5 Channel Partner Updates: Thursday 20 July 2017

Good morning, channel partners. Here are five technology news updates, insights, chatter, and plenty more to start your day for Thursday, July 20, 2017. Actually, there are 16 timely 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…

16. Talent: Christopher Doggett has joined Fuze as Chief Sales Officer (CRO). He's responsible for driving Fuze's sales strategy and leading its growing global sales organization -- including direct sales, channel sales, sales engineering, and sales operations, according to his updated LinkedIn profile. Fuze offers a cloud-based unified communications and collaboration platform. Doggett previously held key executive, sales and channel posts at Carbonite, Kaspersky Lab and Sophos. 15. Partner Margins: Sandler Partners says its Commissions Integrity Program, which proactively audits commissions and SPIF payments for its agent partners, has directly recovered more than $3 million for agent partners, and many times that in future commissions payments, since the program was introduced in January 2013. Unlike other master agencies that require agents to report missing commissions and SPIFs, Sandler Partners proactively audits commission and SPIF payments on behalf of its partners, Sandler asserts. 14. Partner Program, Part I: D-Link has bolstered its partner program in a bid to drive channel growth and partner profitability, the company says. Keep an eye on the so-called VIP+ effort...

Jabra's Cheryl Walline

13. Partner Program, Part II: Jabra has launched a partner program and named Cheryle Walline as Head of Channels, Public Sector and SME in North America. Jabra specializes in audio technology. 12. Distribution, Part I: Arrow Electronics has expanded its distribution relationship with Gemini Data Inc, which develops an analyst platform that provides situational awareness across data and security solutions. In addition to Europe, Arrow’s enterprise computing solutions business will now also distribute Gemini's products and services throughout North America, the companies say. 11. Distribution, Part II: Tech Data's StreamOne Enterprise Solutions cloud marketplace now offers Webair's Off-site Backups and Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) solutions to partners. But wait. There's more. Continue to page two for the dramatic conclusion to this blog entry. (Yup, items 10 through 1 await you there) Welcome to page two of today's morning update. Here's the final portion of today's list... 10. Channel Momentum: ESET has grown its channel partner base 40 percent over the past 12 months. The partner wins include growing enterprise momentum, the security company asserts.  

9. Intel Kills Wearables Business: Intel apparently has killed its wearable computing division...

8. Lenovo PC Growth?: Lenovo vowed to jumpstart growth in its PC business, and Yang Yuanqing has publicly vowed to step down as chairman and CEO if he doesn’t deliver on a critical online sales goal. 7. Laptop Ban Ends: The U.S. has now lifted entirely a controversial ban on laptops in hand luggage for passengers flying to the country from the Middle East or via certain Middle Eastern airlines, with the Department of Homeland Security professing itself satisfied with “enhanced security measures in place,” according to TechCrunch. 6. Government IT Concerns: Public sector organizations undergoing digital transformation are losing confidence in IT Operations’ ability to manage the influx of new technologies and evolving citizen and mission expectations. According to a Ponemon and Splunk research survey, at least 60 percent of respondents felt as or less confident in carrying out their responsibilities in the following areas than they did 12 months ago:

• Handling the scale and complexity of IT operations
• Assuring performance and availability to consistently meet service-level agreements
• Pinpointing root-causes and sources of failure quickly
• Ensuring efficiency of IT operations
• Migrating workloads and applications to the cloud

Um, was anybody ever confident in government IT services? 5. SAP Revenues: SAP delivered stronger-than-expected cloud revenues in its just-released quarterly results. Revenue rose 10.4 percent to $6.65 billion, but profits rose only 3 percent because cloud services generally deliver lower margins than upfront software license deals. 4. Rackspace for Google Cloud Platform: Rackspace has started beta testing its managed services for Google Cloud Platform. The service is expected to officially launch this fall. We'll share more detail soon. 3. Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP): LJT & Associates Inc. of Columbia, Maryland, is the latest engineering and IT services firm to embrace an ESOP ownership model. We'll describe the transition later today... 2. Azure Services: SaaSplaza, which specializes in Microsoft Dynamics, continues to push deeper into the Azure market. The company, which has nearly 300 partners, has launched multiple Azure services. They include consultancy services, along with disaster recovery, backup, infrastructure  and consumption services. 1. Black Hat USA Conference News, Analysis: ChannelE2E's sister website, MSSP Alert, has already kicked off coverage on next week's Black Hat USA 2017 conference in Las Vegas. Track all the Black Hat conference updates & trends here.