5 Channel Partner Updates: 17 November 2016

Good morning, channel partners. Here are five technology news updates, insights, chatter, and plenty more to start your day for Thursday, November 17, 2016. Actually, there are 25 (oh my) entries 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… 25. Microsoft and Linux: Microsoft has joined the Linux Foundation, the latest indication that CEO Satya Nadella continues to open up the software giant. Among the recent initiatives: Porting SQL Server from Windows to Linux. 24. Microsoft Small Business CRM: Microsoft is adding another new service to its Office 365 Business Premium plan called Outlook Customer Manager, notes Mary Jo Foley. It's a lightweight CRM offering for small businesses... 23. Oracle Cloud for SMB?: That's what the database giant is claiming. We'll take a closer look soon... 22. Small Business Supplies: Staples has sold its UK retain business to Hilco Capital. The business unit had been up for sale since May. The move comes as Staples strives to refocus its U.S. stores while also building out white label cloud and managed IT services. 21. Hello and Goodbye: AOL hired 1,500 employees over the past year -- and now plans to cut 500 employees while focusing more aggressively on mobile, video and data... 20. IBM's Advice to President-elect Donald Trump: IBM CEO Ginni Rometty has published an open letter to Trump, offering guidance on health care, infrastructure and plenty more. 19. That's Reassuring: Nvidia says autonomous (driverless) cars are "pretty safe" now, and they're going to get safer. 18. Apple Product Quality?: According to the Q3 2016 State of Mobile Device Performance and Health report from Blancco Technology Group, Apple has once again lost the performance battle to Android with its iPhones and iPads failing at a rate of 62 percent worldwide, compared to the 47 percent failure rate of Android devices, the report states. Hmmm... We certainly can't independently confirm those figures. And I tend to be an Apple device guy -- without quite falling into the fanboy crowd.  17. Software Asset Management: SoftwareONE, a provider of software Portfolio management solutions, has updated PyraCloud — an automated platform for procuring, monitoring and optimizing the value of software assets. The new capabilities support cloud and on-premises software management needs, SoftwareONE asserts. 16. Partner Programs:

• Snowflake Computing, a cloud data warehousing company,has launch its Snowflake Solution Partner Program.

• Xerox has launched an automated cloud service that improves the scan-to-app workflow for customers. The twist? Xerox's new Web Capture Service is exclusive to channel partners. Impressive.

• The Zadara Storage Cloud will offer Intel-based, flash storage solutions in a pure-OpEx-based model – however at prices that rival traditional hard disk drive configurations, the company claims. The offering is available to Zadara's channel partners.

15. Another PSA Option Emerges: Keep an eye on Computicate. An MSP in the Netherlands wrote the initial code back in 2003 or so. But a rewrite -- yup, SaaS -- arrived in 2015 or so. It sounds like the company is ramping up to more aggressively promote the platform soon... In the meantime there are at least 20 PSA options floating around the IT channel... 14. You Don't Say: A Forrester Research report commissioned by Autotask says there's value in unifying PSA and RMM... 13. MSP Marketing Talent: Ulistic has hired Mo Guerrero in an account management role. He previously held key roles at MSP University and Tri Digital. Ulistic assists MSPs with their marketing and business growth strategies. 12. MSP Documentation and Help Desks: GMS Live Expert is now offering its MSP clientele a free license to IT Glue, the increasingly popular documentation software. GMS Live Expert provides 24x7 outsourced help desk services to MSPs. 11. Business Continuity, Part I: Veeam Availability Suite 9.5 has launched. It now scales to "protect tens of thousands of VMs and petabytes of data." It also offers direct restore to Microsoft Azure. But Wait. There's more. Jump to page two for items 10 to 1. Welcome to page two of today's update. Here are items 10 to 1. 10. Business Continuity, Part II: Nine-in-ten (90%) IT pros who are using cloud in their DR solution are confident in their DR strategy, while only 74% of IT pros who use on-premise DR solutions alone feel confident in their DR strategy, according to a recent State of Disaster Recovery 2016 Survey from Zetta.

9. CFOs Adjust Their KPIs: CFOs are pushing beyond traditional key performance indicators (KPIs) like revenue, cash flow and profitability to track non-financial data. The additional CFO office KPIs increasingly include non-financial data like customer satisfaction, according to a CFO Indicator Q3 2016 report.

8. Kaseya Cloud, Network Monitoring: Kaseya is preparing to launch Traverse version 9.4, a hybrid cloud and data center monitoring solution. Version 9.4 will feature automation to provision monitoring of new cloud infrastructure, network devices or applications for full network lifecycle management, Kaseya asserts. Kaseya acquired Traverse in 2013, but the platform withered a bit amid Kaseya's own company sale and executive transitions. Kaseya renewed its focus on Traverse this year. 7. Service Desk Integration: AppDynamics and ServiceNow have partnered up to launch AppDynamics for ServiceNow. It's designed to "enable Global 2000 companies to proactively manage enterprise applications to deliver exceptional business uptime." But keep an eye on potential MSP use cases. AppDynamics specializes in so-called Application Performance Monitoring (APM). That's a rather hot market segment as customers strive to optimize applications both on-premises and in the cloud. ServiceNow, meanwhile, has been catching on with some MSPs, though many ChannelE2E readers are hoping for more "MSP-centric" features in the platform... 6. IT Management & Automation: CA Technologies has upgraded its CA Application Performance Management (CA APM), CA Performance Management and CA Virtual Network Assurance platforms. CA is pitching the offerings mainly for DevOps teams. Ahem... what happened to the MSP push? Hmmm... 5. Router Disruption: Gartner predicts SD-WANs will increasingly replace router technologies for wide area network communications... Hmmm... 4. IT Services M&A: Park Place Technologies has acquired Ardent Support Technologies of Dover, N.H. Ardent has about 25 employees, all of whom will remain with the company, according to Crain's Cleveland Business. Park Place, owned by GTCR (a private equity firm) is expected to make more acquisitions... 3. Rest of Thursday: We continue to track application performance monitoring (APM) and cloud management updates from the New Relic FutureStack and AppDynamics AppSphere conference. Stay tuned for more perspectives from our meetings. 2. Meet at Ingram Micro One?: We're finalizing our meeting schedule for the Ingram Micro One conference (Nov. 29-Dec. 1). If you'd like to potentially meet at the conference please email me ([email protected]). 1. Top 50 MSPs Focused on Amazon Web Services: Surely you've seen our widely read list. You'll find it right here. More: Read all of our daily 5 Channel Partner Updates. Plus: Subscribe to our daily enewsletter. Thanks to those who already have.