TECHNOLOGY PARTNERS
What's behind the service
Every IT provider has a page of partner badges. It tells you almost nothing, because a badge is mostly a purchasing relationship, not a capability.
So we've written what each partner actually does once it's inside your plant. If a name is on this page, something in your building depends on it.
Two things this page is not. It's not the list of industry associations whose members get extra benefits, that's partner organizations. And it's not a menu; you don't buy these individually. They're the parts we assemble into one service with one number.
Protection & resilience
The three that decide how bad a bad day gets.
Cork
warranty-backed cyber financial protection, included for every member. corkinc.com
Cork stands financially behind the security controls we deploy and maintain. If those controls are running and an incident gets through anyway, the warranty pays toward what follows: response, forensics, restoration labour, the interruption while you're down.
Why that matters on a plant floor: restoring your systems is our job, but the money bleeding out while we do it has always been yours to absorb. Overtime, an outside responder, expedited freight, a workaround to keep one line moving. Cork's initial payout process starts in under an hour and runs in the $25K–$500K range depending on tier. Money in six weeks doesn't help you on Tuesday.
No separate application, no premium, no questionnaire. Coverage activates once your environment meets Cork's required security baseline, which we put in place during onboarding. Detail on Cork coverage.
Datto
backup, business continuity and disaster recovery.
Datto is what gets you back. Backups run continuously to a local appliance and an off-site copy, so ransomware or a dead server doesn't cost you the last month of production data. The part that matters for a plant: the appliance can run your critical systems itself: ERP, shipping, label printing, while the original hardware is rebuilt. Restores get tested on a schedule, because an untested backup is a rumour. See business continuity & disaster recovery.
Cyrebro
security operations centre, delivered arm's length on purpose.
Cyrebro is an independent security operations centre that monitors your environment 24/7, investigates what it finds, and reports independently, to you as well as to us.
The independence is the point. The people who build and run your network should not be the only people watching it. Your safety program already works this way: the internal committee isn't the last word, an external auditor verifies. We kept the same separation deliberately. It costs us the convenience of a single tidy stack and buys you a governance structure your insurer and your customer's auditor both recognise. See cyber resilience.
Security tooling
Barracuda
email and network security. Email is still how most attacks arrive. Barracuda blocks the fake invoice and the fake change-of-bank-details before it reaches accounts payable.
Tenable
vulnerability management. Continuously finds the unpatched, misconfigured and forgotten things and ranks them by actual risk. Critically for a plant, it also tells us what to leave alone: some line-side systems can't be patched on a normal cycle, so they get isolated and compensated for instead. Knowing the difference is the job.
BullPhish ID
awareness training and phishing simulation, our primary platform. Short, plain training your crew can finish on a shared floor terminal in a few minutes, plus simulated phishing so you can see who clicks before someone real does. Run like a toolbox talk: brief, regular, no lecture. See training.
KnowBe4
additional awareness tooling in the stack. Held for content and reporting we can't cover from BullPhish ID alone: most often a language, a sector-specific module set, or an evidence format a particular customer or insurer asks for. Not the platform your crew logs into by default.
Platforms & cloud
Microsoft / Azure
email and collaboration, identity and access control, and Azure infrastructure where it's the right home for a workload. Two practical things we do here: enforce multi-factor authentication properly without locking out shared floor logins, and run Azure cost reviews, because cloud bills grow quietly and nobody in a plant has time to audit them. See cloud & business software.
AWS
where a business system or vendor application already lives on AWS, we run it there rather than forcing a migration to suit our preferences.
The honest position on cloud: some things belong there, some belong on site, and the test is simple: what happens to this system when the internet drops mid-shift? If the answer is "the line stops," it doesn't belong in the cloud.
Procurement & hardware
Pax8
cloud and licensing procurement, and the source of member discounts. Pax8 gets us better licensing pricing than a single plant can negotiate alone, because we buy across our whole member base. We pass it through: procurement pricing is part of membership, so members buy their M365 licensing at our rate rather than list. See what membership includes.
Dell, Lenovo, Supermicro and Ingram Micro: hardware supply. Servers, workstations, storage and industrial-grade equipment for environments with dust, heat, vibration or wash-down. Ingram Micro gives us distribution reach across all four countries we serve, which matters when you want the same standard build in Ontario and in Berlin.
What that gets you: one purchase order instead of five, kit that arrives configured rather than in a box for someone to figure out, and warranty handled by us rather than by you on hold.
Connectivity
Peplink
failover and SD-WAN connectivity. A plant with a single internet connection has a single point of failure that stops shipping. Peplink bonds fibre, cable and cellular and fails over automatically, usually before anyone on the floor notices.
It matters most for the things people forget are internet-dependent: cloud ERP, label printing against a hosted system, the customer EDI your orders arrive on, scale and scanner integrations, and the VoIP line your customers call. Also useful for temporary sites and remote yards where cabling is impractical.
Management tooling
Kaseya
remote monitoring and management. The unglamorous layer. It's how we see that a disk is filling before it fills, that a backup didn't complete, that a machine missed its patch cycle, and how a technician fixes a workstation without driving to your site.
It's also your evidence trail. Every ticket, response time, patch and change is recorded, and members reach it through the dedicated portal, which is what makes it usable as governance and audit evidence when a customer asks how you manage your systems.
How we choose partners
Four criteria, including the awkward one.
1. Does it work in a plant, not just an office? Dust, heat, cold, vibration, wash-down, 24-hour operation, and staff who share a terminal and can't each have a personal login. A lot of excellent office IT fails this immediately.
2. Can it be operated by a team that doesn't exist? Most of our members have no IT department. Anything needing a full-time specialist to babysit is the wrong tool, however good it is.
3. Will the vendor answer when it's serious? We take escalation seriously and so should they. Some very well-known products don't clear this bar.
4. Is it the right thing, rather than the most profitable thing? The awkward one, so we'll be direct. Every MSP earns margin on what it resells, us included, and that creates an incentive to recommend the higher-margin product whether or not anyone admits it. Our rule: if the cheaper option, or the one you already own, is the right answer, that's the answer you get: in writing, in the assessment report. Sometimes the recommendation is "keep what you've got."
We also review this list. Partners come off it when they stop clearing the bar. This is what we use today, not a permanent commitment.
What this actually means for you
Buying power
We negotiate across our whole member base, not a single plant. That shows up in your licensing, hardware and renewal costs, and through Pax8 it is part of membership from day one.
Vendor accountability
When a product underperforms we escalate through a partner channel, not a support form. That's a materially different queue.
One throat to choke
The real one. When your line stops you don't care whether it's the switch, the ERP, the backup appliance or the internet. You call one number and we work out who owns it, no conference call where four suppliers point at each other while product sits on a conveyor.
Portability
We don't build anything that traps you. If you leave, your data, documentation and configurations go with you. A partner list is a set of choices, not handcuffs.
Become a partner
If you make technology that genuinely works in a manufacturing environment, we'll take the meeting.
Useful to include: what the product does in one sentence a plant manager would understand, where it already runs in production, how it behaves when the internet drops, what it needs from an on-site team (ideally nothing), and how you handle escalation at 2am.
What we're actively looking for: OT and industrial network visibility that doesn't need a full-time analyst, identity and access tools that cope with shared floor logins, and anything that makes an old, unsupported but still-running machine safer without touching the machine.
Send a partnership enquiry → /contact/
What this means for your plant Cork covers you financially, Datto gets you back, Cyrebro watches independently. Our buying power is part of membership: you buy licensing at our rate, not list. One number when it breaks. We work out whose fault it was afterwards.
Book a free assessment → /membership/join/#assessment
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