WatchGuard named a 2026 Inc. Power Partner award winner. Global leader in unified cybersecurity honored for helping small businesses and MSPs simplify security delivery, strengthen customer protection and grow profitably. Seattle, Oct. 20, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) - WatchGuard(R) Technologies, a global leader in unified cybersecurity for managed service providers (MSPs) and small and medium sized businesses (SMBs), today announced it has been named a 2026 Inc. Power Partner Awards winner. The Inc. Power Partner Awards honor the top global B2B organizations that have a proven track record of supporting a wide range of business functions, fostering sustained organizational growth and are instrumental in enabling leadership to remain focused on their company's core missions. "Business owners have no shortage of tools at their disposal, and B2B companies need to make clear why their products and services are worth the investment," said Bonny Ghosh, editorial director at Inc. "The companies on this year's Power Partners list have done just that. They don't just have customers - they have superfans and evangelists. Across industries like marketing, financial services, and technology, they've proved their dedication to helping fellow business owners grow and succeed." WatchGuard was recognized by Inc. Magazine for its commitment to helping MSPs build profitable businesses while meeting the evolving security needs of small and midsize organizations. Today, more than 25,000 MSPs and security partners rely on WatchGuard solutions to secure more than 1.5 million companies worldwide. As a 100% channel-focused company, WatchGuard combines integrated cybersecurity with flexible licensing, simplified billing and dedicated partner enablement to help service providers operate more efficiently. WatchGuard works closely with its Partner Advisory Council to shape solutions around real-world MSP needs, pairing responsive support with technology that helps partners serve more customers. "Our partners' success depends on their ability to protect customers while running a profitable business, and every decision we make needs to support both," said Joe Smolarski, CEO of WatchGuard Technologies. "That means listening to what partners need, simplifying how they do business with us and delivering security they can scale with confidence. This recognition reflects the trust our partners and their customers place in WatchGuard and our commitment to helping them grow." WatchGuard's Unified Security Platform(R) delivers enterprise-grade cybersecurity built for MSPs and the small and midsize businesses they protect. The AI-powered platform brings together network, endpoint, identity and cloud security through a single management console, allowing security teams to identify threats, prioritize risks and coordinate response across connected services. This unified approach gives MSPs centralized visibility and control across customer environments, simplifying deployment, monitoring, and ongoing security management. By reducing operational complexity and manual workloads, WatchGuard helps MSPs efficiently scale services and help small businesses strengthen defenses without overextending IT resources. "Our customers require a strong, well-defined security posture, but many don't have the time or resources to manage a patchwork of tools," said Kevin Willette, President and Co-Founder at Verus. "WatchGuard has been a true partner addressing these challenges, delivering enterprise-grade security through its Unified Security Platform(R). By bringing network, endpoint and identity protection capabilities together with MDR support, WatchGuard makes it easier for our team to meet evolving customer needs, ensure protection for organizations of all sizes and simplify administrative processes to spend more time on high-value initiatives." To learn more about WatchGuard and how it helps partners grow their businesses, increase profitability, and deliver stronger security outcomes for customers, visit https://www.watchguard.com/wgrd-partners. For more information on Inc.'s Power Partner Awards or to view the complete list of honorees, visit https://www.inc.com/power-partner-awards. About WatchGuard Technologies, Inc. WatchGuard Technologies is a global cybersecurity company purpose-built for managed service providers. Its AI-powered Unified Security Platform brings network, endpoint and identity security together so MSPs can reduce operational complexity, strengthen security outcomes and scale their businesses efficiently. More than 25,000 MSPs use WatchGuard to help protect over 1.5 million customers worldwide. Learn more at WatchGuard.com, follow WatchGuard on LinkedIn, or visit the WatchGuard CyberSecurity Hub for real-time threat insights. WatchGuard is a registered trademark of WatchGuard Technologies, Inc. All other marks are the property of their respective owners. About Inc. Inc. is the leading media brand and playbook for the entrepreneurs and business leaders shaping its future. Through its journalism, Inc. aims to inform, educate, and elevate the profile of its community: the risk-takers, the innovators, and the ultra-driven go-getters who are creating the future of business. Inc. is published by Mansueto Ventures, along with fellow leading business publication Fast Company. For more information, visit www.inc.com.

Acronis appoints Prakash Panjwani as CEO to drive next phase of growth. Acronis has appointed Prakash Panjwani as Chief Executive Officer, effective immediately, as the global cyber protection company looks to build on its growth and expand its AI-native platform for managed service providers (MSPs) and IT departments. Panjwani succeeds Jan-Jaap "JJ" Jager, who will remain a shareholder in the company. The appointment brings an executive with extensive experience in cybersecurity, channel-led business models and scaling global technology platforms to the leadership role. "Prakash brings deep cybersecurity expertise and a proven track record in scaling global security platforms," said Warren Adelman, Chairperson of the Acronis Board of Directors. He highlighted Panjwani's product and go-to-market expertise, understanding of the MSP market, and experience in driving organic growth and mergers and acquisitions as key strengths for the company's next phase. Panjwani previously served as CEO of WatchGuard Technologies and SafeNet. During his decade at WatchGuard, he oversaw the company's evolution from a firewall-focused business into a broader cybersecurity platform incorporating AI-powered endpoint detection and response (EDR), extended detection and response (XDR), and managed detection and response (MDR). His experience in developing channel-focused businesses and expanding cybersecurity portfolios is expected to support Acronis' efforts to deepen its relationships with service providers and expand its market presence. The company aims to bring cybersecurity, data protection, infrastructure management and service automation together through a natively integrated platform. Acronis has positioned its platform around the needs of MSPs, which face growing demands to protect customer environments while managing operational complexity and service delivery costs. "Acronis has built a unique AI-native cyber platform with an MSP-focused approach that is highly scalable. I am excited to join this team to build upon that foundation, accelerate innovation and deliver even greater value to our partners," said Panjwani. He added that AI-based automation could help MSPs simplify operations and reduce the cost of delivering cyber protection services, while giving them opportunities to adopt platforms designed to combine protection and operational efficiency. Adelman also acknowledged Jager's contribution to advancing the company's product platform through AI-based innovations, driving partner growth and positioning Acronis for future development.

WatchGuard expands Rai agentic AI across its MSP Security Platform. WatchGuard unveiled a significant expansion of Rai, its agentic AI "digital workforce," at the IMPACT North America conference on October 5, 2026. The announcement adds four new Rai-branded capabilities - Hey Rai, Rai Analyst, Rai Auditor, and Rai Customer Success - to the Unified Security Platform, alongside a new Firebox T175 appliance, a mid-tier Prime Security Suite, and an identity-and-access consolidation tool called WatchGuard Access App. The stated goal, in the words of CEO Joe Smolarski, is blunt about where the industry's margin pressure actually sits: "More products don't create better security. AI-native integrated platforms do." That framing matters more to channel leaders than the feature list itself. WatchGuard is a security vendor rather than a cloud hyperscaler, but the problem it is targeting - MSPs managing an expanding security stack with flat technician headcount - is the same operational bottleneck that shows up across every MSP cloud margin stack, whether the underlying workload is infrastructure, SaaS, or security. What Rai actually automates. The four new Rai components target distinct points in the MSP security workflow: * Hey Rai. A natural-language query interface that lets technicians ask operational questions directly - "which customers currently have the highest security risk?" - instead of pivoting across multiple dashboards to assemble the answer manually. * Rai Analyst. AI-driven incident investigation and prioritization, intended to compress the triage step that typically consumes the most analyst time in a security operations queue. * Rai Auditor. Continuous security posture and compliance assessment, replacing periodic manual audits with an always-on check against policy baselines. * Rai Customer Success. A customer-facing layer that surfaces account-level risk signals MSPs can use in quarterly business reviews and renewal conversations, rather than a purely technical control. WatchGuard also added MCP (Model Context Protocol) integration, letting partners pull WatchGuard security intelligence into external AI platforms they already use, plus shadow-AI visibility tooling to flag unsanctioned AI tool usage inside customer environments. Why this is a channel economics story, not a product story. Every one of the four Rai additions maps to a specific labor cost in the MSP delivery model: investigation time, audit time, reporting time, and the cross-dashboard navigation time that doesn't show up as a line item but still consumes billable hours. Consolidating those into one agentic layer inside the channel partner technology stack is a direct attempt to let an MSP add customers without adding headcount at the same ratio - the same lever every vendor claiming "AI-native" is reaching for in 2026, but applied here specifically to the security operations function rather than ticketing or billing. For partners, the practical evaluation question isn't whether the AI features work in a demo. It's whether Rai Analyst and Rai Auditor produce findings accurate enough to act on without a human re-checking every output - because if the review overhead approaches the time the automation was supposed to save, the margin case collapses. MSPs standardizing on WatchGuard should pilot the new components against a known customer environment before rolling them into managed service level agreements, and should treat the under-the-hood accuracy claims the same way they'd treat any new vendor's uptime SLA: verify before you price it into a contract. Where this fits against the broader MSP security stack trend. WatchGuard's move follows a pattern already visible across the white-label MSP reseller stack: vendors are no longer competing primarily on detection coverage, but on how much operational overhead their platform removes from the partner's technician roster. The Firebox T175 and Prime Security Suite additions are conventional hardware and tiering moves; the Rai layer is the part that actually changes the delivery economics. Partners evaluating security platform consolidation should weigh Rai's maturity against their own channel health metrics - specifically customer-to-technician ratio and mean time to resolution - before assuming the AI layer will immediately translate into headcount savings rather than simply shifting where technician time gets spent. Full details are available via WatchGuard's official announcement and independent coverage from Channel Insider.