Good morning, channel partners. Here are five technology news updates, insights, chatter, and plenty more to start your day for Friday, November 18, 2016.
Actually, there are 10 entries 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. Gartner CMO vs CIO Tech Spending: For the first time ever, chief marketing officers will outspend CIOs on technology in 2017, according to Gartner. I'm not quite sure I agree with the findings. I suspect Gartner is lumping in digital advertising campaign budgets. Still, there's no denying that marketing teams are consuming IT more than ever...
9. Value-Added Office 365 Services: Intermedia is reselling Office 365 -- while wrapping backup, business continuity, voice, compliance and security solutions around the Microsoft suite. Intermedia was an early hosted Exchange provider that has since evolved far beyond the email platform. Among the company's recent moves: Hiring Microsoft channel and cloud veteran Eric Martorano as VP of worldwide sales.
8. FireEye Sales Chief: FireEye has hired former Symantec and Nuance executive Bill Robbins as its new executive VP of worldwide sales, reporting directly to CEO Kevin Mandia. Robbins will need to work overtime balancing FireEye's direct and indirect sales engagements. The security company's consulting team has alienated some partners over the past couple of years, though FireEye has vowed to mitigate channel conflicts.
7. Got Diversity: Microsoft's executive bonus structure now includes a diversity component.
6. Application Performance Monitoring: The application performance monitoring (APM) market will enjoy a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 12.41 percent from 2014 to 2019, according to Technavio. Several APM providers in the study -- particularly AppDynamics and New Relic -- are growing far faster than the overall industry. Much of the hyper-growth involves web-scale APM -- which automatically scales up and down based on cloud applications scaling up and down.
5. SAP's Concur Embraces Systems Integrators: Concur has expanded its systems integrator partner program. The SAP company launched a formalized partner program earlier this year, initially focusing on Office 365 resellers that wanted to move into travel and expense management services.
4. Taxing the Cloud: If you're offering cloud services and trying to figure out your tax bill, here's some food for thought...
3. Webroot MSP Growth: Webroot's business segment bookings grew 35 percent year-over-year in the company's fiscal quarter ended Sept. 30, 2016. More than 700 new MSPs embraced Webroot's endpoint security protection platform in the quarter, bringing the company's total MSP base to 6,900 partners, the company said yesterday. Why is Webroot succeeding at a time when so many large security companies failed with MSPs? The simple answer, according to one source, is a "high-tech, high-touch" approach. In other words: You need to have consistent face time and listening skills to build long-term relationships with MSPs.
2. Next Trip: ChannelE2E is set to attend Ingram Micro ONE and Amazon Re:Invent from Nov. 29 to Dec. 1. If you'd like to potentially meet please email me ([email protected]).
1. Channel Partner Programs: Intermedia is the latest company listed in the ChannelE2E Partner Programs Database. Search the database to find vendors in a range of categories -- cloud services, security, storage and more. Or, add your company to the database. Yup, the database is free.
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