Jay McBain

Canalys

Canalys is the world's leading analyst firm with a distinct focus on channels, partnerships, alliances, and ecosystems. The 26-year-old market analysis firm strives to guide clients on the  technology industry's future and to think beyond the business models of the past - delivering smart, timely, and actionable market insights to IT, channel and service provider professionals. 

In addition to research, the Canalys Forums deliver the industry's largest and most valuable channels events in North America, EMEA, APAC, and LATAM. The firm also offers Candefero, a powerful online channel community delivering a unique blend of real-time feedback, sentiment trackers, polls, and opinion surveys for thousands of technology vendors and distributors.

Chief Analyst - Channels, Partnerships & Ecosystems

Forrester

Forrester is an idea company, where smart, motivated, curious people bring a diversity of opinions and the courage of their convictions to collaborate on ideas that change the course of business. Most of all, bring a point of view. Working with innovative clients at emerging and established brands around the world; these are the business and technology leaders who we can inspire and who will inspire us. The Forrester experience is built on a singular, powerful purpose: to challenge thinking and lead change.

Principal Analyst - Channels, Partnerships & Ecosystems

ChannelEyes

Founded in 2011, ChannelEyes is a global software company that is reinventing how vendors drive channel partner sales and loyalty. The SaaS platform includes ChannelCandy, the world’s largest mobile-first product for partners, as well as OPTYX, the first indirect sales workflow product to help sellers with predictive analytics and leverage big data science to drive more sales. 

ChannelEyes has received numerous accolades for its technology including being named a Cool Vendor by Gartner and one of the fastest growing companies in New York’s Capital Region by the Business Review.

Learn more at: http://channeleyes.com/

Chief Executive Officer, Co-Founder

Autotask

Responsible for developing and executing Autotask's strategy for growth into new market opportunities.  Accelerating the growth of an industry leading suite of cloud based software products and building the Channel programs, marketing and sales execution into new markets and communities.

Senior Vice President, Channel Chief

Lenovo

Developed and executed Lenovo's SMB strategy for North and South America.  Designed an innovative product/pricing portfolio and built the promotions and routes to market to grow Lenovo's share in this critical market segment.  Worked closely with key Channel Partners, Distributors, Retail/eTailers as well as consultants, ISVs and influencers.

Channel Chief, Small and Medium Business, Americas

Channel and sales leadership for SMB segment in US and Canada.  Developed and implemented new field and call centre coverage strategy.  Developed best of breed Dashboard, Product Configurator and coverage strategies, growing revenue by 68% year over year.

North American Channel Sales Leader (Business Unit Executive)

IBM Canada

Invented a new approach to effectively cover “whitespace”. The Knowledge Worker Index, now in use world-wide with IBM in several product divisions, features a scoring algorithm to analyze industry, geography, buying behaviour, and employee size and proactively report sales coverage opportunities

National Sales Manager, SMB, Public Sector and Telesales

Developed a new coverage model for IBM Canada's Small and Medium business unit using innovative scoring techniques as well as geographic mash-ups.  Refined operational dashboards for PC business unit.  Built a product regression model to drive deeper understanding of product/price cells by volume.  Designed a new data analytics model providing 11 different pivots to define growth opportunities across 64,000 customers in Canada.

National Manager of Strategy and Operations

Grew PC sales by over 700% in 4 years achieving a 63% market share in Territory.  Promoted to Western Canada Team Lead in 1999.  Highlights included largest Mobile roll-out in Canadian history as well as largest Government PC roll-out.

Senior Sales Representative and Western Canada Team Lead

Pratt & Whitney

Programming in C, C++, COBOL, Visual Basic and other Scripting languages

Software Programmer (Co-op)

Jay McBain is an accomplished speaker, author and innovator in the IT industry. Named Channel Influencer of the Year by Channel Partners Magazine, Top 40 Under Forty by the Business Review, Channel A-List by CRN, Top 8 Thought Leader by Channel Marketing Journal, Top 20 Visionary by ChannelPro, Top 25 Newsmaker by CDN Magazine, Top 50 Channel Influencer by Penton, Top 100 Most Respected Thought Leader by VSR Magazine, Global Power 150 by SMB Magazine, and Top 250 Managed Services Executives by MSPmentor. 

Jay is often sought out for keynotes, thought leadership and future industry guidance. He has spent his 30-year career in various executive channel sales, marketing, strategy roles within IBM, Lenovo, Autotask, ChannelEyes, Forrester, and now Canalys. Jay is the chief analyst for global channels at Canalys - the world's leading analyst firm with a distinct focus on channels, partnerships, alliances, and ecosystems.

Jay has led several communities at CompTIA including Vendor Advisory Council, Managed Services Community, Advancing Women in Tech and Emerging Tech. He is also a board member of Channel Partners, Channel Vanguard Council, Ziff Davis Leadership Council, and CRN Channel Intelligence Council.

As a futurist, and long standing member of the World Future Society, Jay is a recognized expert in the future of channels, alliances, partnering ecosystems and the study of emerging go-to-market models. An avid blogger, community, and social media expert, he has developed an innovative channel tech stack highlighting the importance of channel data and automation.

Jay has lived in Calgary, Winnipeg, Toronto, Raleigh, Albany & Boynton Beach. He actively gives back to the community and been on the board of the United Way, National Cristina Foundation, and Junior Achievement.

Visit his blogs about the IT industry, channel management, and some of his own life sprinkled in:
https://canalys.com/insights
http://jaymcbain.com/

Chief Analyst

New research alert! 

Excited to work with the amazing Jessica C. Davis on this deep-dive analysis of the Top 40 managed services provider (MSP) events this year. With ConnectWise IT Nation celebrating its 21st year this week, what perfect timing!

I have posted numerous times before about how partner influence in the $608 billion managed services industry (of which 40% is SMB) is strongly driven by events.

We have watched numerous vendor unicorns ($1 billion valuation) form over the past 15 years by using a grassroots, community-driven event strategy with MSPs. A few billionaires have been created as well!

We tracked every vendor sponsor of these 40 events - from platinum-level with 50x50 booths sponsoring the big parties down to the bronze-level at the back of the expo floor. We then applied the pricing tiers from the event media kits to quantify investment level back to the revenue of each of the thousands of vendors.

Vendors fell broadly into three categories:

--> Vendors who sponsored nearly every event (Ubiquitous Sponsors)

--> Vendors who “punched above their weight” with outsized investment relative to company size (MSP-First Investors)

--> Vendors that demonstrated the strongest overall commitment to MSP communities (Event Investment Leaders)

We also created a list of the seven who made it to the top of all three lists—our Triple Crown MSP Event Champions.

This gives us a predictive ability to think about tomorrow's unicorns and billionaires. Hint: Rewst, CyberQP, CyberFOX, FlexPoint, Monjur, Mailprotector, and Galactic Advisors.

We also assessed long-standing events and compared them to some newer entrants that have quickly gained prominence. With 352 events to choose from, vendors need clear and quantifiable ROI estimates on where (and how much) to invest in 2026.

Vendors who treat MSP events as strategic investments in community influence rather than line-item marketing spend will set the standard for the MSP 3.0 era.

Chief Analyst - Channels, Partnerships & Ecosystems - Omdia - Channel Influencer of the Year

Today finds me in the happiest place on earth - Orlando - for the Tanium Global Partner Summit.

Tanium is a modern converged endpoint management (XEM) platform built for real-time visibility, control, and remediation across millions of endpoints — servers, desktops, cloud workloads, and more. 

Founded in 2007, and now at 2,000 employees strong, it is trusted by some of the world’s largest enterprises, governments, and partners for its speed, scalability, and unified design — replacing siloed tools for patching, security, compliance, and asset management in one platform.

The opportunity for partners is unfolding fast. 

With hybrid workforce models and proliferating remote devices, the attack surface has exploded. Traditional tools struggle to keep up, creating an urgent demand for platforms like Tanium that can detect and respond in seconds, not days. 

Tanium’s adoption of SBOM (Software Bill of Materials) and real-time threat hunting makes it especially relevant amid increasing software supply chain attacks given the growth of agentic AI.

Jay McBain is an accomplished speaker, author and innovator in the IT industry. Named 2021 Channel Influencer of the Year by Channel Partners Magazine, Top 40 Under Forty by the Business Review, Channel A-List by CRN, Top 8 Thought Leader by Channel Marketing Journal, Top 20 Visionary by ChannelPro, Top 25 Newsmaker by CDN Magazine, Top 50 Channel Influencer by Penton, Top 100 Most Respected Thought Leader by VSR Magazine, Global Power 150 by SMB Magazine, and Top 250 Managed Services Executives by MSPmentor. 

Jay is often sought out for keynotes, thought leadership and future industry guidance. He has spent his 29 year career in various executive channel sales, marketing, strategy roles within IBM, Lenovo, Autotask, ChannelEyes, Forrester, and now Canalys. Jay is the chief analyst for global channels at Canalys - the world's leading analyst firm with a distinct focus on channels, partnerships, alliances, and ecosystems.

Jay has led several communities at CompTIA including Vendor Advisory Council, Managed Services Community, Advancing Women in Tech and Emerging Tech. He is also a board member of Channel Partners, Channel Vanguard Council, Ziff Davis Leadership Council, and CRN Channel Intelligence Council.

As a futurist, and long standing member of the World Future Society, Jay is a recognized expert in the future of channels, alliances, partnering ecosystems and the study of emerging go-to-market models. An avid blogger, community, and social media expert, he has developed an innovative channel tech stack highlighting the importance of channel data and automation.

Jay has lived in Calgary, Winnipeg, Toronto, Raleigh, Albany & Boynton Beach. He actively gives back to the community and been on the board of the United Way, National Cristina Organization and Junior Achievement.

Visit his blogs about the IT industry, channel management, and some of his own life sprinkled in:
https://canalys.com/insights
http://jaymcbain.com/

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