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Deep Dive  ·  AVANT  ·  August 2026 Some Parts of the Channel Were Never Going to Be Self-Service I've watched a lot of distribution models get built, rebuilt, and declared obsolete over thirty-plus years in this business — UNIX systems at AT&T Bell Labs, the PC clone wars, LANs going Token Ring to Ethernet to WiFi everywhere, on-prem software becoming SaaS. Every one of those transitions produced a wave of people convinced the old way of selling technology was about to disappear entirely, replaced by something faster and more self-service. And every one of those transitions also proved something else out at the same time: for a meaningful slice of buyers, technology decisions are relationship decisions, not catalog decisions. Someone has to sit across the table, understand what the business actually needs, and stay accountable after the contract is signed. That role never went away. It just kept finding a new form. AVANT is ...

Deep Dive  ·  AppDirect  ·  August 2026 Consolidation Is What a Market Looks Like When It's Maturing I've been in technology long enough to have watched this pattern play out more than once. I was working on UNIX systems at AT&T Bell Labs when the first version of “the internet” was still an internal research network, not a product. I watched the IBM PC clone wars spawn an entire industry — Dell included — out of what looked at the time like commodity chaos. I watched LANs go from Token Ring to Ethernet to the WiFi-everywhere world we now take for granted. I watched on-prem applications become SaaS, and I've spent the years since watching security, backup, and infrastructure follow the same arc. Every one of those transitions had a phase where a handful of companies went on an acquisition run to assemble a full stack faster than they could have built it organically. That phase always looks messy from the outside...

Deep Dive  ·  CloudBlue  ·  August 2026 A White-Label Marketplace Platform Just Changed Owners On August 25, 2025, HostPapa completed its acquisition of CloudBlue from Ingram Micro, folding CloudBlue's commerce, automation, and marketplace technology into HostPapa's existing Hostopia channel-partner division [HostPapa press release, Aug 25, 2025] . If you don't recognize either of those parent-company names, the short version is this: CloudBlue is a white-label platform that lets large resellers, service providers — VARs, MSPs, telcos, distributors, national carriers — run their own branded cloud marketplaces on top of commerce and billing plumbing. For most of the last decade that infrastructure belonged to Ingram Micro, one of the largest technology distributors in the world. Now it belongs to HostPapa, a web-hosting and domain company best known to small businesses, not enterprise telcos. That's a change in scale and ide...

Deep Dive  ·  Pax8  ·  August 2026 Pax8 Stopped Calling Itself a Marketplace At Beyond 2026 — Pax8's annual partner conference, held in Salt Lake City June 7-9 — the company launched something it's calling Managed Intelligence. On paper it reads like a features release: a handful of new dashboards, a partner program, an AI-prompting tool. Read closely, it's a repositioning. Pax8 is telling its MSP base that it isn't just the place you buy Microsoft and Google licenses anymore. It wants to be the layer those MSPs build, sell, and govern AI through. That's a meaningfully different company than the one that built its name on marketplace convenience and billing consolidation. Whether it can hold that position is a separate question from what it actually shipped — and the two get conflated in most of the coverage I've read. This post separates them: what's live today, what's still a roadmap slide, and what an MSP evaluatin...