Good morning, channel partners. Here are five technology news updates, insights, chatter, and plenty more to start your day for Monday, October 23, 2017.
Actually, there are eight 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
8. Talent: 8x8, the unified communications specialist, has announced several key hires and executive promotions. They include:
- Scott Sampson, Senior Vice President of Midmarket & Enterprise. He previously was Chief Revenue Officer at New Voice Media. Earlier he had a key post in IBM's analytics business.
- Samuel Wilson, Senior Vice President of Small Business & eCommerce. He joins 8x8 from MobileIron.
- Rick Boyd, Vice President of North America Midmarket Sales. Previously he was sVice President of Client Sales Americas at ShoreTel.
- Brendan Maree, Vice President of Asia Pacific Sales, is based in Sydney, Australia. He joins the company from Interactive Intelligence where he most recently served as Senior Vice President of Japan, Australia and New Zealand.
- Kyle DiPentima has been promoted to VP of North America Enterprise Sales.
- Sharon Maslyn has been promoted to VP of Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) Sales.
7. M&A Financing: Fusion Telecommunications is in the process of selecting banks to arrange financing for its acquisition of Birch Communications’ cloud and business services unit, after inking a merger agreement with the US telecommunications company in August without committed financing in place, according to Reuters.
6. Partner Program: CDK Global's partner program now spans more than 350 companies and 450 unique applications. The CDK Partner Program promotes automotive dealer software and associated solutions.
5. Small Businesses and Facebook: Ripl has launched Apple iOS and Google Android apps to help small businesses interact more closely with Facebook Page visitors. Ripl users are primarily micro-business proprietors who use the software to create, post and track branded videos for social media, the company claims.
4. SMB Backup: Data Deposit Box is rolling out a new hybrid IT backup platform for MSPs. The offering will span hybrid data options as well as automated, end-to-end, mobile and white label cloud backup solutions, the company says.
3. DattoCon London: The conference is under way. We'll be watching closely for updates on Datto's data protection strategy -- along with the company's continued networking push for MSPs... Plus, those rumors about Datto hiring Morgan Stanley for a potential company sale. Looking toward next year, the global DattoCon18 conference is set for June 18-20 in Austin, Texas.
2. Breaking -- Two Cisco Acquisitions: Cisco has acquired Perspica, an application analysis tuck-in. The deal could benefit Cisco's AppDynamics application performance monitoring (APM) business. Separately, Cisco this morning confirmed plans to acquire BroadSoft for $1.9 billion.
1. Cisco Partner Summit 2017: It's next week. ChannelE2E will be on hand. Want to potentially meet? Email me: [email protected].
