5 Channel Partner and MSP Updates: Tuesday 17 November 2020 -

Here are five (actually, more) technology news updates, insights, chatter, and plenty more to start your day for Tuesday, November 17, 2020. Sip up.

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A. What’s Happening Today

1. MSP Marketing - Self-Service Plans: Marketopia has launched a Mach SS marketing plan for MSPs and IT services companies. This self-service, subscription-based plan provides bundled marketing assets to "empower MSPs, vendors and other IT companies to launch fully integrated lead generation marketing campaigns month after month at a fraction of the cost of a full-service marketing program," Marketopia asserts.

2. Funding - Sales Readiness: MindTickle has raised $100 million in a combination of equity and debt financing, led by Softbank Vision Fund 2. Existing investors, Norwest Venture Partners, Canaan, NewView Capital, and Qualcomm Ventures also participated in the round. This will be used to accelerate MindTickle’s go-to-market activities and expansion of global operations, along with R&D, the company says.

3. Kubernetes Data Protection: Zerto is beta testing Zerto for Kubernetes (Z4K), an extension of its Zerto Platform to support cloud native applications.

4. Data Warehousing: Yellowbrick Data has launched an entry-level offering that provides the power of Yellowbrick to enterprise customers with smaller-scale use cases.

5. Network Performance Management (NPM): Riverbed NPM includes more cloud options, increased visibility and analysis of encrypted traffic, and use of artificial intelligence (AI) for behavioral analytics of packets, apps and users for automatically defining baselines and outliers, the company says.

6. Talent: CloudMargin, which develops a collateral and margin management solution native to the cloud, ahas hired Mario Platt as VP and head of information security.

B. Channel Partner Programs and Strategic Alliances

1. Partnerships - Managed SD-WAN Services: Masergy is expanding its SD-WAN Secure solution to offer Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) capabilities. The SASE capabilities leverage technology from Bitglass and Fortinet.

2. Partner Program - Kubernetes Management: Rancher Labs is launching a Partner Program for the OEM and embedded community. The program aims to accelerate industrial adoption of Kubernetes.

3. Partnership - Amazon Web Services: AWS is now a strategic partner for Atos OneCloud, an initiative which brings together Atos’ cloud capabilities into one offering. This increased collaboration is a next step in the strategic alliance between Atos and AWS which started in 2012, the two companies say.

4. Partnership: Computacenter is now an Elite System Integrator for VIAVI in the UK as an extension of a partnership agreement with SOL Distribution.

5. Partnership - SAP Deployments: SAP and Israeli-based software company Panaya are partnering to help mutual customers deploy SAP S/4HANA.