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The 2026 Channel Madness Finals end in *10 MINUTES!* 🚨 Get your last-minute votes in now: https://okt.to/OhKIZj. Good luck to CrowdStrike's Michael Rogers and Sophos' Scott Barlow! Sophos Partners

You have ONE HOUR left to vote for CrowdStrike's Michael Rogers or Sophos' Scott Barlow in the Channel Madness Finals! Vote now: https://okt.to/bkNwao. Sophos Partners

Oracle partners said they see the enterprise cloud software powerhouse becoming more reliant on the channel in the wake of layoffs Tuesday that reports say impact thousands of employees. https://lnkd.in/eitEb6TC

Solution provider NWN is promising unified visibility across Wi-Fi, switching, SD-WAN, security and the end-user experience, with AI-driven analytics to spot issues before users do. “Think intelligent agents embedded in the network that can adjust performance automatically,” NWN CEO Jim Sullivan told CRN. “We’re going to see a massive increase in data traffic,” Sullivan added. “That’s the big shift. Networks will need to handle more complex workloads, more real-time processing and higher performance demands.” CJ Fairfield spoke with Sullivan to learn about AI at the enterprise level and what NWN is doing to help clients on that journey:

With AMD’s next-generation EPYC “Venice” processors set to launch this year, the company is optimistic that the server chips will extend its performance lead over Intel’s Xeon CPUs and allow it to continue taking market share from the rival. This is according to Madhu Rangarajan, corporate vice president of compute and enterprise AI products at AMD, who told CRN in an interview last month that the chip designer is especially bullish about its server CPUs prospects this year because Intel’s upcoming Xeon “Diamond Rapids” chips are expected to lack multithreading, a common feature in x86 CPUs. Dylan Martin has the details, including additional insights from Steve Berg, corporate vice president and general manager of AMD’s Server CPU Cloud Business Group, and a response from Intel fellow Srinivasan (Srini) Krishnan:

🚨 Two weeks remain to submit nominations for the 2026 𝗡𝗲𝘅𝘁-𝗚𝗲𝗻 𝗦𝗼𝗹𝘂𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗣𝗿𝗼𝘃𝗶𝗱𝗲𝗿 𝗟𝗲𝗮𝗱𝗲𝗿𝘀 list. Apply or nominate a rising star today! https://okt.to/dXCIM8. ⭐️ This distinguished recognition celebrates high-performing executives, directors, and managers aged 40 and under who are actively driving business growth, redefining strategic direction, and enhancing customer success within solution provider organizations—including MSPs, VARs, integrators, and IT consultants. If you are aware of an outstanding leader whose contributions are shaping the future of the industry, we encourage you to submit an application. Best of all, applying is completely free. 📅 The final deadline for consideration is Friday, April 10. 🏆 The #CRNNextGen SP Leaders will be featured on CRN.com in June.

New data from Flexera sheds light on how much money customers are spending per month on the largest cloud providers on the planet: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Alibaba, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle and IBM. Flexera’s new 2026 State of the Cloud report surveyed over 750 executive leaders and professionals in the winter of 2025, with 62 percent of respondents based in America, 23 percent in Europe, and 13 percent in the Asia-Pacific region. We dig into the report’s findings:

Deanna Davenport, vice president of customer experience at solution provider ePlus inc., said VistaXM, Inc. has made all the difference in raising the bar on the ePlus customer experience. ePlus is one of a growing number of solution providers and vendors implementing the VistaXM customer experience revenue intelligence as-a-service offering, which is aimed at proactively identifying customer concerns or issues and then taking specific actions to drive sales growth in a land-and-expand IT services market. Steven Burke spoke with Davenport, VistaXM Founder and CEO Erik Vogel and Bruce Coughlin, VistaXM’s chief growth officer, to learn more about the offering:

CrowdStrike is investing to provide “foundational” platforms for solution and service provider partners to fully capitalize on the massive cybersecurity growth opportunities ahead related to AI and agents, according to CrowdStrike Co-Founder and CEO George Kurtz. In an interview with CRN cybersecurity reporter and Senior Editor Kyle Alspach at RSAC 2026 last week, Kurtz pointed to the company’s announcements at the conference, including the launch of new partnerships around its no-code platform for security agents, Charlotte AI AgentWorks. With the new Charlotte AI AgentWorks Ecosystem collaboration, partners such as Accenture can create AI agents finely tuned to deliver specific security outcomes for customers, he said. All in all, “when we think about the ability for AI to help partners, I think their business is going to explode,” he said. “The [partner] organizations who figure out how to harness agentic AI to provide a solution are going to do really, really well.” Read Kyle’s interview with Kurtz to learn more:

AI startup Mistral AI has raised $830 million to secure funding to build a new “cutting-edge” AI data center near Paris, powered by tens of thousands of NVIDIA AI chips.