Good morning, channel partners. Here are five technology news updates, insights, chatter, and plenty more to start your day for Thursday, March 29, 2018.
Actually, there are 16 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…
16. Talent - IT Giants: Cisco Systems has hired IBM, Microsoft and Juniper veteran Gerri Elliott as executive VP and chief sales and marketing officer. She will join Cisco on April 30. Karen Walker will remain in her role as chief marketing officer reporting to Elliott. Cisco also hired Salesforce veteran Maria Martinez as executive VP and chief customer experience officer. Elliott and Martinez will join Cisco’s executive leadership team and serve as executive officers of the company, Cisco added.
15. Talent - MSP Services: VAR Staffing veteran Todd Billiar has joined IT By Design as director of channel sales. IT By Design offers help desk and NOC (network operations center) services to peer MSPs. Based in New Jersey, the company has offices in Tampa (Florida) and Vancouver. IT By Design also owns two global NOCs in India, and a data center in Arizona. Billiar will develope the company's national channel network, and expand the firm's footprint of outsourced IT business solutions.
14. Tesla Trouble Signs: Tesla shares fell sharply again on Wednesday, reeling from a credit downgrade from Moody’s, federal probes of a fatal crash and concerns about Model 3 production, Reuters notes. The big concern: Tesla has $230 million in convertible bonds maturing in November 2018 and $920 million in March 2019. With those debt challenges in mind, the company has a pressing need to raise more cash. Or as The Wall Street Journal puts it: "Tesla will soon need money again. The trouble is, raising it suddenly looks a lot more challenging."
13. Multi-Cloud Data Protection: Druva customers can now view and manage their data across SaaS, PaaS and IaaS platforms. The multi-cloud support ensures customer data is "properly managed through its lifecycle, meets enterprise service level agreements, and achieves consistency of service regardless of where their data is ultimately stored," Druva claims.
12. Application Performance Management: Google has extended its Stackdriver cloud management tools with more application performance management (APM) capabilities. The APM toolkit spans two existing products (Stackdriver Trace and Debugger) and a new offering called Stackdriver Profiler. As the name suggests, Profiler allows customers to profile and explore how their code actually executes in production, to optimize performance and reduce cost of computation, Google asserts.
11. AWS and GDPR Compliance: Amazon Web Services has achieved GDPR compliance, the public cloud services provider asserts.
10. Managed Services: Mirapath has added managed services to its list of service offerings. They span both onsite and remote support tailored to fit their clients’ specific data center needs. Mirapath designs, procures, installs, and manages data center, lab, and IT infrastructure.
9. Ransomware Attack: Boeing got hit yesterday but it sounds like the damage was limited.
8. M&A - Network Services: Windstream has completed its $37.5 million buyout of Mass Communications, a CLEC that offers voice, data, risk management, SD-WAN, managed security and network monitoring services. Windstream has been working overtime to stabilize its business after layoffs and eliminating its stock dividend in 2017.
7. M&A - IT Services: Automated Office Systems has acquired the assets of Complete Computing Inc., essentially blending an office equipment supplier and an MSP. In a very familiar trend, Mike Dudek served as legal counsel and provided legal advice and services to Automated Office Systems and its owners. Dudek has advised scores of of M&A deals in the IT services market.
6. M&A - IT Training: CompTIA has acquired gtslearning, a developer and supplier of learning resources, including printed and online courseware, learning materials, and online practice labs for IT certification exams. CompTIA also purchased intellectual property from courseware developer and provider Logical Operations.
5. M&A – MSSPs: Here’s a closer look at a key M&A deal involving MSSPs that partner with Palo Alto Networks and F5 Networks.
4. Private Equity & CEO Churn: More than half of CEO exits at PE-owned companies is unplanned, leading to longer hold times and lower returns for private equity firms, according to a new survey from AlixPartners and Vardis.
3. Kaseya Funding: Chatter about new Kaseya funding surfaced in November 2017. Fast forward to present day, and a March 2018 SEC filing suggests the funding efforts went well. The total apparent bounty: $48.5 million or so...
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