Good morning, channel partners. Here are five technology news updates, insights, rumors and much more to start your day for Wednesday, January 13, 2016.
Actually, today’s update involves 16 items for VARs, managed services providers (MSPs), cloud services providers (CSPs) and independent software vendors (ISVs) to sip on.
16. Lexmark Going to Pieces?: Looks like managed print services will fail to save yet another company. This time it's Lexmark International, which may break itself up into separate hardware and software assets for potential suitors to acquire...
15. PC Sales Still Plummeting: Windows 10 didn't save the PC market. Indeed, PC sales plummeted more than 10 percent and hit their lowest levels since 2007, according to IDC.
14. Disaster Recovery as a Service, Part I: SingleHop, a provider of on-demand managed cloud services, is among the first service providers to support Veeam Availability Suite v9. The platform offers Disaster Recovery as a service (DRaaS) in the cloud.
13. Disaster Recovery as a Services, Part II: Quantum Corp.'s Q-Cloud Protect is now available as a cloud-based appliance running atop Amazon Web Services (AWS). It's the latest sign that business continuity services are shifting to public clouds.
12. VMware Disaster Recovery (from Microsoft): Microsoft has launched Azure Site Recovery, which includes VMware-to-Azure disaster recovery capabilities. So... If you can recover a VMware backup in Microsoft's cloud, does that mean Microsoft will try to make it easier to move service providers and customers to Hyper-V? (Surely, you already know the answer.)
11. Localized Business Continuity: Datto has chosen Verne Global as the company's second data center provider in Europe. Datto will now be able to use Verne Global’s Icelandic data center to offer European partners a second level of protection for their data. If I wasn't on deadline elsewhere, I'd track down the name and location of Datto's first European data center provider...
10. European MSP Gathering: Continuum's European Partner Day -- set for Feb. 17 in London -- is sold out, though ChannelE2E doesn't know actual headcount expectations. Continuum is adding late registrants to a wait list. A global conference for Continuum MSPs, called Navigate 2016, is set for September in Boston, Mass. Yes, ChannelE2E is scheduled to attend.
9. Cloud Management Dashboards: Keep an eye on Cisco Systems. More details expected later today...
8. Predicting Security Breaches: QuadMetrics Inc. says it can predict with greater than 90% accuracy the likelihood that a company will be breached within the next year, according to The Wall Street Journal. The platform sounds intriguing. The Journal described it this way: "QuadMetrics’ cloud service determines the probability of a breach at a particular company by collecting from its network more than 250 different data points, such as the misconfiguration of servers and routers or whether spam can be seen exiting the network. The technology doesn’t require inside access and instead observes all such characteristics from the outside of the company’s network. That profile is then compared against predictive risk models." Alas, we don't see QuadMetrics partner program info yet... but we'll share it if/when we receive it.
7. Oracle Cloud Pitch: Oracle CEO Mark Hurd will be in New York next week, describing the company's latest cloud milestones to customers and partners. ChannelE2E will be there, too...
6. Fresh Funding: Technology startups raising money to fuel growth include...
- Diablo Technologies (San Jose, Calif.), an enterprise computing memory specialist, raised $19 million in Series C funding led by Israel Cleantech Ventures.
- Elastifile (San Jose, Calif.), focused on all-flash software-defined storage, raised $35 million in Series B funding. Multiple data center and server vendors funded the round.
- Zerto (Boston, Mass.), which develops a data protection platform for cloud and virtualized data centers, raised $50 million in Series E funding led by Institutional Venture Partners.
5. Venture Dollars Drying Up: Despite the funding news above, venture dollars will likely be harder to come by in 2016. According to Bloomberg: "Venture capital firms raised less money and closed fewer U.S. funds last year, according to data from the National Venture Capital Association, a trade association. With less capital to invest, the decline from 2014 could signal an even tighter funding environment for technology startups this year." In other words: It's time for tech startups to live responsibly again.
4. Defending Dell's Pending Buyout of EMC: John Roese, CTO of EMC, does exactly that in this blog post. Responding to critics of the deal, Roese says the Dell-EMC combo will create an $80 billion company that's committed to R&D and customer innovation. Some EMC shareholders have called for Dell to sweeten the $67 billion deal to buy EMC and VMware. But since no third-parties offered to buy EMC during a recent "go shop" period, there's little incentive for Dell to sweeten the deal.
3. Google's Next Partner Move: We have a hunch it involves Google Maps and digital signage. Stay tuned for details soon...
2. Evolving HIPAA Regulations and Guidance: Evolving OCR HIPAA guidelines have raised new questions for healthcare app developers and IT service providers. Marc Haskelson, president of Compliance Group, has been sending me some of his insights on the HIPAA landscape. Stay tuned for a deeper report soon.
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