Video: A Look Back On The Channel In 2024 With Channel Insider

hey Channel insiders happy 2025 I'm your host Katie boso and this is channel Insider partner POV we're doing things a little bit different today I want to jump right in and sort of get into the subject matter because we're talking about predictions and reviewing 2024 and how that's going to impact 2025 so uh to do that I'd like to introduce two very special people that you know a lot about if you're keeping up with Channel Insider but you don't often hear or you don't often see them so to speak so I'd like to introduce the two members of our editorial team who are on the ball every day reporting on the stories that really impact the channel and bringing the news to you I'd first like to introduce our managing editor of Channel Insider Victoria Duran welcome Victoria thanks I I watch all of these and we talk all the time but being a little different so thanks for than for talking me into it I guess you got it I'm very happy that you do watch these so thank you for being a supporter of this series we always appreciate that additionally I'd like to introduce our writer Jordan Smith welcome Jordan hi Katie excited to be here thanks for having us today yeah thank you so much A lot has happened so I'll Dive Right In and first ask what news stories or events stood out to each of you the most in in 2024 and of course why I'm really looking for that uh you know white whale of your year what happened that you saw where you go that really stuck out to me as how I'll remember 2024 Victoria why don't we start with you yeah sure I mean obviously a not a quiet year for for the channel or for Tech I think all go was something that didn't technically happen within 24 but I think the the ramifications of it did and that would be broad C's acquisition of VMware again Tech teally a 2023 event but I think the maybe aftermath is too strong a word but the kind of what comes next of something like that happening with two major vendors in our space was felt pretty heavily throughout this year and I think there's there's the kind of obvious Tech angle to that right of if Partners can no longer service VMware efficiently where do they go and who are they utilizing and the the vendors who have stepped up into that void a bit and kind of made a mark in in calling themselves a VMware Al alternative for those who need it and likewise for the partners who have stayed and who are still you know on the VMware train and and touting this is a great opportunity for them and continue to stick by now broadcom I think is is just a great indicator of where solution provider and other reseller Partners really matter to their customers right how businesses were able to either find another route or continue to be serviced with minimized downtime and and that's because the Channel's able to to be agile when it needs to be and be able to kind of bounce back when something like this occurs and I think also now for the foreseeable future any major acquisition news is going to be is this the VMware of XYZ year so I think just on that alone it's something that's probably not going away anytime soon and and it was for me one of the top stories of the year I will absolutely comment on how I agree with you that while this was technically a 2023 story I remember following Halloween of 2023 it was like that holiday and then everybody wanted to know what was going on with the actual acquisition closing because it had been kind of dragged out for over a year so you don't have to use the word aftermath but I will certainly use the word after math when it comes to what happened after the VM where the the acquisition of vmw by broadcom I would actually use the word Fallout because I think that considering the channel angle of it and you have all of these solution providers who depends so heavily on VMware they suddenly were left scrambling having to find an alternative partner for something that is baked into everything that they do at their own businesses moving on to you Jordan I'd really like to hear your thoughts what stood out to you is probably the biggest event or news story in 2024 yeah I was a late Joiner to the channel this year so it was a lot of uh looking back and seeing what had happened over the past year the biggest story that I ended up covering this year was the kerasoft raid on their headquarters and the sap investigation for those who don't remember the doj has been looking into sap for price fixing and government contracts and it is centered around about $2 billion worth of sap Tech purchased by the US government since 2014 so this has been kind of a long time coming um over the course of 10 years this investigation has been going on uh kerasoft um meanwhile had rest in Virginia headquarters rated by the FBI not a very fun morning for them over there but they are a major distributor of tech products two government agencies uh they have been receiving more than 600 Federal contracts for sap Tech um and this was one of the first major events that I covered in the channel I thought it was a key event in the year especially the latter portion of the year because I think it's just a reminder of having compliance with regulations um you have to stay on top of that sort of thing um and just as a reminder for uh companies in the channel I think it served as kind of informing them again that it'll be harder to serve your customers and create value for your business under the lens of scrutiny um this is something that people are just going to want to avoid going forward and it impacts a whole bunch of other intangible things within your company um employee morale trust in your organization uh these sort of things just have massive Ripple effects your reputation as a company is ever everything more so than anything else that you do more so than your wins your failures or the way that the public and that the industry can scrutinize you can probably hurt you more than some of the best most amazing stuff that you've done as a company so I I will be looking forward to seeing how they recover from that in 2025 um if they do for me if I can weigh in on this subject I think the new story that really defined the year for me was the crowd driven Microsoft outage that literally grounded flights halted ability to call 911 did so much let's let's call it damage cuz it was around the world in a single day for it to happen and for us to all say oh my gosh what attack was this and then to find out that it was essentially a glitch it was a faulty update sent to the colel of these computers that utilized crowd strike with Microsoft on them was a really scary thing to one I think get our minds around that something like this could happen when a mistake happen that there were no redundancies in place this literally was a perfect storm of a situation that just brought everything to a screeching halt two to try to explain this to customers must have been so difficult for these Channel providers but this particular event it wasn't necessarily the actual moment that that all happened that is why it sticks out to me as a defining moment this event showed me that there is a lack of knowledge and understanding within our federal government when it comes to information technology and cyber security and the the technology surrounding it overall uh the reason I say this is because during the Congressional Hearing in September in which crowd strike testified before the United States House Homeland Security subcommittee on cyber security and infrastructure protection I was surprised by the overall lack of knowledge and understanding most of the representatives seem to have about how cyber security updates from crowd strike or really any software that is updated via the colonel for that matter actually happens yes I'm certainly no expert on that and yes I would venture to say that this was probably the first time the general public actually learned about what the curle is inside of our computers but we aren't the ones who are a part of a national subcommittee making Federal level decisions on cyber security at one point during that hearing Congressman Andrew Garbarino as Adam Myers uh the senior vice president of counter adversary operations for crowd strike why were federal agencies impacted by this outage and the answer to that is simply because you use Microsoft on those computers your software is still a commercial product that is used by public and private companies and civilians around the world it's not a closed system so this really detailed to me uh that they don't know that they don't really understand that side of it and that really ization was unsettling for me you can actually go to youtube.com/ Chanel inssider newws and Trends to check out the under seven minute version that we have of that Congressional hearing to kind of catch up on what I mean about this uh we put all the key points in there for you to be able to make your own decision about that and how you feel about it but I'm really looking forward to seeing how that is going to impact the federal government's decisions moving forward in 2025 but let's move on to the next question I'd love to talk about the winners this year uh and I use that term very Loosely because I don't necessarily think that there have to be any losers for there to be winners I'm talking about the companies that is that stood out and Rose above the other ones when it comes to whether it be staying top of mind being extremely in front of our faces when it comes to either the media or just great technology that they used or the ones who were able to capitalize on other situations that happened within the channel and within the IT industry at large so Jordan why don't you kick us off in this one are there any tech companies or even solution providers that you see as winners this year and why or why not speaking of staying in front of your face for the entire year it's hard to be a loser when you're one of the largest cloud providers in the world but AWS had a pretty good 2024 they had a ton of new companies join the AWS Marketplace which is huge for them and also huge for the um the companies that are joining they're able to get their products more efficiently in front of more customers um in order for them to grow they also announced several new Partnerships for AI and Cloud um Innovation they grew with their independent software vendor accelerate program um which is another uh initiative by them to help companies of all different sizes be able to sell their wear sort to speak so yeah AWS they have a ton of new initiatives that they're going to be just ready to go in 2025 they're going to continue growing we have a ton of AWS information ready to go for you to check out on channel insider.com as well so go ahead and check that out the plugs continue yes AWS definitely had quite a a banner year I even like to think about their their investment in anthropic which is a huge competitor to open AI so AWS very interesting to see what they do there uh Victoria for you what company uh was a winner to you in 2024 so not to harp on on what you just articulated so well Katie and and not to maybe be a bit reversed in in some of your thinking but I'm actually going to name crowd strike my winner of the Year interesting obviously the outage was a huge problem I'm certainly not saying that that was a winning moment for anybody involved but I think the way that you've seen crowd strike really bounce back from that one moment in July they had an incredible strong Q3 and incredibly strong what's looking to be Q4 um they have not had a lot of partner turnover they've not had a lot of Partners come out and say that that turned them off I think in part because by many accounts they seem to have handled that very transparently very openly they pushed updates as soon as they could they seem to have a strong graphs technically very quickly on what went wrong and what they needed to fix I don't think they're looking down at 2025 as a real problem of a year for themselves I mean they've been in great Leagues with AWS with other partners they have great SMB programs for providers who are focused in that space and I think they're continuing to make a lot of ground um and keeping themselves front and center for all the right reasons and not necessarily for Global outages and delays uh that happened in in a few days of one month of the year so I think even with the the bad moments that they had I think they came out and ended up finishing really strong in 24 I think that says a lot about uh rip reputation and when we talk about reputational damage I think it also I should include it it matters how you step up afterwards when things go wrong how are you responding so I I agree with you when you put it in that light I think it's really important to consider how crowd strike was able to respond to something that happened um again this wasn't a Cyber attack that forced that that shutdown so I think it's important to consider that they did respond to their their mistake very quickly um and there as you know Victoria their their Partners were a big part of that when it comes to thinking about Winners in 2024 for me what comes to mind is scale Computing if not for anything else but the fact that they absolutely crushed the marketing opportunity given to them when broadcom acquired VMware and announced that they would have an invitation only partner program VMware or scale Computing that is literally called themselves the VMware alternative and put those words next to their logo and name across all of their marketing in 2024 and that effectively sent a a war cry to the rest of the channel that said hey were you affected by this acquisition are you no longer allowed to be a part of the vmw partner program come to us we have a home for you we will help you grow here at scale Computing and I have never seen that before I I they literally had hats that said the VM were alternative scale Computing and I found that so imp Rive they capitalized on the broadcom acquisition of VMware like no one else I've ever seen and from what I can tell it's paid off for them what surprised each of you this year you know I don't know if this is necessarily A A no one saw this coming but I do have to just say um because we haven't talked about it enough yet the generative AI ongoing hype cycle adoption cycle maturity cycle that happens through the past year I think happened at a speed that I was not necessarily expecting I thought we'd end this year still very much in the kind of early day Glory of this is revolutionary and it's going to change all of our lives and we'd hit 25 really still kind of Basking in that light and I think the way that I kind of look back on the year and remember it by may I was already starting to hear from solution providers from customers even from some vendors and Distributors who were like yeah generative AI tools are great but we're not there yet you know whether that's because the tech isn't quite there yet or we're having trouble finding use cases we're having trouble measuring Roi then there were a few months of real what is this ethically going to mean for people are we going to lose our jobs because of this there was kind of this public cycle push back moment I think we're ending the year with nobody saying they're not using AI but nobody really being able to necessarily Define what it is in a product either it's just it's been very fascinating to watch I wasn't quite in the industry yet when the cloud boom happen so this is kind of I think my first time in real time experiencing the Whiplash of this is the greatest thing ever we don't know how to use it but we feel like if we don't find a way to use it we're really far behind and everything that comes in between those two emotions a great point I think we we haven't heard the last of gen AI but as the year was closing out a gentic AI was really starting to Bubble to the top of here's what we're going to focus on in 2025 Jordan how about you what surprised you this year when you think back on 2024 um yeah I'm going to actually add on to what Victoria said and I'm going to make a a little bit of a movie reference uh 10-year-old movie called draft day I'm sorry for anybody who hasn't seen this I'm going to spoil it a little bit for you here um at the end of the movie the general manager of the Cleveland Browns played by Kevin Cosner he has his draft pick he makes it but you realize that this whole time in his pocket he had written on a Post-It note that said vonte Mac no matter what so no matter what happened throughout the movie all these different transactions all these different incidents they were going to draft this person no matter what and I feel like customers clients they're all going into these Mee meetings with partners and vendors and they have a little piece in the paper in their pocket that says AI no matter what I don't think anybody should be surprised by the widespread spread popularity of AI in the channel um but I think what surpris me most this year is how many people simply want AI without any sort of use cases or implementation plans um speaking to companies that provide AI tools they still mention that they're running into this uh potential problem with customers and partners um and AI is just it's become very popular but everybody knows what AI is they might have it in their pocket already um so what really surprised me was that people just want this technology and they want to be able to utilize it but they haven't made the plans for it yet and in 2025 I think that'll be a big trend is that companies are going to have to start going from the top of the Enterprise down figuring out what this plan is for AI and how they're going to use it otherwise it's going to be a waste of a lot of budgetary dollars and a lot of time and thank you so much we don't talk about AI enough on channel Insider partner POV and I say that very sarcastically I thought you were gonna say that you don't talk about the movie Draft Day and that fun Channel Insider part or POV I think my biggest surprise of 2025 so far is that you were able to relate that movie to the AI conversation so I look forward to talking about this in another year and seeing what else surprises us then moving on from there folks let's really get into to talking about the partners in this situation the solution providers of the it Channel what is one common Trend that you're seeing in the growth and the evolution of partner programs in 2024 and what would you say is impacting it kind of thinking along the lines of where we're seeing what Partners want how is that driving what we're seeing inside of those partner programs that are actually offering them these these business relationships Victoria do you want to get us started yeah sure I think this is maybe a cheat answer but I promise I will make it relevant one of the things that's really stood out to me especially within the last quarter of 2024 is how many vendor companies who did not previously have partner programs and who were not really engaged in the channel and any kind of formalized business approach um started bringing those online throughout the past year and I think what that speaks to is a the fact that more and more companies and more and more technology creators are seeing the value in the it Channel as a real kind of growth strategy and not simply a oh okay yeah we have some msps over in a corner doing something these real kind of targeted ways to bring business to them and through them and also B I think we're starting to see another splintering of the ecosystem where the traditional players are not guaranteed market share just because they've had it in the past and so I think that's stood out to me in 24s maybe solution providers saying hey what else is out there you know and if it's not something that traditionally has had a channel feel or a channel strategy can we get it there can we go to them and say I love your Tech but I have certain needs that you know whether that's multi- tendency whether that's I need better margins whatever that might be I think you're starting to see different kinds of companies um approach that with open arms and so I think 25 is going to be a very interesting year of maybe some of the traditional players and the big names that we're used to seeing just get 80 70% of the share by default maybe you're going to start to lose some of that a little bit and so I'm excited to see then what they do in response to get their to get their Partners back I really like that answer I think that that is very true from what I've seen talking to so many partners out there and I do agree with you I I'm looking forward to seeing how that impacts the power dynamic between vendors and their Partners in 2025 Jordan same question over to you what trend are you noticing within the evolution of those partner programs so one of the common Trends I've seen in the evolution of the partner programs in 2024 is kind of this desire of Partners to gain and leverage expertise to add business value um just kind of going beyond the product focus a little bit the skills Gap is something that's still on a lot of people's minds within the channel so having Partnerships kind of serve in a real way to bridge that Gap has been important and um one of the things I've seen in 2024 um there's also just kind of this symbiotic relationship that can occur and partner programs have really turned in a to a way that companies can learn from one another and bring value beyond the products and service whether that's teaching somebody how to use a solution or just starting from the fact of teaching them how to figure out what they need and how they should Define their use cases and how they should communicate with the rest of the company really a lot of a lot of sharing that goes beyond the product development and the buying and purchasing of services I absolutely agree with that that's a big part of what I'm hearing on channel Insider partner POV from the various msps bars solution providers in general that I'm speaking to is that they really want that support in training and I think especially as the AI conversation continues which it absolutely will and as it evolves we're going to hear more and more about how the partner base needs that support when it comes to that knowledge we don't all come out knowing about Ai and certainly as we've seen over the last two years it's changing it is an Ever growing and evolving conversation where we're talking about AI in different ways imagine just this year from AI to gen AI to now a gentic AI it's a lot going on let's move on here and talk more about what you two have kind of picked up along the way this year are there any lessons whether it's personal to you or just one that you've observed as being valuable in the industry that you take away from 2024 and this question can go in a lot of different directions so I'm curious to hear your answers Victoria why don't we start with you I think one thing that that I kind of constantly come back to and I think this is maybe just by nature of our work a little bit as well but it's just how important people still are right how important human interaction still is even when we talk about tech and I don't even just mean about the the kind of AI conversations that have dominated that conversation but in any case you know there are always human beings at the heart of tech decisions it's one thing to buy a product it's another thing to be able to deploy it for for an employee to use and I think we've seen this come up a lot in security as well that you can have all of the best of breed Solutions you want and if you're end user customer has an employee that's going to click a fishing email every time it can only go so far right so I think what we've kind of come back to in our reporting what I always kind of start every story with is just what are the people at the heart of this conversation how do they matter and how can people learn from people Jordan over to you on that same question when you think about a lesson from 2024 that you've learned either personally or one that you've just kind of observed happening in the industry I'd love to hear about it yeah sort of adjacent to what Victoria was saying as humans still being a central part of everything that happens within the channel I think communication is just a vastly important uh area that a lot of companies have emphasized but a lot of companies still do need to do a little bit of work on I've touched a lot during our conversation here today about um developing use cases and making sure that there is just this unified approach to adopting new technologies new Services um and that starts with having communication across the entire Enterprise different branches of companies need and offices they need to be sort of in lock step on adopting new technologies from it departments to legal to the Sea Suite these are things that can't be siloed off into different parts of the company because technology is just becoming so pervasive with how we do business and how companies operate you don't have to be an IT company specifically to be involved in this either or to have legal ramifications or anything of that nature so having communication as is just a valuable lesson I think that you can take into not just uh the business world but of course into all of our personal lives really I absolutely agree with that I try to be over communicative probably to a point where both of you have examples of where you go hey Katie maybe stop slacking me at this point we get it we know going on from there Jordan staying with you for this next question you joined us uh middle of the year and this was also your your first entry into the channel you've done a beautiful job but your background was in a different subject so I really want to know what has it been like immersing yourself in this world for the first time and what were your initial thoughts just coming into the channel space compared to how you feel about it now my thoughts over the past few months have definitely been that it is a unique industry my impression of it is that there really are a lot of companies though that um are in the channel and they're solely focused on driving value for their con customers and always thinking about them above all else um I won't say it's altruism because of course this is how companies make money but it really is their load star thinking about what the customer wants from first Sometimes I think we have this vision of Engineers just hooking up gamechanging Tech and seeing what they can Cobble together and then throwing that out into the world and trying to sell it um but really in the channel these solution providers they start with the question of my customer has this issue how can I resolve it for them and all the successful Solutions all the successful products they start from that um that very simple and basic question of course these products can be applied to other companies across different Industries but it really starts with that kind of hand inhand approach that these Channel Partners have established with their customers and and helping them out great point there we are so happy to have you Jordan so I'm very excited to know that you are finding the core uh of this so easily which is the customers at the end of the day so Victoria knowing that you've been working in the channel your entire career so far did anything surprise you or stand out about the industry since joining Channel Insider earlier this year did you learn anything new yeah I mean I think at the risk of sounding like annoyingly cliche there's something you all every day um and what I mean when I say that is I think to Jordan's point so much of the channel if you really drive into it is is about relationships and about who you trust right who customers trust from a partner level who Partners Trust on a vendor level and a distribution level and everything in between I think it's really just about how you show up every day and what you want out of the people around you and the more I get to talk to more of those people from whichever side of the spectrum they're on everyone has a slightly different perspective everyone has a slightly different need slightly different Focus you know I can talk to somebody in the morning who thinks that agentic AI is the final frontier and somebody in the afternoon who really doesn't care frankly about any of it and just wants to know that when they open their laptop every morning their email is going to work and all people need service from both ends of that spectrum and and everywhere in between and so the best days that I get to to work here the days where I just get to talk to a whole bunch of people and and learn from them and absorb them like a sponge um and so it's been great it's been great to kind of sit on that middle of the fence so to speak or middle of the triangle I don't know which shape we're we're using anymore but yeah there's something new every day and the minute you think you have a hold on it there's four new ACR that pop up and you don't know anything anymore so it's uh it's enough to keep you busy for sure it's one of those things where I totally agree with you where you say I think I finally got my finger on the pulse and then all of a sudden it seems to change within one afternoon so here's the fun part guys 2025 predictions let's talk about it what company strategy or technology do you think will take off in 2025 or a completely different prediction that maybe I'm not uh kind of in you for right now let's talk about it let's crack into it Victoria let's start with you there's a million ways you could go with this right I think what I'm focused on is a bit of a prediction to the degree that I can predict anything in Tech um I've heard a lot from Channel Partners from solution providers bars Etc who are really starting to look outside of the big three hyperscalers in terms of what cloud adoption and consumption is going to look like in 25 um I'm not going to sit here and say that you know by the end of the year no one's going to be talking about AWS or Azure or Google Cloud that's certainly not going to be the case but I do think we've seen the wave of cloud and we're starting to see really particular Niche cases come up that companies outside of those big three are filling gaps for and so I'm interested to see how that market starts to shift a little and whether that coincides with this kind of ongoing conversation we're having around hybrid multicloud and whether we're returning to on Prem how AI demand and data demand are going to slot into both of those I think it's going to be a big year for cloud but not in the ways that we've necessarily talked about Cloud up until this point interesting yeah I agree with you and I look forward to seeing where those conversations go Jordan over to you when it comes to your 2025 predictions what's on your mind so for 2025 and this might seem a little bit obvious but I feel like it's worth mentioning is um cyber security I think it's always been important but I think over the next year or so it'll become even more key as regulation start to take shape and all these different um ethical considerations start to take shape when it comes to AI um AI is just going to continue to grow in the Channel people want it people want to use it for their business to automate processes but this will also coincide with the growth in AI used by threat actors to help them with breaches to create certain fishing tools like deep fakes and creating false voice recordings to try to um trick people into getting into your systems and um as I mentioned before AI is more pervasive than ever people know what it is beyond um these scary entities from movies uh they have ai in their pockets they're utilizing it on a day-to-day basis um in a lot of cases and I I think security as it relates to the data management that could go into feeding these um learning models uh detecting AI enhanced breaches will be much more important and also just meeting regulatory standards that will be um starting to develop more and more we're already seeing a little bit of it but um keeping on track of those will be important for the channel going forward and you know I think that's going to lead into compliance being taken much more seriously than it's been in the past where you're not necessarily going to see it hand inhand with cyber security it's going to be its own Standalone priority uh especially knowing that the AI conversation is continuing how is that going to impact the way that uh we do business how is that going to impact the way that customers trust those solution providers and trust those vendors and how are they showing in showing up with that compliance uh so I think we'll we'll see that a lot more too before I share my prediction um I do have to say I don't know if this will happen but because of my observation of what I saw uh at the Congressional hearing for crowd strike I I could Venture a guess to think that this might be something the federal government agencies are considering a bit more but let me let me explain so again the crowd strike outage this year showed how interconnected the government is with these commercial software companies and if they want to avoid future outages they'll either have to work with these existing companies and great minds to come up with a solution or regulate the existing ones more um truly I believe that the great minds uh within technology are working in the private sector and not in the government so I think they're going to have to find a way to work more closely together to protect government operations uh and we'll see how that goes in 2025 additionally uh I think 2025 will be the year of true AI computers because the end of life of Windows 10 could mean a surge of new computers on the market for personal computers and I think the top Hardware companies should capitalize on this with AI enabled computers because we don't have any true ones at the moment and we're wondering where they are uh so I do look forward to hearing more about how computers with that AI technology baked in truly Incorporated directly into the hardware I I look forward to seeing those on the market and hearing how that's going to go and just wrapping up here folks I I also want to talk about some of the companies that we be watching in 2025 whether they touch the channel or whether they don't necessarily do so directly uh I definitely want to hear about the companies that you'll be following closely uh Jordan what's on your mind as far as what's at the top of your your list where you'll be following those companies this year to bring in Full Circle um we'll definitely be keeping track of what's going on with the sap and koft investigation um just want to see see what sort of um I don't want to use the term Fallout from that because that just makes it seem like it's so uh desperate of a situation but it could also just be a learning lesson for both companies uh a Learning lesson for um other companies who are watching this situation unfold um so I want to be keeping track of that and as you mentioned too the AI enabled uh devices that we are going to start to see um keeping track of companies like Intel um with aips and um these these first iterations that we'll start to see we'll we'll see how they impact the channel and how they become more pervasive over the course of 2025 Victoria for you companies are Tech trends that you'll be following this year yeah I I mean I think there's a few too many companies to name specifically but within one Tech Trend that I'll be keeping an eye on and and whoever wants to say that they're playing in the space um I'm interested to see when and where sustainability environmental sustainability goes from a kind of altruistic nice to have thing we talk about to a real kind of practical offering um that solution providers and vendors are working together on for customers I think with an increase in to go back to this conversation compliance and Regulatory needs um supply chain emission conversations and the like I think we're going to see more businesses want to take a tangible step and not just say oh we're sustainable and good for the planet to say that they are but to be able to really start to show some effects of their work and their broader Supply Chain management work um as it relates to ESG guidelines to whether those are federal or state regulations and the light but I I think we're going to start to see that shift towards a A Greener technology and someone's going to have to Define what that means absolutely absolutely I think that there is starting to be a bit of a kind of a muddling when people are using terms then and I I associate it to an extent with greenwashing because I want to see some actual data that shows that you've been able to reduce your carbon footprint if that's what you're telling me you're going to be able to do as far as companies I'll be watching in 2025 Intel Intel is about to rebuild and step into its next chapter whether or not that's a good thing or a failure I don't know yet but I'll be watching I want to know what's going on and what's going to happen with their found plans now that former CEO Pat Ginger uh suddenly retired from the company uh I want to know how they're going to gain share in the AI Market if they do it all and really compete in that space I'm also interested in how they're going to invest in the channel while doing these things after completely gutting their Channel team this year so that's a company I'll be keeping a close eye on another company a little less Channel related but still a massive one to keep an eye on I'll be watching open AI closely because many of the founding members of the company and those brought in with a vision to keep their AI offering safe and secure and be responsible with them have left that team has uh very much dissolved and and not always uh leaving on good terms so this is a company that I think has had such an amazing 2024 by being at the top of all the headlines on everyone's mind uh chat GPT is something that is so um ubiquitous across the AI conversation it's almost the kleenex of that AI conversation so I look forward to seeing uh how they're going to be able to compete and continue that momentum but this could be the year that we see somebody kind of rise up and overtake them so anything could happen it's anybody's guess folks brings us to the end of our time together if we want to get in touch with you in 2025 and be able to talk about the different news that we have going on at our companies or perhaps we want to be interviewed on channel Insider partner POV I don't know uh or we just want to talk about the channel happenings and be able to talk to you about that where can we reach each viw so I'm probably more reachable than I should be most days uh you can always find me on LinkedIn I'm just under my name Victoria durgen um happy to chat there we do also have an email dedicated to getting news tips and submissions right to the CI edit team so feel free to email us together at NewsChannel insider.com and one or the two of us will will be happy to see your message and get the ball rolling if and when it makes sense find me over on LinkedIn you can find me at Jordan Smith uh you might need to add technology advice in that search bar because I have a pretty common name but you should be able to find me and I'm Katy boso you can reach me at katie. boso technologyadvice.com that's our parent company technology advice you can also check out channel insider.com for all the episodes of Channel Insider partner POV and our awesome content on there by Victoria and Jordan head on over to our YouTube page youtube.com/ Chanel inssider news and Trends you can watch all of our editorial content there as well as follow Channel Insider partner POV episodes and if you'd like to reach out to channel Insider to inquire about partner POV how to be a part of it how to be on it you can email me at partner po@ Channel insider.com you can also listen to us across all of your favorite podcast platform forms as well thank you so much it's been an incredible 2024 I'm so excited about 2025

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