Good morning, channel partners. Here are five technology news updates, insights, chatter, and plenty more to start your day for Friday, June 23, 2017.
Actually, there are 12 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…
12. Customer Milestone: Intermedia, which promotes cloud business applications SMBs and the channel partners that serve them, says the company now serves more than 100,000 businesses. The company has more than 6,000 active partners and 750 employees.
11. Dell EMC Kills vBlock: Dell EMC is killing vBlock, essentially punting a Cisco relationship to the curb in favor of Dell's own gear. We'll share more details soon.
10. Red Hat Intros HCI: Red Hat has, quite literally, thrown its hat into the hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) market. The company introduced a Red Hat HCI solution that combines virtualization and storage. It's designed to help enterprises bring datacenter capabilities into locations with limited space, such as branch offices and other remote facilities. In other words, I don't believe Red Hat is looking to compete head-on against data center HCI solutions from Nutanix and HP Enterprise's SimpliVity. Also, I don't think Red Hat HCI includes network virtualization...
9. Accenture Results: Accenture revenues rose 5 percent to $8.9 billion in its Q3 2017. Roughly half of those revenues involve "new" areas like digital, cloud and security-related services, a "significant" increase over Q3 2016 -- though Accenture didn't disclose specific figures for the increase. Accenture has maintained a $1 billion war chest to acquire multiple IT services and consulting companies with expertise in such areas as Salesforce, security and WorkDay to drive those "new" revenues.
8. Synnex Earnings: The distributor delivered record Q2 results and repositioned as a "business process services" company. Revenue jumped 16.5 percent to $3.9 billion. Much of the growth likely involved M&A contributions, but there also was organic growth. For instance, the company's technology solutions segment saw revenues jump 13.5 percent to $3.5 billion. Synnex's CloudSolv business contributed to much of that growth. We'll share more thoughts soon.
7. Staples Nearly Sold?: Private equity firm Sycamore Partners is in advanced talks to acquire Staples Inc. following an auction for the U.S. office supplies retailer, according to The New York Times. The buyout price could top $6 billion, the report said. The pending deal follows last year's failed Staples-Office Depot merger, which a U.S. federal judge blocked based on antitrust grounds. At one point Staples owned an MSP business called Thrive Networks, and the company even contemplated acquiring an RMM (remote monitoring and management) tool for MSPs. But Staples ultimately punted on the market and sold Thrive Networks in 2014.
6. M&A - Application Performance Management: Elastic has acquired Opbeat, a SaaS-application performance management vendor. Opbeat's 15 employees have joined the Elastic team. Financial terms were not disclosed. Elastic CEO Shay Banon sees today’s acquisition through a strategic lens, giving his company a leg up on the competition by offering not only a way to search log data, but also giving insights into the applications that are generating the data and why they may be performing poorly, according to TechCrunch.
5. SD-WANs and MSPs: Omega TeleServe, an independent IT and telecom consulting firm, has selected VergX's NaaS solution, specifically the turnkey software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) and security (SD-Security) as the newest additions to their product portfolio, the companies say. The move comes a few days after MyDigitalShield launched an SD-WAN platform for MSPs in the SMB sector.
4. Managed Backup Services: Egenera has embraced Acronis for Xterity, the company's wholesale managed cloud service. We'll share more thoughts later today.
3. "Krowing" About Nothing?: Here's a rather strange announcement. Krow Software announced "explosive growth and customer momentum" for its PSA software. But take a closer look and the company disclosed absolutely zero metrics to quantify that "explosive growth" claim. The one saving grace involved the names of roughly 10 customer wins. Um... during a typical month at rival PSA companies, at least 50 to 100 new logos sign up. No doubt, Krow Software has made some impressive announcements over the years. But this one, clearly timed to counter FinancialForce's big customer event, was empty click bait devoid of stats.
2. PSA Upgrade: Upland Software has upgraded its Tenrox Professional Services Automation (PSA) solution. The release focuses on user-driven feature updates to the Resource Management module—the core component of the application—to help professional services organizations more effectively manage their dispersed workforce, Upland asserted.
1. SolarWinds Network Management vs. Auvik?: SolarWinds continues to enhance its enterprise network management product portfolio. The latest offerings include SolarWinds Network Operations Manager and SolarWinds Network Automation Manager. It sort of makes me wonder: Will SolarWinds take those enterprise-class network management products and somehow repackage them for the SolarWinds MSP division? After all, a growing number of MSPs crave network-centric RMM (remote monitoring and management) tools... as Auvik Networks has proven.
