5 Channel Partner Updates: Wednesday 18 December 2019

Here are five (actually, far more…) technology news updates, insights, chatter, and plenty more to start your day for Wednesday, December 18, 2019.

Our Daily Brew

A. What’s Hot Today

1. M&A - Executive Search Firms: ZRG is acquiring certain assets of Miror Partners, a California-based executive search firm focused on the technology industry.

2. M&A - Managed Hosting Providers: Summit Hosting has acquired iNSYNQ -- which suffered a serious ransomware attack earlier this year.

3. M&A: Boomi, a Dell Technologies business, has acquired Unify to help customers analyze data. Unifi Software provides data discovery, catalog, and preparation offerings built on a cloud technology stack.

4. Talent - Lenovo Founder Retiring: Lenovo Group’s founder, Liu Chuanzhi, will retire at the year end as chairman of its parent Legend Holdings, Reuters reports. Seventy-five-year-old Liu, who founded Legend Holdings in 1984, had stepped down as the chairman of Lenovo Group in 2011 to focus on the parent company. Legend veteran Ning Min, who joined the company in 1991 and has held several senior roles over the years including that of chief financial officer, has been appointed the new chairman, Reuters adds.

5. Talent - Data Management: Aparavi has hired Veeam and Cohesity veteran Peter Worsnop as VP of strategic alliances. He reports to CEO Adrian Knapp.

6. Talent - Data Center Automation: Kaloom, a provider of automated data-center networking software, has named Richard A. McGinn as board chairman. He previously served as CEO of VeriFone Systems.

7. Talent - Office Equipment: UBEO Business Services—a provider of printer, copier and document management solutions—has promoted James J. Morrissey from UBEO northeast region president to the new post of president of UBEO nationally.

8. Talent - IT Associations: ID Agent Chief Marketing Officer Dana Liedholm has been elected to CompTIA’s IT Security Community Executive Council. Liedholm has played a key role in ID Agent’s partner program growth. The program offers dark web monitoring capabilities to MSPs. Kaseya, ID Agent's parent, is n0w emulating many of those partner program best practices.

9. Hardware as a Service - Video Conferencing: Lifesize is introducing all-in-one conference room systems as a service.

10. Google Cloud Deadline: Google Cloud Platform has until 2023 to overtake Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure in various public cloud sectors, according to an executive business plan summarized by The Information.

11. Research - Vertical Market Resellers: The NPD Group has expanded its Reseller Tracking Service to include Vertical Reseller data, which will add visibility into what technology hardware and software products are sold to businesses across 20 vertical sectors and more than 300 vertical industry groups, the organization says.

12. Cisco vs. Poly: Cisco has launched a legal war against Poly.

B. Partnerships and Strategic Alliances

1. Deja Vu - AWS Cloud Partner: Checkmarx has been accepted into the AWS Public Sector Partner Program. The company also has AWS Security Competency status, making it the first application security software provider to hold both certifications, Checkmarx asserts.

2. Partner Program - Digital Marketing: Digital marketing agencies Bounteous, Cohaesus, Elevated Third, and Unleashed Technologies have joined the Acquia Lift Solutions Partner Program.

3. Distribution - Flash Storage: Tech Data has agreed to distribute  StorONE Arrays as-a-Service (AFAaaS). Partners and customers gain a subscription-based billing model, priced per terabyte, without a long-term commitment, the companies say.

4. Unified Communications and VARs: 8x8 has expanded its Elev8 Partner Program to include value-added resellers (VARs). 8x8's existing parter program has 1,000 active channel agents.

5. VMware: Otava is now a premier cloud provider in the VMware Partner Network.

C. Upcoming Technology Conferences

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