5 Channel Partner and MSP Updates: Thursday 22 October 2020 -

Here are five (actually, more) technology news updates, insights, chatter, and plenty more to start your day for Thursday, October 22, 2020. Sip up.

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A. What’s Happening Today

1. Passings - IT Services Pioneer: Laurie Dasher, the founder and CEO of Dasher Technologies Inc., has died following a long illness. Dasher built and led one of Silicon Valley's most successful IT solutions providers. The 65-person company expects to generate between $175 million to $200 million in revenue in 2020, Chief Financial Officer Michael Cook told Silicon Valley Business Journal. The article recapped Dasher's management talents, personal interests and family relationships.

2. Lawsuit - MSP Technology Industry: Datto has filed suit against former employee, alleging "unlawful misappropriation of Datto's valuable trade secrets and other confidential information to use at a direct competitor, ConnectWise LLC, and to unlawfully gain a competitive advantage in the marketplace." The employee worked for Datto from November 2018 through July 2020. He joined ConnectWise in September 2020. To be clear: ConnectWise is not party to the litigation.

3. Funding - Data Center Startup: The Goldman Sachs Merchant Banking Division (GS MBD) has partnered with data center veteran Scott Peterson to form Global Compute Infrastructure LP, a newly established global data center infrastructure platform. GS MBD has initially committed to fund up to $500 million of equity capital.

4. McAfee IPO Today: Here are details.

5. Dell Hardware as a Service: The latest push involves Dell Project APEX.

6. Cloud Distribution - Unified Communications: Pax8 is now offering partners across the US the 8x8 Open Communications Platform, which features voice, team chat, meetings, and contact center in a single solution.

7. Integration - Cloud Rightsizing: Apptio Cloudability now integrates with New Relic One. The result: Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure users can leverage additional infrastructure performance metrics from New Relic One, such as memory and CPU utilization, allowing Apptio Cloudability to provide up to 15 percent more savings in rightsizing recommendations for compute resources, the companies say.