Good morning, channel partners. Here are five technology news updates, insights, views and perspectives to start your day for Thursday, Oct. 22, 2015.
Actually, today's update involves 13 items for VARs, managed services providers (MSPs) and cloud service providers (CSPs) to sip on.
13. HP Kills Public Cloud: Bye bye.
12. Meeting of the Minds: I spoke a bit this morning with Chris Tate, founder of TotallyMSP. Yada, yada, yada... sharp guy. That's all I can say about that.
11. Under Pressure: VMware shares fell 20 percent yesterday. Wall Street is concerned about the EMC-VMware decision to spin off Virtustream into a separate cloud computing company. Some critics say EMC is trying to manage too many moving parts across the EMC Federation of companies -- RSA, Pivotal, VMware, Virtustream, etc. But CEO Joe Tucci says the move actually will save money and boost VMware's bottom line. Meanwhile, Michael Dell continues to assure EMC and VMware partners that the $67 billion buyout of EMC won't undermine partner relationships.
10. Magic Quadrant MSPs: Clutch, an analyst firm, appears to be trying to blend the MSP market with Gartner's Magic Quadrant approach. Clutch just released a report on the Top Managed Services Providers of 2015, but the press release was vague on details and the top MSP chart only listed about 10 MSPs. Hmmm... I know where you can go find 491 other leading MSPs to round out that research...
9. MSP Acquisition: Smart IMS acquired Atlas Communications Technology (Atlas), a provider of cloud and managed services offerings. Financial terms were not disclosed. We're pinging the companies for more details.
8. Optimism Rises: The CompTIA IT Industry Business Confidence Index rebounded in Q4 with an increase of 2.2 percentage points, reversing two consecutive quarters of decline. The index now stands at 62.8 on a 100-point scale. The rating is based on IT executives’ opinions of the U.S. economy, the IT industry and their own company.
7. Sold At A Loss: HP has sold its TippingPoint security business to Trend Micro for $300 million. 3Com (now owned by HP) originally acquired Tipping Point for $430 million in 2004. The TippingPoint sale comes as HP prepares to split into two companies (Hewlett-Packard Co. and HP Inc.) on Nov. 1.
6. Docker Container Management: Docker has acquired Tutum, a cloud service provider that helps IT managers to provision, deploy and manage applications in Docker containers.
5. Dell Does IoT: I'm always a bit skeptical when a hardware company announces a "disruptive" device for the Internet of Things market. But Dell's Edge Gateway 5000 series sounds interesting. It "sits at the edge of a network (near devices and sensors) with local analytics and middleware to receive, aggregate, analyze and relay" only meaningful data to the cloud or your data center, Dell asserted...
4. Exit Doors Are Closing: Too many big startups with sky high valuations won't be able to successfully exit through IPO, Venture Capitalist Bill Gurley continues to warn. That sort of explains why I took a close look at the angel investor market throughout 2014... and walked away without making a single investment that year.
3. Memo to Kim Daniels: The Internet of Things can make wine taste sweeter. No joke. But were you looking for something a little more dry (like my humor?).
2. Sorry About That: Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey apologized to the company's ISV partner ecosystem yesterday. Dorsey conceded that the company's relationship with developers "got confusing, unpredictable." In response, he wants to "reset the relationship" with new tools that ease app development and monetization on Twitter.
1. Microsoft's Next Move: Where is Microsoft taking its worldwide partner program next? The answer likely includes the blending of ISVs (running on Azure) and more traditional channel partners. ChannelE2E has some of the early details. We'll share them soon.
Read Them All: Did you miss one of our 5 Channel Partner Observations? Find the archive here here. Subscribe: Receive ChannelE2E’s blog headlines, insights and updates in your inbox daily. Subscribe to our enewsletter. Thanks to those who already have.
