Good morning, channel partners. Here are five technology news updates, insights, chatter, and plenty more to start your day for Friday, March 2, 2018.
Actually, there are 11 timely updates designed for VARs, managed services providers (MSPs), cloud services providers (CSPs), independent software vendors (ISVs), telco master agents and telco agents to sip on. Take a look…
11. Xerox Battle: Hedge fund manager Darwin Deason filed a new lawsuit against Xerox on Friday after the hardware giant refused to allow him to make nominations to its board after a deadline, the latest blows in a row over Xerox's proposed merger with Fujifilm, Reuters says.
10. IBM Setback?: Canada has spent CAD $1 billion (about US$780 million) on a government payroll solution operated by IBM, but it sounds like the Canadian government is scrapping the project because of continued bugs and glitches.
9. Distribution - UCaaS: D&H Distributing has selected Intermedia as its preferred Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) provider.
8. 'Big Spiff' Partner Perk: Morpheus Data is adding a $250,000 back-end cash rebate on top of existing plans for gold-tier channel partners that drive at least $2.5 million in revenue with the company over the next 6 months. Morpheus specializes in cloud cost optimization & management along with DevOps automation.
7. IT Outsourcing Pushback: Two Australian workers unions have called on the federal government to stop trying to cut costs by outsourcing IT and instead invest in staff and systems to support digital government service delivery, IT News reports. The Community and Public Sector Union and the Australian Council of Trade Unions made the call to a parliamentary inquiry investigating the Commonwealth's procurement activities, the report says.
6. Earnings:
- Box's Q4 revenues were $136.7 million, up 24 percent from the corresponding quarter the previous year. The results met Wall Street's expectations, but shares dropped more than 10 percent amid long-term growth concerns. The news could be a yellow flag for rival Dropbox, which recently filed to go public.
- Pure Storage's revenues for fiscal Q4 2018 were $338.3 million, up 48 percent vs. the corresponding quarter last year. However, shares dropped about 6.8 percent as Wall Street worried about future growth rates.
- Salesforce's Q4 revenues were $2.85 billion, up 24 percent year over year and above Wall Street's expectations.
- Splunk's revenues for fiscal Q4 2018 were $419.7 million, up 37 percent from the corresponding quarter last year. Shares jumped nearly 6 percent amid long-term optimism for the company.
- VMware's latest quarterly results, revealed yesterday, impressed Wall Street. But most eyes were on the potential Dell-VMware reverse merger. Here's the update...
5. Talent: Key hires include...
- Flash storage provider Vexata has hired Charlie Leeming as chief sales officer. He's worked with a range of companies, including a 16-year journey with Brocade.
- Nastel Technologies, an application performance monitoring (APM) software company on Long Island, has hired Laura Boccardo as director of marketing.
4. Contract Win - Managed Services: CenturyLink has won a managed services contract with the State of Texas Department of Information Resources (DIR). The deal covers infrastructure management (devices, networks, wireless) and communications (IP telephony, quality of service monitoring, remote implementation of telephony hardware, fault management and reporting). This is the second managed services contract the Texas Department of Information Resources has awarded to CenturyLink since 2013.
3. M&A - Cloud Cost Management: Nutanix is acquiring Minjar, which develops Botmetric. The service provides customers with unified cost control and enhanced visibility into their workloads running in public clouds. Through the Minjar acquisition, the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS will offer customers new capabilities to better manage their multi-cloud deployments, the companies claim. Financial terms were not disclosed.
2. M&A - Systems Integration: ConvergeOne has completed the buyout of Arrow Electronics' Systems Integration business, which specializes in unified communications, contact center, and voice and data technologies.
1. Weekend: Make it a great one. Oh, and check ChannelE2E's homepage regularly. You never know when big news -- and our analysis -- will surface.
