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5 Channel Partner Updates: Wednesday 22 November 2017

Good morning, channel partners. Here are five technology news updates, insights, chatter, and plenty more to start your day for Wednesday, November 22, 2017.

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. Apple Self-Driving Cars: Clues about Apple's self-driving car technology and strategy surfaced in this detailed document about 3D Object Detection.

13. HP Enterprise CEO Change: The details are here.

12. HP Inc. Momentum: HP continues to gain momentum heading into 2018. Indeed, the company's PC-oriented revenues jumped 13 percent in Q4 2017 vs the corresponding quarter last year, and printing revenues rose 7 percent in Q4 2017 during the same quarter last year. Overall Q4 2017 revenues hit $13.9 billion, up a strong 11 percent from the prior-year quarter. The latest moment arrives as rival Lenovo tries to get back on track after several sales and partner program missteps that squeezed revenues and profits this year...

11. Salesforce Momentum: Salesforce's revenues hit $2.68 billion in Q3 2018, up 25 year-over-year, the company said yesterday. Subscription and support revenues were $2.49 billion, up 25% year-over-year. Professional services and other revenues were $194 million, an increase of 20% year-over-year...

10. VIPRE Honors: VIPRE Security has again received OPSWAT Gold certification for its SMB cybersecurity solution. The newly awarded certification ensures VIPRE customers receive interoperable network access solutions from vendors including Cisco, Citrix, Pulse Secure and many others, the company notes. The honor is especially timely, considering VIPRE recently launched a cloud-centric platform for its SMB partners and customers.

9. Incubator: Techstars, the well-known incubator, plans to raise $400 million for its next venture capital fund...

8. Amazon Private Clouds?: Amazon Web Services in 2013 agreed to build the CIA its own smaller version of Amazon’s global public cloud, which would live in CIA’s own data centers and would not be connected to the Internet, according to Data Center Knowledge. Now, Amazon appears to be doubling down on super secure clouds for highly sensitive government agencies...

7. SaaS and Cloud Startup Report: Trying to figure out how the SaaS and cloud markets may evolve? Check out this detailed SaaS and cloud startup report from Crozdesk.

6. M&A: Focus Technology Solutions of Burlington, Mass., has acquired NSK Inc. of Boston, the companies have confirmed. The deal will bolster Focus Technology's recurring revenue pipeline while adding roughly 50 people to the company.

5. Log Management Part One: Datadog has launched a public beta of a new log management solution. The service is integrated with Datadog’s existing infrastructure and application performance monitoring offerings, allowing customers and MSPs to detect, diagnose and resolve complex performance problems that traditionally required highly manual efforts across various tools, the company claims. We'll share more thoughts soon.

4. Log Management Part Two: Scalyr, which develops a log management and server monitoring service, has raised $20 million in Series A funding. We'll be watching to see how the startup plans to differentiate in the incredibly crowded monitoring market.

3. Kaseya Security Momentum: It has been about five months since Kaseya launched a Powered Services initiative to promote SaaS- and subscription-based offerings in the security and network monitoring markets. How are those efforts going? We'll share details later today.

2. Datto-Autotask Merger Update: When Datto and Autotask announced their merger plans in late October, the companies vowed to finalize the deal sometime in Q4 2017. Is the deal still on track to meet that deadline? Yup. We'll share some related updates later today...

1. Thank You: To my business partner, Amy Katz, for building a media company that gave me yet another soapbox upon which to stand. To my family for allowing me to stand on that soapbox -- even when it sometimes means less time at home. To our sponsors for funding the soapbox. And most importantly, to  our readers for gathering around the soapbox each day -- to consume the latest reports from our bloggers and contributors across ChannelE2E and sister site MSSP Alert. Happy Thanksgiving.

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.