5 Channel Partner and MSP Updates: Wednesday 02 December 2020

Here are five (actually, more) technology news updates, insights, chatter, and plenty more to start your day for Wednesday, December 2, 2020. Sip up.

Our Daily Brew

A. What’s Happening Today

1. Funding - SMB Online Services: GoSite, an all-in-one platform helping small businesses grow online, has raised $40 million in Series B fundraising round led by New York-based Left Lane Capital.

2. M&A - Restaurant Management Software: Lightspeed POS Inc. has acquired Upserve from private equity firm Vista Equity Partners for $430 million -- or roughly 11 times Upserve's revenue for the trailing twelve-month period ending September 30, 2020. Lightspeed develops cloud-based, omnichannel commerce platforms. Upserve of Rhode Island develops a cloud-based restaurant management platform. Lightspeed has been active in the M&A market. Another recent acquisition involved ShopKeep, a cloud commerce platform provider serving more than 20,000 customer locations.

3. Microsoft 365 Monitoring: Exoprise CloudReady is now available in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace, an online store that provides applications and services for use on Azure.

4. Research - 2020 and 2021 Cyber Threats: The annual Acronis Cyberthreats Report has surfaced here.

5. Microsoft Teams Update: Microsoft has unveiled new Teams calling features. The capabilities surfaced on the same day that Salesforce acquired Teams rival Slack for $27.7 billion.

6. Managed Network Services: Granite Telecommunications, LLC, a $1.6 billion provider of communications services, has launched Granite Guardian, a managed network solution that safeguards business connections from WAN to LAN using “as-a-service” delivery, the company says.

7. Talent - From Salesforce to ServiceNow: Salesforce Einstein veteran John Ball has joined ServiceNow to lead the company' Customer Workflow business unit.

B. Channel Chiefs, Partner Programs and Strategic Alliances

1. Partnership - Cloud Storage: Wasabi and Tintri have partnered to provide a hybrid cloud experience for users of Tintri VMstore and Intelliflash. The result: IT departments will "recognize increased data mobility, protection, and availability through an ability to replicate, backup, or migrate data volumes and VM snapshots to Wasabi through Tintri Cloud Connector," the companies say.

2. Partner Program - Unified Communications: Dubber has unveiled a Global Partner Program for Cisco and its resellers, supporting the recently announced availability of its Unified Call Recording (UCR) and Voice AI solution on major Cisco voice platforms. Dubber is the recording and data capture platform natively integrated into the Cisco Webex Calling Cloud Collaboration suite, the company says.

3. Partner Program - Website Accessibility: accessiBe, which specializes in website accessibility automation and ADA compliance, has launched a strategic partner program.  Key customers include Billabong, GoPro, Lexus, Pacific Life and Wilson Sonsini.

4. Partnership: Tata Consultancy Services is developing solutions that leverage PagerDuty's technology.

5. Microsoft Teams - Certified Partner: Carousel Industries ranks among the the first IT services providers worldwide to attain the Calling for Microsoft Teams Advanced Specialization.

C. Channel Partner Summits, MSP Conferences and Virtual Event Calendar