5 Channel Partner and MSP Updates: Tuesday 01 December 2020 -

Here are five (actually, more) technology news updates, insights, chatter, and plenty more to start your day for Tuesday, December 1, 2020. Sip up.

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A. What’s Happening Today

1. MSP Entrepreneur: SolarWinds MSP veteran and Passportal founder Colin Knox has launched Gradient MSP...

2. Talent: Web.com Group has hired Paula Drum as chief growth officer, reporting directly to President and CEO Sharon Rowlands. Drum is responsible for leading the Web.com Group marketing team, as well as driving new customer acquisition, customer retention and cross-selling across Web.com Group’s brands and services, the company says.

3. M&A - Private Equity: Vista Equity Partners has acquired Gainsight, a customer success software company that has been venture-backed since 2013. Vista Equity Partners is a familiar name within and across the IT channel. The private equity firm also owns stakes in Datto, Infoblox, Jamf, and LogicMonitor, among many others.

4. M&A - Smart Home Security: Plume, which is backed by Comcast, has acquired Walleye Networks to bolster its smart home security services, MSSP Alert reports.

5. AWS Partner & MSP Updates: Track this live blog covering AWS re:Invent 2020 for ongoing cloud partner updates…

6. Research - Shadow IT and MSPs: NinjaRMM's findings are here.

7. Partnership - IT Cost Management: Apptio has expanded its integrated tools with Atlassian. Apptio already leverages a connection to Jira to ingest Atlassian customer data on Projects, Issues, Sprints, and Users into its Cost Transparency application. The connection allows joint customers to marry these “work” costs with the supporting resources, technology, and infrastructure costs to "gain a full picture of their project and product development spending," the companies say. The expanded relationship involves Apptio Cloudability and Atlassian’s Jira Software and Jira Service Management. In the coming weeks, joint customers will be able to act on Cloudability optimization recommendations directly within Jira Software and Jira Service Management and view the resulting cost savings in Cloudability, the companies add.