Today is Monday, March 2, 2026. Welcome to In Case You Missed It, our weekly five-minute rundown of important channel news stories that might have flown under the radar last week.

In this edition:

Hello and welcome to In Case You Missed It from ChannelBuzz.ca, your Monday morning recap where we catch you up on some of the channel news and trend headlines you may have missed in the last week. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca. Today is Monday, March 2, 2026. Let’s get your week started right.

This week, the IT channel is being forced to confront an uncomfortable reality. Global components shortages and memory price spikes are fundamentally reshaping how hardware deals are negotiated and fulfilled, and vendors are already updating partner policies as they try to cope.

At the center of the storm is a note from Cisco Systems to partners, which was obtained by CRN, in which Cisco says it’ll adjust partner contract terms in response to rapidly rising memory costs and supply volatility. The company now reserves the right to cancel compute orders up to 45 days prior to shipment and to adjust pricing between order and shipment date if component costs, tariffs, or other external factors shift dramatically. That’s a significant departure from the traditional price protection norms.

And this isn’t isolated. Executives from major distributors told CRN that memory and storage shortages, particularly DRAM and SSDs, are pushing prices up and tightening supplies across servers, storage, and PC portfolios. Memory prices are reported to have doubled year over year in early 2026, and are expected to continue rising, leading many distributors to shorten their own validities and revisit backlog pricing with vendors. Vendors themselves are directly advising partners of pricing shifts too. Lenovo has warned partners that select PC and server products will see price hikes in March unless orders are placed and shipped promptly, reflecting those costs.

And hardware availability is also tightening in real terms. For example, Western Digital says its entire 2026 hard drive production capacity is already spoken for, with most allocations locked up in long-term agreements with hyperscale cloud and AI customers, a trend that could push prices higher and leave less inventory for channel projects.

As memory, storage, and other components become harder to source and pricier to procure, partners may face shortened quote windows, less pricing certainty, and project timing risk, compelling MSPs and VARs to rethink their own quoting strategies, accelerate their sales cycles, and build supply chain agility into their roadmaps. Good luck out there.

Also worth noting, Everpure, the company formerly known as Pure Storage, has completed a major strategic evolution, rebranding itself to signal a transition from traditional storage vendor to a broader AI-ready data management platform and announcing changes that partners should really pay attention to. The name change, which takes effect on the New York Stock Exchange March 5, reflects the company’s push into enterprise data orchestration and intelligence beyond simply shipping storage hardware and arrays.

Central to this transformation is Everpure’s planned acquisition of data intelligence firm 1touch, a move designed to bring automated data discovery, classification, and semantic enrichment capabilities into its portfolio. This expands the enterprise data cloud vision, equipping enterprises to make data inherently AI-ready and more valuable across hybrid environments.

Alongside that rebrand, Everpure has updated its partner engagement model with a new tiering structure that gives MSPs, resellers, and distributors clearer pathways to profitability and growth, reflecting the broader mission of the company going forward. Recent results show that the demand for data management and subscription services are driving double-digit growth, the company says, underscoring why partners should lean into Everpure’s evolving platform play. For channel pros, the message is that Everpure sees partners as critical to selling data-centric solutions in the AI era and is aligning its incentives and program structure accordingly.

Up next, WatchGuard is positioning its latest platform updates as a way for MSPs to deliver what it calls enterprise-grade security to small and mid-sized customers, without the complexity typically associated with large enterprise tools. The company says the enhancements are focused on unifying endpoint, network, identity, and MDR capabilities into a single manageable platform designed for service providers.

Key to the message is simplification. WatchGuard is emphasizing centralized management, automated threat response, and bundled security services that allow MSPs to deploy advanced protection like zero-trust network access, AI-driven threat detection, and 24/7 monitoring at scale and under predictable pricing models. For MSPs, the pitch is that this closes a long-standing gap, giving smaller customers access to security capabilities that more rival enterprise deployments, while still fitting MSP operational and margin requirements. WatchGuard argues that as threats become more sophisticated, the ability to offer enterprise-grade outcomes without enterprise-grade overhead is becoming a baseline expectation rather than a premium add-on.

And speaking of more sophisticated threats to bring this week’s roundup home, new threat research from Amazon Web Services adding to the evidence that AI is actively changing how attacks are carried out, not just how they’re defended against. AWS researchers report seeing threat actors use AI-assisted techniques to more quickly identify and exploit vulnerabilities in perimeter devices, including Fortinet FortiGate firewalls, reducing the time between disclosure and real-world exploitation.

The finding reinforces a growing concern for solution providers. Attackers are using AI to scale reconnaissance, speed up exploit development, and adapt attacks faster than traditional defenses expect. For MSPs and VARs, the implication is clear. Staying ahead now requires faster patching cycles, continuous monitoring, and security platforms that assume AI-accelerated threats are the norm and not an edge case.

Those are some of the things we were paying attention to last week. This week on the podcast, expect to hear how Citrix is thinking of partners as it hands off more of its channel management to Arrow Electronics, a look at the role of identity in taming shadow AI, and how startup Lexful is aiming to redefine how MSPs think about documentation. I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca. Have a great week!