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5 Channel Partner Updates: 25 Nov 2015

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Good morning, channel partners. Here are five technology news updates, insights, chatter and so much more to start your day for Wednesday, November 25, 2015.

Actually, today's update involves 13 items for VARs, managed services providers (MSPs) and cloud services providers (CSPs) to sip on.

13. IT Certification Company Hacked: Pearson VUE, which manages IT certification tests and programs for Cisco Systems, IBM and Oracle, has been hacked. We'll be back with more info later today.

12. Credit Applications and ConnectWise: GreatAmerica Financial Services Corp. has enhanced its integration with ConnectWise to allow customers to submit credit applications. The new feature will improve front-end efficiency for ConnectWise users, the lender and financial services company says. GreatAmerica has also been helping channel partners to focus on hardware as a rental (HaaR) -- a new twist on the old hardware as a service (HaaS) model.

11. Partner Program Overhaul: EnGenius Technologies Inc., which develops networking and telecom solutions, has overhauled its  EnPower Partner Program. It now features ,three tiers primarily determined by a partner’s revenue commitment. The name to know: Vicki Bilyeu, channel marketing manager at EnGenius.

10. Disaster Avoidance: Despite three backbone carriers going dark last week, Artisan Infrastructure and its channel partners were minimally affected. Why? In a show of healthy bravado, Artisan Infrastructure attributes its resilience to the company's "over engineered network, which leverages multiple peering and redundant carrier backbone feeds to support its internet connectivity pool."

Meg Whitman
9. HP Hits and Misses: Now two separate companies, Hewlett Packard Enterprise met earnings expectations and HP Inc. (PCs and printers) missed them, according to quarterly results shared yesterday. The next big move for both companies comes Dec. 1-3, at the Hewlett Packard Enterprise Discover 2015 conference in London. The CEOs of both companies -- Meg Whitman and Don Weisler -- and more than 10,000 customers will be on hand. We'll share more thoughts soon.

8. Dell's Office of the CTO: Sure, Dell is plenty busy trying to finalize its buyout of EMC and VMware -- though the deal faces some shareholder pushback. But did you realize that Dell's Office of the CTO is plenty busy evangelizing DevOps, containers and micro-services to customers and channel partners? ChannelE2E will share more details soon.

7. Hewlett-Packard Enterprise & Azure: You already know that Hewlett-Packard Enterprise is killing its public cloud platform. What's the new strategy? Apparently, CEO Meg Whitman will hitch the company's fortunes to Microsoft Azure -- believing that Microsoft has a strong cloud strategy and platform for CIOs and enterprise customers. I tend to agree. But HP Enterprise will need to make sure that it's more than an Azure reseller and integrator. Whitman has to figure out how to get some HP Enterprise generating revenues of Azure. More on that soon.

mapr-executives

6. Big Data in the Channel: During a lengthy conversation with MapR VP of Marketing Jack Norris yesterday, he shared some nuggets about Hadoop momentum in the channel. Norris also hinted that some big MapR surprises are under development... As you may recall, MapR recently hired Oracle veteran Matt Mills to help accelerate business growth and to prep for a potential IPO. We'll share some more details sometime after Thanksgiving. 

5. Big Data Training: Meanwhile, MapR rival Hortonworks is promoting Hadoop Certification -- calling on channel partners and IT professionals to learn at their own pace... and perhaps spend their remaining 2015 budget dollars on online courses.

4. Hey Honey, Have You Heard?: An algorithm can predict the success -- or failure -- of a couple's relationship simply by analyzing tone of voice. Hmmm...

Pascal Bourguet Pascal Bourguet

3. Lenovo Channel Chief: Former HP VP Pascal Bourguet will join Lenovo as EMEA vice president of products and channels in March 2016. Sammy Kinlaw remains Lenovo's North American channel chief.

2. Windows Server Disaster Recovery: StorageCraft VirtualBoot for Hyper-V is now available. It allows StorageCraft ShadowProtect partners to instantly boot a protected Windows system as a guest virtual machine directly on a Hyper-V host when using Windows Server 2012 R2.

1. Happy Thanksgiving: After Nines Inc. and ChannelE2E wish you a healthy, happy Thanksgiving. Our blog updates continue throughout Wednesday, Nov. 25. We're closed Thursday and Friday (Nov. 26-27), returning on Monday, Nov. 30.

More: Read all of our daily 5 Channel Partner UpdatesPlusSubscribe to our daily enewsletter. Thanks to those who already have. 

Joe Panettieri

Joe Panettieri is co-founder & editorial director of MSSP Alert and ChannelE2E, the two leading news & analysis sites for managed service providers in the cybersecurity market.

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