The 10 Biggest News Stories Of 2024

This year’s leading news stories include the ongoing AI wave that’s remaking the IT industry, the impact of several multibillion-dollar acquisitions, the contrasting fortunes of two of the industry’s leading semiconductor companies – and what was likely the biggest IT system failure ever.

AI Technology Highs, IT System Failure Lows

The top news stories this year are a study in contrasts.

At the top of the list is the wave of AI development that exploded in 2023 and continues to remake the IT industry in 2024. IT vendors, solution providers and their customers are all riding that AI tsunami as it promises to make IT – and everyone who uses it – a whole lot smarter.

And yet another major story in 2024 is about how a simple cybersecurity software upgrade triggered a massive number of system failures, disrupting businesses around the world and causing losses that totaled billions of dollars.

Other top stories for this year include the impact of three industry acquisition deals (two completed and one still in progress) with 11-figure price tags. The rapid rise of one industry semiconductor maker and the struggles of another is also a major story, as are transformative moves made by Microsoft and Cisco Systems – two of the most important IT companies for the channel.

And IT company layoffs, while not as widespread as last year, made headlines in 2024 as did a steady stream of ransomware and cyberattacks.

Here’s our look at the top 10 news stories of 2024, starting with No. 10 and counting down to No. 1. Take a look and see if you agree with our choices.

Editors Kyle Alspach, Mark Haranas, O’Ryan Johnson, Dylan Martin, Wade Tyler Millward and Gina Narcisi contributed to this story.

No. 10: Donald Trump Wins Another Term As President Of The United States

On Nov. 5, Donald Trump was elected 47th president of the United States. With his election the IT industry – and the channel – will start off 2025 with a lot of questions and uncertainty about what policies the new administration will pursue in terms of taxes, tariffs, international trade, enforcement of antitrust regulations, subsidies for the U.S. semiconductor industry, and more.

Some see Trump’s election as a positive that will provide the economic foundation for continued success of entrepreneurial channel businesses.

“Donald Trump at his core is a businessman who understands what it takes to make a business successful in this country,” said Bob Venero, CEO of Future Tech Enterprise, No. 76 on the Solution Provider 500, which he started in the basement of his house in 1996. “I see this as a positive shot in the arm for American business and technology entrepreneurs like myself who are going to build the next generation of AI-powered businesses that will fuel American economic growth in the 21st century.”

Trump has long expressed his opposition to government regulations. That could be good news for companies looking to conclude acquisition deals, including Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s pending $14-billion deal to acquire Juniper Networks, which could be facing an antitrust challenge from U.S. regulators.

It could likewise be good news for Google. The U.S. Department of Justice is considering a divestiture of Google’s Android operating system, AdWords ad sales platform and Chrome web browser after a judge ruled the tech giant is a monopoly in the online search and text advertising markets.

Trump has also espoused lowering the corporate tax rate from 21 percent to 15 percent. Corey Kirkendoll, CEO of Plano, Texas-based 5K Technical Services told CRN on election day that the expected tax relief from a Trump administration would help his business.

A 100 percent bonus depreciation provision allowing for deduction of particular capital investments will drop to 50 percent in 2025 and is set to phase out by 2027. Trump wants to keep the bonus depreciation provision and allow research and development tax breaks in the year the business incurs the expenses instead of amortizing the cost over a period of years, according to an October report from Kiplinger.

But Trump has also indicated that he intends to take a hard line on international trade, including implementing tariffs on goods coming in from China, Canada, Mexico and the European Union. That could disrupt business for many IT companies who manufacture products overseas, buy components from suppliers outside of the U.S., and – if other countries retaliate by implementing tariffs on U.S. goods – for IT companies that sell their products to international customers.

No. 9: Aftershocks Of Broadcom’s $69-Billion Acquisition Of VMware Continued Through 2024

On Nov. 22, 2023, Broadcom closed its $69 billion acquisition of virtualization technology giant VMware, 18 months after first announcing the deal. But while the acquisition, one of the largest in the history of the IT industry, was completed by the start of 2024, the ramifications of the deal continued through the entire year.

Almost immediately Broadcom began implementing major changes to VMware including reorganizing VMware into four divisions, implementing layoffs that impacted more than 2,000 jobs, and announcing that Raghu Raghuram was stepping down as VMware CEO.

Broadcom has continued to reshape VMware, including its operations and its go-to-market practices, in 2024 with significant implications for the company’s partners and customers.

Broadcom reduced the VMware product portfolio from thousands of products to just four core product subscription-based offerings; eliminated the VMware Partner Connect Program; increased prices; and terminated AWS’ reseller agreements with AWS, requiring that customers now to go directly to Broadcom for procurement of VMware Cloud on AWS.

In February, VMware struck a deal to sell its End User Computing business, including its VDI solutions, to private equity giant KKR for approximately $4 billion.

VMware’s legions of channel partners have been particularly impacted. In late December Broadcom said it was canceling existing VMware partner agreements with resellers and service providers as of Feb. 4, 2024, and that partners would have to reapply to continue selling VMware By Broadcom products. And in early January word leaked out that Broadcom was taking VMware’s top customers direct – an estimated 2,000 strategic accounts – and would reject partner attempts to register deals with those customers.

All this led to significant blowback from VMware’s scared and angry partners early in the year. “This will bite them in the [expletive]. Imagine 50,000 VMware partners with a chip on their shoulder,” said one of the partners who received the termination notice and in January did not know whether it would be allowed to join Broadcom’s partner program or how the business could recoup that revenue if it could not.

Broadcom President and CEO Hock Tan had a very different viewpoint, calling the first 100 days of VMware under Broadcom’s ownership “a strong start” in a March blog post. “All of these moves have been with the goals of innovating faster, meeting our customers’ needs more effectively, and making it easier to do business with us. We also expect these changes to provide greater profitability and improved market opportunities for our partners,” he said.

During an earnings call in June Tan said the changes were designed to eliminate the “chaos and conflict” of VMware’s old go-to-market model. And on an earnings call in September the executive said VMware bookings continued to accelerate as customers were converted from perpetual licenses to subscriptions with many of those for the full stack of VMware Cloud Foundation.

The impact of Broadcom’s moves with VMware rippled out to other segments of the IT industry including VMware OEMs and competitors. In April Scale Computing CEO Jeff Ready told CRN that Broadcom’s price increases and channel policy changes were fueling demand for his company. In May Dell Technologies CEO Michael Dell told CRN that demand for Dell’s hypervisor-agnostic PowerFlex was enjoying “great momentum” as customers and partners hunted for VMware alternatives.

The ramifications continued right up to year’s end. In December distributor Ingram Micro said it would drop Broadcom from its product lineup after failing to reach a distribution agreement and so would limit the sale of VMware licenses and products as of January 2025.

"We were unable to reach an agreement with Broadcom that would help our customers deliver the best technology outcomes now and in the future while providing an appropriate shareholder return,” Ingram Micro said in a statement provided to CRN. “Ingram Micro will no longer be doing business with Broadcom and have limited engagement with VMware in select regions.”

And just as the year drew to a close Broadcom said that global channel chief Cindy Loyd, who presided over the sweeping VMware channel changes through 2024, was stepping down from that post to take another job within the company.

No. 8: IT Industry Layoffs Stretch Into 2024

Employee layoffs continued throughout the IT industry in 2024, although not at the pace of the massive waves of layoffs that IT companies undertook in 2022 and 2023. Many of the layoffs came early in the year.

Correcting for over-hiring in recent years and continued economic uncertainty were behind some employee roster cuts. But in some situations, rapid technology transformation and changes in business strategy – often driven by the impact of artificial intelligence – have led some IT companies to restructure their operations and re-think what employee skills they need.

In January, for example, Google laid off more than 1,000 workers in such areas as advertising sales, and CEO Sundar Pichai told employees to expect more through 2024. In an internal memo Pichai said the cutbacks were about “removing layers to simplify execution and drive velocity” in certain areas – including being able to invest in its biggest priorities such as AI.

Cloud application giant Salesforce said at the beginning of the year that it would cut some 700 jobs and then in July added about 300 more. Those job cuts followed massive layoffs in 2023 that reduced the Salesforce workforce by about 10 percent.

Also in January, Xerox said it would cut 15 percent of its workforce, more than 3,000 employees, during the first calendar quarter as part of what it described as part of its reinvention with a new operating model and organizational structure.

SAP launched a restructuring plan at the start of the year, including job buyouts and position changes, that the Software giant initially said would impact 8,000 jobs. In August SAP said that number had increased to between 9,000 and 10,000 positions. SAP said the cuts were part of the company’s efforts to “transform its organizational setup” and focus on “key strategic growth areas” such as business AI. With hiring for new positions and employee re-training, the company expects to finish 2024 with about the same number of employees, more than 105,000, it started the year with.

Cisco Systems has laid off more than 9,000 employees this year, some due to business conditions and some to strategic realignment as it morphs into a security, AI and networking services provider – including completing its $28 billion acquisition of Splunk in March.

In February, Cisco confirmed reports that it would lay off 5 percent of its global workforce (about 4,250 employees) in a company-wide restructuring, citing weak product revenue and the need to adjust expenses to focus on key growth areas. In August Cisco announced plans to lay off an additional 7 percent of its workforce with restructuring costs reaching $1 billion.

In an example of how some layoffs are due to strategic restructuring, data protection technology developer Veeam said in January that it was cutting about 300 employees in sales, marketing and administration. But the company also said it planned to increase its engineering and development payroll by nearly 500 workers this year.

In September IBM confirmed that it had begun a round layoffs – the number of impacted employees was not disclosed – as part of a “workforce rebalancing” effort announced earlier in the year.

But some employee layoffs were blunt cost-cutting efforts. In August, chipmaker Intel said it would eliminate approximately 15,000 jobs as part of a plan to reduce fiscal 2025 spending by more than $10 billion. CEO Pat Gelsinger, in an open letter to employees, said Intel’s revenue had not grown as expected and the company had to “align its cost structure with its new operating model and fundamentally change how it operates.”

In July OpenText said it planned to cut 1,200 employees – but add 800 new ones – as part of a “business optimization plan that ultimately reduced its workforce by 1.7 percent.

A number of companies within the crowded cybersecurity space announced layoffs in 2024 including Proofpoint (280 employees), Okta (400 workers), and Orca Security (60 employees).

The cuts continued until the end of 2024. In November, AMD said it was cutting 4 percent of its workforce as it focused its efforts on AI chip technology while in December distributor Ingram Micro disclosed a plan to lay off 850 employees as part of a business restructuring.

No. 7: Cisco Remakes Itself For A New Era

On March 18, networking giant Cisco Systems completed its $28 billion acquisition of data management and observability platform developer Splunk, wrapping up one of the biggest acquisitions in the history of the IT industry. The two companies first announced the acquisition deal in September 2023.

The Splunk acquisition was just the most visible element of a number of steps that Cisco took in 2024 as it continued its transformation from a networking hardware manufacturer into a new company where security, AI and networking services are king.

“If you really think about it, we are the only company who can bring networking, observability, security to our customers – all integrated together,” Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins said onstage at the 2024 XChange Best of Breed Conference in October. “We think that all of those things coming together are more important than they ever have been, and that's what we're going to deliver: a secure networking company that actually delivers incredible capabilities—whether it's a AI ready data center, future proof workplace, or an underlying layer of digital resilience that we're going to deliver.”

The Cisco-Splunk merger combined the two companies’ observability and cybersecurity technology strengths, creating what company executives described as a distinctive AI-powered data platform.

Cisco and Splunk wasted no time in bringing together their technology portfolios and capabilities. At the RSA Conference 2024 in May the two companies detailed plans to integrate their security products, including integrating Cisco’s XDR platform with Splunk SIEM technology. That momentum continued in the following weeks with product integration and development announcements at the Cisco Live and Splunk .conf24 events.

Executives from both Cisco and Splunk made it clear that Splunk will not be subsumed into Cisco: Cisco’s observability development operations, in fact, were moved into the Splunk business unit shortly after the acquisition. Speaking at Splunk .conf24 in June, Robbins and Splunk president and CEO Gary Steele, newly appointed as Splunk general manager and president of Cisco’s go-to-market operations, vowed that the acquisition would not disrupt Spunk’s track record of technology innovation.

Cisco does 90 percent of its business through partners, so some of the biggest news coming out of the company in 2024 was the October launch of Cisco 360, a new partner program built to attract more MSPs and MSSPs with its focus on the value partners bring over transactions. Cisco 360 marked the biggest refresh of the partner program in the company’s history.

Cisco’s goals for the new program are to drive double-digit growth in the markets it serves while boosting the profitability of partners. The program, which includes new incentives and does away with separate partner programs and the historic Cisco Gold partner designation, represents a significant break from the biggest payouts going to partners who land large, capex infrastructure deals.

But the company’s transformation came with a price. Cisco Systems laid off thousands of employees this year, some due to business conditions and some to strategic realignment. In February Cisco confirmed reports that it would lay off 5 percent of its global workforce (about 4,250 employees) in a company-wide restructuring, citing weak product revenue and the need to adjust expenses to focus on key growth areas.

In August Cisco announced plans to lay off an additional 7 percent of its workforce, upwards of 6,000 people, with restructuring costs reaching $1 billion. Robbins, during an August earnings call, said Cisco was “shifting hundreds of millions of dollars into AI,” including AI networking for cloud, AI infrastructure, silicon and cybersecurity, and attributed that as part of the reason for the layoffs. On the same call, CFO Scott Herren said the restructuring and layoffs were not about saving costs, but rather “finding efficiencies across the company so that we can pivot more resources, much like we did last year, into the fastest growth areas within the company."

Following the Splunk acquisition Cisco also moved to consolidate some of its Bay Area operations, including shuttering several of its San Jose offices and Splunk’s headquarters in San Francisco.

Cisco’s leadership ranks also underwent significant changes in 2024. In addition to Steele’s new role as president of all go-to-market operations, Executive Vice President and Chief Customer and Partner Officer Jeff Sharritts announced in May that he would be leaving the networking giant after 24 years as an employee. (He left at the conclusion of Cisco’s fiscal year in July.) And Cisco’s partner operations are now overseen by new channel chief Rodney Clark who was hired in late 2023 and began work at Cisco in January.

Cisco made several significant AI and security acquisition deals in 2024. The company closed two security software acquisitions, including DeepFactor, a privately held cloud-native application security company, and Robust Intelligence, a privately held AI security solutions company.

In October Cisco announced a deal to acquire Deeper Insights AI, a privately held AI services company based in the U.K. And in December Cisco said it would acquire SnapAttack, a threat detection and engineering platform provider that the company expects will help Cisco’s Splunk business power the Security Operations Center (SOC) of the future.

Signaling its intent to use its vast resources to boost its presence in the AI arena, Cisco, at its Cisco Live 2024 event in June, unveiled a $1 billion global AI investment fund targeting strategic investments in startup companies that build offerings based on Cisco’s strategy and infrastructure.

No. 6: Microsoft Moves Forward With AI And Copilot+ PCs, But Hits Some Turbulence

Microsoft played a huge role in 2024 in bringing AI capabilities to its customers and its channel partners. But the software giant also made a number of missteps in its dealings with the channel during the year and sometimes found itself engulfed by controversy – especially the security of its products.

While Copilot for Microsoft 365 was available for enterprises in late 2023, it wasn’t until January of this year that solution providers in the company’s Cloud Solution Provider program were able to begin selling Microsoft Copilot for Security. Copilot has gone on to become a fixture of customer conversations for many Microsoft partners

In May, Microsoft debuted Copilot+ PCs, bringing AI processing to the device level as partners and their customers assess the value of new AI technologies and presenting a massive partner opportunity as the end of support for Windows 10 in October 2025 spurred customers into making plans to buy new devices.

But Copilot+ PCs became mired in controversy with its AI-driven “Recall” search capability when security and privacy experts raised questions about the feature because it periodically takes snapshot of users’ screens to build an explorable timeline of their actions.

Just five days before its release Microsoft announced that it would delay the controversial feature’s availability – what became known as the “Recall recall,” while it added privacy and security safeguards – including turning it off by default. Release of the updated feature was delayed multiple times before finally becoming generally available in December.

In April, Microsoft confirmed that it would change one of the most controversial parts of its already controversial New Commerce Experience program and allow partners in its Cloud Solution Provider program to transfer end customer NCE subscriptions from one partner to another midterm. NCE garnered controversy when Microsoft began enforcing it in March 2022, putting a premium on month-to-month commitments of popular Microsoft offerings. Partners say that some customers prefer to make annual commitments, which are 20 percent less expensive than month-to-month commitments.

Another controversy ongoing at year’s end is Microsoft’s introduction of a 5 percent premium on various annual subscriptions where the customer wants to pay monthly instead of once a year, starting with some of the vendor’s Copilot artificial intelligence tool plans. Microsoft announced the plan in November and began implementing it in December.

In April Microsoft came under fire from the U.S. Cyber Safety Review Board for the Microsoft cloud email breach in 2023 that impacted multiple federal agencies, saying in a report that the breach “was preventable and should never have occurred.” The U.S. Department of Homeland Security board said it determined that “Microsoft’s security culture was inadequate and requires an overhaul” – an urgent issue “in light of the company’s centrality in the technology ecosystem and the level of trust customers place in the company to protect their data and operations.”

And in July Microsoft found itself at the center of the massive CrowdStrike-initiated outage that brought down millions of Windows machines worldwide. On July 19 a defective CrowdStrike Falcon update sent an estimated 8.5 million Windows devices into a “blue screen of death” state, leading to widespread IT, business and even societal disruption. Microsoft has since said it is developing safeguards to prevent other vendors’ security products from impacting the Windows kernal as the CrowdStrike update did.

No. 5: The Ongoing Wave Of Ransomware Attacks And IT System Breaches

Cybersecurity has been a major subject of concern across the IT industry and within businesses and organizations that heavily rely on their IT systems. This year was no different with a number of high-visibility cyberattacks making headlines, particularly attacks targeting U.S. critical infrastructure and a focus on exploiting network security devices and VPNs and compromising SaaS systems.

Healthcare providers and insurance companies were particularly in the crosshairs of attackers. Reports surfaced in February that Change Healthcare, a unit within UnitedHealth’s Optum subsidiary, was a victim of a cyberattack that led to major disruptions for pharmacies and patients. A Russian-speaking cybercriminal group known by the names of Blackcat and Alphv claimed responsibility.

In April UnitedHealth confirmed that a potentially significant amount of data may have been stolen in the attack and “could cover a substantial proportion of people in America,” the company said in a statement. In May Change Healthcare said exposed data included patient medical diagnoses, test results and prescriptions. Reports said United Health paid $22 million to cybercriminals to regain access to its system.

In May the Ascension health system, with 140 hospitals and operations in 19 states and Washington D.C., said a data breach disrupted its clinical operations, making its electronic health records system unavailable and leading to the delay of non-emergency elective procedures.

On June 18 and 19 CDK Global, a provider of software used by thousands of car dealerships, shut down its systems following a pair of cyberattacks. Thousands of car dealerships that depended on CDK software were unable to access records, complete sales transactions, handle orders for repairs or schedule appointments. Disruptions for some lasted until the end of June.

Attackers exploiting IT system vulnerabilities have continued to be in the news. On January 30 the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) warned that malicious actors had found a way to bypass mitigations for widely exploited vulnerabilities in Ivanti VPN devices and recommend that Ivanti Connect Secure customers take steps to avoid being compromised or minimize damage from a breach. Ivanti issued patches for the vulnerabilities the next day, but on Feb. 1 CISA said U.S. government agencies had to disconnect their Ivanti Connect Secure VPNs as attackers continued to exploit multiple vulnerabilities in the devices.

Leading IT vendors were not immune from attack. In January Microsoft disclosed that a Russia-aligned threat actor known as Midnight Blizzard was able to steal emails from the company’s senior leadership team, as well as employees on its cybersecurity and legal teams. In March Microsoft said Midnight Blizzard had tried to exploit information shared by customers through emails. In April CISA published an emergency order that said Midnight Blizzard had been able to steal emails from government federal agencies in connection with the breach of Microsoft executive accounts.

In June, widespread attacks targeting Snowflake customers led to a cascade of major data breaches affecting a number of well-known corporations including AT&T, Ticketmaster, Santander Bank, Pure Storage, Neiman Marcus Group and Advance Auto Parts. According to researchers from security researcher Mandiant, there were “approximately 165 potentially exposed organizations” in the series of attacks tied to Snowflake with a “significant” volume of data stolen. AT&T said in July that records of phone and text messages for “nearly all” customers were exposed in a massive breach reportedly tied to the Snowflake attacks.

In February, the FBI said that a China-linked espionage group was found to have hijacked “hundreds” of small office/home office routers in the U.S. as part of a campaign to compromise U.S. critical infrastructure providers. The FBI said it succeeded at disrupting the efforts of the group, tracked as Volt Typhoon, which was backed by the Chinese government. Targets of the Volt Typhoon attacks included critical service providers in communications, energy, water and transportation, the FBI said.

In what U.S. Senator Mark Warner called the most significant hack of the nation’s telecommunications network ever, a China-linked espionage group tracked as Salt Typhoon carried out a reportedly months-long compromise earlier this year of carriers including Verizon and AT&T. Media outlets reported in October that the Salt Typhoon attacks had targeted the campaigns of presidential candidates Donald Trump and Kamala Harris and vice presidential candidate JD Vance. Some U.S. government officials did see their communications compromised in connection with the attacks, the FBI and CISA confirmed in a joint statement in November.

A more comprehensive list of ransomware attacks and data breaches in 2024 can be found here.

No. 4: Nvidia’s Rise And Intel’s Struggles

It would be hard to find two companies in the IT industry with such divergent fortunes in 2024 than semiconductor giants Nvidia and Intel.

In a sign of how much the fortunes of the two companies have changed, Nvidia replaced Intel on the Dow Jones Industrial Average index on November 8.

With soaring demand for its GPUs and AI infrastructure products, Nvidia was on a roll in 2024. The company recorded revenue of $60.9 billion for its fiscal 2024 (ended Jan. 28) and is forecast to more than double that in the current fiscal year to $128.6 billion.

Several times throughout 2025 Nvidia, whose market cap has hovered above the $3 trillion mark through much of the year, became the world’s most valuable company surpassing IT industry leaders Apple and Microsoft.

How did Nvidia pull this off? An analysis shows that Nvidia spent years building a comprehensive stack of chips, systems, software and services for accelerated computing – with an emphasis on data centers, cloud computing and edge computing – and was well-positioned when demand for AI systems exploded.

The company has also made savvy moves to maintain its momentum through key partnerships with Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud in the cloud infrastructure space; server builders including Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Lenovo, Dell Technologies and Cisco Systems; and other industry leaders such as IBM, SAP, ServiceNow, Databricks, Snowflake and many others.

Nvidia spent most of 2024 fulfilling continuously high demand for AI chips and systems based on its Hopper GPU architecture that debuted two years ago. But it also set the groundwork for products and services – including debuting its game-changing Blackwell GPU architecture – that the company expects to be major sources of revenue growth in the future.

Intel, meanwhile, has struggled to regain the momentum that once made it one of the IT industry’s most powerful companies.

CEO Pat Gelsinger, with his IDM 2.0 strategy, has made sweeping changes throughout the company in recent years including launching Intel Foundry, building new fabrication plants and revitalizing Intel’s contract manufacturing business. He also refocused Intel’s attention on CPUs, accelerator chips and networking chips, and exited some businesses and spun off others that were considered not core to Intel’s business.

There have been some wins. In June Intel secured an $11 billion investment from Apollo Global Management for a chip fabrication plant in Ireland that opened in 2023. And November the company said it had finalized a deal with the U.S. government to receive nearly $8 billion in federal funding to subsidize new chip manufacturing sites in the U.S.

But overall progress has been slow and on August 1 Intel said it would cut its workforce by more than 15 percent, roughly 15,000 jobs, as well as make big cuts in operating and capital expenditures and suspend the company’s dividend in a bid to reduce costs by more than $10 billion in fiscal 2025. That included plans to slash spending by the company’s Sales and Marketing Group by 35 percent.

“Our revenues have not grown as expected – and we’ve yet to fully benefit from powerful trends, like AI,” Gelsinger wrote in an open letter to employees. “Our costs are too high, our margins are too low. We need bolder actions to address both – particularly given our financial results and outlook for the second half of 2024, which is tougher than previously expected.”

Intel’s channel community was rocked in September with the news that Jason Kimrey, vice president of North America commercial and partner sales and 23-year Intel veteran, was leaving the company. Kimrey was admired by partners as a fierce channel advocate and was considered by many to be the “face of the channel” for the chipmaker. (In late September Kimrey publicly said he was leaving because he had accepted an “early retirement opportunity” and he remained confident in Intel’s future.)

But an even bigger shock came Dec. 1 when Gelsinger suddenly announced his retirement, apparently forced out by Intel’s board because of the slow progress in turning Intel around. Intel named two interim co-CEOs to lead the chipmaker, CFO David Zinsner and Client Computing Group General Manager Michelle Johnston Holthaus, while it searches for Gelsinger’s permanent replacement.

Gelsinger’s unexpected departure has called into question Intel’s strategy and roadmap for turning around the company’s fortunes. On Dec. 4 Zinsner, speaking at an investor event, said the company’s “core strategy remains intact.” A week later Zinsner and Holthaus, speaking at another investor event, gave mixed reviews about Intel’s performance across its products groups – including its AI accelerator chips – and left open the question of whether Intel Foundry, the company’s contract chip manufacturing business, should remain part of Intel or be split off as a separate company.

No. 3: HPE Works To Complete Juniper Acquisition In $14B Blockbuster Deal

On Jan. 9 Hewlett Packard Enterprise, confirming reports that had been circulating for a couple of days, said it had struck a deal to buy Juniper Networks, a leading networking products and service provider, for $14 billion.

The acquisition deal, the IT industry’s largest announced so far this year, is expected to double HPE’s networking business and sets up a battle for network supremacy in the AI era between HPE Aruba Networking and market leader Cisco Systems.

HPE CEO Antonio Neri, in an email to employees, said the acquisition of Juniper Networks is a “transformative deal” that creates a “new HPE” with secure networking as its new core business to accelerate “AI-driven and hybrid cloud strategies.

“Our acquisition of Juniper puts one powerhouse networking player together with another, creating an industry leader that will catalyze innovation across the entire networking stack,” Neri said.

Artificial intelligence, as is true throughout much of the IT industry today, is a major driver of the deal. AI and hybrid cloud is driving demand for secure and unified networking offerings that can connect, protect, and analyze companies’ data from edge to cloud. Juniper today leads with its AI-powered Juniper Mist platform, which competes against Cisco Meraki and HPE Aruba’s own Edge Services Platform.

Juniper also has a significant presence in the service provider market and brings to the party a strong product portfolio that includes data center networking, security, and campus and branch networking products.

The acquisition has cleared regulatory hurdles in the European Union and U.K. But in November a Bloomberg report said that the U.S. Department of Justice was ready to “challenge the deal if necessary” and had made their concerns known to HPE and Juniper. HPE and Juniper executives met with DOJ officials in an effort to prevent an antitrust challenge to the acquisition.

During an earnings call with analysts in early December, Neri expressed confidence that the acquisition would be wrapped up in early 2025. “We’re working through the process,” the CEO said. “We’re confident this will close in the early part of 2025, and we are working very, very collaboratively with the DOJ (Department of Justice). So nothing gives me pause this will not happen.”

No. 2: CrowdStrike Update Triggers Unprecedented Global IT System Outage

On the morning of Friday, July 19, Microsoft systems all around the world began failing, causing massive disruptions for major airlines, healthcare service providers, 911 emergency systems, retail and hotel payment systems – likely thousands of businesses and millions of people. Ultimately, it proved to be the most widespread, most impactful IT system outage ever.

While there were initial fears of a cyberattack, the problem was quickly traced to a defective Falcon software update for Microsoft Windows host servers from cybersecurity giant CrowdStrike. (On July 24 CrowdStrike said a bug in its content approval system slipped through the company’s validation process.)

While CrowdStrike quickly deployed a fix, system recovery in many cases took hours and even days because many of the impacted systems had to be restored and rebooted manually. One estimate put the number of impacted Windows devices at 8.5 million.

Airlines were hit especially hard with American Airlines, United Airlines, Delta Airlines and others cancelling hundreds of flights on the day of the outage and, ultimately, cancelling and delaying thousands of flights through the weekend and even into the start of the following week.

Many businesses and organizations managed to get their IT systems back up in hours after the outage. But some continued to struggle for days after the incident. Perhaps no business was hit harder than Delta Airlines, which struggled for nearly a week to resume normal operations: The airline estimated its lost revenue from cancelled flights alone at $500 million and is now seeking significant damages from CrowdStrike in a lawsuit filed in October. (CrowdStrike has filed a countersuit against Delta.)

Cloud insurance firm Parametrix estimated that the outage cost U.S. Fortune 500 companies a collective $5.4 billion or an average of $44 million each.

CrowdStrike executives, including CEO George Kurtz and Chief Security Officer Shawn Henry, issued apologies and mea culpas in the hours and days following the outage. In Congressional testimony in September Adam Meyers, CrowdStrike senior vice president of Counter Adversary Operations, said his company had overhauled its approach to deploying threat-related content updates that impact the Windows kernal.

But there also has been a fair amount of finger-pointing in the wake of the disaster. And questions remain about how a single software update could cause such widespread havoc and what – if anything – can be done to prevent it from happening again.

No. 1: AI Wave Continues To Remake The IT Industry And The Channel

The tsunami of activity around artificial intelligence that began in 2023 accelerated in 2024, impacting all aspects of the IT industry including new product development, startup activity, and mergers and acquisitions.

It seemed that every new product, service or program announcement from IT vendors and solution providers in 2024 had an AI or generative AI component to it. Solution providers began selling Microsoft’s Copilot for Microsoft 365 in January. In April Amazon announced the general availability of its Amazon Q AI-powered personal assistant while in September Google Cloud began integrating Gemini AI models as part of its Workspace Business, Enterprise and Frontline portfolio. And Cisco featured new AI-powered collaboration products and features at the WebexOne event in October.

(In April, CRN debuted its inaugural AI 100 list of 100 companies that are leading the AI revolution by providing AI solutions for cloud computing, cybersecurity, data and analytics, edge computing, data centers, PCs and software.)

Leading IT vendors have been investing millions of dollars in AI startups. In May Microsoft invested $1.5 billion in United Arab Emirates-based AI developer G42. In June Amazon Web Services committed to investing $230 million in startups taking AI applications to the next level. The same month Cisco Systems launched a $1 billion global AI investment fund targeting startups that build AI-related products based on Cisco’s technology. And in November AWS said it would invest an additional $4 billion into Anthropic – on top of the $4 billion AWS had already invested in the AI startup – while Anthropic named AWS as its new primary AI training partner.

The AI wave has also fueled much of this year’s merger and acquisition activity including SAP’s $1.5 deal to buy WalkMe to boost its Joule AI copilot software, Nvidia’s $700 million acquisition of AI infrastructure management startup Run.ai; and AMD’s bid to acquire large language model developer Silo AI for about $665 million. In August AWS said it would buy AI chip designer and model specialist Perceive Corp. for $80 million to boost AWS’s large language model and edge computing capabilities.

To supply electricity to its power-hungry AI data centers, Microsoft in 2024 went so far as to commit to buying power from the previously shuttered Three-Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania – site of the nation’s worst nuclear disaster – under a plan with a $1.6-billion price tag.

Many AI initiatives and efforts in 2024 focused on the development of AI agents – also known as agentic AI technology – designed to independently make decisions and take actions to achieve specific goals. The technology flourished in 2024 because of its ability to take action autonomously, help customers realize their vision of utilizing generative AI to increase productivity.

In November Google Cloud launched an AI agent partner program to help partners build and co-innovate AI agents. The program includes technical assistance and product support, incentives, go-to-market resources and co-selling opportunities.

In 2024 it also became clear that the AI revolution has a dark side with emerging security threats. Threat actors are increasingly using AI to intensify the pace and sophistication of attacks, including using generative AI to develop more targeted attacks through personalization and audio deepfakes. Experts even warn about the security threat to AI large language models through “data poisoning.”

AI is also creating big opportunities – and big challenges – for the channel. Solution providers are investing millions of dollars in AI training, certifications, innovation labs, and solution and service development.

World Wide Technology, for example, invested $500 million in AI-related technology, infrastructure and personnel for its AI lab and revamped its 10,000-plus workforce into AI experts, hired top AI talent and created homegrown GenAI products. Accenture trained 30,000 employees on Nvidia’s full stack of AI technologies and started the Nvidia Business Group to focus on driving enterprise adoption of what it called “agentic AI systems.” And Cognizant launched its Advanced AI Lab to focus on “core AI research and breakthroughs,” Cognizant AI CTO Babak Hodjat told CRN.

A majority (62 percent) of solution providers reported seeing a “positive impact” to their overall business from AI with 13 percent calling the impact “significant,” according to an AI study from IPED, the channel consulting arm of CRN parent The Channel Company. AI, for example, is expected to be a major driver in anticipated PC refresh activity later this year and beyond.

Early adopters are already seeing business benefits and late-comers are risking competitive disadvantage, IPED senior consultant Mark Williams told CRN in October.

“The AI pioneers, the people that really know what they're doing, they are seeing significant impacts,” Williams said. “They are aggressively investing. They're investing in assessments and workshops and education and validation and modeling targets. They're actively hiring anybody they can both from a technical and business perspective.”

That line of thinking was echoed by Zac Paulson, director of product and strategy at managed service provider ABM Technology Group, who told CRN: “Solution providers who don’t invest in AI internally [and] AI offerings for their clients are going to get left behind.”

IT vendors launched numerous initiatives in 2024 to assist partners with AI. In April at the Google Cloud Next 2024 event Google Cloud debuted a new generative AI specialization and AI delivery technical bootcamps for solution providers and increased its incentives by a factor of 10 for systems integrators and software vendors to implement Google Cloud’s generative AI solutions.

In May Hewlett Packard Enterprise launched an AI Partner Ready Vantage pilot program to help partners capture the potentially massive AI market opportunity. Also in May next-generation database provider MongoDB debuted its MongoDB AI Applications Program to provide a complete technology stack, services and resources to help customers and partners develop AI-infused software. And distributor Ingram Micro is providing training, strategic support and specialized events to help partners drive adoption of Microsoft Copilot.

As 2024 drew to a close, it became clear that while AI PCs had begun to trickle out during the year, 2025 will see a flood of AI PCs hit the market with demand fueled by their superior performance and security capabilities. And as solution providers were discovering as 2024 drew to a close, customers will need a lot of support as they navigate the complex AI PC landscape.