

When you’re responsible for the performance, stability, and security of an organization’s website or e-commerce platform, you need full confidence in the technologies that you select to build it. But it goes deeper than that. You must also have faith in the people within the vendor’s organization and its core values.

During the recent Codegarden conference in Copenhagen, Karla Santi, CEO of American digital agency, Blend Interactive, presented the findings from the platinum partner’s survey of 40 small, medium, and large digital agencies, undertaken by Promethean Research. This revealed:

• The average revenue growth over the past year was 7.5% compared to 20% in previous years
• Sales cycles are extending
• Clients are seeking more business case framing and asking ROI questions earlier in engagements
• Agency leaders are feeling the strain of navigating market disruption
• agencies that reduced services and specialized achieved above-average growth

Based on the survey data, Santi encourages fellow digital agency leaders to refine their services and protect their relationships.

In the first episode of the Loom podcast, I sat down with Mats Persson, CEO of the open source CMS platform company, Umbraco, to discuss how business leaders can remain confident in such uncertain times.

We discussed how the vendor’s values of transparency and flexibility are tightly aligned with our own, and how this helps us to build trust with customers.

An open culture opens doors

Referring back to Lambrecht’s point about value alignment, it was Umbraco’s openness that first attracted us to become a partner. We were able to make an informed decision about whether it was the right organization and technology for us to partner with because, to a large degree, we were permitted to look behind the curtain.

We could see what the company was really like, what its enterprise aspirations were, and how central partners really are to its growth strategy.

As Persson commented during the podcast discussion, “You gain more trust if you're open and willing to share your challenges. Partners can handle the truth. If you're transparent with them, it’s an opportunity to fix something, and that becomes more trustworthy.”

Gaining confidence in the cloud

Vendor trust was a really important aspect in my decision to put Umbraco Cloud forward when speaking to our clients about their projects. The company’s transparency solidified my decision to move from us hosting customers’ sites to building enterprise customers’ projects on Umbraco Cloud.

There was an established feedback loop of Umbraco listening to partners and customers. This is not merely performative. Umbraco has demonstrably acted upon feedback. That gave us enormous confidence that when we saw a pain point, we knew it would get fixed.

We didn't switch everything over all at once. We started to feel it out, to see how the support functions. We explored what the challenges were and what we needed to change to get the best out of it. We liked what we saw and started to build increasingly complex sites on Umbraco Cloud.

Quality beats quantity

As Lambrecht wrote in ChannelPro, “The strength of a partner ecosystem is not defined by the number of partners in a network, but by how effectively partners are aligned, enabled, and equipped to deliver value in changing conditions. At the core is a shared value narrative that brings together complementary strengths of vendors and partners, with both combining to create a joint proposition that is clearly differentiated.”

We talk about trying to build a culture of openness within our organization and with our stakeholders. But if we were dealing with a CMS vendor that didn't share those values, wasn't providing the necessary level of support, and wasn't adapting the product based on feedback, that would show to the end client.

Ultimately, carefully choosing who you work with is a major consideration as we all navigate these uncertain times together.

We are not unique. Indeed, many other companies are on the same journey of discovery to get to a point of established trust and create the foundations of current and future success.

Delinea has cut the ribbon on a new global partner program designed to improve partner profitability and simplify engagement with the identity security vendor.

The Delinea Partner Advantage Program introduces a range of new incentives and operational changes, including protected discounts, published deal registration rules, AI-powered training, and streamlined quote-to-cash processes.

Developed following partner feedback gathered through a global listening survey, the initiative aims to address ongoing channel concerns around margin erosion, channel conflict, and unclear rules of engagement, while providing partners with a more structured framework geared towards long-term growth.

In an announcement, Scott Goree, Delinea’s senior vice president of channel and alliances, said the company has avoided unnecessary complexity and focused on combating the practical challenges faced by partners.

“Partners don’t care about your partner program,” he commented. “They care about technology that works, protected discounts, and a vendor that’s easy to work with. We built this program around what partners told us they actually need.”

Inside the Partner Advantage Program

California-headquartered Delinea’s identity security platform governs access for human users, machines, and AI agents across on-premises and cloud environments, continuously working to discover identities, analyze risks, and apply least privilege access controls.

The firm said its new channel program has been built around three pillars – Protect, Align, and Scale – and includes codified rules of engagement, AI-driven enablement, and greater channel autonomy to help partners drive growth through the platform.

According to the vendor, partners will benefit from published deal registration policies, teaming protections, and earned incumbency discounts designed to reward them for maintaining and expanding customer relationships.

The program also includes AI-powered training and certifications alongside a new partner portal that offers guidance throughout the sales cycle.

Elsewhere, Delinea is also providing simplified tools and automation to help reduce administrative complexity across the quote-to-cash process, allowing partners to spend more time on customer engagement.

AI adoption fuels channel opportunity

The launch of the Delinea Partner Advantage Program comes as organizations continue to adapt to identity security challenges driven by the increasing presence of AI technologies.

According to the vendor’s 2026 Identity Security Report, 92% of surveyed organizations said they expect AI to amplify identity-related threats in the coming years, while 42% said that AI expansion has already increased their non-human identity risk in the past 12 months.

Delinea said its new program will help partners tap into this growth opportunity and benefit from a new revenue stream backed by its identity security platform.

Commenting on the launch, Mark Thornberry, senior vice president of partnerships at GuidePoint Security, a Delinea partner, said the vendor’s new initiative “reflects a strong commitment” to building successful, long-term channel collaboration.

“The program provides a clear framework that supports how we work together in the market, while recognizing the value partners bring through the customer relationships we cultivate and support," he said.

Enrolment for the Partner Advantage Program is now open for selling partners, with roles for MSPs, GSIs, advisory, and technology partners to follow.

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The IBC event is back again for another year, with that, we’re pleased to announce that our IBC Best of Show Awards program is now open for entries.

The Amsterdam-based event, which runs from 11-14 September, is designed to recognize the most outstanding broadcast products and solutions. ITPro's Best of Show awards aim to showcase the best of the best. Entries are open now until the extended closing deadline of 23:59 CET on Friday, Aug 28. You can enter via the website here.

ITPro is joined by other key Future B2B sites - AV Technology, Installation TV Tech, TVBEurope, Radio World,, and Sound & Video Contractor - in hosting the awards program.

Nominations are reviewed by a panel of industry experts who consider the overall quality and relevance of a given product, its design and build quality, the business/operational benefits, and other key factors such as cost-effectiveness and innovation.

It's £525+VAT per entry but it really is worth entering to ensure your innovation gets the attention it deserves.

The benefits of entering are:

•  Fully-licensed nominee badges for all entries to use in both digital and print promotions.
• Dedicated editorial coverage across participating brands. Online, newsletter and social promotional activity for all winners from participating brands. 
• Winner marketing assets to further promote your success. You will receive an official award winner's badge, fully licensed to be used with your winning product both domestically and overseas at no additional cost in addition to a winner's social assets.
• Complimentary winner trophies to display your success. Winners will receive a trophy to display their success to IBC attendees.

So don't delay, make sure you enter today! Or certainly before the closing deadline of 23:59 CET on Friday, Aug 28.

A group of current and former Meta employees is suing the company, claiming that it used AI to target those on medical or family leave for layoffs.

In May, Meta announced it was cutting around 8,000 staff, representing roughly 10% of its workforce. According to the lawsuit, the tech giant used AI systems to identify those set for redundancy.

These systems allegedly took into account keystroke monitoring data, AI token usage

“Meta did not assemble the termination list through the considered judgment of managers who knew the work,” court filings state.

“Instead, Meta used a constellation of internal artificial intelligence systems — including a system referred to internally as ‘Metamate,’ employee-trained ‘second-brain’ agents, keystroke- and activity-monitoring data, AI-token-usage dashboards, and algorithmically assisted performance ranking and calibration — to score, rank and select employees for inclusion on the list.”

Complainants allege this put employees on protected medical or family leave, or those whose output was reduced by a disability, at a disadvantage by penalizing them with reduced performance scores.

"The result was that employees who took protected leaves were disproportionately selected for layoff, based on scoring that not only failed to account for their protected leaves, but in effect penalized the employees for exercising their legal rights to these leaves."

In one example, an employee was laid off while on approved pre-birth pregnancy leave – the day before her waters broke, and just two days before she gave birth.

In another, a manager’s own performance review noted that his demotion followed his return from medical leave; he was put on the list sixteen days into a second medical leave.

The 26 plaintiffs claim that Meta has violated state-protected leave laws, the Family and Medical Leave Act, the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, and the Americans with Disabilities Act.

They're calling for a preliminary court ruling that would stop Meta from finalizing the layoffs while they pursue their ​claims.

“Once these separations are final, the harms are irreversible: employer-subsidized health coverage lost during pregnancy, postpartum recovery, and active medical treatment; time-bound leave rights extinguished; unvested equity forfeited; and immigration consequences triggered,” they said.

Plaintiffs are also seeking financial compensation that could include reinstatement, back pay, lost equity, benefits, and other damages.

AI in HR is a delicate balancing act

The use of AI systems in HR and recruitment has been a long-running point of contention, particularly with regard to the potential for bias or discrimination.

Workday, for example, is facing a class-action lawsuit amidst claims its AI software discriminated against job applicants. As ITPro reported in June, the company hit back at the claims, with a spokesperson insisting its AI solutions “don’t make hiring decisions”.

Ilia Kolochenko, founder of cybersecurity company ImmuniWeb and a lawyer practising in cybersecurity and data protection, noted that over-regulation of the use of AI in HR could cause long-term harm.

"With the current trend to restrict or even entirely ban AI in HR decision-making processes, most organizations will either conceal the use of AI or shift back to non-AI systems especially in those jurisdictions that have no GDPR-like protection against automated decision-making on human subjects," he said.

"Compared to AI-powered HR systems, their non-AI homologues are quite primitive, fail to consider the relevant context and often provide incorrect metrics or data,” Kolochenko added.

“For instance, a poor performance of a delivery truck driver will not be correlated with extreme summer heat or winter snowfalls, sudden family loss or simply a technical issue with the vehicle. Eventually, innocent persons are wrongly punished.”

ITPro approached Meta for comment, but did not receive a response by time of publication.

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British companies have doubled spending on AI, but they need to also invest in the basics to ensure real results.

That's according to research from ServiceNow, which ranked the UK 51/100 in terms of overall AI maturity despite companies spending 102% more than they did in the year prior.

ServiceNow pinned that on a failure to invest in the foundations needed for AI, including data management and governance processes, and updating legacy systems.

According to a service by the company, 73% of UK executives said they were finding inadequate data accuracy, access, and management a major barrier to rolling out and using AI.

Just 20% of UK businesses had implemented testing, auditing, and risk assessment for AI, for example. Under one-fifth (17%) of businesses surveyed in the UK had also replaced legacy systems with integrated platforms.

"UK organizations are investing heavily in AI, which tells us the challenge is not ambition," said Damian Stirrett, Group Vice President and General Manager for UK and Ireland at ServiceNow.

"It is connecting that commitment to the operational infrastructure that makes AI work across the enterprise."

The ServiceNow results follow similar research from Cisco earlier this year that found nearly all companies are expanding privacy and governance work in response to AI adoption.

Not ready for AI

While two-thirds of UK companies polled had used agentic AI, just 6% did so to create autonomous workflows, highlighting a lack of maturity in AI roll-outs.

That was echoed by findings showing that 15% of UK organizations have streamlined or integrated workflows using AI, which ServiceNow said showed a gap between AI investment and operational readiness

"Too many businesses are bolting AI onto fragmented systems, disconnected assistants and workflows that have not yet been reimagined," said Stirrett. "The next phase is about moving from isolated pilots to trusted, end-to-end workflows that can deliver at scale."

ServiceNow said improvements will require getting the right data, governance, and workflow foundations in place to scale AI.

You can't spend your way out of trouble

Despite the challenges, UK spending is largely on par with that across EMEA, which saw AI budgets leap by 113% over the last year. By 2027, AI spend will make up 20% of IT budgets, ServiceNow predicted.

However, the company noted that organizations that are succeeding with AI aren't necessarily spending more, pointing to 21% that are seeing strong returns.

Instead, they have the "most mature governance", including data management and risk controls, and that's helping to deliver a 164% return on investment now. The company predicts this could climb to a 199% return on investment within two years.

Governance, the company argued, doesn't slow innovation but is "operating discipline" that enables it, in particular when it comes to scaling quickly and ensuring systems are trusted and auditable.

That echoes comments earlier this year from Tenable co-CEO Stephen Vintz, who said enterprises need to consider the "responsibility gap" with regard to AI governance.

Speaking at RSAC Conference 2026, Vintz pointed to the fact that 90% of organizations had adopted AI and half have already had a related cyber incident.

"There is a fundamental mismatch between the exponential speed of AI adoption and the linear speed of traditional corporate governance, and things will only move faster and things will only become more complex," he said at the time

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European small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are bullish on generative AI, according to new research from SAS and IDC, and some are setting an example in how to nail adoption.

Analysis conducted by IDC on behalf of the data management firm shows SMBs across the region are executing AI deployments in a far more efficient manner to global counterparts.

In North America, for example, SMBs scored strongest in terms of planning and building, but many aren’t reaching full deployment.

This contrast suggests European organizations are making “stronger progress in operationalizing AI and embedding it into day-to-day operations”.

A key factor in European SMB successes lies in readiness, according to the report. IT leaders across the region are prioritizing areas such as governance before diving head long into adoption projects.

“Organizations treating governance as a foundation rather than an obstacle are often the ones best positioned to execute,” said John Carey, Senior Vice President of Global Channels at SAS.

“The findings suggest European SMBs are taking a more operational approach to AI adoption – focusing not just on experimentation, but on putting the right structures in place to scale AI effectively.”

Notably, Carey suggested that “stronger execution performance” among European SMBs may be due to regulatory considerations such as the EU AI Act.

Simply put, IT leaders at small businesses across the region are accelerating preparation to ensure compliance with the legislation.

It’s perhaps no surprise then that governance, risk, and compliance for AI has emerged as the top priority for SMB leaders, cited by 26%.

Progress on this front is easier said than done, however. The study noted that uncertainty is rife with regard to compliance, risk management, and security.

Nearly one-quarter (24%) identified this as their biggest execution barrier with AI adoption.

Still a long way to go

Despite positive signs for European SMBs, on a global scale the pace of AI adoption is still slow. SAS noted that many are “still struggling to move from experimentation to meaningful business impact”.

Nearly three-quarters (70%) of SMBs worldwide either remain in ‘experimental’ or ‘opportunistic’ stages of AI maturity, for example. Similarly, only 9% have fully embedded AI into daily operations or decision making.

Slow progress in AI maturity is, at least in part, due to traditional data-related problems such as silos and visibility. Nearly half (45%) of SMB leaders said their data remains “scattered across systems with no clear ownership”.

A similar number (46%) said AI tools are often still used in isolated environments across the business, preventing teams from aligning workflows.

Notably, 90% of those in experimental phases report having no formal AI strategy in place, which is impeding progress for IT leaders.

“To actually make something of their AI strategy, SMBs need to move from disconnected pilots to true alignments of their data, people, and resources,” said Daniel-Zoe Jimenez, VP of research at IDC.

“Experimenting with the technology is one thing. Deploying it strategically and sustainably is quite another.”

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The memory market continues to reel from shortages created by the diversion of resources to the manufacture of higher-margin AI infrastructure memory. DRAM (Dynamic Random-Access Memory) and NAND flash memory used in mainstream devices are now in such short supply that prices have been pushed up by 130% leading to PCs increasing by an average 21%.

While device shortages were also apparent during the COVID pandemic, prices then remained stable. Instead, today’s situation is more akin to the shortages in new car production which saw a spike in demand for second-hand cars with prices rising accordingly. OEMs are experiencing similar issues with respect to stock availability which means they are struggling to fulfil contracts, with shipments expected be down by between 6.6% to 23%, resulting in lead time slipping.

To make matters worse, geopolitical events are further compounding matters. The war in Iran is now disrupting the production of helium, which is essential for chip manufacturing, for example, with around a third of the world’s supply of helium comes from Qatar. The war is also seeing the oil needed by chipmaking nations such as South Korea and Taiwan delayed or rerouted. Consequently, there’s no real way of knowing when production might normalize.

Lack of supply chain resilience

What the shortages have revealed is a considerable lack of resiliency in the supply chain. Rigid procurement and device refresh strategies now seem woefully out of step and stockpiling inventory is not a viable option because it risks purchasing at the peak and saddling the organisation with too much stock. Instead, we need to look at how we can plan, buy and manage technology to accommodate these kinds of events.

Some organizations are playing for time by delaying device refreshes. They’re moving from a proactive three-year cycle to a “replace on failure” approach, with average life cycles then stretching to 4.3 years. But this can have a knock-on effect on efficiency and productivity, not to mention higher break-fix support costs. Others are considering second-hand devices or switching to vendors with more available stock, but they don’t necessarily have the market knowledge or the capability to put those devices through their paces.

Then there’s the software issue. The memory shortages are also forcing organizations to look at how and where they run their software and whether they can make changes to compensate for hardware shortages. For example, some are looking to load-balance servers to use capacity more effectively.

It’s these kinds of issues that Channel partners are ideally placed to help with. Their knowledge of the market can prove indispensable, as they can draw on their relationships with manufacturers to lock down shipment schedules and pricing. They can also provide flexible financing to ease budget constraints and source or even road-test equipment from alternative suppliers on behalf of their customers. That makes it more likely that organisations will end up with a ‘mixed estate’ of devices that those partners can then help to manage.

How the channel needs to adapt

But to fulfil those roles, the channel must adapt. Rather than continuing to focus on the same sourcing strategies, partners need to begin looking at where they can create efficiencies by offering advice, lifecycle management and ‘intelligent refresh’ strategies. The latter is particularly interesting because it steps away from the cyclical nature of the traditional refresh approach. Instead, it seeks to stagger and prioritise deployments by assessing device health, performance and user requirements.

Intelligent refresh uses a data-driven approach to lifecycle management. Tools such as benchmarking and Digital End User (DEX) solutions are used to assess device utilization and map personas and workloads, for example. Potential devices from different OEMs can then be tested to see if they will align with the performance requirements of the organization, and financial options explored such as CAPEX, leasing or DaaS. Once selected, the devices can be configured according to those personas, secured and asset tagged. Then DEX tools can be used to track health, usage and UX, ensuring high uptime and devices remain matched to the needs of the employees.

Taking a data-driven approach enables partners to utilize real-time performance data, which can then be used to help with planning for refresh. Because this forecasting is based on utilization, it sees blanket refresh cycles replaced with smaller strategic waves, making it easier to fulfil those orders and maintain a consistent inventory.

In addition to assisting with the sourcing of hardware, partners can also offer device lifecycle management. They can provide a range of support, from security covering patching, policy enforcement and endpoint analytics, through to rapid break-fix support such as field-based repair to keep employees productive, and device management by tracking warranties, managing spare or loaned devices and extending asset value. They can even help claw back revenue by assisting with the resale of second-hand components.

In this way, partners can step up to help their customers adapt to this new normal. The memory shortages, initially expected to last into 2027, could now last years, according to Nvidia CEO, Jensen Huang, which means organizations will have to become more strategic in how they manage, maintain, and replace their end-user devices. That will drive an uptick in demand for partners who can advise on the optimization of hardware and software to improve utilization and longevity, who can manage a mixed estate, and draw upon data to devise intelligent refresh programmes that then forecast exactly where and when new devices are needed.

Cyber resilience firm Rubrik is set to invest more than £375 million in the UK over the next five years, which will include opening a new EMEA headquarters in London.

According to Rubrik, the plans for the new HQ reflect the country’s role as one of its fastest-growing and “most strategically important markets”.

The site will act as a springboard to scale regional operations and access the country’s “deep technology talent pool”, the company said.

“The UK is one of the world’s leading technology markets, and has become increasingly important to Rubrik’s long-term growth,” said Bipul Sinha, CEO, chairman, and co-founder of Rubrik .

“As organizations accelerate AI adoption, cyber resilience is now an urgent business imperative. This investment strengthens our UK ecosystem, helping EMEA customers address the critical need for European data sovereignty, quickly recover from cyber attacks, and safely scale AI.”

Rubrik’s new London office will provide a “collaborative workspace” for staff, including an ‘executive briefing center’ designed to support engagement with customers and partners, the firm said.

Kanishka Narayan, minister for AI and Online Safety, said the move by Rubrik is a “vote of confidence” in the UK’s technology sector, with the country establishing itself as a prime destination to “invest, hire, and grow”.

"It will create high-skilled jobs and deepen our strengths in the fast-growing fields of cyber and AI, another sign that the UK is where the world's leading tech companies are choosing to build their future,” Narayan said.

Rubrik eyes EMEA expansion

The company has secured several large customers for its cyber resilience platform in recent years, including Manchester City Council, Harbour Energy, and the Scottish Government.

Across the EMEA region as a whole, Rubrik now serves roughly 2,000 customers and has launched a series of EMEA-focused product ranges, including Rubrik Security Cloud on the AWS European Sovereign Cloud.

To meet growing demand, the company said it plans to accelerate hiring in the region for roles such as sales, marketing, and customer support.

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Ten years ago, a server outage might have affected a single office or application. IT was simpler, stakes were lower and customers were willing, and able to accept a reactive relationship. Managed Service Providers (MSPs) built their value on ticket closure rates, uptime stats, and how quickly they could put out fires. It worked. But that era is over.

Today, a single point of failure can ripple across hybrid cloud environments, disrupt customer experiences globally and trigger regulatory risk. Businesses aren’t looking for faster helpdesks anymore; they’re demanding strategic IT partners that can provide true visibility into their environments and clear guidance on how to use technology to drive business outcomes. And they want all of this while budgets tighten and risk intensifies.

IT leaders are also operating under financial pressures. They’re no longer judged solely on system stability, but are expected to help drive revenue, support innovation and manage risk.

At the same time, many IT leaders are being asked to deliver AI projects, strengthen cybersecurity and drive digital transformation projects, without proportional increases in IT budgets. This is resulting in a more detailed examination of infrastructure spending, particularly around refresh cycles and long-term support strategies.

In this landscape, MSPs that still rely on a break-fix model aren’t just behind the curve; they’re becoming irrelevant. Support capabilities are still important, but the real difference now is made by those who go beyond fixing issues to become more of a strategic partner to their clients.

From visibility to insight

Today’s enterprise estates are fragmented by design, spanning on-premises infrastructure, colocation, multiple public clouds and an expanding edge. Layer in legacy systems, cloud-native applications and a patchwork of vendors and operating models, and the result is an environment that isn’t just complex; it’s opaque.

It is that opacity that’s the real challenge.

It’s no longer sufficient to detect when something breaks. By the time an alert triggers, the damage is often already underway. What IT leaders need now isn’t more monitoring noise; it’s clarity. They need partners who can cut through the sprawl to reveal how infrastructure is actually performing, where risk is accumulating and where inefficiency is quietly draining value.

This is where infrastructure intelligence comes in. Infrastructure intelligence goes beyond traditional monitoring tools to bring together data from across hybrid environments and layers in analytics, automation and contextual awareness. Rather than generating more noise, infrastructure intelligence is about filtering, correlating and interpreting signals in real time.

This enables MSPs to understand not just that something is happening, but why it’s happening and what the downstream impact will be. For example, instead of flagging a spike in CPU usage as an isolated event, it can tie that signal to broader workload behaviour, capacity trends or emerging resource constraints across environments.

This shift allows MSPs to move away from reactive incident management and towards predictive and preventative operations. Patterns can be identified before they escalate into outages, capacity can be optimised ahead of demand, and risks can be surfaced long before they impact users. In this model, insight replaces hindsight, giving both the MSP and the customer far greater control over performance, cost and resilience.

Redefining infrastructure lifecycle strategy

Traditional OEM-led refresh cycles are also coming under scrutiny. It no longer makes financial sense to replace hardware on a fixed timeline when it’s still running effectively. As a result, organizations are more likely to extend infrastructure lifecycles, provided they have the expertise to manage risk and performance. For MSPs, this creates an opportunity.

Partners that can help customers balance performance, reliability and cost optimization are playing a far more strategic role in IT decision-making. Third-party maintenance (TPM), once seen as purely a cost-cutting tactic, is now playing a key part in broader infrastructure optimisation. In hybrid environments, it gives organizations the flexibility to keep reliable systems in place longer, while putting their investment into the areas that really need it.

This allows MSPs to go beyond service delivery and play a more strategic advisory role, helping customers understand what to replace, what to keep and how to align support with what the customer actually needs. By combining lifecycle data, performance insights and support histories, MSPs can make far more informed recommendations about when to extend, when to replace and where to optimize.

This evolution doesn’t diminish the role of OEMs or traditional managed services. It reflects a shift towards the idea that customers now expect flexibility. In multi-vendor, hybrid environments, MSPs are increasingly judged not by vendor alignment, but by their ability to deliver outcome-driven, objective guidance.

The future of the MSP

The definition of value in managed services is being fundamentally rewritten. Closed ticket metrics still matter, but they no longer define the leaders in the market. Value is now measured by what doesn’t happen - outages avoided, inefficiencies eliminated, and unnecessary spend reduced. It’s reflected in better utilization, longer asset lifecycles and infrastructure that performs predictably under pressure.

To meet these expectations, MSPs need to evolve both what they offer and how they deliver it. They also need a mindset shift away from simply managing infrastructure and towards making sense of the data it generates and turning it into meaningful business insight.

This shift is changing the growth trajectory of the channel. MSPs that stick to a break-fix model risk being reduced to a commodity, competing primarily on price as margins continue to shrink.

The next phase of growth belongs to MSPs that can move upstream, translating data into insight, insight into action, and action into measurable outcomes. That requires building infrastructure intelligence capabilities that go beyond visibility, integrating optimisation and lifecycle management into a continuous, insight-driven model of service delivery.

As IT estates continue to expand and fragment, success will depend on the ability to provide direction as much as delivery. MSPs that can simplify complexity and help organisations make better decisions will move beyond day-to-day operational support to become true strategic partners, trusted not just to run infrastructure, but to help shape how it develops over time.

Accenture and Google Cloud have announced a new partnership aimed at driving AI adoption rates for mid-market firms amid sluggish deployment progress.

As part of the scheme, the duo will provide firms with a suite of six industry-specific agentic AI solutions designed to help push projects from pilot to production.

These solutions cover intelligence and growth, customer experience, cybersecurity, business operations, industry solutions, and workforce enablement.

"The companies that will define the next decade aren't waiting — they're building,” said Rajendra Prasad, technology reinvention engine lead at Accenture.

“Accenture Edge offerings built with Google Cloud technology help mid-market organizations do exactly that. They can deploy solutions in weeks and get measurable outcomes at the scale, budget and speed that they need to grow."

The collaboration will see Google Cloud provide the underpinning infrastructure and AI solutions to support organizations, including the Gemini Enterprise app, Gemini Enterprise Agent platform, and Agentic Data Cloud.

Accenture, meanwhile, is set to provide forward deployed engineers (FDEs) to offer guidance and technical support for participating firms.

Forward deployed engineers are in vogue

The move by the duo comes amidst a sharpened focus on driving enterprise adoption of AI and agents. The use of FDEs, in particular, has taken off as providers look to embed specialists within customer teams to support projects.

Last week, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft both announced plans to invest heavily in FDE-related efforts, with the aim of hiring thousands of engineers in the coming years.

As ITPro reported, FDEs could become a key growth area for the industry moving forward, with big tech providers providing more bespoke support for customers.

Kevin Ichhpurani, president of Google Cloud’s global partner ecosystem, said the scheme will provide businesses with the “full power” of the hyperscaler’s product portfolio.

“We’re seeing tremendous demand as mid-market enterprises adopt AI agents to fundamentally reinvent their business workflows," Ichhpurani said.

"The launch of Accenture Edge brings the full power of Google Cloud’s entire portfolio including enterprise AI, our Agentic Data Cloud and AI Threat Defense directly to this sector. Together, we’re enabling mid-market companies to confidently scale AI across their organizations for growth.”

Driving mid-market adoption

According to Accenture, mid-market firms – or those with revenues of between $300 million and $3 billion – have largely been locked out of large-scale AI transformation due to complexity and integration barriers.

A recent study from Klarus highlighted the significant challenges faced by mid-market enterprises on this front. While nearly three-quarters (73%) have deployed AI solutions, around 90% of projects remain stuck or stalled in the pilot stage.

Although up to 94% of leaders feel confident about AI deployment, lack of expertise and governance concerns are causing projects to fail.

Mid-market firms aren’t alone in AI deployment challenges, however. Research from MIT last year found around 90% of all generative AI pilots fail, while similar research from Gartner warned up to 40% of agentic AI adoption programs are expected to fail.

These organizations are in a prime position to fully capitalize on the technology, however. Klarus CTO Alper Gunaydin said mid-market firms have the advantage of agility compared to larger competitors.

“Mid-market companies have a real advantage because they can often move fast, particularly when it comes to technology transformation. We see this agility in action when companies are turning to AI and automation to address productivity and accelerate growth," Gunaydin commented.

"However, our research shows that too many pilots stall because companies lack AI expertise, quality data and effective governance. Making that agility count requires clear priorities, strong foundations and access to senior expertise, all of which will help translate investment into tangible business outcomes and unlock growth without increasing the cost base.”

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Yorkshire Building Society (YBS) is using AI agents to help reduce admin and improve customer service – and the high street lender said it's recording solid results so far.

Three AI agents named Penelope, Sam, and Alf are supporting customer service teams by summarizing complex complaints, searching policies and past cases, and drafting member communications, all with human oversight.

Penelope helps draft final responses for complaints, while Alf supports this process by searching policies, procedures, and past cases. Sam, meanwhile, summarizes long or detailed complaints.

According to the building society, Sam is saving an estimated seven minutes per use, with Penelope saving up to 26 minutes when supporting more complex complaint responses.

“That time really adds up,” said Polly Conner, senior manager of customer relations at YBS. “We’re able to minimize the amount of time staff are spending on admin tasks and actually spend that time talking to our customers, helping them resolve the challenges they’ve faced.”

The high level of regulation around financial services means that handling complaints from the building society's three million members and customers requires a lot of admin.

That can mean switching between multiple systems, searching for policies, summarizing long histories, and drafting detailed responses in advance of any conversation.

"This technology is going to give our members more choice and better access to information when they need it most,” said Simone Fox, director of customer support at YBS. “But there will always be a human available to speak to them when they need it.”

AI in banking

The results highlighted by YBS come amidst a sharpened focus on AI in the financial services sector, with a host of major providers ramping up adoption of the technology.

In January this year, Nationwide announced a partnership with Moneyhub to launch an AI-powered transaction analytics platform for customers across the UK.

Lloyds Banking Group, meanwhile, is also accelerating AI innovation internally in a bid to drive customer support capabilities. The bank unveiled plans to launch a new AI Academy earlier this year, with the aim of providing 67,000 staff with practical skills.

Building the foundations for AI

Before rolling out new tools, YBS built a cloud native data platform with Microsoft Fabric and strengthened data governance through Microsoft Purview.

It also enhanced its security with Microsoft Sentinel, expanded infrastructure foundations in Azure, and introduced Windows 365 remote desktops to enable secure, flexible working.

“Our ambition with data and AI is to improve our organization, help our colleagues be more efficient, make better decisions, and ultimately, serve our members better,” said Rebecca Fitzgerald, YBS director of data and AI. “All built on trust, with responsibility built in.”

Elsewhere, YBS is piloting AI agents to support internal risk and control testing, with early results suggesting efficiency savings of around 40%.

The high street lender is also rolling out a new customer service platform built using Microsoft Dynamics 365 Contact-Centre-As-A-Service. This brings customer history, previous self-service activity, and relevant guidance into one place for colleagues.

An AI assistant can summarize cases, highlight relevant knowledge and help draft responses, reducing the need to search across multiple systems.

“The platform is really going to help our colleagues better serve our members,” Fox commented. “It’s going to enable them to have a 360‑degree view of our members, so they’re not having to move between various platforms.”

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Arrow Electronics has signed a new pan-EMEA distribution agreement with ABB Electrification that will see the distributor add ABB’s uninterruptible power supply (UPS) portfolio to its enterprise computing offering.

The agreement builds on a long-standing relationship between the two companies and will enable Arrow to distribute the vendor’s critical power technologies to channel partners across key European markets – including the UK and Ireland.

Arrow said the deal will help partners deliver more comprehensive IT infrastructure projects by combining ABB’s power resilience capabilities with its existing portfolio of compute, management, and security solutions.

Initially, the deal covers ABB’s UPS portfolio, although the companies said the range is expected to expand over time to include additional electrification technologies designed for demanding enterprise and data center environments.

In an announcement, Mike Worby, head of strategic alliances at Arrow’s enterprise computing solutions business in EMEA, said the move opens up a range of “important new capabilities” for channel partners.

“Power protection is a vital part of any modern IT design and the addition of ABB uninterruptible power supplies means our customers can work with a broader and more complete set of solutions,” he explained.

“It is a strong addition to our existing portfolio and creates new opportunities for channel partners to support their customers’ evolving needs.”

Arrow provides technology distribution, integration, and supply chain services for channel partners across areas including enterprise computing, networking, cybersecurity, cloud, and data center infrastructure.

The firm said that adding ABB’s critical power portfolio will enable its partners to source technologies designed to support secure uptime and energy efficiency, while helping customers improve operational continuity and meet sustainability goals.

The agreement will initially be available across the Benelux region, France, Germany, Spain, the UK, and Ireland, with additional countries expected to be added over time.

“Working with Arrow enables us to reach a wider IT channel audience and support channel partners with high-quality electrification and critical power solutions suited to modern digital infrastructure,” commented Sebastien Surply, head of ABB Electrification’s Critical Power business line.

“Our technology is trusted by tech giants and data center operators worldwide, and we are seeing strong demand across a range of critical environments.”

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Workday has appointed HR Path as an authorized value-added reseller (VAR) partner for the UK and Ireland, as part of the vendor’s ongoing ecosystem expansion across EMEA.

The agreement will see HR Path directly sell Workday’s HR and finance platform to small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) across Ireland and Scotland, as well as provide consulting, implementation, and operational support.

According to Workday, its expanded VAR strategy aims to help growing organizations adopt enterprise-grade HR, finance, and AI capabilities, while simplifying complex digital transformation projects through a single partner relationship.

As an authorized VAR, HR Path will act as a single point of contact for clients and will manage the full customer lifecycle – including strategic advisory, software procurement, implementation, and long-term optimization.

In an announcement, Daniel Pell, Workday’s vice president and country manager for the UK and Ireland, said the partnership is intended to accelerate time to value for businesses’ digital transformation initiatives.

“HR Path brings deep local experience and hands-on delivery, Workday brings a secure, AI-powered platform, and together, we can give customers one trusted route to modernising their HR and finance functions,” he commented.

Workday’s hybrid go-to-market strategy

The announcement marks the latest stage of Workday’s shift away from a purely direct sales model to a hybrid go-to-market approach, at a time when demand for advanced AI capabilities continues to grow.

The vendor said regional VAR partners will combine localized implementation expertise with its own AI-powered enterprise platform, enabling organizations to deploy advanced AI capabilities while ensuring compliance with local regulatory and market requirements.

The model is also designed to provide customers with continuous support as business requirements evolve, rather than focusing solely on initial software deployment.

To support the expansion, HR Path said it is investing in consultant training, Workday certifications, as well as joint enablement programs to provide earlier access to new AI capabilities and product developments.

Commenting on the expanded partnership, Angelo Gallo, partner at HR Path, described Workday’s VAR model as “the next logical step” in being able to provide more comprehensive support to SMBs in Ireland and Scotland.

“Our strength lies in combining world-class technology with local market knowledge and hands-on execution,” he explained.

“Together with Workday, we are creating an offering that delivers greater guidance, security, and trust throughout the entire transformation process.”

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ITPro is 20 this month. To celebrate, we've taken a look back at the team's favorite stories from the beginning to now.

2008: Science fiction's influence on technology: ideas made real

"The influence of Sci-Fi on technology has become increasingly apparent in the years since Simon Bisson wrote this piece from CES 2008 – just 12 months after the launch of the iPhone. In 2026, futuristic technology like wrist-worn devices and voice activated computers from Star Trek, the IoT and generative AI from the novels of Philip K Dick have evolved into the mundane: smart watches, home assistants, white goods, and chatbots.

"Perhaps the biggest change, though, is not the influence of sci-fi on hardware development but on tech leaders themselves. Mark Zuckerberg has spoken of his love for Snowcrash, which in part influenced the Metaverse. The influence of The Morning Rocket on Elon Musk was even documented in a BBC podcast series."

Jane McCallion, managing editor

2019: Is AMD finally winning the chip wars?

"Tim saw what was coming with AMD and Intel really early on. This article is a fantastic showcase of the subject matter expertise our team and extended team have. We not only report on what's happening, but also use our real-world experience to anticipate what may come next."

Bobby Hellard, reviews editor

2016: Why are women such a problem?

"I wrote this piece a few months after ITPro's 10th birthday. While much has changed for the better since publication, we still have a long way to go when it comes to being able to say the IT industry really embraces diversity.

"Sure there are some organizations leading the way and the fact more conversations are happening can only be a good thing. However, we need action not just talk. And we ALL need to be part of the discussion and the doing."

Maggie Holland, global content director

2023: Hybrid cloud comes into its own with GenAI

This was an exclusive interview with NetApp CEO George Kurian at the company's annual Insight event in 2023. Less than a year after the launch of ChatGPT, the fledgling GenAI industry was well and truly booming. After several years of gradual shifts toward hybrid cloud approaches, Kurian argued that this strategy was ideal for generative AI due to security and flexibility capabilities.

Ross Kelly, news & analysis editor

Most UK business leaders have a “limited understanding” of their AI budgets, and they're struggling to turn AI investment into measurable business outcomes.

KPMG’s latest Global AI Pulse report found that 26% of UK companies are now using AI as part of everyday work, up from 18% in the first quarter of this year.

This increased adoption means that managing usage costs is becoming both more complex and more critical to realizing value.

Three-in-ten UK leaders told the firm that they struggle with usage-based costs, while 42% have only partial visibility into AI spending. One-third, meanwhile, cited “limited understanding” of AI cost structures, including tokens, as a challenge to deploying AI agents.

“AI is moving rapidly into everyday work, but scaling it responsibly brings a new set of challenges," said Dr Leanne Allen, head of AI at KPMG UK.

"Leaders now need to show not just that AI can be deployed, but that it can be trusted, financially controlled and clearly linked to value. Cost visibility is central to that."

Enterprises need a clear path with AI

According to KPMG, companies where CEOs are accountable for AI decisions often report higher confidence in their AI strategy, and are more likely to unlock meaningful business value and stronger returns on investment.

"As organizations use more AI tools and agentic systems, they need to understand how costs build, where value is being created and where governance controls are needed. Without that clarity, it becomes harder to make confident investment decisions or demonstrate returns," said Allen.

“Clear accountability, practical governance, and workforce adoption must move together if businesses are to turn AI momentum into sustained value.”

To help manage AI costs, the survey found organizations are implementing stronger governance controls, including monitoring and spending controls.

More than half (57%) of UK leaders report having AI cost monitoring dashboards, with 61% embedding cost reviews as part of AI approval processes to enable stronger control and decision-making.

Notably, organizations with stronger cost visibility are four-times more likely to report established ROI, at 25% versus 6%.

“AI cost management cannot sit as an afterthought. If businesses want to scale AI responsibly, they need to build financial discipline into the way AI is approved, monitored and governed from the start," said Allen.

"The organizations that can see their AI costs clearly are better placed to understand what is working, what is not and where to keep investing.”

AI costs are spiralling

Surging AI costs have become a recurring pain point for enterprises across a range of industries in recent months. As ITPro reported in June, these surging costs are the result of AI provider shifts toward consumption-based billing combined with increased usage rates.

The ‘tokenmaxxing’ trend, whereby users are encouraged to ramp up their use of AI tools, has already caused serious issues for some major companies, such as Uber.

Uber revealed that it used its entire annual AI budget in just four months after encouraging staff to use the technology, prompting a rethink of how AI is used internally. This included the introduction of a $1,500 monthly cap per employee, which is tracked through an internal dashboard.

Accenture has also urged staff to stop using AI for needless tasks in a bid to tackle mounting costs.

Last week, analysts at Gartner told ITPro that tackling this problem will require a concerted focus on cost optimization practices, including the use of context engineering techniques to maximize the use of the technology.

This call to action by Gartner came after research found AI token costs could exceed developer salaries by 2028.

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‘Always on’ culture is placing significant pressure on workers across the UK, according to new research, with nearly half (42%) considering quitting roles due to stress.

A study from HR platform HiBob suggests the trend is “becoming the norm” for many employees, with workplace intensity building significantly in recent years.

More than half (58%) of respondents revealed pressure in their role has increased compared to two years ago, while 49% feel “expected to always be available”.

The result is that around one-third (36%) now work late on a regular basis, with 50% checking work messages while on holiday. Notably, the grind starts almost immediately on a daily basis for many, with 55% of respondents revealing they check work messages within just minutes of waking up.

Toby Hough, VP of people & culture for EMEA at HiBob, said the study highlights a concerning “structural shift in how work happens”.

“Many workers no longer feel there is a natural point where pressure eases or where they can properly switch off, while managers increasingly find themselves balancing rising performance expectations with protecting employee wellbeing,” he said.

“Left unaddressed, this shift poses a significant long-term risk to businesses.”

Workers can’t switch off

The study from HiBob suggests that mounting workplace intensity means workers are finding it “harder than ever” to switch off after their day is finished.

Around two-in-five (42%), for example, admitted checking work messages in the middle of conversations, while 29% do so on dates.

Managerial expectations are fanning the flames on this front, according to the survey, with nearly half (49%) highlighting a demand to always be available.

For some, these activities are warranted. More than one-quarter (27%) said they believe that failing to respond to work-related messages after hours could harm their career opportunities.

The source of this pressure often comes from senior leadership, however. Nearly three-quarters (72%) of managers said they’re now expected to maintain consistent high-performance levels, and many are absorbing this pressure.

HiBob noted that this spill over between work and personal life is having a serious negative impact on employee wellbeing. Nearly half (47%) feel mentally exhausted at the end of their working day while stress negatively affects sleep among 41%.

Managers are at breaking point

The top-down pressure at many organizations is causing significant stress across all seniority levels, according to the study. Around half (51%) of managers said they feel underprepared and out of their depth when it comes to dealing with heightened expectations.

Hough warned organizations that fail to tackle the issue could create huge downstream problems, particularly in terms of retaining talent.

“Companies therefore need to recognize that people-first cultures are performance-first cultures. Sustainable high performance cannot exist without the right support, recovery, and trust within teams,” he commented.

“Businesses now need to equip managers with the training, guidance, and tools needed to lead through this new era of constant pressure and help teams perform consistently over time.”

Crucially, around half (47%) of respondents noted there are no longer clear quiet periods at work, with employees locked in a state of constant activity. This tracks closely with a study from Twilio last year, which revealed that workers are calling for periods of ‘digital silence’.

That study found roughly half (47%) of workers are now prioritizing periods in their daily workflow that are free from distractions, email chains, and calls.

Twilio said the pushback comes largely due to the increasing array of communication platforms used by workers on a daily basis.

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Dropzone AI has announced an exclusive EMEA distribution partnership with QBS Software, in a move the company said will expand the availability of its AI-powered security operations platform to MSSPs and VARs across the region.

The agreement will see QBS distribute Dropzone AI’s Agentic SOC platform, which uses a team of AI agents to automate security alert investigations across existing security environments.

According to the vendor, the partnership aims to help channel partners address the growing demand for security operations capabilities as organizations contend with rising alert volumes, increasingly sophisticated cyber attacks, as well as an ongoing shortage of skilled SOC analysts.

For MSSPs, Dropzone said the platform can help scale managed SOC services without requiring a proportional increase in analyst headcount, while VARs will be able to offer the technology to customers operating in-house security operations centers.

"Security teams are under immense pressure to scale operations, meet increasingly stringent SLAs, and ensure regulatory compliance while maintaining resilience against rising alert volumes,” said Brett Candon, Dropzone AI’s vice president of international, in an announcement.

“Through this partnership with QBS, Dropzone AI will extend its reach to both MSSPs and VARs across EMEA. MSSP partners can scale service delivery and improve profitability, while VAR partners can help customers with in-house SOCs move from alert chaos to incident focus."

Dropzone’s Agentic SOC solution is built around its AI SOC Analyst, which investigates security alerts from across an organization’s existing security stack before escalating confirmed threats to human analysts for response.

The technology integrates with existing SIEM, SOAR, EDR, and case management platforms, allowing organizations to augment existing security operations without replacing current infrastructure.

Benefits for MSSPs and VARs

Dropzone said its platform will help MSSPs improve SLA performance, onboard customers faster, increase SOC capacity, and free up analysts to focus on high-value tasks while building higher-margin managed security services.

Meanwhile, VARs will be able to support customers operating their own SOCs by leveraging the offering to accelerate investigations, reduce false positives, ease alert fatigue, and address temporary cyber security skills shortages.

The companies said the agreement expands the channel opportunity across EMEA by enabling partners to support customers with managed, co-managed, and in-house security operations models while helping address the ongoing shortage of skilled SOC analysts.

"Our partnership with Dropzone AI strengthens QBS' security portfolio with advanced autonomous AI SOC capabilities that addresses a real challenge across the channel,” commented Tom Corrigan, chief revenue officer at QBS Software.

“By bringing category-defining AI SOC capabilities to our partner ecosystem, we're supporting growth, improving service delivery, and helping partners deliver stronger customer outcomes.”

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One Identity has announced plans to become an independent company, with the identity security specialist’s Cork office to become its new headquarters.

The company previously operated as part of Quest Software, which was acquired by Clearlake Capital in 2021.

By going solo, the vendor said it is looking to capitalize on growing demand for identity governance technologies as enterprise environments continue to grow in complexity due to increasing SaaS adoption, stricter regulatory requirements, and the rapid growth of both human and non-human identities.

According to the company, operating independently will provide greater focus and investment as it targets opportunities across identity governance and administration (IGA) and privileged access management (PAM) – with the combined market estimated to be worth $10 billion.

In an announcement, One Identity CEO Praerit Garg said identity has become the “control plane” for enterprise security as IT environments continue to grow in complexity.

“Almost all security breaches can be traced back to identity compromises,” he explained. “Most organizations are still governing it with tools that were built for a different era. AI is accelerating the problem faster than most organizations realize: every agent and every automated workflow are identities that need to be governed.”

As a result, Garg said that One Identity’s customers are now managing more distributed environments that are harder to govern using legacy frameworks.

“Operating as a standalone company gives us the focus this problem requires and the speed our customers demand,” he added.

European focus

As part of the transition, One Identity will designate its Cork office as its global headquarters as the firm looks to build on long-standing investment across Ireland, the UK, Germany, and the wider European continent.

The move highlights the increasing importance of the vendor’s European operations, with more than 80% of its engineering organization and a number of key leadership roles now based in the region.

The firm said that growing regulatory requirements, such as NIS2 and DORA, have also increased demand for identity governance capabilities across Europe.

“As a long-time regional office, Cork has been an important part of One Identity operations for many years,” commented Brid Doyle, One Identity’s Cork office leader and director of global sales operations. “This decision reflects the reality of how the company operates today and how we believe we can best serve our customers all over the world.”

As part of its ongoing evolution, One Identity recently strengthened its executive team with the appointments of chief financial and operating officer Mike Henricks, chief product and marketing officer Randy Menon, and chief technology officer Gihan Munasinghe.

The company said its transition to an independent company will continue throughout 2026, with further milestones to be shared in due course.

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Commvault has announced a new multi-year strategic partnership with Microsoft that will see its cyber resilience platform offered as a native independent software vendor (ISV) service on Microsoft Azure.

The agreement builds on a collaboration spanning more than 25 years and aims to simplify how Azure customers deploy and manage Commvault’s data protection and recovery capabilities.

The partnership will see Commvault Cloud become available directly through Azure, allowing customers to discover, provision, and integrate resilience services from within the cloud platform.

According to the software vendor, the move addresses growing demand for cyber resilience as organizations expand their cloud deployments, ramp up AI adoption, and contend with an increasingly complex security landscape.

Slated for public preview this summer, the native service will provide customers with a more unified experience across procurement, onboarding, and management – ultimately reducing the need for separate infrastructure, external tools, and manual integrations.

In an announcement, Commvault president and CEO Sanjay Mirchandani said the agreement will take the company’s long-standing relationship with Microsoft “to the next level.”

“Many of our customers rely on Microsoft Azure to scale their business in the cloud, use AI, optimise operations, and bring ideas to life,” he commented. “With this joint commitment, we can also make best-in-class resilience plug-and-play for Microsoft customers.”

Native Azure integration

Commvault said the native Azure service will introduce a number of operational benefits, including automatic resource discovery, faster deployment, simplified management, and reduced operational complexity.

The offering is also expected to help organizations improve their ability to recover data, applications, and identities in the event of cyber attacks, outages, or incidents of human error.

Additionally, customers will be able to purchase Commvault Cloud through the Microsoft Marketplace and apply spending towards their Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment (MACC), helping to align resilience investments with existing cloud expenditure.

“Customers rely on Azure as a resilient foundation for their cloud and AI workloads,” said Girish Bablani, president of Azure Core at Microsoft. “Supporting Commvault natively gives them more choice in how they protect and recover their data, with a more seamless experience inside Azure.”

Alongside the technical integration, Commvault and Microsoft said they will collaborate on joint go-to-market initiatives, including co-selling activities, solution development, and integrated sales efforts geared toward accelerating customers’ cloud journeys and cyber resilience initiatives.

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UK Managed Service Providers (MSPs) have embraced flat-rate support because it’s made delivery scalable: standardize the stack, package the service, and give customers a predictable monthly cost.

However, support has expanded faster than fixed fees can keep up with. Users expect instant fixes, boards expect resilience, and compliance teams, insurers, and auditors increasingly expect proof.

At the same time, the modern customer estate - SaaS, cloud, remote endpoints, third parties, and integrations - creates more noise, more incidents, and more out-of-hours work.

The somewhat predictable result is margin erosion: more tickets, more tools, more engineer time, and the same recurring revenue.

That’s why, for MSPs, observability needs to become a clearly defined, billable capability focused on outcomes customers recognize - fewer avoidable incidents, faster resolution, better user experience, and evidence that stands up in audits and insurance questionnaires.

Flat-rate contracts stay profitable when demand is reduced, not just responded to, and managed observability is one of the most practical levers MSPs have to do that.

Support is scalable when demand is predictable

Flat-rate support only works when MSPs can predict and reduce demand. But customer estates keep getting more complex while contract values stay flat, so every extra ticket and escalation eats margin.The usual culprits are ticket volatility, tool sprawl that slows triage and drives up costs, and escalation creep that pushes routine issues onto senior engineers. When resolution slips, SLA penalties and reputational damage follow.

That’s exactly what observability should fix, preventing avoidable incidents and cutting time-to-resolution, but too often it’s treated as “free”, and the service desk absorbs the cost.

Observability becomes billable when it’s auditable

In the channel, monitoring can sound like a checkbox. Customers assume it’s already included, like antivirus used to be, until you translate it into outcomes they care about:

• Less downtime (and fewer productivity losses)
• Faster incident resolution (and fewer escalations)
• Better user experience (especially for SaaS and remote work)
• Evidence for audits, regulators, and cyber insurers (not just “we think it’s fine)
• Capacity and cost control (no surprise renewals, no shadow IT growth)

For many organizations, that evidence now affects audit outcomes and cyber insurance terms, including whether cover is available and how premiums are priced. That shift in language matters because it changes observability from a feature to a service line: something with a scope, deliverables, and a price.

Tier it: response vs assurance

MSPs don’t need to rip up contracts to monetise observability; they can add outcome-based tiers that make proactive work visible and separate reactive support from assurance.

A simple model:

• Baseline covers availability checks, basic alerting, and standard response
• Managed Observability is a paid add-on: alert tuning, SLOs, dependency mapping, service reviews, proactive fixes, plus monthly reporting that supports audits and insurer questionnaires
• Service Assurance is the premium layer for customers who need stronger governance: continuous optimisation, capacity planning, change-impact analysis, and board-ready resilience reporting

The key differentiator isn’t more alerts, it’s less noise and more action. Fewer false positives, faster diagnosis, and a credible narrative of what you prevented, not just what you fixed after the damage was done.

Packaging that doesn’t feel like platform marketing

The fastest way to make observability feel promotional is to centre it on a platform. The fastest way to make it feel valuable is to centre it on operations.

Three practical packaging moves MSPs are using:

1. Define the observable estate: Be explicit about what’s covered (networks, cloud, critical SaaS, key user journeys, core systems) so the scope is clear.
2. Make proactive work visible: A monthly assurance summary showing issues removed, top drivers, automation time saved, and early risks - reusable for audits and insurance.
3. Tie it to business-critical moments: Position it as risk control during migrations, site moA simple model: ves, mergers, major upgrades, and security hardening, not just BAU monitoring.

SLOs, not uptime: measure what users feel

Packaging won’t protect margins if the NOC is already drowning. Observability only becomes a revenue engine when it’s operationally credible, and that starts with alert quality. Duplicate, low-value alerts create noise, slow triage, and trigger unnecessary escalations, inflating delivery costs. Good alert hygiene means de-duplicating, setting thresholds that reflect real user experience, and tuning continuously based on what actually drives incidents.

Consistency matters, too: standard runbooks keep first-line triage predictable and reduce senior-engineer drag. Measure what customers feel with SLOs (latency, transaction time, failed logins, API errors), not uptime alone, and “single pane of glass” should mean one accountable operational picture, not one tool.

The unglamorous truth is that MSPs protect margin not by collecting more telemetry, but by turning telemetry into fewer tickets.

Compliance pressure is rewriting the value conversation

Budgets are tight, suppliers are being rationalised, and procurement is increasingly asking why they are paying if things still break.

Cyber insurance and regulation are sharpening that pressure. Insurers want evidence of monitoring and operational oversight, and frameworks like FCA operational resilience, DORA, and NIS2 are raising expectations for mapping and proof. In many cases, observability is moving from nice to have to a commercial or contractual requirement.

That’s why monetising observability works now: it shifts the conversation from reactive support to measurable assurance, differentiates you from low-cost providers, and protects margin without adding headcount by preventing failures from becoming tickets in the first place.

Westcon-Comstor has announced a new strategic investment and financing agreement with General Atlantic, as the global technology distributor targets its next phase of growth.

The move will see General Atlantic become a minority equity investor and long-term financing partner, while the distributor’s majority owner, Datatec, will retain control of the business.

Westcon-Comstor said the investment reflects confidence in its recent performance and growth trajectory.

The distributor has recorded seven consecutive years of growth and recently announced record annual gross sales of $5.74 billion alongside increased profitability, driven by its continued shift towards software, services, and subscription-based recurring revenue.

In an announcement, Westcon-Comstor CEO David Grant described the investment agreement as an “important milestone” in the company’s evolution.

“We are looking to the future from a position of strength, with strong fundamentals, a differentiated market proposition and consistent financial performance,” he said. “The introduction of General Atlantic as both a financing partner and minority investor provides us with greater flexibility to accelerate our growth strategy, including expanding our portfolio and further strengthening our digital and AI capabilities.”

Westcon-Comstor said its growth has been driven by sustained demand from IT channel partners and technology vendors for its value-added distribution services across its three operating regions – Europe, the Middle East and Africa (MEA), and Asia-Pacific (APAC).

Several long-term market trends have also helped drive this expansion, including investment in AI-enabled infrastructure, rising cyber security spending, as well as expanding cloud and edge environments.

Following its latest investment agreement, existing leadership structures will remain in place – a factor Grant said will ensure continuity as the business looks to build on this recent momentum.

“We retain the leadership stability and long-term strategic focus that have underpinned our success to date, while adding a partner with the scale and expertise to help us maintain our growth trajectory,” he added.

Investment for future expansion

Datatec CEO Jens Montanana said the new investment agreement preserves Westcon-Comstor’s successful operating model while providing additional capital to drive future opportunities.

“This partnership will provide capital as required to support exciting opportunities for expansion in our sector,” he explained. “The structure further embeds senior management in the business as shareholders.”

The partnership will also provide Westcon-Comstor with access to General Atlantic’s global network and capital expertise as it looks to expand both its portfolio and global reach.

“We are delighted to partner with Jens and the Westcon-Comstor team in pursuit of the company’s next phase of growth,” commented Leo Wouters, managing director at General Atlantic.

“We believe our capital and strategic support can help to unlock compelling opportunities as Westcon-Comstor continues to build out its product portfolio and international presence.”

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This week's episode comes to you live from Las Vegas, where we link up with Jane McCallion at HPE Discover and also ITPro's news editor, Ross Kelly, at Pure Accelerate.

Jane talks us through all the major announcements at HPE, with a heavy focus on how its Juniper Networks acquisition is impacting its new products and services. She also gives her thoughts on CEO Antonio Neri and the company's approach to agents.

Across the Las Vegas Strip at Resorts World, Ross gives us his insight into Everpure, the impact of rising hardware costs on its business, and how organizations can get their data AI-ready.

Highlights

"Despite the fact that Juniper has been part of HPE for nearly a year now, this has been the first chance, really, to celebrate it ... [so] the focus has been solidly on networking, and it's slightly hard to say whether this is because this is the first time they've really got to talk about the acquisition that they've really fully integrated everything."

"This idea of cross-pollination has come to fruition. There are parts of Mist, which was a Juniper offering that are now available on Aruba Central and ditto, parts of the Aruba offering that are now available through Mist. So the idea is to give everybody the opportunity to use the full product portfolio without having to move from the platform that they're already using. That's got to change at some point, but there has to be some kind of integration of the two platforms at some point, but I think you know there's a slow and steady let's not upset anybody type approach, which is fair enough."

"[Everpure has] been on a big pivot over the last 18 months. This time last year, Pure announced the launch of their Enterprise Data Cloud, which was part of this sort of pivot towards more of a data management approach. And then they've definitely continued on that vein this year. A couple of big product announcements all focused on this area, it's something that they're really, really moving towards, pushing towards, hard."

"I think on a broader sense, with all of these announcements, Everpure is going into not uncharted territory, but they are to some extent on a collision course, I think, with a lot of other organizations in the industry ... you know, your Snowflakes, Data Bricks, even, like I said, Salesforce."

Links

• Everpure CEO Charlie Giancarlo says firm will share the burden with customers amid rising hardware costs
• Forget tokenomics – agents are a personnel cost
• HPE unveils a raft of new networking products for AI workloads at Discover 2026

Analysts and Managed Service Provider (MSP) leaders have warned that the industry must evolve beyond traditional support services if it is to remain competitive in the AI era.

Speaking at Kaseya Connect Europe in Prague, Omdia principal analyst Maxine Holt described a move from “MSP 2.0” to “MSP 3.0” – a model built around platforms, automation, compliance, and business outcomes rather than reactive IT support.

“MSP 3.0 isn’t just about doing what you’ve always done, but with better tools,” explained Holt.

Instead, she argued, MSPs need to rethink how they create value for customers, moving from technology operators to strategic advisors.

The end of the traditional MSP?

Jack Peploe, founder of MSP Veterinary IT Services, agrees with the need to overhaul the services offered to customers.

“The world of an MSP is dying. I genuinely believe that,” he told Channel Pro.

Peploe points to how the traditional MSP model built around monitoring, patching, and first-line support is becoming increasingly automated - and MSPs are being pushed higher up the value chain. His own company has already removed its traditional first-line support team.

“We haven’t lost anyone, we’ve upskilled them,” he told ChannelPro.

For Peploe, success increasingly depends on understanding customer industries, workflows, and business challenges rather than simply managing technology.

“What [customers] want is someone that really understands them, gets them, understands what they can do, understands their processes, their flows, the inefficiencies,” he said.

AI adoption remains slow

While AI dominated discussions at the event, there were warnings that adoption remains slower than many organisations would like.

Omdia research presented at the event found that fewer than one in five AI proof-of-concept projects ultimately make it into production, highlighting the gap between experimentation and deployment. The biggest barriers include integrating AI with existing infrastructure, a lack of in-house expertise, and difficulties defining clear business outcomes.

Kaseya CEO Rania Succar argued that partners have an important role to play in helping customers bridge the gap between experimentation and deployment.

“The adoption of agentic solutions to date has been too slow,” she told ChannelPro.

Similarly, Holt suggested that customers need practical guidance rather than more hype around AI.

“SMBs don’t need more AI hype,” she said. “They need practical guidance on how to actually implement AI in ways that integrate with existing systems, deliver measurable value, and don’t require them to become AI experts overnight.”

Platforms become the foundation

Underlying many of these changes is the growing importance of platform integration. As MSPs adopt more automation and AI capabilities, fragmented toolsets are becoming increasingly difficult to manage.

“It’s not about the best tool for each of the areas operating independently,” said Holt, who said MSP 3.0 will be built on “fewer platforms with much better integration”.

She added, “MSP 3.0 providers don’t just respond to problems, they anticipate them. They don’t just implement solutions; they recommend strategies. And they don’t just manage technology; they enable business outcomes.”

If an organization is surprised to see IT costs explode when it starts running agents at scale, the problem might not be in the IT budget – it might be a category error. At least in the opinion of HPE CEO Antonio Neri.

“I don’t think of [AI agents] as an IT cost,” Neri tells ITPro at HPE Discover 2026. “I think about the cost of the workforce because, to me, an agent is no different than any other employee I have to hire.”

“So if I hire [a person], there is a cost to onboard him and make sure that he's productive by giving him the tools and everything else,” he says. “When I train an agent, it's going to cost me a number of tokens to train it to drive the best productivity. If I'm going to spend a million dollars to train an agent, it has to be way more productive than [the person]. Otherwise, why am I doing that?”

This turns on its head much of the conversation around agents, tokenmaxxing, and costs as agentic AI starts to eclipse generative in organizational use.

AI sticker shock

ITPro wrote in May about “tokenomics” and so-called sticker-shock when the AI bill finally came due for many businesses. Famously, Uber used up its entire annual AI budget in four months and has now capped the amount each employee can spend on agents per month.

One answer that’s been given to the problem is a shift to on-premises IT rather than ‘cloud-based’ AI like Anthropic’s Claude Code or OpenAI’s Codex, and moving agent costs from OpEx back to CapEx. For an enterprise hardware company like HPE, surely this should be an opportunity to increase hardware sales?

“Sure,” says Neri. “But we think about it as a total cost of [the] workforce, not as an IT expense.”

And is this something that he’s educating his customers about, or do they see it another way?

“Yes, I am,” he says. “I’m spending more than 50% of my time with our customers, and when I bring that concept to life for them, they say ‘ok, ok!’”

“I’d rather give a little bit more budget to IT to reduce my entire cost of the workforce, which is – depending on what you do – probably one of the biggest cost levers,” he continues. “I have only two large cost drivers: people and materials. The materials, in networking, we have a lot of that under control because we have the IP, but a lot of servers, obviously, CPUs, and GPUs I don’t control.

“[The people] I have 65,000 employees. It’s not about reducing employees, which in some cases will happen, but it’s about making those 65,000 employees way more productive with the aid of AI by freeing up capacity for the humans to do more value-added [work] while the agentic models do more work at much bigger scale. I think about that, the total cost of [the] workforce”.

Human / AI interaction

This is an idea that’s been seeded here and there throughout the conference. In Rami Rahim’s keynote, which took place just a couple of hours after Neri’s, one of the demonstrations floated the idea of taking humans out of the loop once a process has been approved.

Katrina Pickett, senior product manager, Juniper Networks, showed how HPE Marvis might help detect and remediate a problem with a sluggish network. The conversation between person and machine was in natural language, but the fixing was agentic. At the point that the fix was applied, Marvis asked if Pickett wanted to have an agent apply the same fix automatically in the future, without human intervention, which would present a time saving.

Human-in-the-loop (HTL), however, has been a key mantra of not just AI but automation more generally. Is it time to take another look at this attitude?

“Well, once you’re confident about [what’s happening], then you can remove the human from the loop and just put on the loop,” says Neri. “I think there needs to be some sort of oversight, but not doing the actual work.”

“In the case of networking, a lot of things were done manually through [the] command line interface, by logging in the console, and putting hands on a keyboard,” Neri continues.

“The scale is now so big that humans cannot possibly manage that scale. Therefore, there is no other choice than to automate things and use artificial intelligence to manage massive amounts of data.”

Naturally, there are caveats. The story of the company that had its entire codebase and all backups erased by a rogue agent is quickly passing from fact into legend; a cautionary tale for any business thinking of letting agents roam free in their network.

“I always say, you don’t get what you expect, only what you inspect [so] I think there needs to be some sort of oversight,” Neri says. “Human beings make mistakes, agents may make the same mistake, right? But as you’re doing it at a bigger scale, it may have a huge impact.”

Mistakes happening are “inevitable”, says Neri. Ultimately, though, there has to be an element of trust that the technology will work as intended. Guardrails can help with this, and, from Neri’s perspective, what HPE is doing with GreenLake Intelligence and Marvis Actions means customers can deploy agents with greater confidence to whatever extent they wish.

HPE still makes everything it always did – it has storage appliances, and it has servers a-plenty, and they’re popular too. According to the company’s most recent earnings call, traditional server orders are booming, growing triple digits year-on-year, while Alletra Storage MP orders also increased triple digits.

The conversation, however, will always revert to networking when it comes to visions of and for the future.

“There was a question in a previous session [that was posed] to Rami (Rahim), which said how far are we to really being fully autonomous, and we believe it’s within the next 12 months,” says Neri.

“It’ s not going to be everywhere across the network, but there are many aspects of the network just running itself.”

“Our opportunities are in the three domains: networking, cloud, and AI. Networking is a huge opportunity; we see it is. And it’s driven both at the edge to the campus and branch, the on ramp into the AI. You need that connectivity.”

At some point, every software company reaches the same crossroads. Integrating a capability that the product doesn’t yet have can be time-consuming and costly.

In many cases, it can take between 12 and 18 months to build (depending on the product), while somewhere else in the market, a competitor is already offering it.

This is the point at which product development leads need to decide whether they build it themselves or find a partner who has already developed it.

At first glance, it seems like a straightforward trade-off between control and speed. In practice, however, it’s more complicated than that.

Building in-house is expensive

For product teams, the instinct is to build. If you own the capability, you have full control over how it works, how it’s scaled, and how it integrates into your central solution.

That logic is sound for core capabilities that sit at the heart of what makes the product valuable. However, customers often require capabilities that depend on new features outside of the team’s specialization. That’s where the instinct to build starts to cost more than it delivers.

Take cybersecurity as an example. If a company in an adjacent market wants to offer dark web monitoring, stealer log detection, or credentials exposure alerts on its platform, the underlying data infrastructure is enormously complex to build. It takes years to develop reliable sources, significant investment to maintain them at scale, and dedicated teams to keep pace with criminal ecosystems that constantly evolve.

That’s all before a single line of product code is even written.

The same challenge shows up in other sectors. Fintech teams address it through fraud detection and identity verification; compliance platforms address it through data sourcing. The specifics differ, but the shape of the problem is similar.

The full cost of building is rarely visible initially. Hiring specialists with the right expertise, building and maintaining the infrastructure, discovering (often after launch) that there are sources not being monitored or threats not being caught, and managing the ongoing operational work that follows every proprietary capability indefinitely.

When those costs are added up, it becomes clear that building these capabilities in-house often makes far less financial sense than it first appeared.

What an integrated partnership looks like

With an integrated product partnership, instead of building a capability completely from scratch, the partner’s technology is connected to the product via an API. From the customer’s perspective, it looks and feels like a native feature. There’s no separate login, no new vendor to onboard, and no visible complexity. The plugin simply enables them to gain a new capability inside of a product they already use.

This brings with it the opportunity for premium pricing tiers and natural upselling, giving sales teams something differentiated to talk about. And because customers are getting more value from the product over time, they’re less likely to move to a competitor.

But it’s the speed to market that makes the biggest difference. Delivering new capability in weeks rather than months or years means revenue starts flowing in faster, and along with it, customer feedback that can start informing the roadmap. A customer who starts using a feature this quarter rather than in a year’s time compounds positively across the whole customer base by accelerating revenue, customer feedback, retention, and competitive advantage simultaneously.

Five areas to examine before committing to a partner

Collaborations only deliver on these areas if the right partner is chosen. These five areas are well worth examining carefully:

1. Is the data proprietary? If the partner’s value comes from data (e.g., threat intelligence, dark web content, identity exposure signals, etc.) the key question is whether that data is unique to them, or whether it’s data that is available from multiple vendors. Shared sources create parity with competitors, not an advantage over them. If there’s no clear difference between this partner and a cheaper alternative, customers will eventually reach the same conclusion.
2. Is the integration genuinely well built? A working API isn’t quite the same as a well-designed one. Good partners invest in consistent data structures and engineering teams who are genuinely available when something doesn’t work. Poor integration experiences only serve to slow down launches and create ongoing maintenance burdens.
3. Do the economies scale? Pricing models that make sense at current volumes can become a problem as the customer base grows. Volume-based pricing (where costs scale proportionally with growth) indicates a partner who is aligned with the business’s success. Fixed-fee or rigid per-seat models can start to squeeze margins precisely when the product is performing well. Before signing, forecast what the partnership would cost if adoption grew by 10x.
4. Does the partnership preserve roadmap freedom? A partner who solves a major setback should not create a dependency that limits what the product can do moving forward. It’s worth understanding what would happen if the partner’s technology changed, degraded, or a key integration point was deprecated. Contracts should include service level protections, and the product architecture should not rely entirely on one partner’s continued performance.
5. Will customers notice? Within a few months of launching a new integrated capability, there should be clear evidence that it’s delivering value. Therefore, it’s critical to track security outcomes (e.g., how many exposures were identified, how many credentials were addressed, etc.) alongside business outcomes like adoption rates, revenue generated, and customer retention. If the numbers aren’t adding up, the capability hasn’t earned its place. Set the success criteria before launch, not at the point of renewal.

Regular evaluation

Partnerships require regular and honest evaluation. If data quality has declined, integration support has become more difficult to access, or customer adoption has stalled despite genuine effort, those are all signals worth acting on. The cybersecurity landscape moves quickly, and a partnership that was delivering strong results in its first year may need significant re-evaluation by year three, particularly if the threat environment has evolved and neither side has kept pace.

The best approach is to treat an integrated partnership the same way any feature is treated on the product roadmap, by acting on what the data shows, and being willing to make changes when it stops delivering.

Integrated product partnerships, done well, are one of the most effective ways to accelerate a product roadmap without overextending an engineering team.

The decision to partner rather than build is often the sharper strategic choice. The real key is to be rigorous about selecting who you partner with, being honest about whether it’s working, and being willing to act if the situation changes.

Monday.com has announced the appointment of Ben Barnett as general manager for EMEA, as the collaboration platform looks to build on its continued growth across the region.

Barnett, who first joined the business five years ago as part of its early London expansion, will now lead the firm's EMEA go-to-market strategy, key partnerships, and its regional growth initiatives.

The appointment comes amid a period of sustained momentum for Monday.com across the region, with EMEA revenue increasing 26% year-on-year in 2025, and the business also significantly expanding its regional headquarters in London.

The company now occupies an 80,000 square foot office in Fitzrovia, which houses more than 370 employees, alongside new offices in Paris and Munich. Across its wider EMEA operations, Monday.com now has more than 2,250 staff on its books.

Barnett brings more than a decade of B2B software sales experience to the role and has overseen Monday.com's UK and Ireland operations since 2021. According to the vendor, Barnett played a key role in scaling its presence from a small founding team in London to a regional operation that now serves more than 27,000 customers.

In an announcement, Barnett said EMEA has emerged as one of Monday.com's strongest growth markets as AI continues to reshape customer needs.

"EMEA has been one of monday.com's most exciting growth stories, and I've had the privilege of living it from the inside," he commented. "As we move now into an AI-powered age, I'm proud to step into this GM role and bring our customers the tools and advice they need to harness technology in a way, and at a speed, that works for them."

In his new role, Barnett will focus on supporting the company's next phase of expansion following its shift from a traditional workplace management solution to what it describes as a unified AI work platform.

The firm recently revamped its offering to combine workflows, people, and AI agents into a single environment designed to automate and execute tasks across customers' business operations.

Casey George, chief revenue officer at Monday.com, said Barnett's deep understanding of complex markets will play a key role as the vendor looks to build on its platform evolution and recent growth momentum.

"He was there at the inception of our London office, and the breadth of knowledge, relationships, and commercial instinct he has built across this region over five years is an extraordinary asset," he explained. "He understands our customers, our partners, and our people in a way that only comes from being in the room for every chapter of this growth story.

"With his leadership, we are strongly positioned to accelerate our annual plan and lead the next frontier of enterprise AI."

Everpure, formerly Pure Storage, is going through somewhat of an evolution.

While flash storage has been the company’s bread and butter and unique selling point since its inception, recent events show it’s diving headlong into the data management domain.

At Pure Accelerate 2025, the company unveiled the launch of its Enterprise Data Cloud (EDC), a platform that aimed to unify and consolidate data storage and management capabilities for customers.

No more disparate solutions, fragmented workflows, and sprawling hardware estates, this represented an all-encompassing ecosystem that combined hardware and software, and catered to hybrid, on-prem, and public cloud customers.

If this was the first sign that Everpure was moving toward the data management space, then the rebrand and acquisition made by the firm in February this year set this new strategy in stone.

The rebrand to Everpure reflects the company’s changing approach to data storage and management, as CEO Charlie Giancarlo said at the time of the announcement.

“We are going beyond just pure data storage and adding context to the information and pulling it together into an enterprise data cloud,” CEO Charlie Giancarlo said in an announcement at the time.

While the rebrand naturally caught the headlines, it was the acquisition of 1Touch and its integration with the EDC that represented the big talking point here. The firm specializes in data intelligence and orchestration, helping enterprises map and classify data across cloud, on-prem, and legacy IT environments.

With Everpure Accelerate 2026 set to kick off tomorrow, we can expect to see more on the integration of 1Touch within the EDC and how the company plans to ramp up intuitive data management capabilities for customers.

Hardware costs on the menu

Everpure’s data management pivot comes amid a challenging period for the firm, and indeed the broader cloud storage space. Skyrocketing hardware costs over the last six months have sent repeated shockwaves through the industry, hurting providers and enterprise customers alike.

In April, Giancarlo penned an open letter to customers warning of impending price increases, albeit insisting that the company doesn’t intend to “profiteer” from the memory crisis.

The average price of Everpure products had surged roughly 70% since the start of 2026, Giancarlo revealed - a “staggering increase,” by his reckoning.

All told, the picture painted by Giancarlo was grim, given the company relies on a “large amount” of CPUs, flash storage chips, DRAM memory, and various other components to produce its storage solutions.

The cost of semiconductor components surged between 300% and 900% since mid-2025, Giancarlo added, and this has placed a significant strain on the company in recent months.

While the company pledged to keep absorbing costs and keep prices "significantly below” supply chain surges, one can’t help but think the prospect of potential price increases will be weighing heavily on the minds of customers.

Challenging market conditions haven’t broken Everpure’s stride, though. The firm’s earnings report from its FY 2027 first quarter showed revenue topped $1.1 billion, marking a 35% year-over-year increase.

Product revenue and subscription services revenue, meanwhile, jumped 55% and 17% year-over-year, respectively.

Data security

Growing cybersecurity threats, particularly ransomware, will likely be a talking point at Everpure Accelerate 2026. This has been an area of intense focus for the company in the years I’ve been covering the conference, with the threat landscape escalating consistently across that period.

Recent research from Veeam, for example, shows that nearly three-quarters (72%) of ransomware victims never fully recover their data – a fact that Everpure is keen to emphasize that it can remedy.

The company recently boasted about its “automated resilience” features for customers, including the Everpure Protect service, which aims to shore up cyber resilience capabilities.

Moreover, with the acquisition of 1Touch, the firm is also rolling out more intuitive data security posture management (DSPM) features - we’ll most certainly see more on this front at the conference.

ITPro’s Ross Kelly will be live on the ground at Everpure Accelerate 2026 in Las Vegas from 16-18 June. Keep tabs on our social media and newsletter for all the news and updates as they happen.

HPE Discover 2026 is the 15th annual get-together for HPE partners, collaborators, and customers held at the Venetian Conference Center in Las Vegas. This year, the conference takes place from 15-18 June.

I will be on site, reporting on all the latest news and delivering insight on the main topics and themes of the week. We won’t be hearing any official announcements until after CEO Antonio Neri’s keynote on Tuesday, which starts at 9.00 am PST, but that doesn’t mean the content is a complete mystery.

Here are three things I expect to see at HPE Discover 2026 – and one person I don’t.

Agent-powered autonomous networking

It’s just under a year since HPE acquired Juniper Networks. How its technology would be integrated into HPE – especially when it comes to Aruba, the existing HPE networking play – was a big focus of HPE Discover Barcelona 2025 in December.

At HPE Discover 2026, I’m expecting to hear more on how the cross-pollination between Juniper and Aruba is going, as well as how much progress has been made towards “self-driving networks”. This idea was debuted at Discover Barcelona six months ago and was described at the time as an AI-agent powered method of increasing the speed of rollout, creating the fewest tickets, and producing "better business outcomes".

The company was then a little quiet on this front for the first half of 2026, but in May, the company announced it was moving “from vision to reality”, with the launch of fully-autonomous, agent-powered AIOps networking.

At the time of the announcement, Rami Rahim, who was CEO of Juniper at the time of its acquisition and is now EVP, president, and GM of networking at HPE, said: “The network HPE now delivers represents a pivotal shift for our customers, and marks a breakaway moment for them to capture the benefits of the next frontier of autonomous actions.”

“This fundamentally changes the role of networking from a system that informs to one that takes action on behalf of the business, freeing customer networking teams to focus on innovation instead of operations,” he added.

I think that we can expect a recap of this, at the very least, during Rahim’s keynote on Tuesday, 16th, and perhaps some more information on customers, such as the UK’s Ministry of Justice.

Supercomputers past and present

It would be unlikely for a new supercomputer to be unveiled at HPE Discover – that kind of thing is normally reserved for ad-hoc announcements or the SC conference, which is happening the week after HPE Discover.

Nevertheless, supercomputers are, at this point, a big part of HPE’s business and bragging rights – of the 10 most powerful supercomputers in the November 2025 Top500 list, six use HPE Cray hardware. That, in my opinion, is enough to open up a conversation about supercomputers at the event

Speaking of Cray, it’s also 75 years since the first Cray supercomputer came online, which is surely worth at least a passing mention.

My final piece of evidence is that Scott Atchley, CTO at Oak Ridge National Laboratory – home of the Frontier supercomputer – is one of the speakers listed for Tuesday afternoon.

AI agents and private cloud

Let’s face it, we can barely move for talk of AI agents these days, and there’s no way HPE will pass up the opportunity to talk about what they can offer organizations in this department. I’ve already mentioned the role of agents in HPE’s networking play, but I think we can expect even more – perhaps pinned to GreenLake, the company’s “edge-to-cloud” platform, or cloud more generally.

One thing I’m genuinely unsure about is whether we’ll hear more about tokenomics – something that came up at Dell Technologies World 2026 – and the increasing pressure AI agents are putting on businesses’ IT budgets. It’s the topic of the moment, but HPE would need some new hardware if it wants to join in the conversation and present a solution.

Private cloud has also been a big part of HPE’s offering for nearly 10 years, with CEO Antonio Neri declaring it was the “edge-to-cloud” company when he took the role in 2018. Two years ago, this was modified to the “edge-to-cloud-to-AI” company, and in 2025, built on this proclamation with a new AMD Helios rack aimed at cloud service providers and neoclouds.

No Jensen Huang this time

Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, is a busy man who seems to make an appearance at multiple conferences throughout the year, not just the company’s own GTC event.

While he made an in-person appearance in 2024, he’s absent from this year’s list of speakers. So while we may get a pre-recorded video (which we saw at Dell Technologies World 2025), I doubt there will be an on-stage appearance from technology’s most energetic CEO in 2026.

I’m at HPE Discover 2026 for the duration of the conference – including the Partner Growth Summit, which takes place on Monday. You can keep up with all the announcements, analysis, and insight from the event as it happens here, as well as on the ITPro Podcast and our social media channels.

Leaseweb has unveiled a new UK channel partner program as the infrastructure provider looks to strengthen support for partners amid growing demand for hybrid cloud strategies.

The launch marks the latest phase of the firm’s investment into its channel ecosystem and coincides with the appointment of Jason Goody as UK channel sales manager, who will work to develop the program across the country.

According to Leaseweb, the revamped initiative has been designed to provide improved support to MSPs, cloud providers, and infrastructure partners working with organizations reassessing workload placement across dedicated, private, and public cloud environments.

The program introduces a three-tier structure covering reseller, referral, and solution partner models, enabling businesses to tailor engagements based on their individual requirements.

The initiative has been built with a focus on commercial flexibility and includes expanded technical and pre-sales support in a bid to help partners deliver infrastructure services to customers more efficiently.

Leaseweb said that partners also gain access to its AI-ready infrastructure portfolio and GPU-powered cloud services as enterprise demand for AI, machine learning, and data-intensive workloads shows no sign of slowing down.

In an announcement, Leaseweb UK managing director Terry Storrar said the channel represents a significant growth opportunity as businesses seek hybrid cloud strategies that offer greater flexibility, control, and cost efficiency.

“Our new channel partner program reflects Leaseweb’s long-term investment in the partner ecosystem, giving partners the flexibility, support and scalability they need to deliver tailored services to customers,” he commented.

Leaseweb targets UK growth with new hire

As part of its increased investment, channel veteran Jason Goody also joins the company as UK channel sales manager. He brings more than 20 years’ channel experience and joins the business from OVHcloud, where he led the company’s UK partner program.

In his new role, Leaseweb said Goody will focus on expanding its partner network and strengthening relationships across MSPs, systems integrators, and technology vendors.

According to Storrar, Goody’s extensive industry experience will play an important role in the vendor’s continued efforts to scale its UK operations.

“I am delighted that Jason has joined our UK team,” he added. “The UK channel represents a significant growth opportunity as more organisations look to adopt hybrid cloud strategies that offer greater flexibility, control and cost efficiency.

“Jason’s experience and leadership will be instrumental as we continue to grow and strengthen our UK channel network.”

Founded in the Netherlands in 1997, Leaseweb operates across 28 data centers globally and provides a range of cloud, hosting, colocation, content delivery network (CDN), and managed infrastructure solutions and services.

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Kaseya has cut the ribbon on MSP Success, a new growth ecosystem designed to help managed service providers (MSPs) scale more efficiently through a combination of marketing enablement, peer collaboration, and community support.

The initiative unifies the firm’s growth and business acceleration programs, including MSP Success Digital Marketing, MSP Success Peer, and the Kaseya Community.

According to the vendor, the new-look ecosystem will help MSPs raise their competitiveness and drive measurable business outcomes at a time when customer acquisition remains a significant industry challenge.

Citing findings from its 2026 State of the MSP Report, Kaseya said 71% of MSPs identified acquiring new customers as their biggest hurdle.

Kaseya eyes pipeline growth with MSP Success

At the heart of the firm’s new initiative is MSP Success Digital Marketing, a new purpose-built platform designed to help MSPs strengthen their market presence and accelerate pipeline growth.

The platform equips partners with a host of tools and services, from search engine and answer engine optimization (SEO/AEO), content marketing, and email and social media campaign assistance, to reputation management, analytics, and lead capture capabilities.

MSPs also gain access to a dedicated marketing success specialist, Kaseya said.

“While MSPs excel at technology, many struggle with marketing in a challenging landscape,” said Kaseya executive vice president of channel, Dan Tomaszewski.

“That’s why we’ve built a team of experienced practitioners, along with the right tools and processes, to help MSPs grow and succeed."

Strengthening peer collaboration

Alongside the digital marketing program, Kaseya has also combined its MSP peer programs – TruMethods Peer and Technology Marketing Toolkit – into a single peer collaboration initiative, dubbed MSP Success Peer.

The combined program aims to provide partners with an improved platform for collaboration and access to a larger network focused on operational and business growth opportunities.

Through the initiative, MSPs can participate in quarterly in-person meetings across North America, EMEA, and APAC, as well as online sessions geared towards building community and accountability.

Expanding growth-focused leadership

To support the continued expansion of the peer program, Kaseya also announced the appointment of seasoned leader Jay Dixon as director of MSP Success Peer Education, with further additions anticipated in due course.

“Building strong leadership starts with people who have lived it,” added Tomaszewski. “Jay spent four years in our Peer program as a captain, exited his business, and is now coming back to help others do the same.

“His experience reinforces our approach to investing in leaders who understand what success looks like.”

Meanwhile, Tomaszewski will lead Kaseya’s wider MSP Success initiative alongside Greg Jones, senior vice president of MSP Success EMEA, and Mike Stodola, vice president of marketing enablement strategy.

According to the company, the program is backed by a global team of 140 employees focused on MSP growth trends, AI-driven business enablement, and partner community development.

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The majority (89%) of MSPs have adopted a vertical-specific market strategy, according to recent research we carried out with Omida.

The reason? As AI spreads, compliance and governance challenges have become more complex, particularly in regulated industries; that’s why more MSPs are tackling these challenges by offering integrated solutions that are tailored to meet the needs of specific verticals.

Governance and compliance are the top barriers to AI adoption

Governance and compliance have hindered AI adoption for years, as many end-customers have struggled to implement the technology securely, effectively, and broadly across sectors and regions.

In 2025, for example, Moody’s found that many organizations “have no rules in place to govern the use of AI,” an unambiguous indictment of how pervasive and serious this problem has become.

The Omdia research shows that these challenges are more pronounced than ever. Indeed, it found that over half of MSPs identify governance and compliance as the main barrier to AI adoption, surpassing technical concerns, including data and security management (14% listed as top barrier), value realization (14%), and technical expertise gaps (13%).

As AI becomes more advanced and deeply embedded across workflows and regions, governance and compliance will only become more challenging and important. The rise of agentic AI amplifies risk. According to one report, for example, less than half of agents are governed, while there are roughly 3 million ungoverned agents in the UK and the US alone. That’s why it’s crucial that end-customers get these problems under control quickly, and MSPs have a huge role to play in that transformation.

As Robin Ody, Practice Leader, MSP Analysis, at Omdia says: “One of the bottlenecks for end-customer AI adoption today is the operational burden of data governance and compliance, which has become more complex and essential as AI continues to spread.”

MSPs turn to integration and specialization to beat AI adoption woes

With legislation like the EU AI Act already in force, and new legislation like the UK’s new Cyber Security and Resilience Bill well on its way to becoming law, AI compliance and governance are only becoming more complicated, and research shows that more MSPs are turning to integrated platforms and specialized market strategies to deliver seamless and effective compliance and governance frameworks.

More end-customers and MSPs are turning to integrated data protection, governance, and compliance platforms to solve and preempt AI adoption challenges.

This is an acceleration of a trend that predates the AI era. End-customers have preferred integrated platforms for crucial functions like data protection for years because these platforms offer greater control and functionality than a patchwork of point solutions that might theoretically offer similar functionality. As AI spreads and adoption issues continue to mount, the push for an integrated, platform-oriented approach to data protection, governance, and compliance has become even more important, creating significant opportunity for MSPs that are able to capitalize on this demand.

Like platform integration, vertical specialization also simplifies compliance and governance, particularly when it’s paired with a platform-oriented approach. By tailoring their market strategies and service delivery to fit the compliance and governance needs of specific regulated verticals, MSPs can win and keep more business than competitors.

Challenges loom, but so does opportunity

Most end-customers still have some work to do before they’re able to use AI securely and effectively. That said, the problems driving stalled AI adoption have become increasingly clear, and MSPs have a leading role to play when it comes to meeting this demand, which is likely to represent a several-billion-dollar opportunity in the coming years.

By adopting an integrated, platform-driven approach to the related priorities of data protection, AI governance, and AI compliance, MSPs can meet end-customers where they are and drive long-term AI success while building reliable, recurring revenue streams.

We know what the market needs. Now, we have to work together to bring the right solutions and services to market and meet this opportunity.

SecurityHQ has announced the appointment of Aaron Hambleton as senior vice president of product and services, as the cybersecurity provider looks to strengthen innovation across its business.

This is the latest step in SecurityHQ's push to transition operations away from reactive monitoring and into measurable, intelligence-led performance improvement.

Hambleton first joined SecurityHQ in 2020 but will now step into an entirely new position to lead product and service innovation across the firm's portfolio – including the continued development of the SHQ Response platform.

An industry veteran, he brings more than 12 years of cybersecurity experience spanning frontline operations, advisory services, regional leadership, and threat intelligence.

In an announcement, SecurityHQ CEO Feras Tappuni said Hambleton offers a practical understanding of what security teams require of their partners – such as clearer context, faster decisions, and services that improve over time.

"Aaron is a sharp strategist who understands what customers need from a security partner and how global threat activity should inform the services built around them," he commented. "He brings the operational experience, threat intelligence perspective, and judgment needed to connect internal signals with external risk, helping customers make faster decisions and achieve more holistic security outcomes."

Since first joining SecurityHQ, Hambleton has transitioned from operational security leadership roles into positions with direct responsibility for regional strategy, customer delivery, and global advisory services.

The firm said his time spent leading teams across service delivery, customer success, operational performance, and growth in the Middle East and Africa has given him deep insight into evolving customer needs.

On the partnerships front, Hambleton is also credited with developing technology alliances that expand visibility and control through enterprise-grade platforms, while also strengthening SecurityHQ's portfolio with new modular offerings.

According to the vendor, his leadership across global threat intelligence, offensive security, exposure management, and platform innovation was a key factor in the company's recognition by IDC as a leading MDR provider in the Middle East for two years running.

In his new role, Hambleton will now focus on product and service innovation across SecurityHQ's range of MDR, threat intelligence, exposure management, and security operations offerings.

"Most security teams already have enough noise. What they need is a clearer way to understand which risks matter, what action to take, and how each decision improves their security over time," he explained.

"My focus is on building services that connect intelligence, exposure, and response so that customers can close the gap between detection and action, while improving their security with every decision."

Take a moment to appreciate the efforts of the English soccer team Southampton F.C. in its attempt to gain a competitive advantage. Vying for promotion into the Premier League (and the huge financial payoff, let alone glamor, that comes with it), the club was caught spying on its opponent, Middlesbrough F.C, ahead of a critical playoff match that would determine both clubs' fates.

Did Southampton use sophisticated spyware to infiltrate IT systems? Drones, perhaps, to fly over the opponent's training ground? It wasn't quite as James Bond-esque as that, with the club reportedly sending a young staffer to the training ground to capture footage with their iPhone while hiding behind a tree.

Corporate espionage in 2026 takes many forms. There are some organizations, like Southampton, that rely on, say, more traditional methods. But staying abreast of the modern means of corporate espionage is a tall order that all businesses, no matter how large and in what sector they find themselves in, must sadly contend with.

In the modern age, businesses must not only deal with physical intrusion but a range of threats, including social engineering, drones, artificial intelligence (AI), and network infiltration, among others. But, with so much to contend with, how can businesses deal with this invisible threat?

The meaning of corporate espionage

Let's be frank – corporate espionage has been a fixture as long as private enterprise has existed. The idea of spying on one's neighbor to gain a competitive advantage may well be traced back to the birth of nations, and it's a practice that quickly transitioned into the professional world.

"Corporate espionage is the attempt to access and steal trade secrets and or information that has economic value. Usually around technology, but it can also be targeted at policy and strategy," Clark Frogley, global head of fraud at data analytics company Quantexa, tells ITPro. Frogley was a former FBI financial crime investigator with first-hand experience dealing with corporate espionage.

"Economic espionage is conducted by either a competitor of the target in any market or country, or by a state actor sanctioned by a foreign government. It is far cheaper for a country to steal trade secrets than invest in R&D and try to build it."

That point is crucial – it's often quicker to steal ideas than generate them from scratch, or indeed take the time to build something. The "goods" that might be under threat include trade secrets, product road maps, pricing strategy, source code, customer lists, M&A plans, manufacturing processes, or sensitive research, says Bastille Networks CTO Brett Walkenhorst. And who might benefit from committing such crimes? Some, he tells ITPro, are direct competitors, or third parties acting on their behalf. But in high-value sectors, like energy, semiconductors, AI or pharmaceuticals, you may find nation states taking an interest in infiltrating your organization's walls.

Corporate espionage "success stories"

Corporate espionage has a long history. Some of the most infamous cases center around Nvidia, Coca-Cola, and Rivian, says Greg Newman, chief of staff at HiveWatch, an AI physical security platform.

Newman, who is a former law enforcement operative with the U.S. Department of State's Diplomatic Security Service, tells ITPro that targets are generally picked based on what their impact is on their vertical, their country, or their significance in the world.

• Hitachi (1983): Two employees pleaded guilty to conspiracy to steal confidential information from IBM and transport it to Japan.
• Rivian (2020): Tesla sued electric vehicle rival Rivian for poaching employees and allegedly encouraging them to steal proprietary information about Tesla's "next-generation" battery technology.
• Coca-Cola (2021): A former employee was convicted of stealing, or attempting to steal, trade secrets regarding bisphenol-A (BPA) chemical formulas in food packaging, which was then sold to rivals.
• Nvidia (2023): A software developer was convicted in Germany for stealing trade secrets from Valeo Schalter und Sensoren to develop parking-assistance software, with this data allegedly used by the GPU-making titan Nvidia.

How have espionage threats evolved?

"The playbook was fairly consistent for decades," Frogley explains. "Computer hacking was always a core method. Beyond that, you had insider plants — people working inside the target organization, photographing documents, copying and emailing files, or physically carrying home sensitive blueprints and customer lists."

Long-term operations, mostly run by state-sponsored actors with the deep resources and patience to invest in such schemes, revolved around finding somebody on the inside susceptible to greed or blackmail, he added. Walkenhorst adds that, in the 2020s, corporate espionage techniques centered on access and social engineering for the most part.

"Attackers used phishing, business email compromise, stolen credentials, credential stuffing, MFA fatigue, malicious OAuth applications, and compromised collaboration tools to get inside organizations. Supply chain compromise also became more common, with attackers targeting vendors, contractors, MSPs, and software providers to reach the intended victim."

The breadth of threats that businesses face in today's corporate climate is far-reaching and terrifying; certainly, listing them would be exhaustive to the extent it may be wiser to ask what isn't a possible entry point. But is there a way to summarize the evolving nature of these threats?

"The biggest shift is that espionage is becoming faster, more automated, and more blended across cyber, physical, and wireless domains," says Walkenhorst.

"AI is the obvious accelerant. It improves the quality and scale of phishing, impersonation, reconnaissance, and social engineering. Attackers can generate better lures, mimic executives, automate research on targets, and tailor campaigns to specific employees or business events."

What impact is AI having on corporate espionage?

AI is the elephant in the room. Indeed, today it feels as if it's the elephant in every room. But as far as corporate espionage goes, you can't ignore its influence.

In November 2025, Anthropic researchers claimed they detected China-linked cybercriminals using agentic AI to execute cyberattacks to infiltrate roughly 30 global targets — succeeding in a small number of cases.

The operation targeted big tech, financial firms, chemical manufacturing companies, and government agencies. But AI goes beyond manipulating tools like Claude Code — it brings notions of identity into question.

"AI allows for people to believably transform their appearances, language, mannerisms, and how they interact with a target," Newman explains. "Social media interactions have become the new 'meeting somebody at a conference, and they’re asking a lot of specific questions about our work'."

The principles remain the same, but technology brings evolution. Newman continues: "Sophisticated phishing campaigns have replaced dropping a bunch of USB sticks in the parking lot and hoping somebody will plug one in at work to helpfully return it to its owner. And instead of sneaking in a Cold-War-era Minox camera to photograph documents, or using a smartphone, cloud infrastructure has made exfiltrating data (and conversely, monitoring and catching this) much easier."

Drones are a new avenue for attack

One entirely new medium is corporate espionage via drones. Over the last few years, drones have become cheaper, better, and more widely available. In recent years, we have seen waves of drones hovering over various highly sensitive U.S. military sites, including Langley Air Force Base in Virginia in 2023, as well as the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, and many other locations.

"They could be doing anything, from surveilling critical infrastructure, just to the point of embarrassing us from the fact that they can do this on a day-to-day basis, and then we’re not able to do anything about it," said Glen VanHerck, former joint commander of North American Aerospace Defense Command and U.S. Northern Command, in an interview with 60 Minutes on CBS in 2025.

Your organization doesn't need to be a highly sensitive military-adjacent one to be vulnerable to this threat, however. Drones can be used as a surveillance tool — whether to view sites from a high vantage point or even microdrones (much smaller than the devices we see today), one day able to infiltrate much tighter spaces and pass seamlessly through corridors and between unsuspecting employees like an insect.

Today, however, drones are certainly capable of proximity-based network hacks, including nearest neighbor attacks, in which intrusion relies on compromising unsecured networks adjacent to the target to intercept data or introduce malicious code into a system.

Walkenhorst focuses on wireless visibility as a "sleeper issue", given businesses operate in dense radiofrequency environments, with Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, BLE, Zigbee, LTE, 5G and other protocols constantly blasting in all kinds of directions at all times. He says there's a growing visibility gap that would-be corporate spies are eager to exploit.

"That matters because a malicious device can be small, inexpensive, and easy to hide. It can use cellular to bypass the corporate network altogether, or use Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, or other wireless protocols to interact with nearby systems. It can be placed by an insider, a contractor, a visitor, or, in some scenarios, delivered or supported by a drone. If the sec

Safeguarding against modern espionage

With such a wide-reaching palette of threats, where do organizations start? For partner at Hogan Lovells, Nathan Salminen, the answer to solving today's problems may lie in the answers of yesterday. "In the era of AI-powered cyber threats, many companies are beginning to shift back to some of the older cybersecurity strategies," he says.

"During the 1990s, most software was relatively easy to exploit. Companies combated that threat by taking fairly draconian steps like physically segmenting networks, limiting certain capabilities to personnel who were onsite, using whitelisting rather than blacklisting, and strictly ratcheting down access rights.

"Those safeguards have all slowly been swept away because they are inconvenient, but now we are on the brink of an era where AI makes most software once again relatively easy to exploit, and companies are starting to weigh security more heavily against convenience."

Frogley adds that all organizations must first understand they could be a potential target. "Technology today can help identify the use of synthetic identities or hacking attempts, and flag employees who go beyond the scope of their employment and access files or physical locations they should not," he says, adding that strong employee training programs are needed for anybody dealing in significant and competitive technology. Education, he explains, can be effective — including briefings before staff travel abroad and debriefings after they return.

Walkenhorst agrees, saying businesses should start treating corporate espionage as a business risk rather than just an IT issue — with the first step being to identify what information would be the most damaging if stolen, then building security controls around that information.

Another recommendation is to implement a strict information classification system to identify how to handle information and technology; this should encompass who has access, for how long, and what can be shared, as well as how to mark everything with proper handling classification.

Newman, meanwhile, advises that organizations invest in building a function-specific threat team, with the "spirit animal" of this being threat awareness, training, detection, and mitigation as primary functions.

"This means," he says, "that there’s a focus on awareness and training for employees who travel about what they might encounter; that phishing campaigns and alerts from a DLP tool are being reported to somebody other than an IT helpdesk, and that a more advanced company may have a full insider threat program proactively looking at indicators of intrusions, employees, and risk."

High-impact companies have always been targeted by rivals or foreign adversaries, but the threat and nature of the infiltration may have evolved. Ultimately, as far as the targets go, as Frogley puts it: "It hasn't changed that much; the companies might have changed, but it will always be a leading-edge company in critical sectors."

"I am sure Elon Musk’s Tesla was a big target as EVs became more in demand and popular. The car design is a target, but so is the battery technology and camera technology, self-driving code, et cetera. The industries evolve, but the logic behind who gets targeted stays remarkably consistent."

Whether you're a leading-edge EV and battery maker — or a plucky soccer team heading for the big leagues — corporate espionage continues to be a very real threat in the 21st century, and businesses should ensure they remain on top of the modern permutations of infiltration, be it drones conducting a nearest neighbor attack or somebody filming your sensitive operations from behind a tree.

Cato Networks has opened the doors at a new London tech hub as the cloud native security firm targets increased regional R&D investment.

The new R&D hub, located in the Holborn area, marks the company’s first dedicated hub in London, and will focus on “key strategic areas” such as AI, security innovation, and SMB growth.

According to the firm, the opening builds on its existing footprint in the city. At present, Cato Networks employs nearly 100 people spanning sales, marketing, and customer success and support.

“Cato’s new London R&D site marks a defining moment and a meaningful acceleration into our next phase of growth,” said Shlomo Kramer, CEO and co-founder of Cato.

“This strategic expansion elevates our global R&D footprint, anchoring us closer to one of the world’s leading AI and cybersecurity talent hubs, and helping us build the technologies customers need to securely adopt AI at scale.”

London hub a “key pillar” for future growth

Cato Networks said the new London hub represents a “key pillar” in its next phase of growth, and aims to capitalize on surging demand for AI security capabilities.

Indeed, researchers based at the R&D site will focus on two key areas, initially focusing on driving the firm’s AI capabilities and relationships with SMBs to help scale the technology more efficiently.

Elsewhere, the hub will also focus on “next-generation” security innovation, and will establish a dedicated security-focused product engineering team in London.

Teams located at the site will comprise a core group of data scientists, software engineers, and product managers, the company revealed. Cato Networks also pointed to longer-term hiring goals over the next three years, with plans to expand the team to more than 50 staff.

“I’m incredibly excited to build a world-class AI innovation hub right here in London,” said Director of Engineering Avidan Avraham, who will lead the effort.

“The opportunity here is vast, and building alongside other global tech giants that have chosen to set up in the city gives us access to a rich pool of experience and talent that we can tap into and develop.

The announcement by Cato Networks marked the latest in a string of big tech pledges to open office sites in London as the city continues to establish itself as a global AI hub.

Earlier this year, OpenAI unveiled plans to open a new R&D site in London, its largest outside of the US.

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The UK's AI investment boom is driven by fear of missing out, rather than actual results, according to new research.

Analysis from IDC, commissioned by Expereo, found AI has become one of the most prioritized technology investments globally. Around 70% of organizations are investing heavily in AI tools and solutions, the survey found.

However, they don't seem to be doing much in the way of planning, with one-in-five admitting they are investing aggressively in AI with little evaluation of the likely return on investment (ROI).

Indeed, many are simply investing out of a fear of being left behind by competitors.

This FOMO effect is strongest in APAC, where 37% of organizations admit they are investing aggressively in AI driven by fear of being left behind – nearly double the global average and well ahead of the US at 10% and Europe at 13%.

When asked which technologies their organization will prioritize in terms of effort and/or financial pledges over the next 12 months, 51% of organizations said AI or machine learning (ML).

Crucially, the results aren't always as good as hoped. Just 19% of respondents said their AI adoption projects had exceeded expectations, and only 5% reported that they've significantly exceeded them.

Just over half said the main reason for underperformance was inadequate or poor-quality training data, with 47% citing higher-than-expected costs or a failure to achieve an adequate ROI.

Meanwhile, nearly half (46%) said AI wasn't performing as well as expected.

Infrastructure readiness hampering AI adoption

According to the survey, a key reason behind these poor returns is a network and infrastructure readiness gap. Just over a quarter of organizations whose AI implementations have failed to meet expectations cited inadequate network or connectivity performance as a contributing factor.

Meanwhile, 54% of organizations said they need more flexible and scalable networks to thrive in an AI-driven environment, and 51% need greater resilience and reliability to maximize uptime.

"Every enterprise we speak to is investing in AI, yet the data shows a clear gap opening up between AI ambition and AI outcomes. More often than not, that gap comes down to the network underneath. AI only delivers on its promise when the infrastructure carrying it is built to support it," said Expereo CEO Ben Elms.

"Without resilient, scalable, cloud-optimized networks, even the most well-funded AI programmes will struggle to deliver ROI. Getting the network right is no longer an IT decision; it is one of the most important conversations happening in the boardroom today to help fulfil AI ambition."

Unchecked investment carries huge risks

According to Expero, concerns are also rising over the longer-term risks associated with unchecked AI investment. More than half (54%) of respondents cited emerging security risks as a potential future threat for their organization’s AI use.

Just under four-in-ten, meanwhile, are concerned about losing track of AI-related costs and ROI once the technology is embedded across the business.

This isn't the first survey to reveal the effects of FOMO on AI investment. Just last month, analysis from software firm Orgvue found that 57% of organizations in the US, UK, Canada, and Australia had deployed AI mainly because their competitors had, rather than because they actually had a strategy for it.

Unsurprisingly, 78% also said they'd had AI projects either fail or remain stuck in the pilot stage.

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Dell Technologies has raised its annual revenue and profit expectations on the back of an increased demand for its AI-optimized servers.

Strong quarterly results mark Dell as one of the biggest winners of the AI boom and also highlight its management of the memory chip shortage, with strategic price increases and supply chain adjustments.

Dell reported its net income for the most recent quarter had more than tripled to $3.44 billion from $965 million compared to the same quarter of 2025. However, the tech giant also raised its prices in January, reflecting higher input costs due to the global memory shortage driven by the AI boom.

"We're repricing, it feels like, every day, and I'm sure our customers feel that pain," Jeff Clarke, Dell Technologies' vice chairman and COO, said on a conference call with analysts, according to CNBC. "Unfortunately, I don't see that changing, given the world that we're living in today, where you have an inflationary environment, whether it's fuel, whether it's raw materials, whether that's DRAM, whether that's NAND, CPUs. We are living in an inflationary environment that is changing at a rate that obviously we've never seen before ... and everything that we see suggests that continues."

As a result, Dell expects to see revenue from AI servers somewhere around $60 billion for fiscal 2027, according to Reuters. This is up from its previous expectation of $50 billion. Quarterly revenue from Dell's infrastructure solution group, which includes storage and server products and services, hit 181%, and PC sales also rose by 17%.

The revised expectations also come in the same week that Dell landed a $9.7 billion deal with the Pentagon to manage Microsoft licenses. This five-year deal will see Dell as the main contractor providing Microsoft 365, cloud subscriptions, and software licensing for Microsoft products to be used by the US defense agency and the US military.

Samsung is set to pay employees in its memory chip division a bonus averaging £310,000 each, after a highly contentious profit-sharing agreement was reached.

The agreement was mediated by the South Korean government, according to Reuters.

Memory chip workers with a base salary of 80 million won (roughly $53,400 or £40,000) should receive a bonus of about 626 million won ($416,000 or £310,000) this year, largely paid in stock. These figures were from a union source, reported by Reuters last week.

Samsung's profits have been boosted by the AI boom, but the deal itself is aimed at avoiding a strike with two unions for the South Korean giant.

The unions said that 74% of the 62,616 workers who cast their votes had backed the deal. Samsung will set aside 10.5% of its operating profits at its semiconductor division to pay special bonuses to those who work on memory chips.

There is a hope that the deal will end a long-running dispute at the tech giant. That said, there are new concerns that it may actually create tensions between other divisions, such as those that work in its consumer electronics divisions.

Memory chip wars

Samsung has seen record profits thanks to a global shortage of memory chips amid the boom in AI. Along with SK Hynix, the two companies account for the majority of global memory production.

However, last year, SK Hynix abolished its cap on bonus pay for 10 years, according to reports. Without the cap, it was able to pay bonuses that were considerably larger than those at Samsung. This, reportedly, led many to leave Samsung for SK Hynix, which in turn sparked a surge in union membership, according to Samsung.

Negotiations saw many proposals tabled, such as a 50% to 100% bounce offer, as a one-off payment that would keep the cap on bonuses.

Terzo has announced the appointment of former Accenture executive Daniel Haitz as head of strategic partnerships and channel growth, as the finance and analytics vendor looks to scale its partner ecosystem.

Haitz arrives with nearly two decades of experience across enterprise software, procurement transformation, and large-scale operating strategy. He joins the business from Accenture, where he led enterprise platform growth initiatives that tripled revenue over a three-year period.

His appointment comes as Terzo continues building momentum around its AI-powered financial analytics platform, which is designed to help enterprises transform contracts, invoices, and purchase orders into real-time financial intelligence.

In his new role, Haitz will focus on expanding Terzo's partner ecosystem and accelerating enterprise adoption of its platform across procurement, finance, supply chain, and revenue operations.

In an announcement, Terzo CEO Brandon Card said the seasoned leader's deep channel expertise will help drive the company's ongoing growth ambitions.

"Billions of dollars leak out of enterprises every year because nobody is continuously connecting what was negotiated to what actually gets paid, billed, or delivered," he explained. "That's the problem Terzo was built to solve."

"Daniel knows how to turn that kind of platform story into commercial outcomes through partners. He brings the operating discipline and ecosystem credibility we need for the next phase of growth."

Terzo's platform works to continuously analyze enterprise contracts and procurement data to identify spend leakage, compliance, renewal risks, and commercial optimization opportunities across both buy-side and sell-side operations.

According to the company, the platform has already delivered more than $1 billion in measurable customer impact – including a Fortune 100 deployment that generated more than 50-times return on investment.

Commenting on his appointment, Haitz said he aims to build on this momentum by strengthening and scaling Terzo's partner network.

"Every contract is a promise, and most enterprises stop tracking them the day they're signed," he explained. "Terzo turns those promises back into EBITDA – money already owed, leakage recovered, and renewals reshaped before the next negotiation – on both sides of the contract. That's a story that scales through partners, and I'm here to build that motion."

Salesforce has expanded its London campus, relocating its existing AI Centre to Devonshire Square in the City of London.

With the aim of creating a single connected campus, the centre is being moved from its original home in London's Blue Fin Building in Southwark to the site of Salesforce Tower, the headquarters of the company's UK operations.

The plan forms part of the company's commitment to invest $6 billion in the UK over five years, and it said it will help it work directly with enterprises, startups, and the public sector.

"Agentic AI has moved beyond pilots to large-scale deployment, where entire ecosystems of agents are transforming every function of business," said Zahra Bahrololoumi, CEO of Salesforce UKI.

"By bringing the AI Centre and Salesforce Tower together as a connected campus, we have created a place where businesses, communities, and future talent can experience that transformation first-hand – and build the skills and confidence to lead it."

Salesforce opened its first AI Centre in 2024, aiming to improve facilities for collaboration and upskilling. Now, with the move to the Devonshire Square site, it will feature a learning lab and collaboration zones.

An immersive AI theater, meanwhile, will offer hands-on experience of the latest AI technologies, including interactive demonstrations of AI agents solving real business challenges. The firm said it's expecting more than 5,000 visitors this year.

"We designed this campus to be a catalyst for innovation, showing what becomes possible when humans and AI agents work together," said Relina Bulchandani, Salesforce's executive vice president, real estate and workplace services.

"Every element of the new space, from the immersive experiences to the collaboration zones, is anchored in giving anyone who walks through our doors the confidence and capability to put agentic AI to work."

The new space is open to Salesforce Ventures portfolio companies, offering a new hub to collaborate across the UK's broader AI ecosystem. Salesforce Ventures, said the firm, has invested over $250 million in UK-based AI companies, including AutoGenAI, an AI-powered proposal writing platform; Covecta, an agentic AI company deploying purpose-built agents and search capabilities for the financial services sector; and ElevenLabs, the AI voice technology company.

The company said its Agentforce agentic AI platform is now being deployed by more than 23,000 customers globally, including Heathrow Airport, Pets at Home, NHS Shared Business Services, the National Trust, and several UK police forces.

It said it remains actively committed to identifying and supporting the next generation of UK AI innovators.

"Innovative firms like Salesforce have a big role to play in equipping British businesses, public services, and the next generation of workers with the tools and skills they need to grasp the opportunities before us," said technology secretary Liz Kendall.

"This investment in their new London AI Campus will only bolster those efforts."

Managed Service Providers (MSPs) are operating in a tougher market where customers are more price sensitive, competition is intensifying, and winning new business is becoming harder.

But according to Kaseya’s SVP of MSP enablement, Greg Jones, the top-performing MSPs are responding very differently from the rest of the market.

Speaking at the MSP Show 2026 in London last week, Jones said the sector is facing growing pressure despite strong demand from SMEs.

“We’ve never seen SME spend outpace enterprise spend before,” he said. “However, it is harder to win new business out there. We’re being challenged on price.”

Rather than cutting prices to stay competitive, Jones argued MSPs need to become far more focused on value, outcomes, and operational maturity.

Here are the five biggest lessons Jones believes MSPs should focus on.

1. Run the business on data, not instinct

The exec said too many MSPs are still operating reactively rather than using meaningful operational metrics.

“A lot of MSPs run their businesses on gut feel anymore. That’s not good enough,” he said.

Top-performing MSPs are tracking detailed KPIs, including ticket volumes, technician utilisation, revenue per employee, and profitability thresholds.

According to Jones, some providers are now supporting between 400 and 500 endpoints per employee by using automation, AI, and machine learning more effectively.

“How are they doing that? AI, machine learning, model change,” he said.

2. Be more selective about customers

Jones warned MSPs against trying to appeal to every type of business.

While many providers define customers by company size or vertical market, he argued the best MSPs go further by identifying organisations with the right growth mindset.

“What you’re trying to do is weed out lifestyle businesses. We’re interested in businesses that want to grow and scale,” he said.

Those customers are more likely to see MSPs as strategic partners rather than simply a supplier to negotiate down on cost.

3. Treat sales and marketing as a growth engine

“The biggest players out there are the ones focusing on sales and marketing,” said Jones, who also argued many MSPs lack a clearly defined sales process.

“When I ask MSPs what their sales process looks like, they don’t actually know,” he said.

Instead, he urged providers to create structured sales playbooks tied to measurable activities, including outreach, events, and pipeline targets.

“You can never fully control the sales numbers. However, you can control your actions today,” he told attendees.

4. Capitalize on AI and compliance services

Jones identified AI and compliance-as-a-service as two of the biggest commercial opportunities currently available to MSPs.

“AI at the moment, and compliance-as-a-service, is the biggest offering at the moment,” he said.

He argued that growing regulatory and governance pressures are creating demand for MSPs that can help customers manage compliance more effectively.

At the same time, AI is helping top MSPs scale operations more efficiently and support larger customer estates without dramatically increasing headcount.

5. Focus on customer experience, not just SLAs

Traditional service desk metrics alone are no longer enough, said Jones. While operational KPIs still matter, customers increasingly expect consumer-style digital experiences, rapid responses and seamless service delivery.

That shift is being accelerated by younger business leaders who are digital natives and expect technology to work instantly and intuitively.

Jones said MSPs must stop focusing purely on tools and technical delivery, and instead concentrate on the business outcomes customers actually value.

“Nobody wakes up in the morning looking for your services,” he said. “Businesses wake up looking for the outcomes of working with an MSP.”

Conflict is usually seen as something IT leaders should steer clear of. But in fact, the opposite is true – and avoiding confrontation can lead to major headaches down the line.

That’s according to service management consultant, Alex Cosma, who argues that productive disagreement is one of the most overlooked drivers of better technology decisions, especially as organizations rush to adopt AI.

“Conflict has a really bad reputation,” Cosma told attendees at the MSP Show 2026, which was held in London last week.

“But I wanted to show not the negative side of conflict, but the positive side, and how that can help you drive innovation in service management.”

The issue is that many teams confuse harmony with success, she said. But meetings where nobody pushes back can leave serious flaws undiscovered until much later.

“Think about that meeting where everybody sits quietly,” she said. “We don’t have anybody weighing in. We don’t have anybody saying, ‘Why are we doing things this way?’”

Cosma described this as “artificial harmony” – situations where teams publicly agree with a plan but privately remain unconvinced. In service management, for example, this can lead to processes people ignore, portals users dislike but never criticise, or projects marked green despite growing operational problems.

AI still needs human disagreement

For channel partners, that challenge is becoming more relevant as AI enters everyday operations. Cosma said organisations risk relying too heavily on AI-generated answers before people have properly explored the problem itself.

“AI shines in convergence. It makes us faster and more consistent in routine decisions. But humans shine through divergence,” she said.

In other words, AI is effective at refining and operationalising ideas. Humans, meanwhile, are still better at questioning assumptions, exploring alternatives, and debating possible approaches.

“First, we need to start with divergence, where we can have a healthy debate and throw ideas on the table. Then we can use AI to get us to the best possible outcome,” said Cosma.

Challenge the idea, not the person

A theme throughout the session was the importance of separating disagreement from personal conflict. Challenging ideas is healthy, but attacking people is where organisations run into trouble.

“We want to challenge each other. However, we don’t want to challenge the person. Never challenge the individual – challenge the idea,” she explained.

Cosma shared an example from her own experience where architects, process managers, and service leaders spent an entire day arguing through a difficult service management problem. The discussions became tense, but the eventual outcome exceeded what any individual participant had originally proposed.

“We allowed ourselves to challenge each other because we trusted each other,” she said.

Why leaders should embrace disagreement

The bigger danger, Cosma warned, is groupthink. Teams naturally want agreement and social harmony, but that instinct can create blind spots and prevent risks from surfacing early enough.

“If everyone agrees with me in a meeting, I get suspicious,” she said.

Instead, she encouraged leaders to actively invite disagreement and create psychologically safe environments where people feel comfortable questioning decisions.

“Disagreement here is not only allowed,” she said. “It’s expected.”

AI is rapidly becoming the channel’s primary growth opportunity, although many IT service providers are still early in their adoption journey.

That’s according to GTIA’s 2026 State of the Channel report, which found that while AI services were identified as the top expected revenue growth category over the next two years, only three-in-ten providers have fully embedded the technology into their business models.

According to the report, 35% of participants currently generate between 11% and 25% of their revenue from AI-related services, with many providers selling a mix of existing and newly developed AI offerings.

In contrast, just 7% said that more than half of their revenue now comes from AI-related products and services.

Commenting on the findings, GTIA said the channel finds itself at an “AI inflection point” as providers increasingly move beyond experimentation and begin operationalizing AI-focused strategies.

“AI hype is fast turning into AI reality, making this a crucial time for providers who must make important decisions about their business strategy,” explained Carolyn April, vice president of research and market intelligence at GTIA. “We are well past the experimentation phase.

“The key differentiator now is how strategically and operationally mature a provider’s AI usage is. Those who can successfully adopt and monetize AI will be best placed to navigate this sea change.”

AI-driven growth expectations

GTIA’s study found that 42% of ITSPs expect AI services to be the biggest revenue growth category over the next 24 months, placing just ahead of cyber security services at 37%.

Meanwhile, 31% of respondents said they are expecting significant growth in AI-related revenue during that period – particularly for those evolving their offerings, as well as investing in new skills and vendor relationships.

GTIA also found that 30% of providers already identify as “AI-driven” companies with formal AI leadership and operational strategies already in place, while 43% said they are “AI-invested” as they continue their transformation.

“Most ITSPs continue to prioritise classic infrastructure‑centric services, but growth expectations are increasingly concentrated in newer, higher‑value offerings,” April continued.

“The gap between what ITSPs sell now and where they expect growth highlights the opportunity—but also the need for new skills, pricing and delivery models as AI shifts to business imperative.”

Ongoing channel challenges

Despite the growing optimism around AI-led services, GTIA’s report also highlighted the key challenges that continue to face the channel.

More than a third (37%) of survey participants cited workforce skills and talent shortages as the biggest barrier to their success, while 34% pointed to external market factors.

Additionally, 16% said they are concerned about the availability and adoption of AI solutions, underlining AI’s current presence as both a growth catalyst and an emerging disruption risk.

Elsewhere, the research also revealed that hybrid business models continue to dominate the ITSP landscape, with the majority of providers still combining managed services, project work, and product sales as part of their diversification and risk management strategies.

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IT leaders are carefully assessing the extent to which AI-generated code can make a difference in their business.

On the one hand, AI developers promise their tools can enable faster code deployment and free up time for developers. On the other, it can be difficult to know where to start with AI tools – particularly if you want total reliability in your code.

How can enterprises make best use of AI code? And what do these tools mean for the developer teams of the future?

In this episode, Jane and Rory are joined by Colin Jarvis, head of forward deployed engineering at OpenAI, to discuss internal code generation.

Highlights

"The folks who use [AI] to increase the output of their existing specialists and their existing like experienced staff, are the folks who are seeing the best output. And I think the folks who see it as an excuse to as, sort of a race to the bottom, are the people who who struggle a bit more."

"[Hiring junior developers] has been a big focus of ours [and]... the number of entry level people has increased in the [forward deployment engineering] team over the last three to six months and the reason for that is that we're finding with the right sort of enablement ... they improve very, very fas, and they end up being as productive as some of our more experienced staff very quickly."

Footnotes

• Enterprises keep cutting staff for AI – and they keep regretting it
• As a software developer, you naturally need to have a willingness to learn
• OpenAI's Codex app is now available on macOS
• OpenAI ramps up enterprise AI push with new consultancy launch

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