From an executive departure to an announcement of a new channel program, here's a look at five news stories of interest to the channel from the week of Oct. 3-7, focusing on key numbers within those stories.

15 – Number of months Zorawar Biri Singh served as Cisco Systems' top technologist and cloud executive before the company confirmed his pending departure. Singh is leaving amid a major engineering reorganization at the networking giant. He's the latest of several Cisco leaders who have left the company this year. Others include enterprise engineering leader Robert Soderbery and longtime networking visionary Pankaj Patel.

50 percent – Price cut for customers running Microsoft's A1 and A2 virtual machines, part of a round of price cuts announced by the Redmond, Wash.-based vendor as it turned up the heat on Amazon Web Services. The A1 and A2, Microsoft's simplest VMs and part of the Azure Basic tier, are entry-level instances meant for smaller production workloads, or development and testing, that don't need load balancing, auto-scaling or abundant memory.

17 – Number of capabilities powered by Salesforce's Einstein artificial intelligence platform that the vendor plans to ship across all its cloud apps in the winter release of its cloud-based software, Commerce Cloud. The technologies empower Salesforce's channel to enhance current customer deployments and enter new practice areas, partners told CRN. Integrations between Einstein and Commerce Cloud enable partners to deploy e-commerce sites that automatically learn about shoppers and make predictive recommendations.

150 – Number of countries AT&T FlexWare, formerly called AT&T Network Functions on Demand, is now available through the AT&T Network on Demand platform, the company announced. AT&T Network Functions on Demand was not a channel product at launch, and there's no word yet on the channel availability of the rebranded AT&T FlexWare.

20 percent – Projected high end of a minimum margin for partners of Viptela, as the SD-WAN startup announced the launch of its first-ever partner program, offering assured margins. Viptela, based in San Jose, Calif., said its vForce Partner program will also offer a rapid onboarding process, "partner success" funding and a no direct sales strategy, topped off with a 100 percent channel sales model.