5 Channel Partner Updates: Friday 04 May 2018

Good morning, channel partners. Here are five technology news updates, insights, chatter, and plenty more to start your day for Friday, May 4, 2018.

Actually, there are 14 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…

14. Big Xerox About-Face: The strange Xerox leadership situation just got stranger. Xerox CEO Jeff Jacobson and six other board members were expected to step down as part of an agreement to appease shareholder activists. But apparently that agreement fell apart, and now the CEO and those board members are staying. Shareholders, meanwhile, are left in a lurch as Xerox attempts to renegotiate an M&A deal with Fujifilm while also potentially listening for bids from other companies. Among the potential suitors: HP Inc.

13. Talent: Green House Data, a cloud hosting, colocation, and managed IT services provider, has hired Kaseya veteran Maxon Duncan as VP of cloud technology.

12. Next-Gen Managed Services:  nDivision has raised $4 million for a so-called Autonomic Managed Services platform, which claims to replace human labor with "digital labor." Hmmm... We'll need to give that a closer look soon.

11. M&A: ComputerWorld, an MSP and VAR, has been acquired by certain management team members. We'll share more thoughts soon.

10. Multi-Cloud Management: Upbound, which allows service providers to manage Kubernetes clusters across multiple clouds, has raised $9 million in Series A funding.

9. NOC Automation: What if Network Operations Centers didn't have humans anymore? Hmmm...

8. Lenovo Caution Flag: The outlook for Lenovo shareholders is looking grimmer after the stock was dropped from Hong Kong’s benchmark stock gauge, Bloomberg asserts. The chatter comes just as Lenovo prepares to host partners at the company's Accelerate 2018 conference next week in Las Vegas. We'll be poking around to learn how the company plans to jumpstart its partner engagements, which misfired quite a bit in 2017.

7. Partnership - Containers: HP Enterprise and Red Hat are partnering to enable enterprises to adopt and deploy containers in production rapidly and at scale. The effort involves Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform...

6. Distribution - Cisco: Tech Data has expanded its Tech Data Cisco Partner Enablement Framework for its U.S.-based Cisco partner community. The expanded framework targets a broad range of partners—from new partners just starting or ramping up their Cisco practices to large, two-tier partners looking to diversify their practices with technical specialization, vertical expertise or geographic expansion, the distributor says.

5. Partner Program:  Xplore Technologies has introduced a new channel partner program and enlisted several new distributors and resellers worldwide to support the company's rugged mobility business.

4. Next Week's Tech Conferences: We'll be tracking eight major technology and conferences the week of May 7. They include...

Instead of wishing us luck with all that show coverage, simply email me the news: [email protected].

3. Distribution - Cloud Services: Pax8 has unveiled a new website featuring Pax8 Stax, a Business Intelligence tool that provides insight into up-sell and cross-sell opportunities for MSPs, the cloud distributor says.

2. ServiceNow Partner Strategy: We'll get the latest details from Tony Beller, ServiceNow VP of Worldwide Alliances and Channels, during the company's Knowledge 2018 conference on Monday morning.

1. MSP M&A Trends: What are the latest trends in MSP mergers and acquisitions? We'll hunt for answers during an MSP M&A Symposium that will kick off the Kaseya Connect 2018 conference on Monday afternoon. In the meantime, follow my M&A views each Friday in this blog series.