Good morning, channel partners. Here are five technology news updates, insights, chatter, and plenty more to start your day for Thursday, April 5, 2018.
Actually, there are 15 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…
15. Microsoft IoT Checkbook: Microsoft plans to invest $5 billion in its IoT efforts, the technology giant says. Our reaction? When a tech company isn't sure how a 'big' market will take shape, the safest bet is to throw a big R&D number out into the market...
14. AWS Momentum: "Tens of thousands" of customers are "flocking" to Amazon's machine learning services, while the Amazon Aurora database has doubled its active customer base in the past year, the cloud giant says.
13. Trump vs. Amazon: Is Oracle CEO Safra Catz helping to fuel President Trump's fire against Amazon? Hmmm...
12. Boycotting AI Weapons: Google employees are calling on the search giant to abandon a Penton artificial intelligence project that could fuel weapons development. Similarly, more than 50 top Artificial Intelligence researchers on Wednesday announced a boycott of KAIST, South Korea’s top university, after it opened what they called an AI weapons lab with one of South Korea’s largest companies, Reuters says.
11. Private Equity - IT Service Management: KKR is investing $172 million into Cherwell Software, an enterprise service management company. KKR previously made a $50 million investment in February 2017.
10. IT Service Management Conference: HDI, a membership association and certification body for service and support professionals, is set to host the HDI 2018 Conference & Expo next week in Las Vegas...
9. Funding - Biggest March Deals: The 15 biggest funding rounds from March 2018 involved these companies...
8. M&A - Telecom Services: Italian state lender CDP is set to buy a stake of up to 5 percent in Telecom Italia (TIM), three sources close to the matter said on Thursday, in a move intended to safeguard Rome’s interest in a company seen as strategic, Reuters says.
7. Service Provider Networks: Cisco and Colt Technology Services have achieved a key milestone in upgrading Colt's pan-European, US and Asian packet network, the companies say. Cisco and Colt revealed in December 2016 that they were working on a system-wide, multiple 100Gbps upgrade to Colt's IQ Network. Colt's next-generation packet network uses end-to-end segment routing technology to simplify and automate network operation and significantly reduce operating costs, the service provider asserts.
6. IT Outsourcing Slowdown: IT services deals experienced a steep decline in 2017, both in terms of the number of deals and total contract value (TCV), compared to both 2016 and 2015, according to GlobalData. While the TCV witnessed a significant annual decline of 33.3 perecnt in 2017 to reach a value of US$61.4 billion, the number of deals announced (4,099) saw a considerable decrease of 25.6 percent in 2017 compared to 2016, the researcher says.
5. SMB Hiring Cools: The pace of small business hiring slowed down in March 2018, according to ADP. The payroll processor tracked 47,000 new jobs at its small business customers in March -- down from 66,000 customers in February and 64,000 in January.
4. Mark Cattini's Next Move?: Multiple executives from ClickSoftware, a field service management software company, will surface at the Field Service USA conference laster this month in Palm Desert, Calif. We'll be watching to see if former Autotask CEO Mark Cattini, now leading ClickSoftware, also surfaces at the conference.
3. MSP Billing Management: An upgraded Pax8-ConnectWise integration allows MSPs to choose how they want to bill their customers -- for instance, in arrears or forward in a recurring-revenue, SaaS style, the cloud distributor says.
2. ConnectWise and MSSPs: Is this a new MSSP landing page from ConnectWise ahead of this month's IT Nation 2018 conference in Europe? Hmmm... Keep an eye on MSSP Alert for potential updates...
1. Top 50 Cloud Monitoring and Management Tools: Complete the survey and your company’s cloud monitoring/cloud management platform could get honored in May…
