CRN’s 2024 Products Of The Year

CRN staff compiled the top partner-friendly products that launched or were significantly enhanced over the past year and then turned to solution providers to choose this year’s winners.

And The Trophies Go To…
The CRN 2024 Products of the Year awards honor the leading partner-friendly IT products as selected by the solution providers that develop solutions and services around these products and bring them to their customers.
CRN editors selected finalists in 30 technology categories from products that were newly launched or updated between September 2023 and September 2024. The categories range from mainstay channel products in enterprise networking, enterprise storage and SD-WAN to products in newer technology areas such as application performance/observability, artificial intelligence architecture and AI PCs.
We then asked solution providers to rate the products based on three subcategories: technology, revenue and profit, and customer need. Products with the highest overall score (the average of the three subcategory scores) in each product category was named the winner.
What follows are the winners, subcategory winners and finalists for 2024.

Application Performance and Observability
Winner Overall: IBM Instana Observability
IBM Instana Observability automatically discovers, maps and monitors all services and infrastructure components, providing complete visibility across an application stack. It continuously captures every trace, detects changes in real-time, and provides detailed insights to automate root cause detection and problem resolution. Instana’s approach to observability includes built-in automation, application and infrastructure context, and AI-powered intelligent actions.
IBM Instana Observability scored highest overall in this product category and highest for revenue and profit and for customer need.
Subcategory Winner – Technology: Dynatrace Unified Observability Platform
Finalist: Datadog Observability Platform
Finalist: Grafana 11
Finalist: New Relic Observability Platform
Finalist: Splunk Observability Cloud

Artificial Intelligence: AI PCs
Winner Overall: Acer TravelMate P4 14
The Acer TravelMate P4 14 laptop for business professionals is an AI-ready business laptop with Microsoft Copilot, TravelMate Sense, and PurifiedVoice with AI Noise Reduction. The product harnesses the power of the Intel Core processor with built-in vPro Essentials hardware security and Intel Unison phone integration capabilities.
The Acer TravelMate P4 14 scored highest overall in this product category and highest for technology and for revenue and profit.
Subcategory Winner – Customer Need: HP EliteBook 1040 G11
Finalist: Apple MacBook Pro
Finalist: Dell Latitude 7455
Finalist: Lenovo ThinkPad 14S Gen 6
Finalist: Samsung Galaxy Book4 Pro

Artificial Intelligence: Infrastructure
Winner Overall: Supermicro AS-4125GS-TNHR2-LCC
The Supermicro AS-4125GS-TNHR2-LCC is designed for large-scale and cloud-scale compute tasks in AI, high performance computing, AI/deep learning, and deep learning/AI/ML development. The rackmount, liquid-cooled server runs on Nvidia H100 GPU processors.
The Supermicro AS-4125GS-TNHR2-LCC scored highest overall in this product category and highest for revenue and profit and for customer need.
Subcategory Winner – Technology: Dell PowerEdge R760xa
Finalist: Lenovo ThinkSystem SR780a V3

Artificial Intelligence: Productivity Suites
Winner Overall: Gemini For Google Workspace
Google Gemini is an AI-powered assistant that helps with a variety of tasks including writing, coding, research, data analysis and design. Gemini is integrated into Gmail, Docs and Sheets.
Gemini for Google Workspace scored highest overall in this product category and highest for technology, revenue and profit, and customer need.
Finalist: Microsoft Copilot

Big Data
Winner Overall: HPE Ezmeral Data Fabric Software
Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s HPE Ezmeral Data Fabric Software is a platform for data-driven analytics, machine learning and AI workloads. It serves as a secure data store and provides file storage, NoSQL database, object storage and event stream capabilities. The product reduces data silos with a unified data lakehouse, and centrally manages and governs data while accessing it directly where it resides.
HPE Ezmeral Data Fabric Software scored highest overall in this product category, highest for revenue and profit and for customer need.
Subcategory Winner – Technology: Cloudera Open Data Lakehouse
Finalist: Databricks Data Intelligence Platform
Finalist: Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform
Finalist: Snowflake Data Cloud
Finalist: Starburst Galaxy

Business Applications
Winner Overall: SAP S/4HANA
S/4HANA is SAP’s flagship ERP (enterprise resource planning) business application suite that provides finance, accounting, procurement, supply chain, production and employee management capabilities. The software uses AI and machine learning to analyze operational data and automate routine business tasks.
SAP S/4HANA scored highest overall in this product category and highest for technology, revenue and profit, and customer need.
Finalist: Epicor ERP
Finalist: Oracle NetSuite
Finalist: Microsoft Dynamics 365
Finalist: Sage Intacct

Business Intelligence and Data Analytics
Winner Overall: MicroStrategy ONE
MicroStrategy ONE is a cloud-based, AI-powered business intelligence system that turns raw data into actionable insights. The software provides an array of role-based analytical capabilities and offers no-code, low-code and pro-code options for infusing analytics into business operations.
MicroStrategy ONE scored highest overall in this product category and highest for revenue and profit. It tied with the highest scores for customer need.
Subcategory Winner – Technology: Amazon Redshift
Subcategory Winner – Customer Need: Domo Data Experience Platform (tie)
Finalist: Google Cloud BigQuery
Finalist: Qlik Sense
Finalist: Salesforce Tableau

Data Protection, Management and Resiliency
Winner Overall: Veeam Data Platform
Veeam Data Platform data protection and management software is used by businesses to protect, backup, recover and manage their data across on-premises, hybrid and multi-cloud environments. The system protects data across a range of physical servers, cloud instances, applications and virtual machines.
Veeam Data Platform scored highest overall in this product category and highest for technology, revenue and profit, and customer need.
Finalist: Cohesity Data Cloud
Finalist: Commvault Cloud Powered by Metallic AI
Finalist: Dell PowerProtect Data Manager Appliance
Finalist: HYCU R-Cloud
Finalist: Rubrik Security Cloud

Edge Computing/Internet of Things
Winner Overall: Scale Computing Autonomous Infrastructure Management Engine (AIME)
Scale Computing AIME provides the AI orchestration and management functionality within SC//HyperCore and significantly reduces the effort required to deploy, secure, manage and maintain IT infrastructure – including edge computing and IoT systems.
Scale Computing AIME scored highest overall in this product category and highest for revenue and profit and for customer need.
Subcategory Winner – Technology: Red Hat Device Edge
Finalist: Eaton iCube
Finalist: HPE Edgeline
Finalist: IBM Edge Application Manager
Finalist: Schneider Electric EcoStruxure Micro Data Center R-Series

Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure
Winner Overall: NetApp Hybrid Cloud
NetApp Hybrid Cloud combines public and private clouds, on-premises data centers and edge locations to run distributed workloads including web and content hosting, application development, data analytics and containerized applications.
NetApp Hybrid Cloud scored highest overall in this product category and highest for revenue and profit and for customer need.
Subcategory Winner – Technology: IBM Hybrid Cloud
Finalist: Dell Technologies Apex Hybrid Cloud
Finalist: HPE GreenLake
Finalist: Nutanix Hybrid Multicloud
Finalist: VMware Cloud Foundation

MSP Platforms
Winner Overall: Kaseya 365
Kaseya 365 is a subscription-based service for MSPs that provides the core functions needed to manage, secure, backup and automate endpoint devices. The company recently introduced Kaseya 365 User to protect user data and identities in Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace environments.
Kaseya 365 scored highest overall in this product category and highest for revenue and profit and for customer need.
Subcategory Winner – Technology: N-able Cloud Commander
Finalist: Atera
Finalist: ConnectWise Asio Platform
Finalist: HaloPSA
Finalist: Syncro Platform

Networking – Enterprise
Winner Overall: Cisco Networking Cloud
Cisco Networking Cloud is Cisco’s AI-native platform built for the global area network that provides unified management, automation, and operational simplicity and security by converging and connecting fragmented on-premises and cloud networks.
Cisco Networking Cloud scored highest overall in this product category and highest for technology, revenue and profit, and customer need.
Finalist: HPE Aruba Networking Enterprise Private 5G
Finalist: Juniper AI-Native Networking Platform
Finalist: Nile NaaS
Finalist: Prosimo AI Suite for Multi-Cloud Networking

Networking – Wireless
Winner Overall: HPE Aruba Networking Wi-Fi 7 Access Point
HPE Aruba Networking Wi-Fi 7 access point networking devices provide AI-ready, high-performance and secure connectivity for enterprise applications, edge IT and IoT devices. HPE Aruba says the Wi-Fi 7 access points provide up to 30 percent more capacity for wireless traffic than competing products.
HPE Aruba Networking Wi-Fi 7 access point scored highest overall in this product category and highest for technology, revenue and profit, and customer need.
Finalist: Extreme Networks AP5020 universal Wi-Fi 7 access point
Finalist: Fortinet FortiAP 441K Wi-Fi 7 access point
Finalist: Zyxel Wi-Fi 7 access point

Power Protection and Management
Winner Overall: Eaton 9PX 6kVA Lithium-Ion UPS
Eaton touts the 9PX 6kVA Lithium-Ion UPS as ideal for enterprise IT, edge deployment and light industrial applications. It features remote firmware upgrades and integration with leading hyperconverged infrastructure and virtualization platforms.
The Eaton 9PX 6kVA Lithium-Ion UPS scored highest overall in this product category and highest for revenue and profit and for customer need.
Subcategory Winner – Technology: Vertiv Liebert GXT5 Lithium-Ion UPS
Finalist: CyberPower PFC Sinewave 1U UPS
Finalist: Schneider Electric Easy UPS 3-Phase 3M Advanced

Processors – CPUs
Winner Overall: Intel Core Ultra Series
Intel describes its Core Ultra processors as its premier processor line for desktop systems and mobile devices for enabling AI experiences such as copilots, productivity assistants, text and image creation, and collaboration.
Intel Core Ultra Series scored highest overall in this product category and highest for customer need.
Subcategory Winner – Technology: Apple M3
Subcategory Winner – Revenue and Profit: AMD Ryzen Pro 8040 Series
Finalist: AmpereOne
Finalist: Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite

Processors – GPUs
Winner Overall: Nvidia H200
With its higher performance and expanded memory bandwidth and capacity, Nvidia’s H200 Tensor Core GPU is a popular processor for GenAI and high-performance computing workloads. Nvidia says the H200 also offers improved energy efficiency and lower TCO than the earlier H100.
The Nvidia H200 scored highest overall in this product category and highest for technology, revenue and profit, and customer need.
Finalist: AMD Instinct MI300X
Finalist: Intel ARC A570M

Public Cloud Platforms
Winner Overall: Microsoft Azure
Microsoft Azure is one of the industry’s leading cloud platforms that provide services for building, running and managing cloud applications. The platform’s wide range of services include compute, storage, analytics and networking capabilities.
Microsoft Azure scored highest overall in this product category and highest for technology and customer need.
Subcategory Winner – Revenue and Profit: Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI)
Finalist: Amazon Web Services
Finalist: CoreWeave Cloud
Finalist: Google Cloud Platform
Finalist: Snowflake Data Cloud

SD-WAN
Winner Overall: HPE Aruba EdgeConnect SD-WAN
HPE Aruba EdgeConnect SD-WAN is a software-as-a-service wide area network that provides secure connectivity and data access for hybrid work environments. Features include secure access service (SASE), a single management interface for observing and controlling the WAN and SASE, real-time monitoring and virtual WAN capabilities.
HPE Aruba EdgeConnect SD-WAN scored highest overall in this product category and highest for revenue and profit.
Subcategory Winner – Technology, Customer Need: Extreme Networks Extreme Cloud SD-WAN
Finalist: Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN
Finalist: Fortinet Secure SD-WAN
Finalist: Palo Alto Networks Prisma SD-WAN
Finalist: Zscaler Zero Trust SD-WAN

Security – Cloud and Application Security
Winner Overall: SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security
SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security provides cloud security, threat detection and response for servers, virtual machines and containers. Part of SentinelOne’s Singularity platform, Singularity Cloud Security works across private and public clouds, including AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Platform.
SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security scored highest overall in this product category and highest for technology and customer need.
Subcategory Winner – Revenue and Profit: Palo Alto Networks Prisma Cloud
Finalist: CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security
Finalist: F5 Distributed Cloud Services Web Application Scanning
Finalist: Orca Cloud Security Platform
Finalist: Tenable Cloud Security
Finalist: Wiz Cloud Security Platform

Security – Data
Winner Overall: IBM Guardium Data Protection
IBM Guardium Data Protection protects sensitive data in the cloud and in on-premises systems. GDP automatically discovers and classifies sensitive data across an enterprise and provides data activity monitoring and analytics, near real-time threat response workflows, and automated compliance auditing and reporting.
IBM Guardium Data Protection scored highest overall in this product category and highest for revenue and profit.
Subcategory Winner – Technology, Customer Need: Zscaler Data Protection
Finalist: ForcePoint ONE Data Security
Finalist: Proofpoint Information Protection
Finalist: Rubrik Security Cloud
Finalist: Wiz DSPM

Security – Email and Web Security
Winner Overall: Mimecast Advanced Email Security
Mimecast Advanced Email Security is a comprehensive, cloud-based email security system that guards email from a range of cyberattacks including spam, viruses and malware. Capabilities include threat intelligence and protection, data leak prevention and secure messaging.
Mimecast Advanced Email Security scored highest overall in this product category and highest for revenue and profit.
Subcategory Winner – Technology, Customer Need: Cloudflare Application Security
Finalist: Abnormal Security Platform
Finalist: Akamai API Security
Finalist: Barracuda Email Protection
Finalist: Proofpoint Threat Protection

Security – Endpoint Protection
Winner Overall: Sophos Intercept X
Sophos Intercept X takes a comprehensive, prevention-first approach to security that Sophos says blocks threats without relying on any single technique. Intercept X provides endpoint detection and response cybersecurity using a wide range of tactics to stop ransomware, breaches, data loss and other advanced threats from impacting end users.
Sophos Intercept X scored highest overall in this product category and highest for technology and customer need.
Subcategory Winner – Revenue and Profit: CrowdStrike Falcon Insight XDR
Finalist: Huntress Managed EDR
Finalist: SentinelOne Singularity XDR
Finalist: ThreatLocker Protect
Finalist: Trend Micro Trend Vision One

Security – Identity and Access Management
Winner Overall: CyberArk Workforce Identity
CyberArk Workforce Identity is a SaaS-delivered system to simplify identity and access management across enterprise systems. The product provide unified workforce and B2B access and identity management within a single offering.
CyberArk Workforce Identity scored highest overall in this product category and highest for technology, revenue and profit, and customer need.
Finalist: Ping Identity PingOne for Workforce
Finalist: Okta Workforce Identity Cloud
Finalist: Microsoft Entra ID
Finalist: OpenText NetIQ Identity Manager
Finalist: SailPoint Identity Security Cloud

Security – Managed Detection and Response
Winner Overall: Huntress Managed Identity Threat Detection and Response
With Huntress Managed Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR), formerly MDR for Microsoft 365, Huntress threat experts monitor and respond in real time to critical security threats such as suspicious login activity, privilege escalation attempts, and email tampering and forwarding.
Huntress Managed Identity Threat Detection and Response scored highest overall in this product category.
Subcategory Winner – Technology: SentinelOne Singularity MDR
Subcategory Winner – Revenue and Profit: Sophos MDR
Subcategory Winner – Customer Need: Arctic Wolf MDR
Finalist: CrowdStrike Falcon Complete Next-Gen MDR
Finalist: ThreatLocker Cyber Hero MDR

Security – Network
Winner Overall: Cisco Hypershield
Cisco Hypershield is a distributed security architecture that protects networks, applications and workloads in data centers and cloud environments. Hypershield features an AI-native rules engine, autonomous segmentation and distributed exploit protection.
Cisco Hypershield scored highest overall in this product category and highest for technology.
Subcategory Winner – Revenue and Profit: Fortinet FortiGate (tie)
Subcategory Winner – Revenue and Profit: SonicWall Cloud Secure Edge (tie)
Subcategory Winner – Customer Need: Fortinet FortiGate
Finalist: Sophos XGS Firewall
Finalist: ThreatLocker CyberHero MDR
Finalist: WatchGuard ThreatSync+ NDR

Security – Security Operations Platform
Winner Overall: Arctic Wolf Security Operations
Arctic Wolf Security Operations, renamed Arctic Wolf Aurora Platform in November 2024, is built on an open XDR architecture and is a cloud-based platform that offers a range of services to protect against cyberthreats including managed detection and response, incident response, threat intelligence, managed risk, managed security awareness and a security operations warranty.
It scored highest overall in this product category and highest for technology, revenue and profit, and customer need.
Finalist: CrowdStrike Falcon Next-Gen SIEM
Finalist: Google Security Operations
Finalist: Microsoft Sentinel
Finalist: Palo Alto Networks Cortex XSIAM 2.0
Finalist: Splunk Enterprise Security

Security – Security Access Service Edge
Winner Overall: Palo Alto Networks Prisma SASE
Palo Alto Networks describes Prisma SASE as a complete AI-powered SASE solution that combines network security, SD-WAN and autonomous digital experience management in a single service. It incorporates the Zero Trust Network Access 2.0 architecture.
Palo Alto Networks Prisma SASE scored highest overall in this product category and highest for technology.
Subcategory Winner – Revenue and Profit: Zscaler Zero Trust SASE
Subcategory Winner – Customer Need: Fortinet FortiSASE
Finalist: Cato SASE Cloud Platform
Finalist: Cisco Secure Access
Finalist: Netskope One SASE

Storage – Enterprise
Winner Overall: NetApp AFF C-Series
The NetApp AFF C-Series storage array platform offers all-flash storage for data centers. The product is designed to provide economical, high-density storage for tier 1 and tier 2 data center workloads and to unify storage environments.
NetApp AFF C-Series scored highest overall in this product category and highest for technology and customer need.
Subcategory Winner – Revenue and Profit: Pure Storage FlashArray//E
Finalist: Dell PowerStore
Finalist: HPE Alletra Storage MP
Finalist: Infinidat SSA Express
Finalist: Quantum ActiveScale Z200 Object Storage

Storage – Software-Defined
Winner Overall: Pure Storage Purity
Pure Storage Purity software unifies, manages and protects data in data centers, the cloud or at the edge. Capabilities include data management (including AI-driven array operations, monitoring, analysis and optimization), data replication, data mobility, data reduction, data encryption, disaster recovery and high availability.
Pure Storage Purity scored highest overall in this product category and highest for technology, revenue and profit, and customer need.
Finalist: DDN Infinia
Finalist: Dell PowerFlex
Finalist: HPE GreenLake for Block Storage
Finalist: IBM Software-Defined Storage

Unified Communications and Collaboration
Winner Overall: RingCentral RingCX
RingCentral RingCX is an AI-powered, omnichannel contact center system that combines voice, video and more than 20 digital channels in a single platform. Capabilities include intelligent virtual agent integration, analytics and reports, outbound dialing and agent scripting.
RingCentral RingCX scored highest overall in this product category and highest for technology and customer need.
Subcategory Winner – Revenue and Profit: Intermedia Unite
Finalist: Cisco Webex
Finalist: Microsoft Teams
Finalist: Nextiva Unified Customer Experience Platform

The Biggest News In AI, Copilots, Agents

Microsoft Copilot Actions, AI agents inside SharePoint and a new Azure AI Foundry experience are among the big reveals.

Microsoft Copilot Actions prompt templates. Artificial intelligence agents inside SharePoint. And a new Azure AI Foundry experience for designing and managing AI apps and agents.
These are some of the biggest new products and updates the Redmond, Wash.-based tech giant is revealing this week during its Ignite 2024 event.
Ignite runs through Friday, with programming in person in Chicago and online. Microsoft had 200,000-plus people register for the event and expected 14,000-plus in-person attendees.
[RELATED: Microsoft CEO: AI Provides ‘On-Ramp’ To Azure Data Services, Copilot Continues To Surge]

Microsoft Ignite 2024

In total, Microsoft revealed 80 new products and features across its product portfolio, a number of those focused on the emerging AI era.
About 70 percent of the Fortune 500 use Microsoft’s Copilot AI tool, according to the vendor. For every $1 invested, companies see a return of $3.70, with some of the highest returns reaching $10.
Microsoft also said that about 600,000 organizations have used Copilot in Power Platform and other AI-powered capabilities, up fourfold year over year.
Accenture, No. 1 on CRN’s 2024 Solution Provider 500, is in the process of rolling out Microsoft copilots and agents to 100,000 employees, according to Microsoft. It has a commitment to deploy 200,000 more.
AI looks to feature prominently for the vendor’s 400,000-member partner ecosystem in 2025. In Microsoft’s latest quarterly earnings call, Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella said that the company’s AI businesses should “surpass an annual revenue run rate of $10 billion next quarter, which will make it the fastest business in our history to reach this milestone.”
“When I talk about Copilot, Copilot Studio, agents, it’s really as much about a new way to work,” Nadella said on the call. “I describe it as what happened throughout the ’90s with PC penetration. After all, if you take a business process like forecasting, what was it like pre-email and Excel and post-email and Excel. That’s the type of change that you see with Copilot.”
Here are the biggest news items coming out of Ignite 2024 in AI and with Microsoft Copilot.

Copilot Actions, Copilot In Teams

Microsoft moved its Copilot Actions customizable prompt templates into private preview, the vendor announced during Ignite.
Users can leverage Actions to receive status updates and agenda items from colleagues and employees, compile weekly reports, schedule daily emails summarizing other emails and Microsoft Teams chats and more.
Actions users can automate templates on demand or with an event trigger. Actions can deliver information in an email, Word document and other specified formats, according to the vendor.
Microsoft will push new Copilot in Teams abilities into preview in early 2025, including a way for users to analyze screen-shared content in the collaboration platform and summarize file content in mobile and on desktop.
Screen-shared content will be available for Copilot summarizations, insight and for use when drafting new content, according to the vendor.
The new file summaries ability will apply to one-to-one and group chats in Teams. This feature will also follow file security policies so that users with unauthorized access don’t receive summaries.

New Microsoft 365 Agents

Microsoft introduced a host of AI agents during Ignite, with one such offering, Agents in SharePoint, entering general availability.
These agents are grounded on users’ SharePoint sites, files and folders to improve finding answers from that content, according to Microsoft. Every SharePoint site will include an agent tailored to its content. Users can also make their own agents scoped to select SharePoint folders, sites and files.
Users can give agents a name and behaviors and answer questions in real time, according to Microsoft. The SharePoint agents will follow existing user permissions and sensitivity labels.
Employee self-service agents have entered private preview. These agents in Microsoft 365 Copilot Business Chat (BizChat) can answer common policy-related questions and do some human resources tasks such as understanding a particular employee benefit, retrieving payroll information and starting a leave of absence.
These agents can also handle some IT tasks, including a request for a new laptop and assisting with a Microsoft 365 product. Users can customize these agents in Copilot Studio.
In preview are facilitator agents and project manager agents. Facilitator agents take notes in Teams meetings in real time and summarize information from Teams chats as conversations happen, according to Microsoft.
Project manager agents in Planner can create new plans and use preconfigured templates. The agent will oversee entire projects, assigning tasks, tracking progress and sending reminders and notifications. It can even complete tasks and create content.
Interpreter agents are expected to enter preview early next year. These AI agents can interpret up to nine languages in real time in Teams meetings. Meeting members can have the agent simulate their personal voice.

Azure AI Foundry

Microsoft introduced Ignite watchers to its Azure AI Foundry experience for designing, customizing and managing AI apps and agents.
Now available in preview are the Azure AI Foundry portal—the former Azure AI Studio—and the Foundry SDK.
The portal is the visual user interface for finding AI models, services and tools. Users can see subscription information in a single dashboard. IT administrators, operations personnel and those focused on compliance can manage AI apps at scale in the portal.
The SDK has a unified toolchain, 25 prebuilt templates and a coding experience users can access from GitHub, Visual Studio, Copilot Studio and other tools, according to Microsoft. Users can leverage the SDK for integrating Azure AI into their applications.
Coming soon to preview is the Azure AI Foundry Agent Service. This feature should allow developers to orchestrate, deploy and scale agents for automating business processes, according to Microsoft. Agent Service will allow for bring-your-own-storage and private networking for data privacy and compliance.
Foundry portal and SDK will gain a preview in December for Azure AI risk and safety evaluations for image content. These capabilities should help users assess the frequency and severity of harmful content in AI-generated outputs.
These evaluations will allow Azure AI to go beyond text-based evaluations and assess text inputs yielding image outputs, image inputs yielding text outputs and images with text—such as a meme—as inputs yielding text or images.
Users can leverage these evaluations for modifying multimodal content filters with Azure AI Content Safety and adjusting data sources for grounding. Users can also update system messages before deploying apps to production.

Copilot Control System

A Copilot Control System from Microsoft aims to help IT manage copilots and agents with data access, governance, security controls, measurement reports, business value tracking tools and adoption tracking tools.
One of the features of the Control System is Copilot in Microsoft 365 Administration Centers (MAC), now in private preview and set for general availability early next year, according to the tech giant.
Copilot in MAC leverages AI to do routine tasks by IT administrators and suggest ways to get more value out of M365 subscriptions. It will be available in the admin centers for M365, Teams and SharePoint and provide summaries of trends across an administrator’s assigned areas. The copilot can also summarize message center posts across all apps and services and meeting reports. It can troubleshoot call quality and other user issues with natural language.
Another feature in the Control System is Copilot Analytics. General availability capabilities within Copilot Analytics include a dashboard that covers Copilot readiness, adoption and learning and M365 admin center reporting to surface adoption and usage trends.
In early 2025, Copilot Analytics will include Viva Insights for no additional charge. Insights is a measurement toolset for productivity and business outcomes.

Copilot Studio Updates

Copilot Studio gained a multitude of previews, including ones for autonomous agentic capabilities, an agent library and an agent SDK.
The autonomous agents can take actions on a user’s behalf without prompting each time. These agents act in the background when recording an uploaded file, receiving an email and responding to events, according to Microsoft.
The autonomous agents plan, learn from processes, adapt to new conditions and make decisions.
The library has templates for leave management, sales order, deal acceleration and other common agent scenarios.
The SDK will allow developers to build multi-channel agents that leverage Azure AI, Semantic Kernel and Copilot Studio services and are deployable across Teams, Copilot, web and third-party messaging platforms.
More previews include image uploads for agents to analyze and advanced knowledge tuning to match specific instructions to unanswered questions,
Copilot Studio integrations with Azure AI Foundry will give Studio access to 1,800-plus models in the Azure catalog. A bring-your-own model capability is in private preview, as is the ability to embed voice-enabled agents in Studio and voice experiences in applications and websites.
A new pay-as-you-go consumptive billing option for Copilot Studio messages through existing Azure subscriptions will become available for users on Dec. 1.

Copilot Pages Upgrades

Microsoft has plans to make new features in its Copilot Pages content creation canvas generally available in early 2025, including rich artifacts and multi-page support.
The rich artifacts support means Pages will gain the ability to support code, interactive charts, tables, diagrams and math from enterprise data and web data, according to Microsoft.
Multi-page support will give users ways to add content from multiple chat sessions and from Pages made in previous Copilot conversations.
Other features entering general availability include grounding Copilot chat prompts on Page content as the page is updated for better answer relevancy and Pages viewing, editing and sharing on mobile.

Copilot in PowerPoint, Outlook, Excel

Copilot in PowerPoint should have some new features in 2025, including a narrative builder based on a file and organization image support.
Narrative builder based on referenced file will enter general availability in January, allowing for better first drafts of slides, according to Microsoft. Copilot will add branded designs, speaker notes, transitions and animations to the presentation.
In the first quarter, a capability for bringing images from SharePoint Organization Asset Library, Templafy and other asset libraries into Copilot in PowerPoint will enter general availability.
Microsoft will also increase access to presentation translations, with all Copilot in PowerPoint web users getting the ability to translate presentations into one of 40 languages in December. Desktop and Mac users will gain the capability in January.
By the end of the month, Copilot in Outlook will gain the ability to schedule focus time and one-on-one meetings based on a user prompt. Copilot will find the best times for everyone and draft an agenda based on the prompt’s details of the meeting
Before year’s end, Copilot in Excel will add a new start experience wherein Copilot suggests the type of spreadsheets users should make based on what they want. Copilot can also refine the template with headers, formulas and visuals.

Microsoft Places Enters General Availability

Microsoft revealed that its Places AI-powered workplace application has entered general availability, bringing location data to Teams and Outlook to help with in-office day planning.
Copilot can recommend when users should go into the office based on in-person meetings, guidance and when common collaborators will be in, according to Microsoft. It can manage room bookings for one-time or recurring meetings and help book rooms and desks based on images of the office and floor plans.
Administrators can leverage Places for an analysis of intended and actual occupancy for spaces.

Azure AI Content Understanding

Now in preview is the service Azure AI Content Understanding, which aims to assist developers in building and deploying multimodal applications.
The service uses GenAI to get information from documents, images, videos, audio and other unstructured data and put that information into customizable structured outputs, according to the tech giant.
Content Understanding has prebuilt templates and ways to customize outputs for call center analytics, marketing automation, content search and other use cases. The service also has prebuilt schemas for users to say what they want extracted from data, such as captions, transcripts, summaries, thumbnails and highlights.

Microsoft Fabric News

Microsoft’s Fabric data integration platform gained a host of new previews, including ones for Fabric Databases, SQL database in Fabric and open mirroring.
Fabric Databases aims to unite transactional and analytical workloads to improve app development optimized for AI databases, according to Microsoft. SQL database in Fabric is the first database engine in Fabric, with plans for Azure Cosmos DB and Azure Database for PostgreSQL to join.
SQL database in Fabric will allow for faster app building with data automatically replicated in Fabric’s multi-cloud data lake OneLake and native vector search capabilities allowing for retrieval augmented generation (RAG).
This capability will also allow for auto-optimizing databases, auto-scaling them and translating natural language queries into SQL with inline code compilation next to code fixes and explanations.
The goal of open mirroring, meanwhile, is to allow any app or data provider to bring the data estate into OneLake within Fabric so they can write change data into a mirrored database in Fabric.
A new OneLake catalog is also now generally available for exploring, managing and governing the Fabric data estate across notebooks, lakehouses, warehouses, machine learning models and more.

Products Of The Year 2024: The Finalists

CRN staff compiled the top partner-friendly products that launched or were significantly updated over the last year. Now it’s up to solution providers to choose the winners.

Application Performance and Observability
As more applications run in hybrid-cloud and multi-cloud environments, maintaining application performance has becoming a more complex task. Application performance management and observability tools help IT organizations maintain the health, performance and user experience of business applications, according to market researcher Gartner. Such tools are used by IT operations managers, site reliability engineers, cloud and platform teams, application developers and software product owners.
Datadog Observability Platform
Dynatrace Unified Observability Platform
Grafana 11
IBM Instana Observability
New Relic Observability Platform
Splunk Observability Cloud

Artificial Intelligence: AI PCs
Everyday information workers and consumers are adopting the rapidly growing number of AI applications, copilots and other AI-driven software to improve their productivity and creativity. That’s fueling demand for personal computers with specialized processors, hardware and software to handle AI tasks. Global AI PC unit shipments are expected to exceed 43 million this year, according to market researcher Gartner, and soar to more than 114 million in 2025.
Acer TravelMate P4 14 (AMD)
Apple MacBook Pro (M3)
Dell Latitude 7455 (Qualcomm)
HP EliteBook 1040 G11 (Intel)
Lenovo ThinkPad 14S Gen 6 (Qualcomm)
Samsung Galaxy Book4 Pro (Intel)

Artificial Intelligence: Productivity Suites
Copilots, AI-powered assistants and other AI-based productivity software have become the most popular vehicle for users to tap into the power of artificial intelligence technology. These tools can help with everyday tasks including writing and editing documents, generating images, conducting research, automating repetitive tasks and more. AI productivity software, along with AI PCs, are the products that are bringing AI capabilities to the masses.
Microsoft Copilot
Google Gemini

Artificial Intelligence: Infrastructure
Businesses and organizations are rapidly expanding their use of AI. Building, deploying and running AI and machine learning applications, however, takes a lot of compute horsepower and the ability to process huge amounts of data. That’s boosting demand for powerful AI hardware in data centers and the cloud. Systems that support AI initiatives are expected to provide high levels of performance and scalability.
Dell PowerEdge R760xa
Lenovo ThinkSystem SR780a V3
Supermicro AS-4125GS-TNHR2-LCC

Big Data
Data volumes continue to explode and the global “datasphere” – the total amount of data created, captured, replicated and consumed – is growing more than 20 percent a year and is expected to reach approximately 291 zettabytes in 2027, according to market researcher IDC.
But wrangling all that data is a major challenge for businesses and that’s fueling demand for a range of big data tools to help businesses access, collect, manage, move, transform, govern and secure data.
Cloudera Open Data Lakehouse
Databricks Data Intelligence Platform
HPE Ezmeral Data Fabric Software
Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform
Snowflake Data Cloud
Starburst Galaxy

Business Applications
Business applications, including Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and financial management software, are the operational backbone for many businesses and organizations. ERP applications are the tools they use to automate and manage their business processes including accounting and finance, HR, supply chain and procurement, manufacturing, and more.
Epicor ERP
Oracle NetSuite
Microsoft Dynamics 365
Sage Intacct
SAP S/4HANA
Syspro ERP

Business Intelligence and Data Analytics
Many businesses and organizations are deriving huge value and competitive advantages from data generated by their own IT systems, collected through customer transactions and acquired from outside sources.
Businesses analyze data to gain insights about markets, their customers and their own operations. They are using the data to fuel digital transformation initiatives. They are even using it to support new data-intensive services or packaging it into data products.
Amazon Redshift
Domo Data Experience Platform
Google Cloud BigQuery
MicroStrategy ONE
Qlik Sense
Salesforce Tableau

Data Protection, Management and Resiliency
Data is the lifeblood of the modern enterprise. Data that’s lost or unavailable, either due to system failure, a disastrous event like a fire or earthquake, human error or a cyberattack, can cause major disruptions.
Data resilience and protection systems and services help businesses protect and maintain access to data, and identify, detect, respond and recover from data-destructive events.
Cohesity Data Cloud
Commvault Cloud Powered by Metallic AI
Dell PowerProtect Data Manager Appliance
HYCU R-Cloud
Rubrik Security Cloud
Veeam Data Platform

Edge Computing and Internet of Things
Efforts to bring applications and data processing closer to data sources is driving the proliferation of local edge servers and IoT devices. That, in turn, is driving demand for products to better manage and support increasingly distributed computing networks.
The global market for edge computing hardware, software and services is expected to grow at a CAGR of 15.7 percent to $111.3 billion by 2028, according to Markets and Markets.
Eaton iCube
HPE Edgeline
IBM Edge Application Manager
Red Hat Device Edge
Scale Computing Autonomous Infrastructure Management Engine (AIME)
Schneider Electric EcoStruxure Micro Data Center R-Series

Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure
Hybrid cloud infrastructure combines cloud-based (often Infrastructure-as-a-Service) resources with on-premises/private cloud IT systems, working together and sharing applications and data to provide businesses with the flexibility and scalability they need to support distributed business workloads and processes. A report from Allied Market Research says the global hybrid cloud market was $96.7 billion in 2023 and will reach $414.1 million by 2032.
Dell Technologies Apex Hybrid Cloud
HPE GreenLake
IBM Hybrid Cloud
NetApp Hybrid Cloud
Nutanix Hybrid Multicloud
VMware Cloud Foundation

MSP Platforms
Managed services have been one of the fastest growing segments of the IT channel as more businesses, organizations and government entities rely on MSPs to manage their IT infrastructure and end-user systems.
That’s boosting demand for MSP platforms, including the remote monitoring and management tools, professional services automation systems and other tools that MSPs rely on to do their jobs.
Atera
ConnectWise Asio Platform
HaloPSA
Kaseya 365
N-able Cloud Commander
Syncro Platform

Networking – Enterprise
Networking hardware, including routers, switches, hubs and bridges, have long been a mainstay of the channel. Today channel companies offer networking solutions and services that span data center and cloud networks, campus LAN and WAN, Network-as-a-Service, network management and automation, and network security systems.
Cisco Networking Cloud
HPE Aruba Networking Enterprise Private 5G
Juniper AI-Native Networking Platform
Nile NaaS
Prosimo AI Suite for Multi-Cloud Networking

Networking – Wireless
Wireless networks are key to making computing, communications and collaboration ubiquitous whether in the home, throughout offices and other workspaces, in manufacturing and industrial plants, and across large venues such as conference facilities and sports stadiums. Wi-Fi 7 is the seventh generation of wireless technology offering faster speeds and improved connectivity and capacity.
Extreme Networks AP5020 universal Wi-Fi 7 access point
Fortinet FortiAP 441K Wi-Fi 7 access point
HPE Aruba Networking Wi-Fi 7 access point
Zyxel Wi-Fi 7 access point

Power Protection and Management
Power protection and management systems and appliances are a critical component for protecting critical IT infrastructure and keeping data centers up and running in the event of extreme events. The product category includes technology for monitoring and managing power usage, protecting IT systems against electricity surges, and providing backup in the event of power failures.
CyberPower PFC Sinewave 1U UPS
Eaton 9PX 6kVA Lithium-Ion UPS
Schneider Electric Easy UPS 3-Phase 3M Advanced
Vertiv Liebert GXT5 Lithium-Ion UPS

Processors – CPUs
CPU semiconductors are the processing engines that power servers, laptop and desktop PCs, and mobile devices. Intel was long-dominant in the CPU space, but rival AMD has developed highly competitive products in recent years. Apple, meanwhile, has been developing its own “silicon” for its Mac, iPad and iPhone devices.
AMD Ryzen Pro 8040 Series
Intel Core Ultra Series
AmpereOne
Apple M3
Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite

Processors – GPUs
Graphics processing units or GPUs are a specialized processor originally developed to accelerate the performance of computer graphics. But they are increasingly being designed into IT systems for high-performance computing tasks such as data science and AI applications. Nvidia has been a pioneer in developing GPUs for a broad range of applications, but rivals Intel and AMD have been expanding their GPU product portfolios.
AMD Instinct MI300X
Intel ARC A570M
Nvidia H200

Public Cloud Platforms
Public cloud platforms provide organizations with an alternative to building and managing their own IT systems and data centers. Public cloud operators also offer their own portfolios of cloud products and services such as application hosting, data storage and analytics. The value proposition is that cloud services reduce capital spending for businesses and provide more flexibility by allowing them to scale IT usage up or down as needed.
Amazon Web Services
CoreWeave Cloud
Google Cloud Platform
Microsoft Azure
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI)
Snowflake Data Cloud

SD-WAN
SD-WAN is a software-defined approach to managing and optimizing the performance and security of wide area networks that connect users to applications and cloud platforms. SD-WAN benefits include improved performance and connectivity, enhanced security, simplified management and lower operating costs.
Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN
Extreme Networks Extreme Cloud SD-WAN
Fortinet Secure SD-WAN
HPE Aruba EdgeConnect SD-WAN
Palo Alto Networks Prisma SD-WAN
Zscaler Zero Trust SD-WAN

Security – Cloud and Application Security
The rapid growth of cloud computing has created new security challenges for businesses and organizations as they adopt and utilize distributed IT infrastructure and applications that lie both within and outside of the corporate firewall. Cloud and application security technologies provide a range of capabilities including protection against internal and external threats, identity and access control, and network visibility and management.
CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security
F5 Distributed Cloud Services Web Application Scanning
Orca Cloud Security Platform
Palo Alto Networks Prisma Cloud
SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security
Tenable Cloud Security
Wiz Cloud Security Platform

Security – Data
Protecting data has become a top priority for with the proliferation of ransomware attacks and other cybercrimes. The media is filled with headlines of businesses, hospitals, insurance companies, government entities and other organizations who find themselves blocked from accessing their own critical data or discover that their data has been stolen and is for sale on the Dark Web.
Data security tools provide a range of functions to accomplish their task including data encryption, user authentication and controlling access to data, monitoring data in real time to detect and respond to unusual activity, manage compliance with data governance requirements, and more.
ForcePoint ONE Data Security
IBM Guardium Data Protection
Proofpoint Information Protection
Rubrik Security Cloud
Wiz DSPM
Zscaler Data Protection

Security – Email and Web Security
Email and other internet communications are perhaps the most common vector for cybersecurity attacks including spam, phishing, malware delivery and system takeover.
Email security products, including antivirus/antimalware tools, spam filters, authentication and encryption systems, are a key component of a business’s overall IT security strategy. Web security tools help prevent attacks against websites.
Abnormal Security Platform
Akamai API Security
Barracuda Email Protection
Cloudflare Application Security
Mimecast Advanced Email Security
Proofpoint Threat Protection

Security – Endpoint Protection
Businesses can be most vulnerable through the endpoint devices (desktop PCs, laptops, smartphones) employees use for everyday work, along with embedded devices, IoT and other edge computing systems. This is especially true with today’s post-pandemic hybrid work practices where many of these devices now sit outside of corporate security perimeters.
Products in this technology category include antivirus and antimalware tools, endpoint protection platforms, and endpoint detection/response and extended detection/response software.
CrowdStrike Falcon Insight XDR
Huntress Managed EDR
SentinelOne Singularity XDR
Sophos Intercept X
ThreatLocker Protect
Trend Micro Trend Vision One

Security – Identity and Access Management
Businesses use identity and access management tools, backed by related policies and processes, to manage digital identities and control access to corporate IT systems and data. IAM tools, a foundational cybersecurity technology for zero trust IT initiatives, are key to identifying, authenticating and authorizing users – including employees and trusted business partners – while protecting against unauthorized access.
CyberArk Workforce Identity
Ping Identity PingOne for Workforce
Okta Workforce Identity Cloud
Microsoft Entra ID
OpenText NetIQ Identity Manager
SailPoint Identity Security Cloud

Security – Managed Detection and Response
Many businesses and organizations, especially SMBs, lack in-house cybersecurity expertise. Many turn to managed detection and response (MDR) providers for outsourced services that monitor clients’ IT systems, endpoints, networks and cloud environments on a 24/7 basis and respond to detected cyberthreats. MDR offerings generally combine cybersecurity teams, advanced threat detection tools and security operations center functions.
Arctic Wolf MDR
CrowdStrike Falcon Complete Next-Gen MDR
Huntress MDR for Microsoft 365
SentinelOne Singularity MDR
Sophos MDR
ThreatLocker Cyber Hero MDR

Security – Network
Businesses face multiple challenges to keep their network infrastructure secure and operational. Potential threats include distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, network-based ransomware, insider threats and password attacks, to name a few.
Securing corporate networks, meanwhile, has become all the harder with the move to remote work and the increasing use of cloud applications.
The specific technology components of a sound network security strategy include firewalls, SASE (secure access service edge) systems, network access control technology, antivirus and antimalware software, intrusion prevention systems, and tools for cloud, application and email security.
Cisco Hypershield
Fortinet FortiGate
SonicWall Cloud Secure Edge
Sophos XGS Firewall
ThreatLocker CyberHero MDR
WatchGuard ThreatSync+ NDR

Security – Security Operations Platform
Security Operations links security and IT operations teams to improve an organization’s cybersecurity posture across IT systems, networks and applications. SecOps software incorporates tools and processes to provide a unified approach to cybersecurity to help identify security threats and vulnerabilities, reduce risks and respond more quickly to security incidents.
Arctic Wolf Security Operations
CrowdStrike Falcon Next-Gen SIEM
Google Security Operations
Microsoft Sentinel
Palo Alto Networks Cortex XSIAM 2.0
Splunk Enterprise Security

Security – Security Access Service Edge
Security Access Service Edge platforms combine network and security services into a single cloud-based system – a critical concept for managing today’s multi-cloud environments and hybrid workforces. SASE can include multiple functions including zero-trust network access, secure web gateways, cloud access security brokers and firewall services to provide centralized control over identity and access policies and operations.
Cato SASE Cloud Platform
Cisco Secure Access
Fortinet FortiSASE
Netskope One SASE
Palo Alto Networks Prisma SASE
Zscaler Zero Trust SASE

Storage – Enterprise
Data volumes continue to explode and the global “datasphere” – the total amount of data created, captured, replicated and consumed – is growing more than 20 percent a year and is expected to reach approximately 291 zettabytes in 2027, according to market researcher IDC.
That data, of course, must be stored somewhere. While more data is being stored on cloud platforms, many businesses and organizations maintain on-premises data storage systems – either standalone or as part of a hybrid system – for a number of reasons including data security and governance and reduced internet costs.
Dell PowerStore
HPE Alletra Storage MP
Infinidat SSA Express
NetApp AFF C-Series
Pure Storage FlashArray//E
Quantum ActiveScale Z200 Object Storage

Storage – Software-Defined
Software-defined storage technology uncouples or abstracts storage management and provisioning from the underlying hardware. One benefit is that pools of physical storage resources can be managed as a single system, helping to reduce costs compared to traditional storage area network (SAN) and network-attached storage (NAS) systems.
DDN Infinia
Dell PowerFlex
HPE GreenLake for Block Storage
IBM Software-Defined Storage
Pure Storage Purity

Unified Communications and Collaboration
Unified communications (including Unified Communications as a Service) integrates VoIP, instant messaging, video conferencing and other communication capabilities through a single interface. UCC has taken on increased importance with more employees working from home and other remote locations.
UCC is a long-time channel mainstay with solution providers implementing, maintaining and operating UCC systems. The global UCC market is expected to reach $141.6 billion by 2027, according to Markets and Markets.
Cisco Webex
Intermedia Unite
Microsoft Teams
Nextiva Unified Customer Experience Platform
RingCentral RingCX

Cisco CEO On Besting HPE-Juniper, Splunk Integration And AI Future

Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins talks about having a leg-up over HPE-Juniper, cross-selling Splunk opportunities, Cisco’s bullish AI strategy and his thoughts on the U.S. economy in 2025 with the upcoming presidential election.

Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins is confident that his company’s longtime networking leadership will continue regardless of new competition from HPE with its pending Juniper Networks acquisition.
“You look at the combination of networking and security and the importance of those two coming together—which they (HPE) do not have—and you look at data center infrastructure, you look at campus networking with wireless, with all of the observability, the security and everything that we have—I mean, we have more technology that brings more value to our customers in the infrastructure layer than anybody else,” said Cisco’s Robbins on stage at the 2024 XChange Best of Breed Conference today in Atlanta.
HPE CEO Antonio Neri said at the conference this week that with HPE’s upcoming $14 billion acquisition of Juniper that “we are becoming a networking company at the core. Something that probably Cisco has forgotten now for a little bit.”
When asked for a response, Robbins said with a smirk: “Well, we forgot more about networking than they’ll probably know about networking.”
[Related: Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins: Moving Fast To Win The AI Battle]
Robbins also spoke about Cisco’s $28 billion blockbuster acquisition of Splunk in terms of its channel partner and integration strategy.
“Well, when you spend $28 billion dollars, you want to be a little careful that you don’t screw something up,” Robbins said. “So we are being thoughtful about it. You have to get through the core fundamentals. It’s like playing sports: you got to get all the foundational and the fundamentals right before you start doing a lot of fancy things. So what we implemented this year is we have a bonus program in place for the Cisco sales force to simply open the door and introduce the Splunk sales team to the CIO of any customers that aren’t using Splunk.”
Robbins also chatted about the upcoming 2024 U.S. presidential election and the potential impact on the economy.
“I think our system is built in a way that restricts radical policy shifts,” said Robbins.
In an interview at XChange with CRN’s Jennifer Follett and Steven Burke, Robbins talks about Cisco networking besting HPE-Juniper, Cisco’s AI strategy, the Cisco-Splunk strategy and AI’s future.

What is the biggest difference between the Cisco-Splunk networking story and the HPE-Juniper networking story?
I did read the article. Look, the difference is we didn’t need [to buy] a networking company, but what our customers are looking for is they’re trying to make sense of all the data they have.
And given the footprint that we have and the platform that Splunk has, if you think about all the insights that can be delivered from networking devices, all the threat intelligence that we get from Talos, all the intelligence we get from technologies like from ThousandEyes—and if you put all that together with all the log data and everything else that Splunk currently sees, then you apply a layer of AI on top of it—we think we can give our customers greater insights about what’s happening in their infrastructure, what’s happening with their applications, what’s happening in their security, and the security of their infrastructure.
We think we can do that more effectively for our customers better than anybody else. That’s what it really brings to us.
[Robbins’ answer continues into next slide.]

What is the biggest difference between the Cisco Splunk networking story and the HPE Juniper networking story?
[Robbins’ answer continues from previous slide.]
So Splunk really brings all of those insights to life. If you contemplate the use of AI by the bad actors around the world, from a security perspective, if we aren’t as good or better at leveraging AI on the most comprehensive data set that you can possibly have of threat intelligence that’s going on—and we see billions of threats every day—if you’re not using AI to actually correlate all these disparate things that are happening in your infrastructure, then you’re going to lose.
As we always say, it’s clichéd but they only have to be right once.
So I think all of that together makes Splunk a great deal for us.
So far, the integration is going incredibly well. We’ve integrated our XDR platform with SIEM (security information and event management) already. We actually are filtering high fidelity alerts out of our Talos threat intelligence and putting that in Splunk already.
There’s some stuff we’re going to talk about at our partner summit in a couple weeks, and we’re just going to keep rolling with the innovation. So it’s good.

HPE CEO Antonio Neri mentioned when he was here that he believes Cisco may have forgotten that it’s a networking company at heart. What is your response to critics who say you’ve taken your eye off the networking ball?
Well, we forgot more about networking than they’ll probably know about networking.
I thought it was interesting that [HPE CEO Neri said] Juniper excelled into campus, and they have 2.6 percent market share in campus. HPE actually has more.
So I guess they think more of Juniper campus portfolio than they do their own.
But look, we have the most comprehensive portfolio, whether you’re looking at cloud infrastructure today, AI infrastructure under training models, the technology that we’re going to deliver for an end-to-end stack for how our enterprise customers are going to deploy AI applications with HyperFabric.
You look at the combination of networking and security and the importance of those two coming together—which they (HPE) do not have—and you look at data center infrastructure, you look at campus networking, with wireless, with all of the observability, the security and everything that we have—I mean, we have more technology that brings more value to our customers in the infrastructure layer than anybody else.

Cisco’s gone through so many evolutions as a company. So what is the elevator pitch of what the Cisco identity is today?
If you really think about it, we are the only company who can bring networking, observability, security to our customers—all integrated together.
We think that all of those things coming together are more important than they ever have been, and that’s what we’re going to deliver: a secure networking company that actually delivers incredible capabilities—whether it’s a AI ready data center, future proof workplace, or an underlying layer of digital resilience that we’re going to deliver.
With the Splunk acquisition, you brought in former Splunk CEO Gary Steele. What changes are you looking for him to make, and what impact do you want him to have on the combined Cisco-Splunk sales and channel strategy?
Gary’s great. Gary is an operator. He did a phenomenal job of running Splunk for the two years before we actually completed the acquisition. He’s done an amazing job.
He really excels at simplifying things. So our partners will appreciate that.
The teams are working on evolving our partner program right now, which we’re going to talk about at Cisco Partner Summit in a couple of weeks.
He’s looking at simplifying our coverage models, simplifying the engagement model and really trying to help our teams just spend more time actually with partners and customers on a monthly basis. That’s what he’s focused on. I think he’s going to make a ton of progress this year.

What does Splunk do to the overall culture of Cisco? Is there some sort of ‘Splunk-ification’ of Cisco going on as more Splunk folks come into leadership positions?
I don’t think there’s a ‘Splunk-ification.’ That’s a good word though.
What you have is the same thing you have with any leader who comes in and is looking at anything through a fresh set of eyes. (Splunk’s CEO Steele) asked questions like, ‘Why do we do that?’ Which is always healthy.
There’s a beautiful six months of ignorance when you take a new job, because you can ask any question you want and he’s done that. He’s challenged us in some areas. He’s asked the right questions about why do we do this?
He’s actually got an incredible balance.
You would think that he would come in and want to push the Splunk portfolio across the entire sales force, and he reminds us quite regularly, ‘Hey, just remember, we need these salespeople selling lots of network infrastructure. So let’s not distract them. Let’s stay focused.’ So the biggest thing that he does, though, is he brings a fresh set of eyes.

What’s your take on the cross-sell opportunity between Cisco and Splunk?
Well, when you spend $28 billion dollars, you want to be a little careful that you don’t screw something up.
So we are being thoughtful about it. You have to get through the core fundamentals. It’s like playing sports: you got to get all the foundational and the fundamentals right before you start doing a lot of fancy things.
So what we implemented this year is we have a bonus program in place for the Cisco salesforce to simply open the door and introduce the Splunk sales team to the CIO of any customers that aren’t using Splunk. So just foundational, basic stuff.
At the same time, we’re getting all their employees into our systems and all those kinds of things, and doing all the hard work of doing a big integration that’s going on at the same time. So we’re going to move as fast as we possibly can, but not faster than we’re comfortable with.

From the partner perspective of not only the Cisco side or the Splunk side, but those who aren’t working with you at all yet and are now looking at this new Cisco-Splunk combination. What is the order of magnitude of opportunity here for those partners?
I would highly encourage all of you to look at Splunk and the security integration that we’re doing. The next generation SOC and the opportunity that our customers are obviously moving towards, I mean—security is a massive data problem, and to the extent that we can help them actually leverage AI, leverage automation, to actually correlate these threats and get to the root of the problem faster, then they’re going to be more effective.
First of all, Splunk is highly concentrated in the upper end of the account base. They’re highly concentrated in the United States. So there’s a huge opportunity for us to expand.
They didn’t have a super robust partner program. They had a partner strategy and they worked with lots of partners, but it wasn’t quite as comprehensive.
This business is the services around it and helping customers get these SOCs built and get it up and running. So it’s quite good for the partners. As we continue to drive the integration across the security portfolio into Splunk, you’ll just see more and more opportunity as this evolves. And then the observability side of it as well.

Where are you going to make the investments to help partners cross the AI chasm and really deliver on this vision of security, observability and networking?
So you’re going to see this begin to roll out at the partner summit. What we have coming up from an AI perspective. We have our WebExOne event coming up. We got our partner summit. We have Cisco Live Asia. We have an AI event we’re doing in January. Then we have Cisco Live Europe and we have Cisco Live in the U.S.
We have this roadmap of product announcements across this space that are all going to be around AI that are leading with infrastructure, both compute and networking, and security. We’re obviously building in a lot of AI capabilities into our portfolio. We’re going to lay out the whole architecture at the partner summit a couple weeks.
You’ll see our incentive structure shift to align with that. Because it’s super important right now—and this is something else Gary (Steele) believes in deeply—the incentives we put in place for our partners and our sales teams—we want them to stay aligned. When they’re aligned, we do really great things together. So we’ll be focused on making sure that’s true.

Cisco is really well prepared for this AI transition. Why is that and what do you see there that’s critical to partners?
There’s a multitude of areas that we’re focused on in the AI space.
First of all, cloud infrastructure underneath the training model. So we’re deployed in three of the four as Ethernet underneath the GPU for these training clusters. So we’re doing that first and foremost. So that says we’re on the front end of this whole trend.
The second thing is infrastructure in the enterprise. We announced HyperFabric a few months back and it’s going to be available the first of year. We’re actually working with Nvidia on some features that they’re still working on for us to get that delivered. That’s going to be Cisco networking, Vast storage, Nvidia GPUs, Cisco CPUs, with a cloud-based orchestration and lifecycle management capabilities with security integrated as well. So that’s happening in the enterprise.
We want to really help our customers more easily deploy these AI applications as the use cases become more apparent. We’re focused on security. We’ve launched Hypershield. We’re working on some other technology that will actually provide a layer of security in front of these custom models that our enterprise customers may run. So there’s a whole security aspect that’s going on.
We need security for AI and AI for security, and we’re working on both of those.
We’re going to have a whole services set of capabilities to help our customers think through use cases with our partners, in conjunction with our partners as we go forward.
We understand our role in the web scale space. We understand our role in the enterprise. We understand our role in the security side of AI. And we understand our role in helping our enterprise customers understand how to deploy AI.

A great unknown for what the economy is going to look like in 2025? With this election coming up, we are going to have a new president in January, one way or the other. What are your thoughts on what the impact is going to be on the economy based on whoever gets elected?
Look, we’ve had both parties in office over the last eight years and the economy has been incredibly resilient. So I think our system is built in a way that restricts radical policy shifts.
I think that there’s so much happening right now that’s positive in the U.S. that the policies and the approach will be different depending on which administration’s in office. But the last eight years has proven that we have a very— especially in light of the inflation that we dealt with, the supply chain shocks that we dealt with, the interest rate increases, the subsequent beginning of the easing—I think we’ve just proven that we have a very resilient economy.
So I think this is going to continue to chug along. We’ll just have to deal with different issues, depending on who’s in office relative to different policy issues and how we respond to them.

CRN’s 2024 Triple Crown Award Winners

CRN assembles solution provider lists and rankings throughout the year, including the Solution Provider 500, Tech Elite 250 and Fast Growth 150. Here CRN recognizes the 47 solution providers that earned a spot on all three lists this year with the annual Triple Crown honors.

With the wave of AI development surging through the IT industry, solution providers have scrambled in the last two years to adopt a rush of new AI products and services from their IT vendor partners and develop AI practices to meet increasing demand from customers. At the same time solution providers have had to make continual course corrections to adjust to an uncertain economy, high interest rates and lingering supply chain disruptions from the COVID-19 pandemic.
Despite these challenges many solution providers have successfully grown their businesses, both organically and through acquisitions, in recent years. They have expanded their technology and service offerings to meet customers’ rapidly changing needs. And they have developed expertise – and won IT vendor certifications – in AI, cybersecurity, cloud computing and other critical technology segments.
CRN publishes a number of solution provider lists and rankings throughout the year including the Solution Provider 500, the largest solution providers operating in North America by revenue; the Fast Growth 150, ranking the fastest-growing solution providers; and the Tech Elite 250, a roundup of solution providers that achieve the highest partner levels and certifications from leading IT vendors.
Each year a number of solution providers accomplish the impressive feat of making all three lists. This year 47 solution providers, profiled on the following pages, achieved that trifecta to become the 2024 class of CRN Triple Crown winners.
As with so much of the IT industry and the channel, the AI explosion is having a major impact on the solution providers that make up the Triple Crown list. One such company is World Wide Technology, a Triple Crown winner for a third time (it previously made the 2015 and 2018 lists). Earlier this year CEO James Kavanaugh told CRN that the sales opportunities around AI are a game-changer for solution providers and their customers.
“I believe AI is going to be the most transformative technology that’s impacted mankind in our history,” Kavanaugh said. “Everybody’s talking about AI, but everybody is also trying to figure it out,” he said. “It’s happening so fast and so many new technologies and new capabilities are launching that customers are overwhelmed.”
Winslow Technology Group, a leading provider of IT solutions, managed services and cybersecurity services, makes the Triple Crown list for a seventh year – more than any other company on this year’s list. Advanced Computer Concepts, ANM and Sterling Computers are all appearing on the list for the sixth year.
The Triple Crown class of 2024 also has 19 companies that are making the list for the first time including Arctiq, GrayMatter, NetFabric Solutions and The Redesign Group.
Here are the profiles of this year’s Triple Crown winners.
Mark Haranas contributed to this story.

Acuative
Vince Sciarra, CEO
Fairfield, N.J.
Promising to power customers’ digi­tal transformation, Acuative provides networking, communications and connectivity solutions backed up with customized support. In addition to network infrastructure, the solution provider offers unified communica­tions, managed security and cloud migration.
2024 SP 500 Rank: No. 209
2024 Fast Growth Rank: No. 142
2024 Fast Growth: 51.4%
Triple Crown Winner: New to list

Advanced Computer Concepts
Reza Zarafshar, President
McLean, Va.
ACC describes itself as a total solution provider that can solve customers’ IT challenges from initial design to enter­prise management. Areas of expertise include cloud, data centers, cyberse­curity, collaboration, networking and audio-visual.
2024 SP 500 Rank: No. 83
2024 Fast Growth Rank: No. 112
2024 Fast Growth: 60.3%
Triple Crown Winner: 2015, 2016, 2017, 2020, 2021

Advizex
C.R. Howdyshell, CEO
Independence, Ohio
Advizex, a Fulcrum IT Partners com­pany, provides infrastructure and enterprise application solutions. Its portfolio includes Everything as a Service, adaptive infrastructure, intel­ligent operations, Dell Technologies Apex and Hewlett Packard Enterprise GreenLake.
2024 SP 500 Rank: No. 115
2024 Fast Growth Rank: No. 117
2024 Fast Growth: 57.1%
Triple Crown Winner: 2023

Alchemy Technology Group
Wes Davis and Travis Graham (pictured), Partners and Co-CEOs
Houston, Texas
Alchemy delivers a broad range of solutions that map key business driv­ers to emerging technology platforms. Its expertise includes data moderniza­tion, digital workspace, cybersecurity, cloud infrastructure and AI.
2024 SP 500 Rank: No. 183
2024 Fast Growth Rank: No. 47
2024 Fast Growth: 110.7%
Triple Crown Winner: New to list

Align
Jim Dooling, President and CEO
New York
Align’s expansive portfolio of IT solu­tions and managed and professional services cover workplace technology, including integrated audio-visual and collaboration systems and cloud/ SaaS applications. The company also offers data center and cybersecurity solutions.
2024 SP 500 Rank: No. 202
2024 Fast Growth Rank: No. 106
2024 Fast Growth: 63.7%
Triple Crown Winner: 2022, 2023

American Digital
Norbert R. Wojcik, Jr., President
Elk Grove, Ill.
American Digital has a deep bench of solutions covering cloud computing, data centers, networking and cyber­security. In addition to its global SAP practice, managed services include fully hosted environments, backup and recovery, application monitoring and management, and security assessments.
2024 SP 500 Rank: No. 338
2024 Fast Growth Rank: No. 134
2024 Fast Growth: 53.3%
Triple Crown Winner: New to list

AMS.NET
Robert Tocci, President and CEO
Livermore, Calif.
In addition to solutions around data center, wireless networking, collabora­tion and communications, cybersecurity and more, AMS.NET provides turnkey design, procurement, implementation and support services. AMS.NET was acquired by MGT in May.
2024 SP 500 Rank: No. 198
2024 Fast Growth Rank: No. 108
2024 Fast Growth: 61.2%
Triple Crown Winner: 2014, 2015, 2018, 2022

ANM
Raminder Mann, CEO
Albuquerque, N.M.
ANM specializes in enterprise infrastructure, including data center, cloud, network, security and collaboration technologies, and digital transformation solutions, all backed by the company’s “discover, design, implement and manage” framework.
2024 SP 500 Rank: No. 98
2024 Fast Growth Rank: No. 102
2024 Fast Growth: 65.5%
Triple Crown Winner: 2017, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023

Arctiq
Paul Kerr, CEO
Irvine, Calif.
Arctiq describes its mission as “engi­neering transformative infrastructure, security and platform solutions.” Offerings span modern infrastruc­ture, enterprise security and platform engineering, including DevOps, appli­cation modernization, Kubernetes, observability, and data strategy and engineering.
2024 SP 500 Rank: No. 123
2024 Fast Growth Rank: No. 29
2024 Fast Growth: 145.1%
Triple Crown Winner: New to list

BlackHawk Data
Maryann Pagano, CEO
New York
BlackHawk Data is a full-service solu­tion provider specializing in designing, deploying and managing data center, cloud, security, networking and col­laboration solutions, many of them on an as-a-service basis. In April the com­pany launched its cutting-edge Private Cellular Network Solutions featuring private 5G.
2024 SP 500 Rank: No. 309
2024 Fast Growth Rank: No. 16
2024 Fast Growth: 193.2%
Triple Crown Winner: 2023

Calian IT & Cyber Solutions
Michael Tremblay, President
Houston
Calian’s IT & Cyber Solutions has a broad portfolio of managed IT, cybersecurity, and IT and cloud trans­formation services. The latter includes infrastructure modernization, cloud development and business process transformation services.
2024 SP 500 Rank: No. 146
2024 Fast Growth Rank: No. 38
2024 Fast Growth: 130.5%
Triple Crown Winner: 2015, 2023

cb20
Chris Pickett, President and CEO
Saratoga Springs, N.Y.
cb20’s solutions span cybersecurity, IT network infrastructure, cloud comput­ing, and audio-visual/collaboration, along with a broad menu of hardware and software products. Managed IT ser­vices support entire IT environments for small, midsize and enterprise customers across multiple industries.
2024 SP 500 Rank: No. 432
2024 Fast Growth Rank: No. 92
2024 Fast Growth: 69.4%
Triple Crown Winner: New to list

Centre Technologies
Chris Pace, CEO
Houston
Centre Technologies serves small businesses in the Texas-Oklahoma region with its offerings in managed IT services, cloud solutions, cyber­security, business intelligence, and IT consulting and support. Centre Technologies recently acquired Tulsa, Okla.-based NetLink Solutions and Dallas-based SMB Suite.
2024 SP 500 Rank: No. 288
2024 Fast Growth Rank: No. 135
2024 Fast Growth: 53.3%
Triple Crown Winner: New to list

Clutch Solutions
Garrette Backie, CEO
Mesa, Ariz.
Clutch Solutions offers a broad range of professional and managed services for networks, servers, storage, cybersecu­rity, client devices and software. It also provides IT assessments for Broadcom, AWS, security, networks and more as well as AWS cloud migration services and government solutions.
2024 SP 500 Rank: No. 228
2024 Fast Growth Rank: No. 49
2024 Fast Growth: 105.5%
Triple Crown Winner: 2022, 2023

Comport Consulting
Jack Margossian, CEO
Ramsey, N.J.
Comport provides AI, data center, networking and cybersecurity solu­tions as well as managed and cloud IT services, including backup and disaster recovery as-a-service and ComportSecure cloud solutions. Comport also develops a wide range of health-care IT solutions.
2024 SP 500 Rank: No. 275
2024 Fast Growth Rank: No. 144
2024 Fast Growth: 50.6%
Triple Crown Winner: 2015, 2016

Computer Transition Services
Michael Vaught, Chief Revenue Officer
Lubbock, Texas
Computer Transition Services says it puts cybersecurity services “front and center” in all its IT service, solution and support offerings, including man­aged IT services, networking, backup and recovery, cloud services, business communications, HIPAA compliance and virtualization.
2024 SP 500 Rank: No. 496
2024 Fast Growth Rank: No. 100
2024 Fast Growth: 65.7%
Triple Crown Winner: New to list

Converged Technology Group
Leo E. Galletta, President and CEO
Islandia, N.Y.
Converged Technology Group provides fully outsourced managed IT services for SMBs and co-managed IT services for midmarket and enterprise busi­nesses. Its Assist360 platform is at the core of many of the company’s offerings, including co-managed server, network and security services.
2024 SP 500 Rank: No. 434
2024 Fast Growth Rank: No. 147
2024 Fast Growth: 48.8%
Triple Crown Winner: 2021

Converge Technology Solutions
Greg Berard, President and Global CEO
Gatineau, Que.
Converge Technology Solutions has grown rapidly in recent years through an aggressive acquisition strategy. The company’s solutions include advanced analytics, AI, application moderniza­tion, cloud platforms, cybersecurity and digital infrastructure.
2024 SP 500 Rank: No. 28
2024 Fast Growth Rank: No. 69
2024 Fast Growth: 83.5%
Triple Crown Winner: 2022, 2023

Coretelligent
Kevin Routhier, Founder, President and CEO
Needham, Mass.
Coretelligent provides a range of “smart IT infrastructure” solutions that the company says help customers operate and transform their business at the same time. Its lineup covers outsourced IT, cy­bersecurity and compliance, AI and au­tomation, cloud, and data and analytics.
2024 SP 500 Rank: No. 265
2024 Fast Growth Rank: No. 137
2024 Fast Growth: 52.8%
Triple Crown Winner: 2017, 2020, 2021, 2023

Dataprise
William Flannery, CEO
Rockville, Md.
Dataprise’s services span cloud and infrastructure, managed cybersecurity, disaster recovery, mobility manage­ment, managed end-user support and IT consulting. Dataprise added cyber incident response and remediation services to its repertoire with its August acquisition of Phoenix IT.
2024 SP 500 Rank: No. 252
2024 Fast Growth Rank: No. 93
2024 Fast Growth: 68.8%
Triple Crown Winner: 2023

EchoStor
Michael Johnson, CEO and Principal
Hopkinton, Mass.
With a focus on IT solutions tailored to customers’ needs, EchoStor specializes in next-generation data centers, secu­rity, digital workflows and modern workplaces—the latter utilizing AI, business intelligence and collaboration platforms to enhance productivity.
2024 SP 500 Rank: No. 178
2024 Fast Growth Rank: No. 91
2024 Fast Growth: 69.5%
Triple Crown Winner: 2018

Effectual
Robb Allen, CEO
Jersey City, N.J.
Effectual is an AWS Premier Tier Services partner that specializes in enterprise digital trans­formation, including cloud strategy and design, migration, modernization and management; application devel­opment; GenAI and data and analytics. VMware to AWS migration and mod­ernization is also a key area of expertise.
2024 SP 500 Rank: No. 349
2024 Fast Growth Rank: No. 46
2024 Fast Growth: 111.2%
Triple Crown Winner: New to list

eGroup Enabling Technologies
Mike Carter, CEO
Mount Pleasant, S.C.
eGroup is a top solution provider in the Microsoft space, offering managed ser­vices and solutions around Microsoft Azure and Microsoft 365. Focus areas include hybrid data centers, security, data, AI and applications. Consulting services cover technology strategy reviews, virtual CISO and licensing optimization.
2024 SP 500 Rank: No. 306
2024 Fast Growth Rank: No. 56
2024 Fast Growth: 97.6%
Triple Crown Winner: 2014, 2015

Evolving Solutions
Jaime Gmach, CEO
Hamel, Minn.
Evolving Solutions sees its mission as helping customers modernize and automate their mission-critical appli­cations and infrastructure to support business transformation. Areas of exper­tise include modern data centers, data availability and protection, networking, security and observability.
2024 SP 500 Rank: No. 139
2024 Fast Growth Rank: No. 121
2024 Fast Growth: 56.5%
Triple Crown Winner: New to list

Future Tech
Bob Venero, President and CEO
Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
Future Tech boasts a solutions portfo­lio that spans IT infrastructure, AI and machine learning, cybersecurity, cloud, virtual desktop infrastructure, storage and networking. Its IT professional services include procurement, configu­ration and imaging, staff augmentation, and managed print services.
2024 SP 500 Rank: No. 76
2024 Fast Growth Rank: No. 72
2024 Fast Growth: 82.1%
Triple Crown Winner: 2016, 2023

GrayMatter
James Gillespie, CEO
Warrendale, Pa.
GrayMatter focuses on transforming operations within industrial and man­ufacturing companies. Its solutions include advanced industrial analytics, automation and controls, and cyber and network infrastructure. The company’s GreyMatterGuard is used to secure industrial operations and reduce fire­wall traffic.
2024 SP 500 Rank: No. 297
2024 Fast Growth Rank: No. 129
2024 Fast Growth: 55.0%
Triple Crown Winner: New to list

Greystone Technology
Jesse Armstrong, President
Denver
Greystone Technology’s portfolio includes fully managed, co-managed and on-demand IT services. The company also provides IT support, end-user training, cybersecurity, and services around web and application development, procurement and proj­ect management.
2024 SP 500 Rank: No. 467
2024 Fast Growth Rank: No. 149
2024 Fast Growth: 49.1%
Triple Crown Winner: New to list

Imperium Data
Nicholas Scarsella, CEO
Tampa, Fla.
Imperium Data provides customized IT solutions for customers using its consult, design, deploy and deliver approach, all of which are backed up by the company’s IT engineering and support services. Data center, security, networking and wireless technologies are at the core of its offerings.
2024 SP 500 Rank: No. 448
2024 Fast Growth Rank: No. 24
2024 Fast Growth: 159.5%
Triple Crown Winner: New to list

iT1 Source
Guy Steinbrink, Principal
Tempe, Ariz.
iT1 Source provides services and solu­tions around cloud, cybersecurity, and communications and collaboration technologies, backed by professional and managed services including 24x7x365 systems monitoring and man­agement. The company has expertise in Microsoft 365, Azure and Copilot.
2024 SP 500 Rank: No. 136
2024 Fast Growth Rank: No. 147
2024 Fast Growth: 49.8%
Triple Crown Winner: 2015

Magna5
Robert Farina, CEO
Canonsburg, Pa.
Magna5 provides managed IT ser­vices, including network and server management, including end-user sup­port and co-managed IT. The company also specializes in cloud services and cybersecurity and has an extensive lineup of IT consulting and procure­ment services.
2024 SP 500 Rank: No. 334
2024 Fast Growth Rank: No. 15
2024 Fast Growth: 198.3%
Triple Crown Winner: New to list

Managed Solution
Sean Ferrel, CEO
San Diego, Calif.
Managed Solution is a national Micro­soft Gold partner providing Microsoft se­curity, managed Azure and Microsoft consulting services. Solution offerings encompass cloud management and de­ployment, communication and collab­oration, business process automation, security and Hyper-V virtualization.
2024 SP 500 Rank: No. 451
2024 Fast Growth Rank: No. 89
2024 Fast Growth: 71.0%
Triple Crown Winner: 2023

MicroAge
Rob Zack, CEO
Phoenix
Under its new “Technology Reimagined” tagline, MicroAge offers a comprehensive mix of IT solutions and managed and consulting services cover­ing IT infrastructure, Microsoft Azure and Microsoft 365. MicroAge also has expertise in business continuity, data centers, networking and security.
2024 SP 500 Rank: No. 103
2024 Fast Growth Rank: No. 68
2024 Fast Growth: 83.6%
Triple Crown Winner: 2023

NetFabric IT Solutions
Rick Karn, CEO
Oklahoma City, Okla.
Anchored by its 24x7x365 network operations center, NetFabric IT Solutions provides managed infrastruc­ture services, managed IT solutions, professional and field services, and products from its over 300 OEM hard­ware and cloud partnerships.
2024 SP 500 Rank: No. 490
2024 Fast Growth Rank: No. 11
2024 Fast Growth: 226.7%
Triple Crown Winner: New to list

NWN Carousel
Jim Sullivan, President and CEO
Exeter, R.I.
NWN Carousel delivers AI-powered IT solutions including intelligent infrastructure, cybersecurity, unified communications, visual collaboration, contact centers and managed devices. The company delivers its managed services and support via its Experience Management Platform.
2024 SP 500 Rank: No. 55
2024 Fast Growth Rank: No. 70
2024 Fast Growth: 82.8%
Triple Crown Winner: 2022, 2023

Omega Systems
Mike Fuhrman, CEO
Reading, Pa.
Omega Systems’ expertise includes public and private cloud, SOC 2-cer­tified data center, managed security, unified communications, backup and recovery, and regulatory compliance services. In June Omega acquired Amnet Technology Solutions and its Cloudpath multi-cloud connectivity platform.
2024 SP 500 Rank: No. 358
2024 Fast Growth Rank: No. 26
2024 Fast Growth: 154.8%
Triple Crown Winner: 2023

Paragon Micro
Jeff Reimer, President and CEO
Lake Zurich, Ill.
Paragon Micro’s areas of expertise include data center and network infrastructure, cloud computing, cyber­security and modern workplace—all augmented by managed, consulting, assessment, implementation, training and asset lifecycle services.
2024 SP 500 Rank: No. 90
2024 Fast Growth Rank: No. 132
2024 Fast Growth: 53.4%
Triple Crown Winner: New to list

Sterling Computers
Brad Moore, CEO
North Sioux City, S.D.
Sterling Computers has expertise in modern infrastructure, digital workspace, cloud, connectivity and security. In addition to proactive moni­toring services, Sterling provides IT systems prepared in its Configuration, Integration and Distribution centers.
2024 SP 500 Rank: No. 54
2024 Fast Growth Rank: No. 149
2024 Fast Growth: 48.4%
Triple Crown Winner: 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2021

STN
Sabur Mian, CEO
Pleasanton, Calif.
STN says it puts information security at the center of everything it does with its managed security infrastructure, SIEM and firewall services—many through its STN ONE security bundle. Solutions span data center, business applications, networks and IaaS, cloud, disaster recovery, backup and archival managed services.
2024 SP 500 Rank: No. 450
2024 Fast Growth Rank: No. 57
2024 Fast Growth: 95.6%
Triple Crown Winner: 2023

Stoneworks Technology
Jody Burton, CEO
Ottawa, Ont.
Stoneworks says it builds “resilient and reliable” custom IT infrastructures for corporations and government custom­ers and provides intelligent enterprise solutions around AI, big data, cloud, cybersecurity, data center, mobility and virtualization. Stoneworks was acquired by Fulcrum IT Partners in July 2023.
2024 SP 500 Rank: No. 206
2024 Fast Growth Rank: No. 109
2024 Fast Growth: 60.9%
Triple Crown Winner: New to list

Strategic Communications
Kathy Mills, President and CEO
Louisville, Ky.
Strategic Communications’ portfolio of customized cloud services around the AWS and Microsoft Azure platforms includes cloud strategy and consulting, cloud architecture and design, cloud migration and digital transformation, hosted applications, cloud security and compliance, and secure SD-WAN.
2024 SP 500 Rank: No. 181
2024 Fast Growth Rank: No. 61
2024 Fast Growth: 89.9%
Triple Crown Winner: New to list

Structured Communication Systems
Ron Fowler, President and CEO
Clackamas, Ore.
Structured Communication Systems is focused on delivering secure, cloud-connected digital infrastructure and managed IT services. Its portfolio spans infrastructure, security, and hybrid and multi-cloud. Managed services include SD-WAN and unified communications and collaboration.
2024 SP 500 Rank: No. 155
2024 Fast Growth Rank: No. 146
2024 Fast Growth: 50.5%
Triple Crown Winner: 2020, 2023

Tego
Nolan Smith, CEO
Raleigh, N.C.
Tego describes itself as an engineering-led provider of end-to-end data center, cloud and security solutions. Services include public cloud, the Tego cloud, security services, audit and compliance, and public sector/SLED. Consulting, project management and “engineering residency” professional services round out its offerings.
2024 SP 500 Rank: No. 415
2024 Fast Growth Rank: No. 99
2024 Fast Growth: 66.0%
Triple Crown Winner: 2023

The Redesign Group
Phil Sanginario, President and CEO
Hermosa Beach, Calif.
The Redesign Group is a global tech­nology and cybersecurity consulting company that provides business trans­formation expertise and cybersecurity services. Its Business Transformation Assessment framework helps organiza­tions transition from tactical activity to strategic execution.
2024 SP 500 Rank: No. 224
2024 Fast Growth Rank: No. 14
2024 Fast Growth: 208.8%
Triple Crown Winner: New to list

ThunderCat Technology
Tom Deierlein, CEO
Reston, Va.
ThunderCat Technology is a service-disabled, veteran-owned small business that delivers technology products and services to government organizations, educational institutions and commer­cial enterprises. Offered solutions cover data center infrastructure, networking, cybersecurity, SecOps automation, col­laboration and cloud transformation.
2024 SP 500 Rank: No. 48
2024 Fast Growth Rank: No. 35
2024 Fast Growth: 134.5%
Triple Crown Winner: 2020, 2021, 2023

Trace3
Rich Fennessy, CEO
Irvine, Calif.
Trace3 offers a portfolio of solutions and managed services around modern infrastructure, cloud, data and analytics, contact center and collaboration, secu­rity, and more. The company has gone all in on AI with solutions and services around strategy, governance and risk, and architecture and operations.
2024 SP 500 Rank: No. 34
2024 Fast Growth Rank: No. 105
2024 Fast Growth: 63.7%
Triple Crown Winner: New to list

Winslow Technology Group
Scott Winslow, President
Waltham, Mass.
Winslow Technology Group specializes in data center, cloud computing and digital workspace and cybersecurity. The company also operates Winslow Financial Services to provide custom­ers with leasing and financing for a wide range of IT asset purchases.
2024 SP 500 Rank: No. 269
2024 Fast Growth Rank: No. 136
2024 Fast Growth: 52.9%
Triple Crown Winner: 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2022, 2023

World Wide Technology
Jim Kavanaugh, Co-Founder and CEO
Maryland Heights, Mo.
World Wide Technology’s solutions and services span just about every segment of IT, including cloud, data center, digi­tal workspace, mobility, security, and AI and data. The company also has an Advanced Technology Center that helps customers design, build, test and evalu­ate new technology solutions.
2024 SP 500 Rank: No. 7
2024 Fast Growth Rank: No. 150
2024 Fast Growth: 48.9%
Triple Crown Winner: 2015, 2018

N-able CEO Pagliuca On Competitive Upheavals And Leveraging AI To Make MSPs More Secure

“So we’re focusing on the MSP partners: If we do what’s right by them, from a product, from a community point of view, that’s what we focus on. All that other stuff kind of takes care of itself.”

N-able President and CEO John Pagliuca said the company is primed to take share from its competitors as it leans in with AI to build better features and deliver on security in a battle for the hearts and minds of MSPs.

“At N-able, we like to be partner obsessed and competitor aware,” he told CRN last week. “So we’re focusing on the MSP partners: If we do what’s right by them, from a product, from a community point of view, that’s what we focus on. All that other stuff kind of takes care of itself.”
The suite of ITSM tools that Burlington, Mass.-based N-able sells competes directly with larger MSP-focused professional service software providers such as Miami-based Kaseya, and Tampa-based ConnectWise. Additionally, several smaller players have entered the market, with HaloPSA taking on N-able’s N-central ticketing system and NinjaOne targeting its RMM tool.
[RELATED: ConnectWise MSPs Want A Better Product]
“Competition is a good thing. It keeps you on your toes and makes sure that you’re doing the best that you can,” Pagliuca said. “But for us, we’re partner obsessed.”
In its second quarter (ended June 30) publicly traded N-able posted quarterly revenue of $119.4 million for year-over-year growth of 12.6-percent. Net income for the quarter was $9.5 million and earnings per share $.05. The company has a market cap of $2.3 billion. N-able shares closed Thursday at $12.41.
During an August earnings call CFO Tim O’Brian raised the company’s full year revenue outlook to $464 million, representing 10 percent growth from 2023. Pagliuca said N-able’s Cove data protection product and the company’s security suite are winning customers.
He told CRN that those are the areas where he sees N-able differentiating with AI as well.
While developers are using AI to improve features on core products, Pagliuca said AI’s power to spot anomalies and flag them is on display with security.
“We’re going to leverage AI to make our products and our customers more secure. Things like anomaly detection, drift from configurations. And so if we see drift we can flag that. There’s a bunch of anomalous things that we can take a look at to say, ‘Hey, look, here’s the perfect state. If it’s drifting away from the perfect state, [there’s the] potential for a bad guy to get in.”
Here is what Pagliuca told CRN. It has been edited for length and clarity:

What’s your take on the change of leadership at ConnectWise?
I mean this genuinely, Jason’s a really good human being. We wish him the best. He’s a class act. He did a lot to move the industry forward.
He really, genuinely understood the ethos of an MSP. What they built in ConnectWise, from a community point of view, it’s noteworthy.
I pinged him separately and privately, and I said, ‘Hey, I tip my hat off to you, man. So good luck to the future.’
But look, with any type of change, there’s a reason why change was made, right?
So there is a little bit of uncertainty. And obviously it introduces a new chapter in their history. They believe that Manny is the person. I don’t know Manny. From what I can see he has about 30 years of experience, so he obviously understands software.
I guess it’s to be determined to what level he’ll understand the MSP community.
It took me years. Frankly, I’ve been in the industry for 12 years, in the MSP industry, and it took me years to understand that.
At N-able, we like to be partner obsessed and competitor aware. So we’re focusing on the MSP partners: If we do what’s right by them, from a product, from a community point of view, that’s what we focus on. All that other stuff kind of takes care of itself.

Is this a moment for N-able to take market share and are you looking at it that way?

So every business at scale has multiple priorities.
At the end of the day, you can only have a top priority. And so they just decided to buy a bunch of stuff with this, with SkyKick, with Axcient, right? I personally think it doesn’t scratch the MSPs’ needs. And now they have this leadership change. By the way, it’s not just Jason. Other parts of the leadership team are brand new.
What does that mean? That means their priorities are going to need to be a little bit more internal-focused, inward-focused, figuring out where the restrooms are and what the business priorities are. By definition you need to do that as a new leader, right?
They’re also going to need to integrate these two companies and figure that out. So they’re going to be doing a lot of inward-focusing at ConnectWise.
Meanwhile, our focus, our number one focus, is going to be external, on the MSP partners. I was part of an acquisition. We put Logicnow and N-able together many moons ago. I know firsthand that when we did that our top focus turned. Our eyes turned inward, and we paid for that and our customers felt that.

So you are staying the course, it sounds like, keeping your eye on the MSP, as it were, rather than the competition?
We didn’t call an emergency meeting or say we need to change plans or change strategies, because Jason’s no longer at the helm there.
Competition is a good thing. It keeps you on your toes and makes sure that you’re doing the best that you can. But for us, we’re partner obsessed.
So tomorrow, we have about 2,000 people signed up to attend our annual partner meeting, and that’s going be a lot of the message.
So for us, it’s about making sure that the products are the best there are. Making sure that way we’re helping these MSPs is the best it can be, because the best will succeed in this industry.
And honestly, it’s a huge opportunity in front of these folks and all these MSPs and it’s a huge opportunity for anyone that’s servicing these MSPs.
For the MSP that’s in the arena, so to speak, I say, ‘You’re not a commodity. We’re going to give you the best tools.’ And so when people tell you, ‘Hey, it’s about the products,’ it’s about some of the products. It’s how the products make these folks more efficient, more secure, and then giving them the business know-how.
What’s really a cool nuance to this business is that it’s a partnership. It’s providing the technology, but also it’s giving them the business know-how to help them move their agendas forward. Helping them with their cloud business model. Helping them with their cybersecurity business model. Helping them push those businesses forward and help drive margin to the bottom line.
The industry has grown up.

What you just said there about helping them with their cloud journey, helping them with cyber, it almost sounds like you’re talking about N-able helping the MSP along with their own digital transformation?
I call it evolution, because it’s not all at once. It’s not a transformation like a butterfly. It’s an evolution for them, but also with their customers.
Several years back there were a bunch more servers and wiring closets and now there are a lot more SaaS applications. There’s somewhat of a hybrid phenomenon going on now.
A lot of MSPs built a lot of data centers. Now they’re rethinking some of that and repurposing some of that and they’re pushing some of that more to hyperscalers. I think some of that will get kind of repatriated back to some of their own data centers.
So it’s part of the MSPs’ digital evolution, but also their SMBs’ digital evolution.
I want my MSPs to be customer obsessed as well. So they need to be very mindful of what’s going on in their customers’ environment. That’s pushing more to this hybrid world, pushing more to this cloud world, but pushing towards this more cybersecurity kind of focus of the world.

I was talking with some MSPs who said the market is going to change quickly in the next 18 months. Vendors are going to have to be nimble to keep up. They see AI accelerating that transformation. Where do you see N-able fitting into the conversation?
My advice to people on AI in general is, I don’t think AI is going to take your job. I think the person who’s leveraging AI will take your job.
Same is true for the MSP community, and the same is true for vendors that supply the MSP community. So if you’re not leveraging AI, an MSP that’s leveraging AI will take your customers.
If I’m a solution provider and I’m not leveraging AI, someone that is leveraging it will provide a better solution, period. I don’t think that’s for dispute. I think that’s a fact.
Here at N-able, we’re already leveraging AI in a bunch of different ways. Our developers are leveraging AI. Our sales and marketing teams are leveraging AI to be smarter about how to touch and engage and give customers what they want. And then our products already have AI in them, our mail security offering.
So going forward we’re going to leverage AI in two ways:
We’re going to leverage AI to make our products and our customers more secure. Things like anomaly detection, drift from configurations. And so if we see drift – and there’s a bunch of anomalous things that we can take a look at to say, ‘Hey, look, here’s the perfect state. If it’s drifting away from the perfect state, [there’s the] potential for a bad guy to get in.’
This is a potential for drift. They’re not configured right. We’re noticing some type of anomalous activity or detection.
So number one, it’s to make our customers and their customers more secure.
Number two is to make these folks more efficient, right? So helping them, even with their knowledge base, leveraging them and allowing them to use natural language to actually go query their RMM, or all of their tools they use, so that they can use natural language.
Think about how you use Google versus ChatGPT. Think about how many steps, the different steps, it takes. So the old world, I hate to say it that way, with Google, is you search. You have to sift through a bunch of garbage, go through a bunch, a couple of things, then maybe find it. You’re four or five clicks away.
Think about the time and cycles that run with ChatGPT. It packages you up an answer and gives you something that’s actionable. That’s where we’re heading as well so that the MSPs can drive this efficiency and get action, as opposed to mucking around with a bunch of different search capabilities.
We’re using it to make them more efficient, and it’s also to make them and their customers more secure. That’s how we’re leveraging AI.

You’re building AI into your products. You’re advising partners to get on board and start using it. But is this really happening in the marketplace? How should MSPs be looking at this?
AI, specifically for the MSP community, is probably still at that beginning part of the “Gartner Hype Cycle,” and people are probably starting to creep into that ‘trough of disillusionment’ where they’re writing ‘AI’ on the board, and not really sure how to leverage it.
It’s a little early for a lot of the MSPs. We are hearing some of the folks using it in some of their tools and some of their search capabilities. I think it’s important for a couple of different reasons, from a strategy point of view. This is why our ecosystem strategy is important.
We at N-able do not believe that we can be the be all, end all for MSPs. With new technology we want our MSPs to embrace it and we’re supporting them embracing that.
So our ‘ecoverse,’ our ecosystem – we call it an ecoverse – is very much a hybrid of our powerful solutions, but then easily integrated products. So if there is a cool, narrow, AI type of tool that’s out there that can help an MSP, we’re going to integrate with them and help the MSPs move their agenda forward.
That’s different than some of our competitors.
Some of our competitors are doing more like the Apple tactic where it’s like a closed network. ‘No. This is my stuff. I’m not gonna let you play with it,’ right?’
We don’t believe that’s good for the community. And so we’re very much more supportive of an ‘ecoverse’ kind of play.
Number two, this is more of a code of honor, so to speak.
We’re pledging to folks on how we’re going to use information. We’re being really transparent on the use of that information. And if MSPs are going to opt in or opt out to leverage that so they can use the collective intelligence, they need to be part of that. So we’re doing everything, I’d say, above board, very transparent with the MSPs, I’d say the right way.
I’m not suggesting others aren’t doing it the wrong way. But I’m saying we’re making sure that we’re taking the high road and being uber-transparent with folks in how we’re going to leverage their data to have a better overall experience.
So I’m not going to speak specifically to what’s going to happen at ConnectWise. I don’t know, but what I can tell you is that when you acquire a bunch of different things, there’s a bunch of leadership change, all this change by definition, there will be more of a focus on organizing internally as opposed to [keeping] your eye on the prize of the customers.
And that’s why we continue to be customer obsessed and competitor aware.

CEO Benioff Attacks Microsoft Copilot Models, Touts Agents As Better

‘Many customers are reporting the OpenAI models are not delivering high levels of accuracy,’ Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said.

Salesforce CEO and co-founder Marc Benioff railed against copilot artificial intelligence products offered by Microsoft and other vendors, touting his company’s agentic approach as one that delivers better accuracy while maintaining the importance of the vendor’s services partners.
In response to a question from CRN during a press and analyst event, the CEO of the San Francisco-based enterprise software said of Salesforce’s 12,000-strong partner ecosystem in delivering AI that “it’s critical that we enable and train them and give them this extension.”
“A lot of them are already next generation Salesforce platform users,” Benioff said. “These are the people using the product. And it (new AI features) just appear inside the platform. It’s not some new thing that they’re going to buy or add on or plug in or whatever. It’s going to appear from within.”
[RELATED: Salesforce Dreamforce 2024: The Biggest News]

Salesforce Dreamforce 2024

Benioff’s view is that providing Salesforce customers a full AI platform without adding on or plugging in AI products will result in better accuracy and lower hallucination. “We believe that this is the key to making it work,” he said. “This is what AI is meant to be.”
Microsoft has been most visible with its copilot brand of AI virtual assistants, but other vendors have used the term as well, including Salesforce itself with Einstein Copilot. Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Spot AI and SymphonyAI.
CRN has reached out to Microsoft and OpenAI for comment.
Benioff pointed out that during a virtual Microsoft event Monday on the next wave of the tech giant’s AI updates, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said AI was becoming “more capable and even agentic” and models were becoming “more of a commodity”–observations Benioff has also made.
Benioff directly attacked Microsoft and ChatGPT maker OpenAI, which has received billions of dollars in investment from Microsoft and helped power some of Microsoft’s AI offerings. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman notably spoke at Salesforce Dreamforce 2023.
“Many customers are reporting the OpenAI models are not delivering high levels of accuracy and resolving even basic customer service issues for them,” Benioff said. “The lack of grounding, the lack of access to the metadata, the data itself, the sharing model, all of the components of a platform that are then needed to be able to achieve this kind of level of accuracy.”
He also said that Salesforce’s Agentforce AI offering “is outperforming OpenAI on Azure in cost, time to value and accuracy.”
Benioff attacked Microsoft’s business practices, commenting on the tech giant’s treatment of Slack, which Salesforce bought in 2021.
“The European Union wrote this interesting statement about how they run their business, about Slack and some of the things that they did inside their company when these two entrepreneurs were trying to build this company and what actions they took and how they went after them,” Benioff said. “You might want to read it. It’s very interesting. A lot of insights. It reminded me also, on Netscape was another one. They had a very interesting document about that. … It’s a very interesting business philosophy there” at Microsoft.
Benioff also expressed some concerns about the perils of AI. “I hope we’re on the right side of history here,” he said. “It’s a very high-wire act. . … I am sure that there’s going to be good stories and bad stories. I’m sure that some of this is going to work, and some of it is going to go horribly wrong. I hope the horribly wrong stories are not as bad as I have them in my mind that they could be. Because they could be horrible. But they also could be magical. And I’m not sure what’s going to happen.”
Here’s more of what Benioff had to say during Dreamforce across his keynote and during a press event.

Benioff Calls Copilots ‘Nasty’

Through Dreamforces for the last especially 10 years, we’ve been talking about the emergence of AI and how AI has been a critical part of our future. And we introduced you to (Salesforce AI offering) Einstein. We did so much in deep learning. … We even invented prompt engineering at Salesforce. … And then we moved into this copilot world.
But the copilot world has been kind of a hit-and-miss world. … Customers have said to us, ‘Hey, I have got these copilots, but they’re not exactly performing as we want them to. We don’t see how that copilot world is going to get us to the real vision of artificial intelligence, of augmentation, of productivity, of better business results that we’ve been looking for. We just don’t see copilot as that key step for our future.’
In some ways, they kind of looked at copilot as the new Microsoft Clippy. And I get that. But it was pushing us. … And we are now, really, at that moment. … I read a Gartner report last week about those nasty copilots, and they were spilling data all over our customers’ floors. And we’re like, ‘That is no good for our customers.’ That’s not the kind of businesses we run. … We all have struggled in the last two years with this vision of copilots and LLMs (large language models) and how are we putting it all together.
So why are we doing that when we can have Agentforce. We can move from chatbots to copilots to this new Agentforce world.
And it’s going to know your business. And it can plan. Iit can reason. It takes action on your behalf. … We’re going to deliver it across all of our industry clouds and all of the key industries that we support with all of the compliance and governance that you need, whether it’s FedRAMP (the U.S. Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program) or HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) or SOC (System and Organization Controls) or whatever it is, so that you get it as you need it and it’s ready to go.

Agents Are AI’s Third Wave

This is the third wave of AI. It’s agents. … We know that that idea that we can give you that next capability, well, that’s just built into our DNA at Salesforce. … When we first introduced our platform in 1999 and we said, ‘We’re going to help you get into the cloud.’
And then mobile in 2006, and we said, ‘We’re going to help you get into mobile.’ And we said, ‘Hey, social, we’re going to help you get into social.’ Yes. And we helped our customers get into AI first. And data, for the last several years, we’ve been introducing them to concepts of building data lakes and federating those data lakes with zero copy.
And now with agents, this idea that we are all going to be using agents. But we’re going to do it all within our Salesforce platform. We’re going to do it all within our Customer 360 apps. And we’ve rewritten all of our customer 360 apps, even the ones that we’ve acquired, into a one, consistent, singular platform. … This platform is the key strategic motion of Salesforce.

Not Just Tossing Customers Another Model

Agentforce has to be the biggest breakthrough that we have ever had on technology, and I think it’s the biggest breakthrough that I’ve seen in a long time in artificial intelligence. … One of the cool things about Salesforce is we’re not just tossing you another model or tossing you a hyperscaler or tossing you an AI engineer or tossing you something else.
We’re just saying on the platform that you already love and use every day, the Salesforce platform, right inside the configurator, right inside the system that you already love and know, you’re going to start to find this incredible new functionality.
And of course, it’s going to be trusted and secure. … And of course, just like every other Salesforce platform. We’re going to have instant scalability, but a very high level of accuracy.
In fact, you’re gonna find these agents … are going to be some of the lowest hallucination agents you have ever experienced. And why is that? Why would our agents be so low hallucinogenic and so accurate?
Well, it has to do with the platform. It’s because we have the data and the metadata and the workflow and the business process and the security model and the sharing model and all those things that we love and have used and are deeply wedded to for 25 years.
It turns out those things make a more accurate AI. … You’re not going to be buying a model from a model company. You’re not going to have to go somewhere else to kind of figure out how to bolt on some other kind of AI. No, no, you’re going to have the most accurate AI in the world built into this platform.

Salesforce’s Changed Vision

It’s all built on this Salesforce platform with all the trust and security and ecosystem that you need. And this means that our architecture now looks different. … This is not what it looked like the last time we were all in this room…. We had a different vision of the future. Customer 360 and Data Cloud was our best selling, most exciting new product ever.
But agents are really changing us. They’re transforming us. They’re giving you that ability to have something that’s trusted and secure and scalable and accurate and easy to customize with this built-in AI. … You buy nothing else from anybody to make it work. It just works with accuracy and low hallucination.
And some of the hypnosis that we’ve had around AI that it doesn’t work exactly like that, or you have to DIY (do it yourself) it. … You want a single, professionally managed, secure, reliable, available platform. … (With) Atlas (Salesforce’s new reasoning engine) … We’re starting to see some amazing results. … benchmarked against the leading models, we’re 2x their accuracy and their hallucination rate because we have this unfair advantage in Salesforce called the Salesforce platform. … The AI is simply better.
This is what AI was meant to be. And you’re going to see how Agentforce is outperforming OpenAI on Azure in cost, time to value and accuracy. It is incredible. And we’re going to encourage you to benchmark us, to do the bake offs, so that you can see the cost differences and the time differences.

False Narratives From Other AI Vendors

There are a lot of narratives out there from vendors and a lot it is not true. There’s plenty of real customers here who are really deploying real AI. … You deployed copilot. You’ve trained and retrained your models. It’s ($200 billion), $300 billion invested, right, in the industry so far, these AI platforms. How much productivity or increase are you getting? Who are your five best customers in your pocket? … Or did it not exactly work as intended? And is there a better way to do it, and are we going to see it?
And so that’s our gambit. … We have a different approach to the Salesforce platform. We have all of our customer touch points. We have our AI. We have our Agentforce platform. Now we’re deploying it with real customers. … By the time that we start our next fiscal year, Feb. 1, our goal is to have thousands of customers live on Agentforce.
And our goal is, by the time we get back here to Dreamforce next year, to have a billion consumers interacting with agents globally. These are our shortterm goals. We think we’ve had a huge technical breakthrough. … We believe that our computer scientists have delivered something that’s extraordinary.
But it doesn’t matter until customers use it and get value from it. … It doesn’t matter what the benchmark is. Or it doesn’t matter what the kind of very cool, like science project, or I’m on ChatGPT … and then it doesn’t get it right, but then the next one it does. … If I can’t bring value to my actual business in my life in a material way, by grounding it in my data, adding it into my workflow, delivering it with my sharing models … We’re about doing it in the right way. And I think this is a better model.

Other AI Products Are ‘Science Projects’

Even Microsoft said yesterday, ‘Models are just commodities.’ … Many customers are reporting the OpenAI models are not delivering high levels of accuracy and resolving even basic customer service issues for them. … The lack of grounding, the lack of access to the metadata, the data itself, the sharing model, all of the components of a platform that are then needed to be able to achieve this kind of level of accuracy. … We’re only about one thing, customer success. … We care about, are you successful … People will come in and say, you have to DIY this, the cloud.
You have to DIY this part, the mobile. This part, the data. This part, the social. And now this part–the AI and the agents. And we say, ‘No, no.’ You don’t have to spend that money. This is a science project. They’re selling you science projects. And you need to move away from it. And we can prove it to you.
And over and over and over again, with our best customers all over the world, we have shown them that our approach is better. … Why are you (customers) doing this to yourselves? You’re … doing a hyperscaler agreement and a database agreement. And you’re hiring an AI engineer. And now you’re doing a frontier model.
And you’re hiring a separate team. … Why are you doing this and not getting the result you want in accuracy and in hallucination rate? … The only way you’re going to break the hypnosis that’s coming out of–not just one, but many vendors–that is not true, is to let the customer at it. … (Salesforce has) hooked it all up and made it work for the average person.

Benioff’s AI Doubts

(An AI user launches an agent and) it’s wonderful, or they unleash their agent and it completely screws up and their whole job is gone. It’s one of those two things.
I don’t know. I hope we’re on the right side of history here. … It’s a very high-wire act. … We realize we’re dealing with the most avant garde technology, the most exciting stuff that everybody wants to talk about and try out.
But how many of us really have the ability to get our hands in the soil? Usually, we have to rely on what everybody’s saying.
How many times do you have an actual customer in hand that said, ‘Yeah, I resolved 80 percent of all my customer service issues, and I increased my revenue by 20 percent. Oh, and employee satisfaction also went up by 30 percent because I’m resolving more issues for them.’ … I think those stories are not quite as, for them, prolific as they are intended to be.
And I think that we’re about to … remove the veil and say, ‘Actually, this is the right approach.’ A completely different approach. … I am sure that there’s going to be good stories and bad stories. I’m sure that some of this is going to work, and some of it is going to go horribly wrong.
I hope the horribly wrong stories are not as bad as I have them in my mind that they could be. Because they could be horrible. But they also could be magical. And I’m not sure what’s going to happen.
This is kind of a moment in my career where we are rolling the … dice a little bit. … And we believe that we have to do this. … This is really important. Not just the hype. And I expect you (journalists and analysts) to talk to them (customers) and bust this bubble and to like, show the numbers.
And say, ‘What are the productivity numbers? How much money are you making? How much money are you saving? Where is this going? What is your commitment to this product, this platform, this technique, this idea? Is this the right approach?’ Because we feel very passionate that we are on to this.

Salesforce And Microsoft

This is a marquee moment for us. And we want the market and our technology to come together.
At the same time, we do want to break the hypnosis around, ‘You know, I really think that Copilot is the next Clippy’ (a Microsoft Office virtual assistant from the 1990s and 2000s). … It hasn’t really delivered for customers what they intended.
It’s cute, it’s fun, does some things, and then you’re not really using it. It doesn’t have the adoption rates. … These models. They’re just commodities. They don’t do anything for you. The value’s in the data and the metadata. … I’m not a mean Microsoft person. … I love them.
They’re great. A very impressive company. They have tremendous acuity in their ability to run their business. … The European Union wrote this interesting statement about how they run their business, about Slack and some of the things that they did inside their company when these two entrepreneurs were trying to build this company and what actions they took and how they went after them.
You might want to read it. It’s very interesting. A lot of insights. It reminded me also, on Netscape was another one. They had a very interesting document about that. … It’s a very interesting business philosophy there.

Continuing To Integrate Past Acquisitions

We kind of went through a bit of a management shakeup about 18 months ago, 20 months ago, 22 months ago. And when we did, we all sat down as a management team … we decided that we would kind of throw away the whole plan that we were working on and start a new plan.
And the idea was to focus really in three areas. One is to really focus on initiative internally that we called ‘more core.’ … The idea was that we still had some legacy code from certain acquisitions that had not been fully moved into the core. … We have two workflow systems.
We have Journey Builder (from Salesforce’s ExactTarget acquisition) … We maintained a separate workflow inside Journey Builder. We don’t like that because to achieve our AI vision, we need to have one flow. So we have rebuilt that into our core.
Two, Commerce (Cloud). We have one of the most successful commerce platforms. … But it’s not running inside our core for a lot of the customers. Now we’ve rebuilt that into the core because commerce also needs to be part of flow.
And the final piece was Tableau … also needed to be deeply integrated into Data Cloud so that you can then visualize everything going on with all your agents and all the one part of one core platform.
And while we have loosely coupled those things, we hadn’t tightly coupled them in the code. … This idea of more core, building foundations, the idea that we are continuing to invest and invest more to have one piece of code that has all of this capability is because we believe, through our research and our understanding of AI, that if we do not do this, we will not end up with the AI that we want, which is the smartest, best, lowest hallucination AI in the world.
We think we need all of that running in the singular platform for the AI to know what to do and what not to do. And that’s why we’re making these huge investments.
(In) two years, the investments have already played out. It’s not totally done … somewhere between 85 to 90 percent done. A lot of the code is being released in the next release in October. The rest in February.
This is a major focus for me, because I believe that for us to deliver the AI vision, we have to get those loose threads kind of put together. And that’s why we’ve done that. And the first version of that is called Foundations. … And it’s our goal is to make all of those things freemium and to make the whole platform freemium.
And then all of these things can get just get toggled on, just like Data Cloud is now. So Data Cloud also went through a freemium transformation a year ago … and our goal is to make everything freemium.
It’s very important that we go through a shift. We want to have all the constructs and all the data objects there.

AI’s Effect On Jobs

With one of our first deployments, which is Gucci, we went to their call center (in Italy) … you buy something at Gucci anywhere in the stores, anywhere in the world, and then the handle breaks or needs to be repaired, you call the call center, and then they arrange to bring it in.
We deployed our technology there and then what we found was that those Gucci agents not only were suddenly fixing those bags faster and more efficiently, because they had more capability, but they were selling Gucci products, which they had not been enabled and trained to do.
And their sales went up through that call center by … 30%. … because the AI … augmented those employees in ways that they did not have before.
So this was an unexpected secondary gain. They did not reduce any heads. They ended up with a more valuable business unit that was not only an expense center, but a revenue center. And I think that this is kind of a right direction of AI, that it can go in many directions.
I’m sure that there will be situations where a call center, a customer service organization, a sales organization, a marketing organization is maybe more efficient, and the company feels like they want to reduce heads.
I think in a lot of cases, you’re going to also see the opposite, like we saw in Gucci, where they’re going to add more heads, add more functionality and add more capability. … We know the doctors and nurses are burned out. … We also have more health data than ever before. … , We’re like, calling our doctor, ‘What about this number? What about that?’ … All of a sudden, doctors are, like, overwhelmed. … We should go, like, remove that. … Get them back to working on the work that they are good at.

ServiceNow Partner Summit, Xanadu Release: The Biggest AI News

‘Those kinds of really significant productivity savings deliver material cost savings to the business,’ Amy Lokey, ServiceNow CXO, tells CRN.

Agentic artificial intelligence. Improvements to the Now Assist AI assistant offering. And a pro edition of RaptorDB.
These are some of the biggest changes ServiceNow has revealed Tuesday as part of its Now Platform Xanadu release and during its Global Partner Ecosystem Summit (GPES) held at its Santa Clara, Calif., headquarters Tuesday.
When asked by CRN during a virtual pre-briefing event about partners working with customers to get AI projects ready–especially if budget is an issue–Amy Lokey, ServiceNow chief experience officer, said that partners can focus on “massive productivity gains that benefit employees, that deliver better customer service, that deliver better customer loyalty.”
“Those kinds of really significant productivity savings deliver material cost savings to the business,” she said. “Our customers can do the math. They can quickly figure out that the value is there and it’s worth the investment because of the productivity gains and ultimately better business outcomes that they’re seeing from these solutions.”
[RELATED: ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott: ‘We’re Putting AI To Work For People’]

ServiceNow Xanadu Release

ServiceNow has about 2,200 channel partners worldwide, according to CRN’s 2024 Channel Chiefs. About 100 ServiceNow partners were scheduled to attend the GPES, according to the IT management and automation tools vendor.
Lokey told CRN during a virtual pre-briefing that the vendor is focused on making deployments easy for partners.
“We’re making that continually simpler and easier, and doing all that hard work so that our customers don’t have to and our partners can quickly achieve what they’re looking for,” Lokey said. “Frequently, our partners are really some of the first to try these new solutions themselves in their own ServiceNow implementations. So they’re really design partners with us as we deploy the solutions. They help provide feedback where we can continually iterate on the product. And then they can take that firsthand experience of seeing the value of these product experiences and then share that with our shared customers.”
Heath Ramsey, vice president of outbound product management for the ServiceNow platform, told CRN during the event that he recommends partners who are talking to customers about AI products to focus on outcomes.
“As our partners are going to market and working with customers around this, it’s a lot of the same things that we’ve been talking about with respect to workflow and everything else,” Ramsey said. “Focus on the things that are high value with respect to automation and then layer the AI on top of it to make it more efficient.”
“What we see from our customers is the desire and the need to continually transform, get all those manual processes into the platform and also prepare them for the future, things like AI,” he said. “For us to be able to get there, it’s about making sure that we have the right foundation for them to set them up for success as they move forward.”
In response to other questions asked on the call, Dorit Zilbershot, ServiceNow’s vice president of AI product management, said that the vendor is differentiating itself in part from more generic agentic AI vendors with its 20 years of workflows, actions and catalog items.
“They already have access to all the policies, to all the past cases, all the workflows, everything is already available for them,” she said.
ServiceNow’s one platform, one data model structure means no siloes when leveraging agents for IT service management (ITSM) across different divisions in an organization, from legal to finance, she said.
Read on for the most exciting news ServiceNow made today as part of its Xanadu release and GPES event.

RaptorDB Pro

A RaptorDB Pro offer is now available to ServiceNow customers, adding to the RaptorDB Postgres‑based database offering unveiled during its Knowledge 2024 customer and partner event in May.
The standard RaptorDB offering promises to act as a foundational data layer for users to process large amounts of transactional data on the Now Platform in real time for AI-powered applications.
Standard is available now for new customers. Existing ServiceNow customers have to wait until later next year, according to the vendor.
The Pro edition is more scalable with better overall performance, with a 53 percent improvement in overall transaction times, according to ServiceNow. Users could see upwards of 27 times faster pulls of analytics, reports and list views–plus three times more transactional throughput across workflows.
Users should have just-in-time trend data and individual reports around how processes perform and how to improve those outcomes, according to the vendor.
The vendor also has a RaptorDB Lighthouse Program rolling out for select early-adopter customers.
ServiceNow leveraged its Swarm64 acquisition from 2021 to build the new database offering. The vendor said that RaptorDB reduces up to 70 percent of query times over five seconds, increases queries per second twelvefold and reduces configuration management database (CMDB) list view load times by about 90 percent among other advantages.

Knowledge Graph

ServiceNow plans to release in March 2025 a unified Knowledge Graph that consolidates data management and analytics to cut down on manual data mapping and integrations.
Users can manage a large amount of insights to speed up connecting real-world events and pulling data across operations, employees, partners and customers for personalized information.
The capability should reduce supply delays and improve supply chain management among other use cases, according to ServiceNow.

ServiceNow AI Agents

ServiceNow’s summit happened alongside the release of its Xanadu AI platform, promising users capabilities around AI agents, email reply generation, data visualization generation and more.
The vendor’s first AI agent offers–Customer Service Management AI Agents and ITSM AI Agents–should have a limited release in November, according to ServiceNow. More use cases will come in 2025.
ServiceNow AI agents can understand environments, tap into available data across the enterprise and take actions from that data and autonomously handle tasks that otherwise take up a large amount of employee attention, according to the vendor.
An example of an AI agent at work is an agent working a case of Wi-Fi not working while a human IT professional is away. The agent should have the ability to verify network stability, analyze similar cases and ask the customer for router details and provide the human with next steps based on company policies.
Eventually, ServiceNow AI agents will have the ability to pull context from voice, video, images and other inputs for personalized responses, according to the vendor.
Agents will have the ability to collaborate with each other across workflows and aiding multiple departments.

Xanadu AI Capabilities

The Xanadu release brings hundreds of AI updates to ServiceNow, according to the vendor. The ServiceNow Xanadu release marks improvements to ServiceNow’s Now Assist AI assistant for IT support workers.
Included in those updates is email reply generation, which promises to save IT support workers time on communications with requestors, according to the vendor. Email tone can be made more empathetic, and the emails can bring in information from the complaint.
Change summarization, powered by Now Assist for IT Service Management (ITSM), can summarize change requests and speed up related data assessment, potentially decreasing cycle times and minimizing risks.
Now Assist for HR Service Delivery (HRSD) powers large language model (LLM)-based proactive prompts in the platform for relevant and timely task completion reminders. Users can have reminders for travel request approval, mandatory training completion and other tasks, according to ServiceNow.
And the data visualization generation feature should bring managers and process owners all the data and information needed for decision-making. Users can leverage natural language prompts to translate complex data queries into charts and graphs.

Improved Now Assist

A Now Assist integration with Copilot for Microsoft 365 became generally available (GA). Copilot can pass new laptop ordering, company policy questions and other automated self-service employee tasks to ServiceNow’s Now Assist for real-time responses and workflow kick offs.
Now Assist for Security Operations aims to improve security incident response (SIR) workflows and manage threat exposure in real time, according to ServiceNow. SecOps teams can leverage AI-driven incident summaries and interactive question-and-answer experiences to prioritize and respond to security events, scaling incident response protocols and accelerating the response process.
Now Assist has come to sourcing and procurement operations, with more GenAI capabilities for finance and supply chain workflows expected, according to ServiceNow. The sourcing and procurement operations Now Assist aims to simplify procurement intake processes and request submitting. Employees use a conversational prompt to start requests and access information. The tool also promises to free up time for procurement and finance teams.
The Now Assist Skill Kit allows for custom GenAI prompt and skill building within the ServiceNow platform. Users can tailor skills to specific use cases, according to ServiceNow.
Users can build, test and deploy GenAI skills and underlying prompts, select models and then assign the skills to apps and AI agents. They can use Now LLMs or third-party and custom models, according to the vendor.

Industry-Focused Now Assist Offers

ServiceNow revealed iterations of Now Assist meant for particular industries, with the first offerings including telecommunications, media and technology (TMT), financial services operations (FSO), public sector digital services (PSDS).
Now Assist for TMT can generate summaries of technical issues and test results to speed up diagnosis and IT support work. A resolution summarizer is meant to update customers and help future cases, according to the vendor.
Now Assist for FSO has offers aimed at banks and insurers. Now Assist for Banking integrates with ServiceNow Disputes Management to leverage GenAI to speed up resolutions around card issues and increasing customer loyalty. Now Assist for Insurance can summarize claims to give workers context and improve response times, reduce repeat questions for customers and cut down on mistakes.
And the iteration for PSDS brings government employees relevant case history for better decision-making and speeding up assistance. The offer is aimed at nutrition assistance, housing, transportation, medical care and other government services, according to the vendor.
Industry-focused Now Assist offers that were already released include Now Assist for Government Community Cloud (GCC) and Now Assist for Telecommunications Service Management (TSM).

Retail Sector Offers

The Xanadu release brings ServiceNow further into IT products aimed at retailers, in the store and in the back office and with leadership, according to the vendor. Both products have two-way communication and visibility between stores and headquarters.
Retail Operations seeks to aid managers and associates with open and close checks and broken point of sale (POS) system fixes, among other tasks. Retail Operations is integrated with Field Service Management to allow for robust field technician support, according to the vendor.
A Retail Service Management offering brings the ServiceNow Customer Service Management to the retail space, with in-store and online request submission and offsite support workers collaborating on a single system.

Updates For Developers, IT Teams, Employees

The Xanadu release includes an integrated developer environment (IDE) meant to speed up digital work at scale from within ServiceNow environments.
Developers can make apps in code and leverage source control, conflict resolution, error detection and other capabilities, according to the vendor. Developers can also edit apps in the more familiar platform user interface (UI) without leaving.
The new release also aims to integrate AI operations (AIOps) into IT workflows, especially for incident prevention and mitigation. Operators can test automations before activation, seeing the effect on data and when grouping alerts. Users can also leverage Now Assist for ITOM (IT Operations Management) to get a summary of an issue and how to troubleshoot.
ServiceNow expanded its Application Portfolio Management (APM) offering into Enterprise Architecture, better aligning IT teams with business objectives for less waste, better compliance, better data privacy control and lowered time to market, according to the vendor.
A service reliability management capability aims to speed up resolutions around app issues and outages with visibility into technical services performance, according to ServiceNow.
Site reliability engineers and app teams can set on-call schedules, align with service-level indicators and objectives and manage alerts autonomously–saving central administrators work.
Guided self-service in employee center is meant to give knowledge, frontline and deskless employees help across IT, human resources (HR) and other departments with a visual, interactive question-and-answer experience.
The self-service feature can answer questions around computer upgrades, benefits and time-off policies to cut down on support tickets and article reading.

The 10 Biggest Tech M&A Deals Of 2024 (So Far)

Major IT companies looking to expand their technology portfolios and private equity firms buying IT vendors and solution providers account for many of the biggest mergers and acquisitions this year. And AI is a factor in many acquisitions. Here’s a look at the biggest tech mergers and acquisitions that have been announced, completed or are still in the works in 2024 (so far).

Come Together
Despite high interest rates and ongoing economic uncertainty, merger and acquisition activity has continued at a brisk pace across the IT industry in the first seven months of 2024.
The year (so far) has seen a number of significant acquisition deals (and a few divestitures) announced or completed involving IT vendors and solution providers. Most notable has been Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s blockbuster deal at the start of the year to buy Juniper Networks for $14 billion and the completion of Cisco Systems’ $28 billion acquisition of Splunk in March.
As with so much else in the IT industry today, AI technology has been a major driver in many mergers and acquisitions this year. In addition to being a factor in the Cisco-Splunk and HPE-Juniper deals, many smaller (under $1 billion) acquisitions this year involve established companies buying startups with leading-edge AI technology.
Some of this year’s AI technology-driven acquisition deals that weren’t big enough to make this Top 10 list, for example, included SAP’s $1.5 billion deal to buy WalkMe to boost its Joule AI copilot software; Nvidia’s $700 million acquisition of AI infrastructure management startup Run.ai; and AMD’s move to acquire large language model developer Silo AI for approximately $665 million.
While dollar value is a factor in the following ranking, some mergers and acquisitions have a greater impact on the IT industry in general, and the channel in particular, and that figures into the rankings. In many cases, including one that makes this list, the value of the acquisition was not disclosed.
Some 10-figure acquisition deals that just missed making this list but were nevertheless significant include CyberArk’s $1.54 billion acquisition of machine identity firm Venafi in May, Cognizant’s $1.3 billion deal to purchase engineering services specialist Belcan in June, and the $1.75 billion acquisition of AWS and Google partner Thoughtworks by private equity firm Apax Partners in August.
Even mergers and acquisitions that don’t happen can be big news in the IT industry. In April cloud application giant Salesforce was reported to be discussing an acquisition deal with big data software developer Informatica with an $11 billion price tag. And Google was reported to be close to acquiring CRM application company HubSpot and cloud cybersecurity startup Wiz–the latter for a reported whopping $23 billion–but those deals never came to pass.
Here’s a look at the IT industry’s biggest acquisition, merger and spinoff deals in 2024 (so far), starting with No. 10 and working up to No. 1. Some deals were unveiled last year and completed this year. Others have been announced but are still working their way through regulatory and/or shareholder approvals before they are wrapped up.

No. 10: Ahead Buys CDI In $3.7B Digital Transformation Channel Play
IT solution provider Ahead announced on Feb. 1 that it had acquired Computer Design & Integration (CDI) in a move the company said created a $3.7 billion global digital transformation powerhouse.
No dollar value was disclosed for the deal that combined two of the IT industry’s leading solution providers. Both were owned by private equity companies–CDI was sold to Ahead by One Equity Partners. Ahead was No. 30 on the 2024 CRN Solution Provider 500 while CDI was No. 57.
The acquisition not only provides Ahead with a deeper portfolio of technical capabilities in hybrid IT, cybersecurity and other areas, it also gives the solution provider a major presence in the Northeastern U.S. as well as expanded worldwide coverage.

No. 9: HPE To Sell 30 Percent Of Its Stake In H3C For $2.1B
On May 24 Hewlett Packard Enterprise said it had struck a deal to sell 30 percent of its shares of China-based H3C to Chinese IT provider Unisplendour for approximately $2.1 billion. The transaction was expected to be completed by Aug. 31.
H3C is HPE’s exclusive provider of HPE servers, storage and associated technical services in China.
HPE had owned a 49 percent stake in H3C. With the sale, HPE’s stake is reduced to 19 percent. HPE said it also had an option to sell its remaining 19 percent share of H3C at a later time.

No. 8: OpenText Sells App Modernization Business To Rocket Software For $2.275B
OpenText’s $5.8 billion acquisition of Micro Focus, announced in August 2022 and completed in January 2023, was one of the IT industry’s most significant acquisition deals in recent years. That acquisition included Micro Focus’ mainframe software business.
On May 1 of this year OpenText completed the divestiture of the mainframe software and application modernization and connectivity (AMC) business to Rocket Software, a Bain Capital portfolio company, for $2.275 billion.
Rocket Software, based in Waltham, Mass., provides IT modernization and IT automation services.
OpenText said it planned to use the proceeds from the sale to reduce the company’s debt by $2 billion.

No. 7: Perficient To Be Acquired By Private Equity Firm EQT For $3B
This year (so far) has seen a number of acquisitions of IT vendors and solution providers by private equity firms.
On May 6 global IT solution provider and digital consulting firm Perficient announced that it had agreed to be acquired and taken private by Swedish private equity company EQT for approximately $3 billion. The all-cash deal amounted to about $76 per share, a 75 percent premium over Perficient’s share price at the time.
Perficient, ranked No. 56 on the CRN Solution Provider 500, is a global business with operations in North and South America, Europe and India. The company, which generated $907 million in revenue in 2023, has about 7,000 employees across more than 40 locations worldwide and counts about 300 of the Fortune 1000 companies as clients.
Perficient and EQT expect to complete the acquisition by the end of 2024. Until then Perficient’s shares continue to trade on the Nasdaq exchange at around $75 per share.

No. 6: T-Mobile Acquiring UScellular Wireless Operations, Other Assets For $4.4B
In the latest wave of consolidation within the telecommunications industry, T-Mobile announced on May 28 that it would buy substantially all of UScellular’s wireless operations including UScellular’s wireless customers and stores along with certain specified spectrum assets.
The deal’s value was put at approximately $4.4 billion in a combination of cash and T-Mobile’s assumption of up to $2.0 billion of debt in an exchange offer made to “certain UScellular debtholders.” (UScellular is retaining some of its spectrum and its towers and T-Mobile will lease space on some of those towers.)
T-Mobile said that with the deal it can put more heat on its competitors with lower prices, faster transmission speeds and better 5G performance. “With this deal T-Mobile can extend the superior Un-carrier value and experiences that we’re famous for to millions of UScellular customers and deliver them lower-priced, value-packed plans and better connectivity on our best-in-class nationwide 5G network,” T-Mobile CEO Mike Sievert said in a statement at the time.
The transaction is expected to be completed in mid-2025.
The T-Mobile-UScellular deal followed news in March that IT communications company Viavi Solutions would buy telecommunications test specialist Spirent Communications for approximately $1.3 billion.

No. 5: KKR To Buy VMware’s End-User Computing Business For $4B
As part of the aftershocks of Broadcom’s $69 billion acquisition of virtualization giant VMware in 2023, private equity firm KKR announced on Feb. 26 a deal to buy VMware’s End User Computing business for approximately $4 billion.
Broadcom had said it would find a new home for VMware’s EUC division, which covers VMWare’s VDI solutions, when it closed the VMware acquisition in November. Since then it has ordered solution providers to parse out deals for the End User Computing products, including Workspace ONE and Horizon, separately from VMware’s other cloud products.
KKR said it expected to complete the acquisition later this year, whereupon the EUC division will become a stand-alone company “with greater access to growth capital and a dedicated strategic focus on empowering customers and partners worldwide with innovative digital workspace solutions,” KKR said in a statement at the time.

No. 4: Thoma Bravo To Acquire Darktrace for $5.3B
One of the biggest private equity firm acquisitions of the year so far came on April 26 when Thoma Bravo announced a deal to buy Darktrace, a pioneer of cybersecurity AI technology, for approximately $5.3 billion.
Darktrace was founded in 2013 with the idea that AI and machine learning could be used to improve the detection of cyberattacks. The company went public in 2021 but was reportedly in acquisition talks with Thoma Bravo as early as 2022.
Thoma Bravo has been an active acquirer of cybersecurity companies in recent years with a portfolio that currently includes Proofpoint, Sophos and SailPoint, in addition to holding stakes in a number of other security vendors.

No. 3: IBM Buying HashiCorp for $6.4B
On April 24 IT giant IBM said it had struck a deal to buy HashiCorp, developer of the Terraform “infrastructure-as-code” platform, in a $35-per-share cash deal valued at $6.4 billion.
IBM said that with the acquisition of HashiCorp and its suite of hybrid- and multi-cloud life-cycle management tools the company can create a comprehensive, end-to-end hybrid cloud platform “to help clients grappling with today’s AI-driven application growth and complexity.”
IBM, for example, cited the combination of Terraform’s automation capabilities with the configuration management functionality of its Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform as one example of potential synergies that will help it compete for a bigger share of the $1.1 trillion total addressable cloud market.
HashiCorp shareholders approved the deal July 15, and the two companies look to complete the acquisition before the end of the year. But the U.S. Federal Trade Commission is scrutinizing the deal and on July 15 IBM and HashiCorp acknowledged receiving a second request for information from the FTC, indicating a deeper anti-trust review, according to a Bloomberg story.

No. 2: Cisco Completes $28B Splunk Acquisition
On March 18 Cisco said it had completed its $28 billion acquisition of Splunk in a move to combine the two companies’ cybersecurity and observability strengths and create what company executives described as a distinctive, AI-powered data platform.
“As one of the world’s largest software companies, we will revolutionize the way our customers leverage data to connect and protect every aspect of their organization as we help power and protect the AI revolution,” Cisco Chair and CEO Chuck Robbins said in a statement, following the completion of the all-cash, $157-per-share acquisition deal.
The two companies initially announced the acquisition agreement on Sept. 21, 2023.
Since the acquisition Cisco and Splunk have been integrating their operations and product lines with Cisco’s observability development team moved into Splunk. Splunk President and CEO Gary Steele, meanwhile, was named Splunk general manager and Cisco go-to-market president. At Cisco Live and Splunk .conf24 events in June Robbins and Steele vowed that the acquisition wouldn’t slow Splunk’s innovation efforts.

No. 1: HPE Buying Juniper Networks In $14B Deal That Sets Up AI Networking Battle With Cisco
HPE sought to step up the pressure on Cisco in the enterprise networking arena when on Jan. 9 it announced a $14 billion deal to acquire AI-native network platform provider Juniper Networks.
HPE said the deal to buy Juniper would provide it with additional AI networking muscle and effectively double its networking business, creating what it called in a statement a “new networking leader with a comprehensive portfolio that presents customers and partners with a compelling new choice to drive business value.”
Through the deal HPE will gain, among other assets, Juniper’s Mist AI capabilities, its campus and branch networking business, and a more robust security technology portfolio. Juniper will also bring its large pool of MSP partners with the acquisition.
The deal appears to be on track for completion in early 2025. Juniper shareholders approved the $40-per-share, all-cash deal in April and the acquisition has won approval from European Union and U.K. regulators.

The 2024 Tech Innovator Awards

From among more than 320 applicants, CRN staff evaluated and selected products spanning the IT industry – including AI and AI infrastructure, cloud management, data analytics, networking, security and storage categories – that offer ground-breaking functionality and new opportunities for partners.

Tech Innovators 2024
The wave of development around artificial intelligence and generative AI in the last two years has shaken up the IT industry. As with earlier major paradigm shifts, such as the Internet and cloud computing, AI is spurring innovation across nearly every IT product and technology category including applications, software development, data management, PCs and cybersecurity.
From well-established IT giants to startups with breakthrough ideas, IT vendors have been rushing to develop new products and adapt their current product portfolios in the face of the AI tsunami, either to reap the advantages of adding AI capabilities or upgrade them to meet the new demands of AI systems.
So which new and updated products are creating opportunities for solution providers who work on the front lines with customers as they navigate this new AI-driven market?
To help solution providers identify products that are truly innovative and offer real value for their customers, the 2024 CRN Tech Innovator Awards showcase IT products that can provide game-changing advances in IT – and partner growth opportunities – across 36 technology categories including AI and AI infrastructure, application development, cloud management, data management and analytics, edge computing, networking, security (across 10 subcategories) and storage, among others.
The winners and finalists for this year’s Tech Innovator Awards were chosen by CRN staff after evaluating more than 320 applications. The following slideshow spotlights the winners and finalists among those applications across the 36 technology categories. Complete application data from all the applicants can be found here at crn.com.

AI Infrastructure
Winner: NetApp AIPod
NetApp AIPod is an artificial intelligence- and machine learning-focused converged infrastructure system built on NetApp all-flash storage. AIPod provides a comprehensive AI solution that’s designed to address the challenges that businesses face when adopting and implementing AI.
AIPod consolidates a data center’s worth of analytics, training, and inference compute into a single AI infrastructure, reducing cost and complexity. Supported by NetApp’s storage systems plus NetApp BlueXP, AI Control Plane and DataOps Toolkit, AIPod integrates with the most popular MLOps platforms.
Finalists:
Liqid UltraStack AI Server
Vertiv SmartRow 2
WEKA WEKApod

Application Development & DevOps
Winner: GitLab Duo
GitLab Duo is a privacy- and transparency-first suite of AI capabilities embedded across the entire software development lifecycle. Applying AI across DevSecOps workflows improves team collaboration and reduces the security and compliance risks of AI adoption.
GitLab’s goal is to deliver a comprehensive suite of AI features that supports and provides value to all users involved in delivering software, from developers to non-technical team members.
Duo’s capabilities go beyond code generation to include: Suggested Reviewers, Code Suggestions, Chat, Vulnerability Summary, Code Explanation, Planning Discussions Summary, Merge Request Summary, Merge Request Template Population, Code Review Summary, Test Generation, Git Suggestions, Root Cause Analysis, Planning Description Generation, and Value Stream Forecasting.
Finalists:
The Azul Zulu Builds of OpenJDK for Java 21
LaunchDarkly Feature Management Platform

Application Performance/Observability

Winner: Cisco Observability Platform
The Cisco Observability Platform is a developer-ready system built on an open, extensible, scalable and flexible entity relationship data model that allows developers to build and extend data models and experiences to deliver relevant and impactful observability and business insights.
The platform gathers and correlates metric, event, log and trace data from multiple domains at scale, such as networking, security, applications, end user, cloud services and verticals, and leverages ML and AI capabilities to contextualize and correlate real-time telemetry across these domains. This functionality allows organizations to better gain visibility, insights and actions to improve digital experiences for customers, employees and end-users.
Finalists:
Nobl9 Reliability Center
vFunction Architectural Observability Platform

Artificial Intelligence
Winner: Cohesity Gaia
Cohesity Gaia is an AI-powered enterprise search assistant that brings retrieval augmented generation (RAG) AI and large language models (LLMs) to high-quality backup data within Cohesity environments.
The conversational AI assistant enables users to ask questions and receive answers by accessing and analyzing vast pools of enterprise data. When coupled with the Cohesity Data Cloud, these AI advancements transform data into knowledge and can help accelerate an organization’s goals while keeping data secure and compliant.
By building a RAG AI solution on Cohesity’s multi-cloud platform, Gaia provides RAG AI conversational search experiences across cloud and hybrid environments, allowing enterprises to gain deeper insights into their data and make informed decisions, no matter where their stored data resides.
Finalists:
Atlassian Intelligence
ConnectWise Sidekick
Domino Data Lab Domino Enterprise
Fortinet FortiAI
HiddenLayer AI Detection & Response for GenAI
Red Hat OpenShift AI
SnapLogic SnapGPT

Business Intelligence & Data Analytics
Winner: Starburst Galaxy
Starburst Galaxy is a fully managed, end-to-end data lakehouse platform built on the open-source Trino SQL query engine and Apache Iceberg, known as Icehouse. It offers a solution for near real-time analytics, allowing customers to leverage the scalability, performance, and cost-effectiveness of Icehouse without the complexities of creating and maintaining a custom solution.
The platform supports data ingestion, governance, and Iceberg data management at scale, particularly in multi-cloud environments. It targets industries aiming to harness interactive applications and business intelligence, offering a user-friendly SQL interface for data optimization and live application integration, catering to a broad market that requires advanced data management and analytics capabilities.
Finalists:
Cloudera Open Data Lakehouse (1.7.9 release)
Zscaler Business Analytics

Cloud Tools/Management
Winner: Prosimo AI Suite for Multi-Cloud Networking
Prosimo’s AI Suite for Multi-Cloud Networking (MCN) is a full-stack, cloud-native platform that streamlines AI adoption for enterprises. The AI Suite enables organizations to utilize cloud-native connectivity for AI, helping teams deploy AI workloads faster. Prosimo’s platform takes a full lifecycle approach, offering Multi-Cloud Networking for AI and Nebula, a conversational AI assistant enabling AIOps for MCN.
Multi-Cloud Networking for AI provides the core connectivity, security, and infrastructure for AI workloads, including: end-to-end private connectivity for seamless data access distribution, deep observability to detect abnormal behaviors across the stack, enhanced enterprise-level security for AI services, and application-driven routing for request-aware steering.
Nebula enhances observability, monitoring, and troubleshooting with predictive recommendations and accelerated root-cause analysis.
Finalists:
Alkira Extranet-as-a-Service
Quest Software Foglight Cloud
Tangoe One Cloud

Data and Information Management
Winner: Cribl Lake
Cribl Lake is a turnkey data lake solution designed to provide IT and security teams with complete control and flexibility over their data. Provisioned directly from Cribl.Cloud, organizations collect, analyze and route a complete view of all IT and security data across the enterprise, streamlining workflows and providing value within minutes.
Cribl Lake’s unified management layer allows organizations to leverage low-cost object storage, either Cribl-managed or customer-owned, and automate provisioning, unify security and retention policies, and use open formats to eliminate vendor lock-in. Cribl Lake integrates with Cribl’s suite of products including Ingest, Stream, Edge and Search.
Finalists:
Couchbase Capella
M-Files Aino
Nasuni File Data Platform
Promethium Data Fabric
Tessell Database-as-a-Service

Data Protection, Management and Resiliency
Winner: Veeam Data Platform
Built on the principles of data security, recovery and freedom, the Veeam Data Platform 23H2 update includes advanced data security, malware detection, automated recovery, and hybrid cloud capabilities to keep businesses running even in the face of ransomware and cyberattacks.
As part of the update, Veeam Backup & Replication v12.1 further reduces incident response time with proactive threat hunting for backups, integration with SIEM platforms, and YARA rules for ransomware pattern detection.
Beyond the platform updates, the new Veeam Data Cloud is built on Microsoft Azure and Zero Trust principles and leverages Azure Blob Storage isolated from production environments. This all-in-one service includes backup software, infrastructure and storage, keeping costs low and predictable while simplifying management.
Finalists:
Enterprise Control for Backblaze Computer Backup
Commvault Cloud powered by Metallic AI
HYCU R-Cloud
Infinidat InfiniSafe Cyber Detection

Displays
Winner: Hisense USA 75MR6DE GoBoard Live
The New 75MR6DE GoBoard Live display features Google certification, Android 13 operating system and an integrated 4K camera. Hisense Interactive Display solutions deliver unrivalled performance and market leading value. Combining the power of a digital display, tablet, electronic whiteboard and video conference device, Hisense delivers the ultimate all-in-one display solution. Superior processors and the latest touch technology provide best-in-class user experiences while seamless wireless integration makes collaboration both simple and engaging.
Finalists:
Hisense USA 100BM66D

Edge Computing/Internet of Things
Winner: Red Hat Device Edge
Red Hat Device Edge aggregates an enterprise-ready and supported distribution of the Red Hat-led open-source community project MicroShift (a lightweight Kubernetes project derived from the edge capabilities of Red Hat OpenShift) along with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, providing more consistent Day One and Day Two management of hundreds to thousands of sites and devices.
Red Hat Device Edge is targeted at partners and customers looking for a consistent platform for resource-constrained environments that require small form factor compute at the device edge, including Internet of Things gateways, industrial controllers, smart displays, point of sales terminals, vending machines, robots, in space and more.
Finalists:
Expanso Bacalhau
Radix IoT Mango 5.1
Scale Computing Autonomous Infrastructure Management Engine
Thinaer Sonar

Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure
Winner: Dell APEX Cloud Platforms
Dell Technologies’ APEX Cloud Platforms are turnkey systems that integrate Dell infrastructure, automated management and operations software, and cloud operating stacks to deliver consistent multi-cloud operations by extending cloud operating environments on-premises.
APEX systems are collaboratively developed with partners, including Microsoft and Red Hat, to deliver: choice for the cloud ecosystem that best meets needs without being constrained by operational considerations; adaptability while protecting investments with common infrastructure building blocks; productivity using familiar operational and developer experiences regardless of cloud; operational excellence with automated management and operations software that delivers consistent outcomes across every ecosystem; and control using a shared, storage layer that spans multiple ecosystems and locations.
Finalists:
Broadcom VMware Cloud Foundation
Flexera One IT Visibility
SoftIron HyperCloud

IT Automation/RPA
Winner: ConnectWise RPA
Robotic process automation (RPA) uses software robots to automate individual, repetitive tasks that usually require human access. RPA bots can mimic human actions such as button clicks, text box fills, and file path updates. ConnectWise has custom-built RPA for MSPs. With ConnectWise RPA, MSPs can drastically enhance a team’s productivity and customer satisfaction. Sixty-six percent of knowledge workers say that automation has helped them be more productive, and 90 percent say that automation has improved their lives in the workplace. ConnectWise says it is bringing RPA to partners in an actionable way so they can achieve more with automation.
Finalists:
Gluware (5.1, 5.2 and 5.3)
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

IT Infrastructure Monitoring and Management
Winner: Nexthink Flow
Nexthink Flow is a powerful orchestration engine for end-user computing that bridges the gap between monitoring and management with its real-time, automated workflows.
Nexthink Flow combines AI-powered data with a low-code orchestration engine to continuously optimize complex workflows, monitor progress, handle exceptions, and ensure that all tasks are completed as intended.
With Nexthink Flow EUC teams can: achieve proactive IT with real-time event monitoring and workflow triggering; improve productivity with a low-code visual designer; save time with less powershell coding and manual intervention: resolve complex issues using smart automations with built-in logic and decision making; and cut costs with software license reclamation and hardware refresh use cases using third-party API connectors.
Finalists:
ConnectWise Automate
NetBrain Next-Gen V11
Netwrix 1Secure

Laptops and Mobile Devices
Winner: HP Elite x360 1040 14-inch G11 2-in-1 Notebook PC
The HP Elite x360 1040 G11 is designed for users seeking to excel anywhere, any time with maximum performance optimized for AI experiences and seamless collaboration in a safe, secure PC that is thin, lightweight, and sleek.
Featuring an Intel Core Ultra processor with a NPU, the device powers AI-enabled intelligent performance while optimizing power usage to help ensure the PC stays cool and quiet. Four Poly Studio tuned speakers and SNR studio microphones ensure comfort and clarity during virtual collaboration with AI noise reduction, dynamic voice leveling, and studio mode recording. HP Wolf Security for Business provides a hardware-enforced, always-on, resilient defense to protect the PC from modern threats.
Finalists:
Acer TravelMate P2 14
Panasonic Toughbook 55 Mk3

MSP RMM Platforms
Winner: ConnectWise Asio Platform
ConnectWise Asio is a modern, scalable, and secure cloud-based platform purpose-built for MSPs. It leverages centralized data and common services, including ticketing, contacts, and alerting. A generative AI engine and an orchestration layer support the delivery of hyperautomation and productivity for MSPs.
Centralizing data puts AI at the center of the platform, creating insights and automation that span products in ways decoupled solutions never could. Hyperautomation empowers organizations to rapidly identify, vet, and automate as many business and IT processes as possible. Workflow orchestration allows for process automation across many integrated products and prescriptive AI allows learning models to predict what will happen and proactively suggest solutions or auto-remediate.
Finalists:
Guardz AI-Powered Multilayered Cybersecurity Platform
HP Managed Print Service Subscription
Moovila Perfect Project
Thread

Multifunction Printers
Winner: HP Color LaserJet Pro 3000 series
Designed for customers that require high-performance printing in a small footprint, the new Color LaserJet 3000 series is the latest device powered by energy efficient TerraJet toner technology, enabling sharper colors and fast print speeds for growing businesses. The series introduces both a single-function and multifunction devices for all the varying print needs.
Finalists:
Epson SureColor T5770DM 36-inch Large-Format Multifunction CAD/Technical Printer

Networking – Enterprise
Winner: Nile Access Service
Nile Access Service delivers campus wired and wireless LAN as a cloud-native service, powered by a new approach to enterprise AI networking that is within reach for all businesses, whether they have five people or 50,000.
This model combines cloud-native software delivery, AI and automation, zero trust networking security, and custom-built wired, wireless, and sensor network infrastructure in an “as-a-Service” offering. Unlike legacy Network-as-a-Service products, Nile Access Service was built from the ground up with powerful AI applications to automate and orchestrate traditionally manual network operations.
It offers a standardized system design, a single data store, and an integrated software stack to deliver guaranteed performance, coverage, capacity, and availability for wired and wireless LAN connectivity.
Finalists:
Aryaka Unified SASE-as-a-Service
ExtremeCloud SD-WAN
F5 rSeries r12900-DS
Meter DNS Security

Networking – SMB
Winner: Aryaka Unified SASE-as-a-Service
Aryaka’s Unified SASE-as-a-Service leverges four design elements: Aryaka OnePass Architecture, which enables distributed policy enforcement through a distributed data plane, unified control plane and single management pane; Aryaka Zero Trust WAN, which traverses Aryaka’s global private network backbone in over 100 countries; comprehensive networking, security and observability, including the Aryaka SmartSecure next-generation firewall with secure web gateway, anti-malware and intrusion prevention system; and flexible delivery that allows businesses to choose their preferred delivery (Aryaka or third-party) and implementation (managed, co-managed or self-managed).
Customer benefits include reduced network attack surface and risk with integrated network security, and cost-effective network performance, security and operations due to “as a service” economics, flexibility and simplicity.
Finalists:
Zyxel Networks XMG1930-30HP 24-Port 2.5G Multi-Gig Lite-L3 Smart Managed PoE++/PoE+ Switch with 6 10G Uplink

Networking – Wireless
Winner: Zyxel Networks WBE660S BE22000 WiFi 7 Triple-Radio NebulaFlex Pro Access Point
Zyxel Networks says the WBE660S BE22000 WiFi 7 Triple-Radio NebulaFlex Pro Access Point is the first WiFi 7 access point with a Smart Antenna for MSPs and SMBs. WBE660S combines the most advanced Wi-Fi standard with the most advanced antenna technology to deliver an outstanding Wi-Fi experience in high-density environments such as offices, classrooms, and airports.
While Smart Antenna technology intelligently shapes antenna patterns to mitigate interference, Zyxel’s exclusive RF-first design incorporates Advanced RF Filter and Advanced Cellular Coexistence technologies to minimize interference from adjacent Wi-Fi channels and 4G/5G mobile networks. The enterprise-grade WiFi 7 Access Point delivers speeds up to five times faster than WiFi 6/6E solutions, providing seamless, latency-free connectivity to optimize high-bandwidth applications.
Finalists:
Cisco Spaces (“AP Auto Locate” feature)
Fortinet FortiAP-441K

Power Protection and Management
Winner: CyberPower Smart App Sinewave Lithium UPS Series (PRL1500RT2UC and PRL3000RT2UC)
The Smart App Sinewave Lithium UPS series is the next generation of cloud-enabled UPS systems for powering and protecting corporate, networking, and telecom applications. Lithium battery backup technology translates to lighter weight, longer run times, and a product life of up to eight-to-10 years. Integrated PowerPanel Cloud technology makes it easy to monitor power status of the UPS and connected equipment from anywhere there is an internet connection.
Finalists:
Eaton 9PX 6kVA lithium-ion UPS
Schneider Electric EcoStruxure IT

SD-WAN
Winner: Zscaler Zero Trust SD-WAN (SASE)
Zscaler Zero Trust SASE builds on the industry’s leading AI-powered security service edge (SSE) platform with a fresh approach to SD-WAN that securely and reliably connects users, locations, and cloud services via the Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange. Zero Trust SASE provides least-privileged access for users, devices, workloads, and business partners in managed offices, eliminating the need for complex and costly network-based security that fails to prevent security breaches. Remote workers, who are already cared for with the Zscaler Client Connector on their devices, represent only a fraction of a customers’ total attack surface. Zscaler SASE adds Zero Trust SD-WAN access through a virtual or physical gateway for workloads, IoT/OT devices and business partners at managed locations.
Finalists:
FortiGate Rugged 70G with 5G Dual Modem, powered by Fortinet Secure SD-WAN

Security: Cloud and Application Security
Winner: Snyk AppRisk
Snyk AppRisk is an Application Security Posture Management (ASPM) solution that empowers AppSec managers by minimizing risk and improving developer productivity. Snyk AppRisk delivers automated application asset discovery, tailored security controls and risk-based prioritization.
The ASPM solution allows for seamless collaboration between developer and security teams to better address cybersecurity challenges, while also providing C-Suite stakeholders with visibility into software supply chain risk posture.
Snyk AppRisk also complements the Snyk Developer Security Platform by providing a holistic, developer-first ASPM workbench that aims to improve the overall security posture for developers so they can focus on fixes that reduce the most critical business risks.
Finalists:
Cisco Multicloud Defense
CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security
Lacework Code Security
Orca Cloud Security Platform (CNAPP)
Palo Alto Networks Prisma Cloud (Darwin Launch)
Qualys TotalCloud2.0
Tenable Cloud Security

Security: Data Security
Winner: Deep Instinct Prevention for Storage
Deep Instinct Prevention for Storage (DPS) applies a prevention-first approach to cybersecurity, filling gaps in data security using a deep learning framework. Files added or changed in NAS or cloud storage environments, even large volumes, are scanned in real time without impacting system performance. Malicious files are eliminated or quarantined, pre-execution, before harm can be done.
DPS provides a holistic approach to storage security across on-premises and public clouds. This is crucial as the amount of data being stored in these environments grows exponentially. While cloud vendors protect the storage itself, they do not ensure the integrity or safety of files stored as DPS does.
Finalists:
BigID AI Remediation Recommendations
Forcepoint ONE Data Security
Sentra’s LLM-powered classification engine

Security: Email and Web Security
Winner: Abnormal Security QR Code Detector
Abnormal Security now provides capabilities to detect QR codes in emails and parse their corresponding links, strengthening protection against evolving email attacks.
The new models are designed to determine when an email contains a QR code within the body of the email or in image/PDF attachments. The platform parses the QR code’s embedded link and employs NLP to detect topics, tone, and sentiment commonly associated with social engineering attacks, including urgency and formality.
These extracted signals are combined with Abnormal’s behavioral analysis across the broader email and SaaS environment. The platform already analyzes tens of thousands of signals across these environments to understand normal business relationships and communication patterns, allowing it to pinpoint unusual (malicious) behavior.
Finalists:
Menlo Security Secure Cloud Browser
SlashNext Email+ Security
Trustifi Security Awareness module

Security: Endpoint Security
Winner: Sophos Intercept X
Sophos Intercept X defends more than 300,000 organizations worldwide against advanced attacks with anti-ransomware, anti-exploitation, behavioral analysis, and other innovative technologies. It provides multiple layers of security for unparalleled protection against known and unknown threats.
New context-sensitive defenses in Intercept X are revolutionizing endpoint security. Defenses include Critical Attack Warning, launched in September 2023, which detects and notifies organizations of high-impact indicators of in-progress attacks, and Adaptive Attack Protection, also introduced in 2023, which automatically disrupts in-progress attacks, giving defenders valuable time to respond.
Intercept X is powered by threat intelligence from Sophos X-Ops and is part of the Sophos Adaptive Cybersecurity Ecosystem and shares real-time threat intelligence for improved detection, protection, and response.
Finalists:
Cisco Secure Endpoint
ControlUp Secure DX
ESET Protect Elite
Tanium Converged Endpoint Management (XEM)
WatchGuard Advanced EPDR

Security: Identity Security
Winner: CyberArk Secure Cloud Access
New security controls for CyberArk Secure Cloud Access secure access to every layer of cloud environments, while causing no disruption or change to the way developers and others access cloud services.
New capabilities include the ability to identify IAM misconfiguration risks in multi-cloud environments; context-based, automatic approval workflows for high-risk access to cloud services that can be easily customized to meet governance objectives via no-code identity orchestration and automation capabilities within the CyberArk platform; and integration with IT Service Management and ChatOps to facilitate greater adoption from engineers and allow cloud security teams to quickly and securely approve time-sensitive access requests in service outages.
Finalists:
1Password Enterprise Password Manager
BeyondTrust Identity Security Insights
ConnectWise Access Management
Veza Access Control Platform
Xage Multi-Layer Identity and Access Management

Security: Managed Detection and Response
Winner: CrowdStrike Falcon XDR Platform
The CrowdStrike Falcon XDR platform is a powerful, capable and innovative cybersecurity platform that delivers market-leading security to the endpoint and beyond within organizations of all sizes. Customers are consolidating with CrowdStrike because the AI-native CrowdStrike Falcon XDR platform brings industry-leading EDR outcomes to all key security domains and makes it easy to expand protection beyond the endpoint to defend cloud, mobile, identity and data using the same lightweight agent and command console.
Finalists:
Arctic Wolf Managed Detection and Response
Blackpoint Cyber Dark Web Monitoring
Cisco XDR
Expel Vulnerability Prioritization
Huntress MDR for Microsoft 365
Secureworks Taegis ManagedXDR
Sophos Managed Detection and Response

Security: Network Security – Enterprise
Winner: Palo Alto Networks Strata Cloud Manager
Palo Alto Networks takes a fundamentally different approach with Strata Cloud Manager, an AI-powered Zero Trust management and operations solution. It revolutionizes network security management and operations, proactively preventing network disruptions and strengthening security in real-time across all enforcement points. Security teams can achieve comprehensive visibility and management for all deployments in a single user interface, strengthen security in real-time, and predict and prevent network disruptions.
The target market is enterprises, SMBs and MSSPs with a network security system. Specific use cases include net-new Palo Alto Networks customers that don’t need an on-premises management solution and SASE customers who want to expand or connect to a data center.
Finalists:
Armis Centrix
Cisco Cyber Vision
Fortinet FortiGuard Attack Surface Security Service
Infoblox BloxOne Threat Defense – SOC Insights
SonicWall NSsp Series

Security: Network Security – SMB
Winner: Zyxel Networks USG FLEX 700H Security Firewall Appliance
Zyxel Networks USG FLEX 700H Security Firewall Appliance is a Unified Threat Management (UTM) firewall that delivers 2.5G WAN performance for under $2,000. As multi-gigabit Internet becomes more widely available to SMBs, USG FLEX 700H makes it feasible for businesses to harness that performance while maintaining uncompromised high-speed network security.
The high-performance firewall combines ultra-fast firewall/UTM/VPN throughput, powerful multi-gigabit and PoE+ interfaces, and advanced best-of-breed network security to provide multi-layered protection against cyber threats. It supports enhanced SecuExtender to extend enterprise-grade security to remote networks while providing a 30W PoE power budget option that simplifies deployment of devices such as WiFi 6E access points, IP Cameras, VoIP Phones and 5G routers.

Security: Security Operations Platform
Winner: Palo Alto Networks Cortex XSIAM 2.0
Cortex XSIAM (extended security intelligence and automation management) is the AI-driven security operations platform for the modern SOC, harnessing the power of AI to simplify security operations, stop threats at scale, and accelerate incident remediation. It reduces risk and operational complexity by centralizing multiple products into a single, coherent platform.
XSIAM unifies security operations functions including EDR, XDR, SOAR, ASM, UEBA, TIP, and SIEM. It centralizes all security data and uses machine learning data models designed specifically for security. Organizations can automate data integration, analysis, and response actions, enabling analysts to focus on the incidents that matter and allow them to work on threat hunting and proactive threat intelligence.
Finalists:
Adlumin Ransomware Prevention
Exabeam Threat Center and Exabeam Copilot
Securonix EON for Unified Defense SIEM
Sevco Security
SonicWall Network Security Manager
WatchGuard Cloud

Security: Security Service Edge
Winner: Zscaler Zero Trust SASE
Zscaler Zero Trust SASE builds on the company’s AI-powered security service edge (SSE) platform with a fresh approach to SD-WAN that securely and reliably connects users, locations, and cloud services via the Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange.
Zero Trust SASE provides least-privileged access for users, devices, workloads, and business partners in managed offices, eliminating the need for complex and costly network-based security. Remote workers with the Zscaler Client Connector on their devices represent only a fraction of our customers’ total attack surface. Zscaler SASE adds Zero Trust SD-WAN access through a virtual or physical gateway for workloads, IoT/OT devices and business partners at managed locations, requiring only an internet connection.
Finalists:
Barracuda SecureEdge
Cisco Secure Access
Fortinet FortiSASE
Skyhigh Security Service Edge Portfolio

Storage – Cloud
Winner: Infinidat InfuzeOS, Cloud Edition
InfuzeOS powers Infinidat’s unique software-defined storage (SDS) architecture. It drives the performance, availability, cyber storage resilience, ease of use, and economic benefits of Infinidat storage platforms InfiniBox, InfiniBox SSA, and InfiniGuard. InfuzeOS’ SDS architecture delivers powerful capabilities without dependence on proprietary hardware or components.
InfuzeOS Cloud Edition delivers InfiniBox platform experience on public cloud compute and storage resources. It is functionally equivalent to the on-premises InfuzeOS that enables InfiniBox platforms. Amazon Web Services is the first supported public cloud platform to deploy InfuzeOS Cloud Edition in a single node, allowing customers to deploy a full version of InfuzeOS that resides in their AWS environment. In May support for Microsoft Azure clouds was announced.
Finalists:
Dell APEX Block Storage for Public Cloud
NetApp Google Cloud NetApp Volumes
Titan Cloud Storage, S3-Compatible Cloud Storage

Storage – Enterprise
Winner: Quantum ActiveScale Z200 All-Flash Object Storage
Quantum’s ActiveScale Z200 All-Flash Object Storage with Cold Storage capabilities combines advanced object storage software, high density all-flash servers, and hyperscale tape technology, providing an advanced solution for data lakes and storage clouds with high performance, durability, and storage efficiency.
The Z200 is a scale-out object storage architecture built for the AI era, ‘always available’ access and massive scale – efficiently storing billions of objects from terabytes to exabytes. The Z200 delivers up to 5X greater throughput (GB/s) and up to 9X more transactions (obj/s) to support high throughput ingest and AI pipelines. The solution is intended for organizations that require high-performance analysis, fast data retrieval, and long-term data preservation.
Finalists:
Dell PowerScale (OneFS 9.8 software, F210 & F710 all-flash lineup)
Dell PowerStore 3.6
MinIO Enterprise Object Storage
Nexsan Unity NV6000

Unified Communications and Collaboration – Enterprise
Winner: RingCentral RingCX
RingCX is a native and proprietary AI-first contact center solution that’s simple to use and easy to deploy. Available as a standalone product or integrated with RingCentral’s unified communications platform, RingCX offers omnichannel capabilities across voice and digital in a single pane of glass. RingCX seamlessly connects with leading CRMs and workforce engagement management tools. AI-generated call summaries and conversational analytics turn agents into customer superheroes, freeing them up to handle more complex customer cases.
Built on RingCentral’s secure and reliable global network, RingCX meets compliance standards for complex verticals. RingCX provides smarter customer experiences, with a lower total cost of ownership compared to traditional contact center options.
Finalists:
Bright Pattern AI-Powered Interaction Analytics
Logitect Sight
Zoom AI Companion

Unified Communications and Collaboration – SMB
Winner: Cisco Webex Customer Experience Essentials
Cisco Webex Customer Experience Essentials is an innovative contact center solution that seamlessly integrates calling and contact center functionalities within the Webex App. Designed for both agents and supervisors, it provides essential capabilities without the complexity of advanced solutions. It’s ideal for Webex Calling customers across various sectors such as enterprise help desks, pharmacies, insurance agencies, and healthcare clinics seeking to enhance customer engagement.
At its core, the solution offers easy configuration via Webex Control Hub, real-time and historical data views, agent and queue management, and URL screen pops for efficient customer interaction. It empowers customer engagement teams beyond traditional contact centers, removing communication barriers and providing comprehensive analytics for data-driven decision-making.
Finalists:
8×8’s Proactive Outreach and Video Elevation for 8×8 Contact Center
Intermedia Spark AI
Nimble CRM Webforms

Virtualization/Virtual Desktop Infrastructure
Winner: Parallels DaaS
Parallels DaaS launched January 30, 2024, as a cloud-native solution for Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS), granting users secure and immediate access to their virtual desktops and applications. Its unique architecture fortifies security and functionality; simplifies the administrative complexities of deploying, configuring, and maintaining a cloud environment; and offers an exceptional user experience accessible from any device with a modern HTML5-based web browser.
Administrators connect their company’s Microsoft Azure subscription to host resources. They are then provided with an intuitive, simple, modern Web-based management portal for all Parallels DaaS configuration and management. At a glance they can see registered users, published resources, running virtual machines, and active user sessions, amongst other things.
Finalists:
Nerdio Manager for Enterprise: Unified Application Management (UAM)