5 Channel Partner Updates: Thursday 13 February 2020

Here are five technology news updates, insights, chatter, and plenty more to start your day for Thursday, February 13, 2020. Sip up.

Our Daily Brew

A. What’s Hot Today

1. Funding - Private Equity and MSP: August Equity has invested in Air IT, an MSP that has generated a 28 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) over the past three years.

2. M&A - Smart Home Systems Integrator: Resideo Technologies has acquired privately held Herman ProAV, a provider and distributor of professional AV products, procurement services and labor resources to systems integrators in the commercial AV industry.

3. M&A - Data Centers: The latest data center acquisitions involve:

4. Potential M&A - Data Centers: CyrusOne has retained Morgan Stanley to explore a potential company sale, joint venture and/or other opportunities, Bloomberg reports.

5. M&A - Google and Looker: Google has completed its acquisition of Looker, which offers a "comprehensive analytics solution that integrates and visualizes insights at every layer of their business."

6. Oracle Cloud - Data Science: The Oracle Cloud Data Science Platform is now available. The platform can help "enterprises to collaboratively build, train, manage and deploy machine learning models to increase the success of data science projects," Oracle asserts.

7. Alibaba Cloud Revenue: Alibaba's cloud computing revenue grew 62 percent year-over-year to RMB10,721 million (US$1,540 million) for the quarter ended December 31, 2019, the company said today. The growth rate and annual run rate keeps Alibaba in the neighborhood of Google Cloud Platform, but far behind Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure in terms of global cloud revenues.

8. Cisco Systems Forecast: Cisco Systems says its revenue for Q3 fiscal 2020 will decline 1.5 percent to 3,5 percent amid continued global economic challenges and pressure on the network hardware industry. Still, there are some bright spots within the company's product and service mix. In Cisco's Q2 2020, security revenue rose 9 percent with strong  performance in identity and access, advanced threat and unified threat management, the company says. Also, AppDynamics had a double-digit growth rate.

9. Email Protection: Barracuda has expanded its local availability zones in Australia and Canada. The expansion allows customers and partners in those regions to protect data locally.

B. Partner Programs and Strategic Alliances

1. Distribution - Data Protection: Dropsuite now integrates with Ingram Micro Connect, a supply automation platform that manages products and services, contracts, ordering and fulfillment, usage and subscriptions. The new integration makes it easier for resellers to trial, order and provision such Dropsuite products as Cloud Backup and Archiving for Office 365 and Website Backup.

2. Distribution - SaaS Managed Cloud: Promark, an Ingram Micro company, has agreed to distribute Platform9.

3. Distribution - Expanded Line Card: DLT Solutions, a wholly owned subsidiary of Tech Data and a government technology solutions aggregator, has added new offerings from Glasswall, Illumio, NetBrain, Parasoft, Perfect Sense, TYCHON and ZorroSign.

4. Partnerships - Mobile Workforce Management: Skedulo has inked technology partnerships with Kronos Inc. and Zendesk, respectively.  With Skedulo and Workforce Dimensions from Kronos, organizations gain real-time data sharing between the two solutions. And as a Zendesk Technology Alliances Partner, Skedulo will be the first mobile workforce management solution available on the Zendesk Marketplace, the company says.

5. Partnership - Data Center Storage: US Signal's seven Midwest data centers now leverage 12 InfiniBox systems for business-critical application and data storage. Additional InfiniBox arrays will support a newly constructed, purpose-built eighth data center in Metro Detroit scheduled to go online in March 2020, the companies say.

C. Upcoming Technology Conferences

Got news to share for our morning update? Email me: [email protected].