With the holidays now a speck in the rear-view mirror, the technology business trained its sights on the year ahead last week, starting with plans by a security vendor to build out its North American sales channel.

280 – Number of channel partners of Boston-based insider threat detection and mitigation company ObserveIT, which is looking to revamp its partner program and build out its sales channel in North America. The company had previously invested heavily in an inside sales strategy, which represented a departure from a channel-focused approach that had brought it international success.

59 – Number of people cloud business applications provider Intermedia plans to add to its current sales staff of 91 as it seeks to more than double its sales. Intermedia has snagged three former Microsoft leaders and is launching field sales and sales engineering practices as part of its efforts.

$620 – Savings per PC that Dell EMC foresees in a new offering, ProDeploy Client Suite, that the vendor has rolled out for solution providers looking to drive services revenue around PCs. In a statement, Dell EMC said ProDeploy can be either resold by channel partners or co-delivered with Dell EMC.

144 – Number of employees that systems integration powerhouse CompuCom has told Texas authorities it will lay off at its Plano facility on March 6. The notice was filed Jan. 4, less than a month after the $1.9 billion company - No. 23 on the CRN Solution Provider 500 - announced it would move its corporate headquarters from Plano to South Carolina. CompuCom's chief marketing officer, Jonathan James, said the layoffs weren't connected to the corporate relocation but were, instead, the result of CompuCom shifting service desk operations from Plano to offices in Louisville, Ky., Mexico City and Ontario.

50 percent – Projected cut in average launch times for Salesforce clouds with Bluewolf Go, a solutions package unveiled by Bluewolf, according to its CEO, Eric Berridge. Bluewolf, one of the earliest and largest systems integrators in the Salesforce channel, released Bluewolf Go to help accelerate small-scale deployments of several Salesforce products. The offering is geared toward smaller deployments – either SMB customers or larger enterprises with specific departmental needs for a particular Salesforce cloud.