Good morning, channel partners. Here are five technology news updates, insights, chatter, and plenty more to start your day for Thursday, May 25, 2017.
Actually, there are 11 updates for VARs, managed services providers (MSPs), cloud services providers (CSPs), independent software vendors (ISVs), telco master agents and telco agents to sip on. Take a look…
11. New Rackspace CEO: Rackspace has named Joe Eazor as its new CEO, succeeding Taylor Rhodes, who resigned earlier this month. Eazor formerly was CEO of EarthLink. He has also held key roles at EMC, HP and EDS. He arrives at Rackspace during a critical time for the managed cloud provider. Rackspace has growing momentum as an MSP for Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform. But the company's other revenue pipelines have been hit and miss. The private equity-owned company cut 6 percent of its U.S. staff earlier thus year.
10. Earnings - PCs: HP Inc.'s latest quarterly results show improved performance in the PC and printer market. Also, Lenovo returned to profitability.
9. ESOPs: Here's more chatter about ESOPs (employee stock ownership plans) providing an exit strategy for aging founders and entrepreneurs who want to gradually unlock their net worth from their business.
8. Funding - IT Services: Melbourne IT has taken a step towards completing its acquisition of digital marketing agency, WME Group, raising $30.7 million in fresh share offering on the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX), ARN reported.
7. Office 365 Managed Services: Socius and BrainStorm are partnering to promote Office 365 managed services....
6. HP Enterprise Controversy: HP Enterprise has apologized to thousands of North American sales team members. The reason: HPE's internal sales compensation system, which tracks commissions, still isn't working correctly. The bigger question: If HPE can't calculate commissions then how can Wall Street and investors trust the company's earnings statements -- which surely require proper sales compensation figures...
5. Funding - SaaS Cost Management: Meta SaaS, which develops software to help companies manage their SaaS subscriptions, has raised $1.5 million in seed funding.
4. Cloud Monitoring: New Relic has pushed forward with its effort to unify application performance monitoring and infrastructure monitoring. Rival Datadog has a somewhat similar strategy and recently hired New Relic veteran John Gray to drive strategic alliances and partner engagements -- particularly with MSPs.
3. Business Continuity, Part I: Zerto this week at ZertoCON 2017 is previewing enterprise-class application replication and recovery going to and from public cloud. The preview is "exclusively for ZertoCON 2017 attendees." Hmmm... Sounds like it's not quite ready for public consumption. The new features and platforms will be officially released later this year, the company said.
2. Business Continuity, Part II: Stay tuned for updates from eFolder sometime today... We'll share more details soon.
1. Ingram Micro: Our live blogs from the Ingram Micro TrustX Alliance conference in Orlando continue today. Among the two key themes to watch: Ingram has announced multiple financing programs for channel partners -- and they involve far more than the classic "financial credit" conversation. Also, multiple MSPs here are doubling down on managed security services. Stay tuned to both ChannelE2E and MSSP Alert for more updates today.
