Good morning, channel partners. Here are five technology news updates, insights, chatter, and plenty more to start your day for Thursday, September 7, 2017.
Actually, there are 10 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.
10. Oracle Layoff Details: Oracle continues to decline comment about layoffs, but details continue to leak out in the media. As most chatter indicated, Oracle has slashed jobs from its Solaris and SPARC product lines, according to notices filed with California's Employment Development Department, the San Jose Mercury News reported. Related Partner Conference: Oracle OpenWorld 2017, including a partner day, is set for October.
9. IBM 'Cloud' Win: The U.S. Army's Logistics Support Activity (LOGSA) has awarded IBM a $135 million cloud services contract. Under terms of the deal, IBM will continue providing cloud services, software development and cognitive computing, constituting the technical infrastructure for one of the U.S. federal government's biggest logistics systems. Impressive. But it's unclear how much of those revenues actually involve recurring as-a-service revenues (IaaS, SaaS, PaaS) rather than consulting revenues...
8. Huawei SD-WANs: Huawei has launched a Software-Defined WAN (SD-WAN) solution and a series of universal computing gateways, providing on-demand interconnection between branches, branches and data centers, and branches and the cloud, the company said.
7. Huawei Partner Program: Speaking of the Chinese IT giant, Huawei is investing $250 million in its global partner program to bring independent software vendors, independent hardware vendors, systems integrators, and consulting partners on board, ZDnet reported.
6. Huawei Cloud Services: Oh, and just for good measure. Here's the biggest statement of all from Huawei CEO Guo Ping: "In the future, we predict there will be five major clouds in the world. Huawei will work with our partners to build one of those five cloud -- and we've got the technology and know-how to do it." The Math: There's Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure/Office 365 in the top two spots. Perhaps Salesforce and Google Cloud Platform in the No. 3 and 4 slots. That leaves Huawei battling IBM and Oracle for the No. 5 slot...
5. Talent: BVoIP, which develops an MSP communications platform, has hired Datto veteran Alec Stanners to drive marketing and strategic alliances. He previously was deeply involved in DattoCon, the data protection company's successful MSP-centric conference.
4. IT Management: Opengear has launched Lighthouse 5 -- a "completely redesigned" platform for centralized out-of-band management of Opengear devices and many third-party console servers as well. For example, network administrators utilizing legacy Cisco or Vertiv devices can now manage their entire IT infrastructure of both new and old devices from a single pane of glass, Opengear asserts. The new platform is available immediately via channel partners.
3. RMM Upgrade: SolarWinds MSP has released N-central 11.1, an upgrade to the company's RMM (remote monitoring and management) platform for IT service providers. N-central 11.1 features delayed automatic patch approvals, improved monitoring and remote connectivity for Linux (including Ubuntu), and updated hover-over status icons for improved dashboard visibility, SolarWinds MSP says. Related Partner Conference: SolarWinds MSP's Empower MSP conference is set for October.
2. New Webroot CEO: Details of the succession plan were confirmed this morning.
1. Hurricane Irma: Our coverage -- including storm preparation moves by IT services providers -- continues here. Best wishes to everyone who's preparing to ride out the potential storm.
