5 Channel Partner Program and MSP News Updates: Friday 15 January 2021

Here five (actually, more) technology news updates, insights, chatter, and plenty more to start your day for Friday, January 15, 2021. Sip up.

What’s In Our Daily Brew?

A. What’s Brewing Today: Technology News

1. Private Equity Database: TagniFi, a financial data platform for emerging firms, has released TagniFi Investors, a dataset of more than 3,400 private equity firms and family offices.

2. M&A - IT and Cloud Consulting: Deloitte Consulting has completed its acquisition of HashedIn Technologies. Deloitte entities have made 14 acquisitions of cloud-technology firms or their businesses since 2017, including software-modernization company innoWake, cloud-management platform startup ATADATA, and technology consultancy Keytree, the company notes. Track more Deloitte acquisitions here.

3. Cloud Marketplace - European Expansion:  Pax8 has launched Pax8 UK and announced the region's strategic leadership team. Stay tuned for more details...

4. Cloud Benchmarks - AWS vs Azure and Google Cloud Platform: Cockroach Labs' 2021 Cloud Report findings are here.

5. HIPAA Compliance - Legislation to Note: Keep an eye on the HIPAA Safe Harbor bill -- which could have implications for MSPs and IT solutions providers. Compliancy Group shares details here.

6. Relocating to Austin, Texas: Data center provider Digital Realty is the latest California-based company to relocate its headquarters to Austin, Texas. Ironically, the city of Austin is struggling to manage the influx of businesses and their employees, according to The Wall Street Journal. Austin is now one of the fastest-growing cities in the U.S., with a population of about a million, versus 675,000 in 2000, the Journal says. Apple, Oracle and Tesla, among others, all expanding their operations in the area.

B. Channel Chiefs, Partner Programs and Strategic Alliances

1. Snowflake Marketplace: The Snowflake Data Marketplace has expanded more than 300 percent since April 2020, with more than 350 data sets from over 120 data providers supporting the system.

2. Partnership - Cloud Data Management: Snowflake Computing and Saturn Cloud have inked a strategic alliance involving product integrations. The result will be the "highest-speed tooling for data science and machine learning teams," the two companies say. Joint customers of the companies choose the solution because of the ease-of-use of Python and to achieve 100x faster performance over serial Python and Apache Spark, the companies say.

3. Partnership - Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS):  Global IT consulting firm Atos and RingCentral have released Unify Office (UO) in the United States.

4. Global Alliance - Hybrid Clouds: IBM is partnering with Larsen & Toubro Infotech to help businesses leverage Red Hat OpenShift for hybrid cloud services. The expanded alliance emerges as IBM acquires multiple cloud consulting companies -- including Taos and 7Summits.

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