Good morning, channel partners. Here are five technology news updates, insights, chatter, and plenty more to start your day for Wednesday, June 21, 2017.
Actually, there are 17 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…
17. Apple Partner, Customer Training: Ingram Micro is partnering with LearnQuest to promote Apple Authorized product and service training. We'll share more details soon.
16. IBM Squeezing Contractors?: After forcing home workers to relocate to IBM offices, the technology giant apparently is cracking down on contractors. IBM recently stopped hiring new contractors and asked those who remained to take a 10 per cent pay cut. Now it's trying to cut contractors' hours, in three ways, according to The Register...
15. FalconStor Running Out of Time?: FalconStor, a storage company on Long Island, has confirmed another CEO change and more layoffs. The company has attempted to promote its storage solutions to MSPs in recent years but the strategy hasn't achieved mainstream success. Once a promising startup, FalconStor largely lost its way after founder ReiJane Huai committed suicide amid an accounting scandal in 2011.
14. Private Equity Needed?: Data center and IT hardware maintenance provider Interactive Pty of Australia has stepped up its search for a new investor, according to Financial Review.
13. Containers: SUSE has launched a container as a service platform, which lets IT operations and developers provision, manage and scale container-based applications and services to meet business goals faster. The big question: Is it multi-tenant for MSP management? Hmmm...
12. Dell Boomi: Dell has upgraded Boomi platform to help partners and customers accelerate their application integration projects.
11. Digital Experience Management: Riverbed has upgraded its SteelCentral platform -- empowering partners and customers to "measure and troubleshoot all parts of the digital experience, from the user’s experience on the device to the back-end network, infrastructure, cloud and application." In some ways, it sounds like Riverbed is set to compete more aggressively against web-scale monitoring platforms like Cisco AppDynamics, Datadog and New Relic...
10. Distribution: Arrow Electronics has agreed to distribute Monnit's ALTA wireless sensing solution for Internet of Things (IoT) environments.
9. Red Hat Surges: Red Hat's latest quarterly revenues easily beat Wall Street's expectations. More than a Linux provider, Red Hat said newer offerings like OpenShift for cloud deployments are driving the company forward.
8. Next-Gen Data Protection: Comtrade has launched a data protection platform specifically designed for Nutanix's hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) deployments. Is HCI the next major inflection point for data protection? Comtrade sure seems to think so...
7. Microsoft vs. Kaspersky Lab: Microsoft has indirectly responded to Kaspersky Lab's antitrust claims against the technology giant. For a look at Microsoft's spin on the situation, check out Microsoft Partner Director Rob Lefferts' blog perspectives here. What's the true meaning of that lengthy blog entry? Independent Blogger Paul Thurrott offers his spin and analysis here...
6. More Rackspace Channel Changes: Revolving door management remains the norm within Rackspace's channel organization. Blake Wetzel has exited and the company hasn't yet publicly announced a replacement. Rackspace's partner program, quite frankly, has lacked stability and focus since former Channel Chief Christopher Rajiah exited way back in 2012. Rackspace went private in 2016, refocused on AWS and Azure managed services, and cut about 6 percent of its U.S. workforce in 2017. What does that mean for the channel? Right now, your guess is as good as mine...
5. Azure MSPs, Part I: MSPs are painfully behind the times when it comes to building and monetizing Microsoft Azure managed cloud services. While thousands of MSPs celebrate their Office 365 reseller status, most have failed to study and embrace Azure-related opportunities, according to ChannelE2E observations at such recent conferences as ConnectWise Automation Nation, DattoCon, Ingram Micro SMB Alliance and TruMethods Schnizzfest.
- 24x7x365 monitoring, technical support, and incident response
- Planning, design and implementation of Azure infrastructure using best practices
- Azure security management, network and access controls
- Consultation with Cloud Architects
- 100% uptime SLA
3. M&A - IT Solutions Provider: American Portfolios (AP) has officially acquired the intellectual property and developmental capabilities of TrustFort, an IT solutions provider for the financial industry.
2. PSA and Salesforce.com: FinancialForce has launched an upgraded PSA platform. The offering runs on Salesforce, and previous releases have won strong support from midmarket IT consulting firms and service providers. We'll share more details soon.
1. Major Cisco Move: The details are here. But we'll provide deeper analysis later today...
