Redmond Channel Partner

News Enterprise storage decisions are increasingly being shaped by what’s happening one layer up the infrastructure stack. As organizations reconsider their virtualization platforms, Gartner sees the resulting hypervisor disruption creating new requirements, and new opportunities, for the storage vendors supporting those environments. That dynamic emerges from Gartner’s Aug. 19 2026 Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Storage Platforms.

News Bill Gates says the debate over AI and employment is approaching a question that technological progress alone cannot answer: If artificial intelligence becomes capable of doing a job more efficiently than a person, are there nevertheless some roles society should refuse to automate? The Microsoft co-founder calls that territory “Human Reserved,” a concept he outlines as part of a broader argument about managing AI’s economic and social consequences.

News Microsoft is moving Windows 11 26H2 closer to general availability, giving enterprise IT organizations a chance to begin testing the annual feature update while also rolling out a new Windows Autopilot capability that can verify corporate PCs at the hardware level before they are enrolled. Windows 11 26H2 is now available to Windows Insiders in the Release Preview Channel as Build 26300.9278, with a broader release planned for later this year.

News Microsoft is eliminating one of the more confusing distinctions in its AI lineup, bringing the consumer Copilot and Microsoft 365 Copilot apps together in a single application that can accommodate personal, work and school accounts. The move gives users one entry point for AI chat alongside Microsoft’s productivity services rather than requiring them to choose between separate Copilot destinations. The transition began Aug.

News Microsoft’s growing population of internal AI agents is giving the company a large-scale test case for the governance problems enterprises are likely to face as agent adoption accelerates. With hundreds of thousands of agents operating across its environment, Microsoft is using Agent 365 to establish a centralized inventory and identify who owns those agents, how they are being used and where potential risks are emerging.

How Top Partners Build a Predictable AWS Pipeline (Hint: Find the White Space with Enlyft's Pipeline Agent) Date: Wednesday, September 9 at 11am PT / 2pm ET Every AWS partner sales team is fighting the same battle: landing new accounts in a crowded ecosystem, while reps burn hours a week researching which accounts to call and what is the best pitch angle.

News For enterprises adopting agentic AI, the question is rapidly shifting from whether autonomous systems are ready for real-world use to how much freedom organizations should give them once they get there. New research indicates that AI agents are already making the jump from experimentation to production, bringing security, governance and accountability to the forefront of enterprise AI strategies.

News Microsoft Intune may represent the direction of enterprise endpoint management, but for many IT departments, getting there means managing two worlds at once. Rather than making a clean break from traditional management tools, organizations are increasingly running Intune alongside Configuration Manager while they move workloads to the cloud at their own pace. That hybrid reality is emerging clearly in Recast Software's State of Intune in 2026 report, released July 28.

News Microsoft reported record fourth-quarter and full-year fiscal 2026 results on Wednesday, July 29, driven by continued strength in Azure and growing enterprise adoption of its AI offerings. For the quarter ended June 30, Microsoft posted revenue of $90 billion, up 18% year over year. Net income increased 31% to $35.8 billion, while diluted earnings per share rose 32% to $4.81. For the full fiscal year, revenue climbed 18% to $331.8 billion.

News As AI agents take on increasingly autonomous roles inside enterprises, Microsoft is rolling out new security capabilities intended to help organizations identify and stop malicious or risky agent behavior in real time. The announcement combines a new AI-driven cyberdefense framework with expanded runtime protections aimed at giving security teams greater oversight of deployed AI agents.