Best Of Breed Virtual 2020

The Best of Breed (BoB) Virtual Series is designed to meet the evolving needs of the IT channel’s largest, fastest-growing, and most progressive solution provider organizations and the top technology vendors and distributors. Each event in the invitation-only BoB Virtual Series will bring together 50+ attendees from CRN’s elite solution provider lists ─ Solution Provider 500, Tech Elite 250 and Fast Growth 150 ─ to connect and engage in a strategic, highly focused 2 ½ hour online format.

The virtual event will feature what you have come to expect from our BoB conferences, including: empowering CEO interviews, SP 500 solution provider spotlights, economic and market trend sessions, and peer-to-peer networking.

Get all of CRN's coverage of the event here and follow along on Twitter at #BOB20.

IBM President Jim Whitehurst’s 10 Boldest Remarks From Best Of Breed Virtual 2020
“I come from the airline industry,” said Whitehurst. “They say planes don’t have rearview mirrors. If you’re moving forward, it doesn’t matter what’s behind you.”

Antonio Neri’s 10 Boldest Statements From Best Of Breed Virtual 2020
HPE CEO Antonio Neri sounded off on everything from competitors ‘copying’ HPE’s long-standing Everything-as-a-Service strategic initiative to Aruba’s edge computing advantage over rival Cisco and his partner pledge that HPE has been, is and ‘will continue to be a channel-led company.’

Antonio Neri: Ezmeral Eliminates VMware Virtualization Costs, Reduces Opex By 50 Percent
‘We believe with HPE Ezmeral we have the ability to run both the legacy apps and the cloud native apps without paying all that middleware in the virtualization of the infrastructure,’ says HPE CEO Antonio Neri. ‘Ezmeral is able to run both stateful and stateless applications on bare metal solutions, so you don’t have to pay for the cost of virtualizing anything. So you can run the legacy and the container versions of the workloads.’

IBM’s Jim Whitehurst On Why Red Hat Wins Vs. VMware, HPE
Red Hat’s years of experience delivering open source to the enterprise, and the cloud-native methodologies of its OpenShift platform, give the open source leader and parent IBM a leg-up in the rapidly growing hybrid cloud market, Whitehurst says at The Channel Company’s Best of Breed conference.

Former Fed Economist: This Recession Is ‘Unlike Anything We’ve Seen In The Past’
There’s little about the current downturn that resembles past recessions—both in what it looks like and how it will end, says Thomas J. Cunningham, chief economist for the Metro Atlanta Chamber, during CRN’s Best of Breed 2020 conference.

Ingram Micro CFO: Partners Who Used Financing Seeing ‘Outstanding’ Growth
‘We went back and we looked at everyone who used financing in Q2—it doesn’t matter what type— they grew their business by 11 percent,’ says Ingram Micro CFO for the Americas Anthony Mackle.

ePlus CEO Mark Marron: Solution Providers Key To Helping Customers ‘Navigate The Next’
‘I do believe it’s a great time for companies like ePlus [and our peers] to make a difference with technology, especially with customers that are lagging in the IT space, and help them make a forward leap,’ Mark Marron, president and CEO of ePlus, tells attendees of this week’s Best of Breed virtual conference.

IGEL, Pax8: Scale Is Being ‘Redefined’ As Virtual Partner Training Booms
IGEL CEO Jed Ayres and Pax8 Chief Channel Officer Ryan Walsh discuss the influx of partners being trained virtually as channel participation in virtual education skyrockets during COVID-19.