5 Channel Partner and MSP Updates: Thursday 24 September 2020

Here are five (actually more) technology news updates, insights, chatter, and plenty more to start your day for Thursday, September 24, 2020. Sip up.

Our Daily Brew

A. What’s Happening Today

1. IT Consulting - Revenue Weakness: Accenture's revenue was $10.8 billion in Q4 of fiscal 2020, down 2 percent from Q4 of fiscal 2019, the company announced on September 24, 2020. The results provide a timely reality check for IT consulting firms worldwide -- many of which are navigating coronavirus pandemic fallout in their regions.

2. MSP Network Monitoring: SolarWinds N-central, an RMM (remote monitoring and management) software platform for MSPs, is now more deeply integrated with the Cisco Meraki Dashboard API. The result: MSPs can more easily discover and monitor Cisco Meraki devices from within their N-central dashboards, SolarWinds says.

3. Partner Program - Application Performance Management (APM): Dynatrace has launched its Partner Competency Program. New Dynatrace Competencies align with partners’ expertise in specific use cases and technologies, including AIOps, DevOps, Cloud, ITSM/ITOM, and Government, the software company says.

4. Partner Program - Robotic Process Automation (RPA): Automation Anywhere has enhanced its global partner program -- which currently spans 2,000 worldwide channel partners. Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) Chris Riley said: "Our partners are key to our RPA vision as we continue to support customers on their automation journey. To meet this demand, we are investing in our channel ecosystem to propel partners to capitalize on the growth of cloud-based RPA."

5. Microsoft - Robotic Process Automation (RPA): The latest RPA effort from Microsoft is known as Power Automate Desktop. Now in preview, Power Automate Desktop enables "coders and non-coders alike to automate processes and tasks across desktop and web applications," the company says. RPA technology is expected to increasingly influence help desk and service desk automation.

6. SAP on AWS Cloud: Lemongrass has unveiled Lemongrass Application Archiving, which works in tandem with the Lemongrass Cloud Platform (LCP). The solution "enables an SAP customer to move an old and/or relatively unused SAP system into a low cost, easy to access, secure cloud platform," the IT consulting firm says.

7. Partnership - High Performance Computing and Cloud Services: Rescale's cloud HPC simulation platform is now available on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Rescale's platform helps engineers and scientists build, compute, analyze, and scale simulations with high performance computing, the company says.

8. Partnership - Cloud Data Lakes: WANdisco and Infosys are partnering to help enterprises migrate their data lakes to major public clouds including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.

9. Data Protection: Retrospect, a StorCentric company, has announced general availability (GA) of Retrospect Backup 17.5, which includes new cloud storage provider certifications and platform updates for Apple macOS, as well as performance enhancements to Retrospect Management Console. The enhancements "ensure customers around the world can leverage the latest Apple technology and utilize an ever-growing number of cloud providers for off-site data protection," the company asserts.

10. Intel Processors and IoT Capabilities: The 11th Gen Intel Core processors, Intel Atom x6000E series, and Intel Pentium and Celeron N and J series now bring new artificial intelligence (AI), security, functional safety and real-time capabilities to edge customers, the chip giant says. The developments come as Intel faces intensified competition from AMD and Nvidia, among others.

B. Technology Conferences and Virtual Partner Events