5 Channel Partner and MSP Updates: Friday 16 October 2020 -

Here are five (actually, more) technology news updates, insights, chatter, and plenty more to start your day for Friday, October 16, 2020. Sip up.

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A. What’s Happening Today

1. Alleged Tax Evasion - Software Investors: A Houston software executive who has investment ties to private equity giant Vista Equity Partners was charged with hiding approximately $2 billion in income from U.S. tax authorities over 20 years, in what officials said was the largest criminal case ever brought against a person accused of evading U.S. taxes, The Wall Street Journal reports.

Key points from The Journal's coverage include:

The case focuses mainly on billionaire Robert Brockman, CEO of Reynolds and Reynolds, an automotive software market.
Some of Brockman's investments involved Vista Equity Partners, the private equity giant.
Brockman allegedly concealed from the IRS gains he made in Vista’s funds.
Vista Equity founder Robert Smith admitted to willfully evading $43 million in federal taxes from 2005 to 2014 and agreed to cooperate with the continuing investigation.
Under a settlement reached with the Justice Department, Smith will pay $139 million in fines and back taxes but won’t be prosecuted.

2. Funding - Salesforce Partner: Salesforce Ventures has invested in Apisero, an IT consulting firm focused on the MuleSoft and Salesforce platforms solutions for enterprise, commercial, and mid-market customers. Apisero in 2020 has seen a 300% organic increase in its overall customer acquisition, and 2.2X year-over-year revenue growth, though actual revenue and profit figures were not disclosed. The company expects to exceed 1,000 employees by the end of Q4 2020.

3. M&A - MSPs: TeamLogic IT of the North Carolina Triad Region, led by President John Fox, has acquired Convergent Technologies, according to a local news report.

4. MSP - Financial Services: RESULTS Technology, a Top 100 Vertical Market MSP for community banks, is featured in Bank Director’s FinXTech Connect Technology Partner Directory for Banks. FinXTech Connect is a curated directory of emerging technology companies who are strategically partnering with financial institutions.

5. Local MSP Growth: EasyIT has been named to the Columbus Business First’s Fast 50 list for 2020, an honor recognizing the 50 fastest-growing businesses in Central Ohio.

6. Managed Application Services: Konica Minolta Business Solutions, U.S.A. has launched Application as a Service packages including document and print management with workflow, network fax and healthcare-specific offerings. The managed application services, part of Konica's Workplace Hub effort, span:

Document management to provide process automation for the storage and retrieval of documents, content, emails and data;
Print management to manage, analyze, account and optimize print, copy, fax and scan output while providing document security to help comply with government regulations;
Print management with single sign-on (SSO) to advanced workflows;
Network faxing with integration and automation capabilities; and
Healthcare bundles to secure Protected Health Information (PHI) from EHR backend systems.

7. Data Protection: Zerto announced Zerto 8.5 -- which offers backup to Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS) directly from on-premises deployments. The offering supports Azure VMware Solution (AVS), Google Cloud VMware Engine, and Oracle Cloud VMware Solution. The company also launched Zerto Data Protection (ZDP), which offers Continuous Data Protection (CDP) for all applications, Zerto asserts.

8. Cloud Database Services: Oracle has introduced an updated Exadata Cloud Service, now based on the Exadata X8M platform. Oracle positions the system for "customers to move even the largest and most demanding databases and workloads seamlessly to the cloud with no changes to applications," the company says.

9. Partnership - Cloud Migrations: Anexinet and iland have partnered to assist customers with cloud migrations that avoid "overly complex 'big box' cloud offerings" and instead deliver "white-glove guidance, pay-per-need billing, and the ability to utilize existing infrastructure investments where necessary," the companies say.