5 Channel Partner Updates: Wednesday 29 April 2020 -

Here are five (actually more) technology news updates, insights, chatter, and plenty more to start your day for Wednesday, April 29, 2020. Sip up.

Our Daily Brew

Who We Serve: Content for managed services providers (MSPs), cloud services providers (CSPs), IT consulting firms, systems integrators, VARs, independent software vendors (ISVs), and any other partner acronym that further caffeinates our already stellar SEO.

Frequency: Every business morning.

Reaching the Barista: Send news, tips and rumors to [email protected].

A. What’s Hot Today

1. Enterprises and Microsoft MSPs: U.S. enterprises are pushing Microsoft MSPs to offer more VAR and system integrator services for Azure workloads, ISG Provider Lens research says.

2. Customer Renewals: How can partners improve their customer renewal rates? Cisco offers guidance here.

3. Work From Home: RapidFire Tools, a Kaseya, has launched a Network Detective Work from Home (WFH) solution. It features a self-service portal that allows WFH employees to initiate a network and security scan. The scan allows MSPs and IT support pros to analyze and documented home user systems before those systems are permitted to connect to the corporate network.

4. MSP Sales and Marketing Tips: NinjaRMM offers these sales and marketing tactics to help MSPs amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

5. Training: CompTIA has updated its Cybersecurity Analyst (CySA+) certification exam.

6. Research - IT Trends: How are technology professionals evolving their roles and focus areas amid cloud, on-premises and hybrid IT shifts. A new report, titled SolarWinds IT Trends Report 2020: The Universal Language of IT, offers some insights.

7. Microsoft Azure Backup: Veeam Backup for Microsoft Azure is now available.

B. Channel Partner Programs and Strategic Alliances

1. Partner Program - Data Protection: The 2020 Global Acronis #CyberFit Partner Program features these enhancements, the company says:

Remote Work Solutions – Acronis is offering enterprise-grade, file sync and share technology at no additional cost to protect remote workers.

Acronis #CyberFit Academy – To better protect their customers while keeping costs down, Acronis has updated its training and certification programs for its partners.

Acronis #CyberFit Financing – As many small businesses are struggling during the coronavirus outbreak, Acronis is taking this action to support partners and customers.

Acronis #CyberFit Platform Program – With this platform, partners can differentiate from competitors by protecting new data sources, support new data storage destinations and enhance their applications with cyber protection.

2. Partner Program -- APIs: Jitterbit has announced an MSP partner program. The program enables system integrators and consulting partners to leverage the Jitterbit Harmony platform to help organizations automate and streamline key business processes.

3. Partnership: Alluxio, a developer of open source cloud data orchestration software, is partnering with Intel to offer an in-memory acceleration layer with 2^nd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors and Intel Optane persistent memory (PMem). The solution eliminates performance degradation of analytics clusters that are increasingly built on disaggregated compute and storage architecture, Alluxio asserts.