Good morning, channel partners. Here are five technology news updates, insights, chatter, and plenty more to start your day for Monday, January 25, 2016.
Actually, there are seven items for VARs, managed services providers (MSPs), cloud services providers (CSPs) and independent software vendors (ISVs) to sip on.
7. Apple Outlook: Apple will announce quarterly earnings on Tuesday. Recent rumors suggest Apple suppliers have scaled their manufacturing plans in recent weeks -- suggesting that Apple's best days in the smartphone market could be behind the company... We'll get clearer answers on Tuesday.
6. Big Days Ahead: VMware and EMC are expected to announce quarterly earnings on Jan. 26 and 27, respectively. Those results arrive amid rumored job cuts at VMware and confirmed cuts at EMC. Both companies are hoping to show reasonable business strength ahead of Dell's pending $67 billion buyout of EMC, which owns a major stake in VMware. EMC, meanwhile, says it remains focused on the channel and the company announced partner program enhancements a few days ago.
5. IT Management Alliance: Watch for growing work between Splunk and IBM. Splunk's data-centric management tools help customers and service providers with application delivery, log management, security and plenty more.
4. Fresh Funding: Qubole, which offers Hadoop as a Service, just raised $30 million to expand in Europe and Asia. The company already has a good presence in the United States, where a growing number of VARs and MSPs are moving big data workloads into Qubole's cloud. ChannelE2E interviewed Qubole CEO Ashish Thusoo earlier this year, exploring the rise of big data and Hadoop in the cloud.
3. Cloud Deaths: dotCloud, which offers platform as a service (PaaS) for Docker containers, will shut down in February. The company's parent, Cloud Control, has filed for bankruptcy. Customers have until Feb. 29 to migrate their workloads to other systems. The company is recommending dotCloud customers migrate to Heroku...
2. Top Vertical Market MSPs: If you're a top vertical market MSP serving health care, financial services, retail or another vertical then it's time to celebrate your success. Complete our Top Vertical Market MSPs survey. We'll recognize the best of the best in Q2 2016.
1. MSP Software M&A: Ahem... Rumor has it this could be a busy week for M&A activity in the MSP software market. There's a lot of logic behind the rumors. I'll be watching my Mac dashboard closely for updates...
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