Yes, it's hard to believe, but another working week is nearly done, and while the days may be getting shorter, there's still plenty of action in the Kiwi channel.

With Dell EMC World conference hitting the stage in Las Vegas, we heard about the company's refreshed portfolio which features an ‘IT transformation' focus,

On the distie front, Exeed has been on the road again with the Best of Breed Hybrid IT show offering up tips on how resellers can maximise the hybrid IT opportunity (stay tuned for more on that next week, for those who couldn't make it along to the event).

Synnex signed an exclusive distribution deal with Avast which will see it rolling out the entire AVG security portfolio in New Zealand – something Synnex ANZ boss Kee Ong says will provide plenty of new opportunities for resellers, including new bundling options and additional revenue streams.

Also signing deals were cyber resilience platform provider UpGuard, with Insentra now the vendor's exclusive service delivery partner locally, providing service and support for the Kiwi channel and Act Today which announced a partnership with software and services provider, Swiftpage, that will see it become the master distributor in New Zealand.

Meanwhile SolNet was also inking a deal – joining the New Zealand Government Web Services Panel and Accenture was making another acquisition snapping up Aussie's The Monkeys and Maud to help build out its design interactive capabilities across Australia and New Zealand.

There was plenty of news for MSPs too, with Continuum serving up a new network management offering, hard on the heels of its new partnership with Auvik Networks, and Kaseya debuting a public cloud management offering for MSPs.

West Unified Communications Randy McGraw gave us the exclusive lowdown on how resellers can capitalise on the latest trends in the unified communications industry, while CompTIA provided their step by step guide to business transformation for the reseller channel, followed by the release of the ANZ channel community's first Channel Industry Roadmap.

On the analyst front Gartner's latest survey revealed ANZ CIOs have a greater focus on digital transformation than their global peers, but budget growth is lagging, while another Gartner survey highlighted that CIOs – and resellers – may have their work cut out for them persuading CEOs to opt for more ‘transformational' technologies, such as blockchain, IoT, AI and robotics, rather than sticking with the conventional. Gartner says evangelising of the DX technologies is required in order for CEOs to move beyond cloud, ERP, CRM and analytics, in order to achieve their ‘aggressive' productivity improvement goals.

451 Research forecast growth in hosting and cloud services spending to outpace total IT spending growth this year, and gave us the lowdown on how the results of its latest survey show specialisation really is important for the channel.

Security continued to be a hot topic for all, with channel focused startup RedLock emerging from stealth with public cloud security offerings, Menlo Security's global team snapping up two Stevie awards, and news that cyber attacks on governments have doubled in the past year, with IoT also causing concern as both a threat and source of attack.

And with that, have a safe and secure weekend, and we'll see you back here next week for more adventures in Channel-land. (And yes, that is a purely gratuitous puppy pic to round out the week.)