5 Channel Partner Updates: Thursday 25 June 2020 -

Here are five (actually more) technology news updates, insights, chatter, and plenty more to start your day for Thursday, June 25, 2020. Sip up.

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A. What’s Happening Today

1. Financial Forecast - IT Consulting: Accenture narrowed its full-year revenue growth forecast range today as customers curbed spending and delayed projects due to the coronavirus-fueled slump in demand, Reuters reports.

2. MSP Cybersecurity Framework: ConnectWise has unveiled the MSP+ Cybersecurity Framework and supporting Playbooks. The framework and playbooks are designed to shorten the cybersecurity learning curve for MSPs-- and enable them to efficiently sell, deliver and support cyber solutions. The framework leverages and aggregates MSP-centric guidance from other well-known frameworks including NIST CSF, CIS 20, UK Cyber Essentials, Australia’s Essential Eight and others.

3. Microsoft 365 Monitoring: Netreo has released Microsoft 365 Insight, a new module delivering visibility into the performance, availability, and utilization of Microsoft 365 cloud infrastructure.

4. Cloud Distribution - Data Protection: Pax8 has agreed to distribute NewCloud Networks' cloud storage and compute resources for Veeam Cloud Connect Backup and Disaster Recovery.

5. Partnership - Data Protection: Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and Commvault have partnered to deliver multi-cloud, edge-enabled data protection, the companies say.

6. Data Protection: StorageCraft has released ShadowXafe 4.0. It provides:

Unified management across mixed software and hardware environments.
Hyper-V, vCenter and ESXi support.
Integration with ConnectWise Manage and Automate.

7. Migration Services From Nuvolat Cloud: UBX Cloud is offering free migration services for MSPs impacted by the recent Chapter 7 bankruptcy filing of Nuvolat Cloud Group, a VMware data center partner managing over 130,000 virtual machines.

8. Simplified Mobile Application Development: Amazon is beta testing Amazon Honeycode. This new fully-managed AWS service "gives you the power to build powerful mobile & web applications without writing any code," the company says. "It uses the familiar spreadsheet model and lets you get started in minutes. If you or your teammates are already familiar with spreadsheets and formulas, you’ll be happy to hear that just about everything you know about sheets, tables, values, and formulas still applies."

9. Bare Metal Automation:‌ MetalSoft today announced the launch of their intelligent bare metal automation software platform. The infrastructure management tool allows enterprises and service providers to better automate and manage their datacenters’ bare metal infrastructure while solving challenges of running new kinds of workloads, the company says.

10. VMware for Telco Service Providers: VMware has expanded its VMware Ready for Telco Cloud program, formerly known as the VMware Ready for NFV program. To date, more than 35 partners have received more than 170 certifications as part of the program. The expanded program will offer two new certifications:

VMware Ready for Telco Cloud certifies network functions for deployment and lifecycle operations through VMware Telco Cloud Automation, a multi-cloud orchestration and automation platform.
VMware Ready for Telco Cloud Infrastructure, formerly known as VMware Ready for NFV, identifies telco network functions that interoperate with the core infrastructure layers of the VMware Telco Cloud, as referenced by the VMware ETSI-compliant vCloud NFV Reference Architecture.

11. Enterprise Artificial Intelligence: Deloitte has launched the Deloitte AI Institute, a center that focuses on AI research, eminence and applied innovation across industries.

12. Talent - Channel Leadership: Prodoscore, a developer of employee visibility and productivity software, has hired Nadine M. Sarraf as chief marketing officer, and Tom Moran assumes the new role of chief channel officer.