Good morning, channel partners. Here are five technology news updates, insights, chatter, and plenty more to start your day for Friday, February 9, 2018.
Actually, there are nine 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…
9. M&A Part One: Thomas H. Lee Partners, a private equity firm is acquiring Alfresco Software, an open-source provider of process automation, content management, and information governance software. Alfresco often positions itself as a Microsoft SharePoint alternative.
8. M&A Part Two: LogMeIn is acquiring Jive Communications, a provider cloud-based phone systems and Unified Communications services. LogMeIn will align the offering with its existing GoToMeeting, GoToWebinar, OpenVoice, and join.me offerings.
7. No Thanks, But...: Qualcomm on Thursday rejected Broadcom's revised $121 billion buyout offer, but proposed meeting its peer to see whether they can address what it called the bid’s “serious deficiencies in value and certainty,” Reuters says.
6. MSP Contract Win: Broward College has signed a $1.9 million managed IT services contract with CSPi. As part of this contract CSPi will design, deploy, integrate and manage a private cloud to support enterprise applications. CSPi will also deploy a new campus WLAN and NAC Solution forming a solid foundation needed for secure high-availability, scalability and growing demand to support IoT devices.
5. Funding - Cloud Contract Management: Icertis Inc. has raised $50 million to fund its cloud contract management platform expansion. The platform tracks variables like contractual obligation monitoring, automatic risk mitigation and the ability to “increase contract velocity” through automated processes, the company claims.
4. Talent: Akamai and Citrix veteran Paolo Di Leo has joined Neverfail as director of sales for the EMEA region. He's based in Neverfail’s London facility.
3. Talent: HP Enterprise veteran Robert Vrij is joining Lenovo as senior vice president and president of EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa), according to CRN. He will also oversee key global partner relationships with giants like CDW, Insight, Ingram Micro and Tech Data, the report says. Vrij joins Lenovo at a very challenging time. The company's recent financial performance revealed ongoing challenges in the PC, server, data center and mobile markets. Plus, Lenovo's U.S. channel group has taken lumps for partner program changes that hurt partner incentives earlier this year.
2. Presidio Earnings: Presidio's revenue was $661.6 million in the company's latest quarter -- nearly $90 million below Wall Street's expectations. Still, CEO Bob Cagnazzi reaffirmed the company's annual revenue and earnings outlook for the IT solutions provider's full fiscal year, which ends June 30, 2018. According to Cagnazzi, "Our second quarter results were impacted by delays in the delivery of certain solutions to our clients," Cagnazzi said. "However, we are encouraged to see the delayed activity reflected in our robust and growing revenue backlog and client bookings so far in the third quarter, which we expect to accelerate our revenue growth in the second half of our year."
1. MSP Profit Analysis: Hilltop Consultants, a Top 100 Vertical Market MSP that recently acquired two legal MSPs, leverages MSP CFO's software platform to track the profitability of its contracts on a customer by customer basis. Hilltop mentioned MSP CFO's business value during an MSP M&A Symposium hosted by Kaseya yesterday in Florida.
