5 Channel Partner and MSP Updates: Wednesday 16 September 2020

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

Our Daily Brew

A. What’s Happening Today

1. Measuring & Addressing (Lack of ) Diversity in the Channel: What actionable steps can the channel take to address lack of diversity among executive and leadership ranks? The answer, according to channel veteran and podcaster Dave Sobel, involves actually measuring diversity in the channel (here are his just-released channel diversity stats) and then taking concrete steps to improve on those metrics.

2. Snowflake IPO: Snowflake’s IPO (initial public offering) is today. Here are 10 things to know.

3. Funding: AppDirect, a subscription commerce platform, has received investments of US$185 million from such backers as Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec (CDPQ) and existing investors. AppDirect has raised $465 million to date.

4. M&A: Pure Storage is acquiring Portworx for roughly $370 million in cash, representing company's largest acquisition to date and deeper expansion into the fast-growing market for multi-cloud data services to support Kubernetes and containers, SeekingAlpha notes.

5. Careers - Robotic Process Automation (RPA): Udacity, an online learning platform, has launched a Robotic Process Automation (RPA) Developer Nanodegree program in conjunction with UiPath. The program is designed to provide learners with the practical experience and resources needed to understand and facilitate RPA.

B. Channel Partner Programs and Strategic Alliances

1. AWS Outposts - Partner Solutions: Dozens of technology companies have certified their applications and solutions to run on AWS Outposts -- the on-premises version of Amazon Web Services.

2. Partner Program Enhancements - Technology Intelligence: Snow Software plans to launch an enhanced partner program in January 2021.

3. Partner Program - Identity and Access Management (IAM): OneLogin has announced Accelerate 2.0, the next evolution of its partner program.

4. Partnership - SD-WANs: Adaptiv Networks, a cloud-native SD-WAN-as-a-Service vendor, has partnered with SDWAN Solutions Ltd., an SD-WAN managed services provider serving the UK and Europe.

5. Distribution: SYNNEX Corporation has added Palo Alto Networks to its GSA and NASPO contracts, giving partners the ability to sell Palo Alto Networks’ cybersecurity technologies in the state, local and education (SLED) market.

6. Distribution: Tech Data will offer access to IBM’s Cloud Pak for Security platform as part of its Cyber Range – a virtual environment for training and testing security response procedures.

7. Partnership - Cloud Data Warehousing: HCL’s Actian portfolio, starting with Actian Avalanche, is available via Google Cloud. Actian Avalanche is a hybrid cloud data warehouse designed to power an enterprise’s most demanding operational analytics workloads. The offering surfaces the same day that cloud data warehouse provider Snowflake is set to IPO.

C. Technology Conferences and Virtual Partner Events