Good morning, channel partners. Here are five technology news updates, insights, chatter, and plenty more to start your day for Friday, October 20, 2017.
Actually, there are 11 timely updates designed 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. Azure Stacks: Both Lenovo and Dell EMC have officially launched Azure Stack data center gear. The offerings essentially deliver an on-premises version of Azure's public cloud capabilities. That could be good news for partners and customers that want hybrid cloud services extending from on-premises gear out to Azure's cloud. But be careful of the hype. Somebody other than Microsoft is gonna have to manage that on-premises equipment. Perhaps that sets the day for MSPs to plug in with their services...
10. Distribution: Ingram Micro plans to build a $40 million distribution center in Jeffersonville, Indiana -- creating 550 jobs in the region, according to USA Today's Courier Journal.
9. Talent: Cohesity, which specializes in hyperconverged secondary storage, has hired former NetApp President Rob Salmon as president and COO. Also, former VMware President and COO Carl Eschenbach has joined Cohesity's board.
8. Artificial Intelligence & Salesforce: Nearly 40 percent of Salesforce customers expect to invest in Artificial Intelligence within the next 12 months, according to a State of Salesforce report from Bluewolf. It's a safe bet that means Salesforce customers will be kicking the tires on Einstein -- an AI platform from the CRM giant.
7. IPO: MongoDB, the fast-growing database provider, launched a successful IPO yesterday. Shares jumped more than 34 percent to over $32 on the first day of trading. The stock opened the day at $24 -- well above the original proposed range of $18 to $20.
6. Partner Program: Aptos, which develops end-to-end retail technology solutions, expects partners to deliver 30 percent of the company's global implementations in 2018, according to VP of Strategic Alliances Danny Rosenoff. If Aptos hits that figure, we suspect it will represent a major jump from 2017.
5. Partner Program: Juniper is launching updates to its Partner Advantage Program for 2018, including two new cloud specializations... The announcement comes only a few days after Juniper announced weaker-than-expected demand from cloud services providers.
4. M&A: In a Carbonite newsletter to partners, Channel Chief Jon Whitlock shared more details about Carbonite acquiring Datacastle. Carbonite gained more than 20 employees and 300 partners from the deal, along with endpoint backup capabilities for organizations that typically have 50 or more users, Whitlock wrote. The M&A deal is part of CEO Mohamad Ali's vision to address SMB data protection across backup, disaster recovery and high availability solutions. Over the past two-plus years, Ali has cherry picked several underperforming companies (EVault, Double-Take, Datacastle, etc.) with strong technologies, and rolled them into an integrated platform strategy at Carbonite.
3 . Acronis Triple Play: The Acronis Cloud now supports three data protection services for MSPs -- including backup, disaster recovery, and file sync/sharing services. We'll share more thoughts soon.
2. Where To Launch Your Career: Looking to build or jumpstart your IT career? Check out this 2018 Career Launching Companies List from Wealthfront. Numerous companies on the list focus extensively on MSPs, MSSPs and IT service providers.
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