5 Channel Partner and MSP News Updates: Monday 15 March 2021

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

What’s In Our Daily Brew?

A. What’s Brewing Today: Technology News

1. SPAC Concerns: U.S. regulators are growing concerned that risks posed to shareholders from blank-check companies are getting increasingly dangerous as the SPAC bubble inflates to unprecedented levels, Bloomberg reports. “Lately, we have seen more and more evidence on the risk side of the equation for SPACs as we see studies showing that their performance for most investors doesn’t match the hype,” Acting Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Allison Herren Lee said, Bloomberg added. Related: See an expansive list of Technology SPACs here.

2. Zombie Company Concerns: U.S. companies now face the highest levels of debt on record — more than $10.5 trillion, according to the Federal Reserve and the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, or SIFMA, CNBC Reports.

3. COVID Relief Funds - Spending Concerns: Microsoft stands to receive nearly a quarter of Covid relief funds destined for U.S. cybersecurity defenders, sources told Reuters, angering some lawmakers who don’t want to increase funding for a company whose software was recently at the heart of two big hacks. Source: Reuters, March 15, 2021.

4. Funding - Digital Payments: Stripe is raising $600 million in new funding at a $95 billion valuation, making it the most valuable startup in the U.S. It's nearly triple the $36 billion valuation Stripe secured last April, when it raised another $600 million from investors including Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital, Seeking Alpha notes. Investors in this round include Allianz, Fidelity and Baillie Gifford, as well as the sovereign wealth fund of Ireland, which is the home country of Stripe founders John and Patrick Collison, Seeking Alpha adds.

5. NinjaRMM Relocates Headquarters: Fast-growing NinjaRMM is relocating its headquarters from San Francisco to Austin, Texas.

6.  Talent - Enterprise AI Software: DataRobot has promoted President and COO Dan Wright to CEO. He succeeds co-founder Jeremy Achin. Write previously was COO at AppDynamics, which Cisco Systems acquired. DataRobot in December 2020 raised $320 million in a pre-IPO funding round led by Altimeter Capital. The financing valued the company at over $2.8 billion.

B. Channel Chiefs, Partner Programs and Strategic Alliances

1. Channel Chief - Hybrid Cloud IT Management: Virtana has hired Alex Thurber as senior VP of customer success and channel strategy. Virtana's software platform provides "unified observability platform for migrating, optimizing, monitoring, and managing application workloads with flexible consumption across public, private, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments," the company says. Thurber previously held key channel and executive posts at Pulse Secure, BlackBerry, Cisco Systems, McAfee, Tripwire and WatchGuard.

2. Channel Chief - Data Protection: Druva has named Robert Brower as senior VP of worldwide partners and alliances. Druva CEO Jaspreet Singh explained the company's overall cloud-based data protection and partner strategy in this ChannelE2E interview from 2020.

3. Data Protection - Google Cloud Marketplace: Redstor has launched its data protection application in the Google Marketplace, allowing MSPs to "protect customer data in Google Workspace in a few clicks," Redstor asserts. The data protection company, founded in 1998, is headquartered in Reading, UK and has offices in Cape Town and Johannesburg, South Africa. Redstor supports more than 400 partners and 40,000 organizations worldwide, the company says.

4. Partnership - Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and Google Cloud: Automation Anywhere and Google Cloud have announced a strategic, multi-year collaboration to "accelerate intelligent automation adoption with enterprises on a global scale," the companies say. Automation Anywhere on Google Cloud will be generally available beginning in May 2021, and the two companies will:

5. Partner Program: Accurics, cloud cyber resilience specialist, has launched a channel program designed for partners who share a developer-first approach to cloud security.

6. Partnership - Managed Fiber Networks: Consolidated Communications and KC Fiber are partnering to bring managed services to North Kansas City businesses. KC Fiber operates and maintains North Kansas City’s fiber-optic broadband network.  Consolidated’s managed services span data networking, collaboration tools, and security..

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