From the Field

The Channel Partners Conference & Expo keynote lineup just dropped — Amazon Leo, Verizon's Mark Tina, Jay McBain, and a Food Network celebrity. Danny Brunson tells you what's worth your time and what's just a great excuse to expense a Venetian suite.

Everyone in the channel talks about deal registration like it's a partner benefit. It's not. Here's what it actually is, who it's really for, and what to do about it.

Forget the keynotes. Forget the expo floor demos. Here are the real conversations happening in the hallways, the bars, and the taxi lines at Channel Partners 2026.

Danny Brunson just got back from RSAC 2026 in San Francisco. The agentic AI hype was loud. But underneath it, something real is happening — and channel partners need to know how to separate the two.

Microsoft Teams vishing is surging — and it's especially dangerous for MSPs because attackers are pretending to be exactly what you are.

For the first time in years, the federal government's top cybersecurity agencies skipped RSAC 2026. The industry noticed. Nobody on the record will say what it means.

AI agents wiped out $300 billion in SaaS market value in February. Per-seat subscription models are under existential pressure. For MSPs who built their book on SaaS resale and management, this isn't hypothetical — it's already changing the conversations you're having with customers.

The UCX with RingCentral expansion adds AI CCaaS and conversation intelligence to Spectrum's business bundle. If you sell UCaaS or CCaaS to mid-market customers, your carrier is now pitching the same solution.

Amazon's honeypot caught Interlock ransomware exploiting a max-severity Cisco Secure Firewall bug six weeks before Cisco patched it. CISA issued a three-day patch deadline. Your customers are probably still exposed.

D&H Distributing just posted 70% Cloud IaaS growth and added 3,200 new MSP customers in 2025. Their NEXT+ conference in June is the next move. Here's what it actually signals about where distribution is headed.

Front's new partnerships with Avant, Intelisys, Sandler Partners, and Telarus bring a $100M ARR customer ops platform into the agent channel for the first time. The timing is deliberate.

ShinyHunters breached Telus Digital by pulling credentials out of Salesforce Drift support tickets. If your BPO provider touches customer data, this is your wake-up call.

Salesforce launched Agentforce Contact Center at Enterprise Connect and called it an 'iPhone moment.' The CCaaS partners who built their businesses on Salesforce integrations had a different name for it. Danny collected a few of them.

Residual commissions are how channel partners build long-term income. Here is the math, the tradeoffs, and what happens when customers churn.

The Fusion partner program expansion and AI Agent Connect API are Five9's answer to Salesforce, and they're more defensible than they look.

A perfect 10.0 CVSS vulnerability. Active nation-state exploitation. Five-eyes intelligence scramble. And most partners found out from a blog.

Three conferences in five weeks. Your liver, your expense report, and your marriage are all about to be tested. A field guide.

Every vendor at Enterprise Connect claims channel-first. Wildix is the only one that actually means channel-only. Here's what zero direct sales looks like in practice.

They keep dangling the next promotion. You keep believing them. Here's how to tell when loyalty becomes a liability.

The channel was built by people who couldn't stomach corporate. Now private equity is showing up with org charts and KPI dashboards and wondering why everyone's upset.

Happy Valentine's Day. Your carrier loves you so much they sent a SPIFF that expires before you can close anything.

The keynotes are fine. The expo floor is fine. The real conference starts when the badges come off.

Channel conflict isn't a policy failure. It's a feature. And the guy who took my deal probably got a President's Club trip for it.