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5 Channel Partner Updates: Monday 20 August 2018

Good morning, channel partners. Here are five technology news updates, insights, chatter, and plenty more to start your day for Monday, August 20, 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. Talent - IT Services: Infosys CFO M.D. Ranganath has resigned after three years in the position. His exit from India's second-largest IT software services company comes about six months after a new CEO joined the firm. Infosys, like many IT services firms, is working to evolve its business amid worldwide shifts to cloud services, artificial intelligence and automation.

10. Vodafone Outage Impacts Airport: Gatwick, Britain’s second busiest airport, was forced to post flight information on white boards on Monday after a Vodafone IT glitch meant its digital screens failed, reports say.

9. Lenovo SMB North America: The PC giant, backed by recent data center momentum, is planning some SMB-centric channel efforts in North America. Among the goals: Make Lenovo the Number One preferred PC brand in Canada within three years, CDN reports.

8. UK Seeks AWS Cloud Migration Partner: The United Kingdom is developing plans to migrate its police systems -- including storage, network and compute components -- to Amazon Web Services. The Home Office -- a department that oversees UK immigration, security and law and order -- is seeking an AWS partner to lead the migration, The Register reports.

7. Google Cloud Platform and Artificial Intelligence: Google is developing pre-packaged artificial intelligence (AI) services to help companies address contact center, talent and recommendation services, the search giant says. It's another example of AI going mainstream without consumers necessarily noticing AI's presence.

6. Cloud Distribution - Cisco Systems: Synnex CLOUDSolv has agreed to distribute the following Cisco solutions in North America:

5. Business Continuity - Midmarket, SMB: StorageCraft today unveiled OneXafe, a converged data platform that blurs the lines between primary and secondary storage and scales out to help manage data growth, the company says. StorageCraft also ShadowXafe, an SMB platform that allows partners to  perform virtual machine recovery in "milliseconds" and restore an entire infrastructure in minutes using StorageCraft's VirtualBoot technology, the company says. We'll share more details soon.

4. Talent and Diversity: Carbon Black has taken the ParityPledge pledge, vowing to interview at least one qualified woman candidate for every open position, vice president and above, including the C-suite and board.

3. Employee Business Ownership & ESOPs: The Main Street Employee Ownership Act is now a law. It seeks to make better use of existing programs offered by the Small Business Administration (SBA) to companies considering an employee owned model, such as an Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP), according to the ESOP Association.

2. MSP Peer Group Conference: Taylor Business Group's BigBig 2018 conference is scheduled for September 13-15 in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Big stands for "Business Improvement Groups" -- a peer group format that has connected MSPs to drive business growth since 2001. The overall Taylor Business Group (TBG) membership represents roughly $400 million in annual revenues. The conference is open to member and non-member MSPs.

1. Benchmark Your MSP: How is your business performing compared to the overall MSP and IT services market? Join the next ChannelE2E webcast this Thursday to find out.

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.