5 Channel Partner Program and MSP News Updates: Tuesday 30 March 2021

Here are five (actually, more) technology news updates, insights, chatter, and plenty more to start your day for Tuesday, March 30, 2021. Sip up.

What’s In Our Daily Brew?

A. What’s Brewing Today: Technology News

1. N-able Financial Performance: The MSP software provider shared more financial details about its business in an SEC filing. The filing further explains a potential spin-off from parent SolarWinds.

2. Research - MSP Market: Kaseya's latest annual findings are here.

3. Research - Office 365 and MSP Revenues: Nearly 90 percent of MSPs increased their Microsoft Office 365 revenue in 2020, according to an Altaro survey. Predictable, portions of the survey focused on Altaro's core market -- email security and backup solutions adoption for Office 365. Among the question marks: How many MSPs are offering SaaS-based monitoring and management of Office 365 deployments -- an area where upstarts like Augmentt and SaaS Alerts are assisting MSPs.

4. Talent - MSP Infrastructure Monitoring: LogicMonitor has hired Five9 and AppDynamics veteran Ryan Kam as chief marketing officer.

5. Funding - Women-Led Startup: Digital adoption and enablement platform Spekit has raised $12.2 million in Series A funding. Foundry Group and Renegade Partners led the round, with participation from Operator Collective, Matchstick Ventures and Bonfire Ventures. Total Spekit funding is now $15.7 million. Founded in 2018 by CEO Melanie Fellay and Head of Product and Technology Zari Zahra, Spekit is one of only three women-led companies in the broader digital adoption, enablement and learning management Ssstem (LMS) space, the company says. As part of the financing, Spekit has added two female investors to its board: Foundry Group Partner and serial SaaS investor, Jaclyn Freeman Hester and Roseanne Wincek, co-founder and managing partner of Renegade Partners, whose previous investments include unicorns Looker, Glossier, KeepTruckin and more.

6. Funding and Talent - Autonomous ITSM:  DeepCoding has named former ServiceNow CISO Yuval Cohen as executive chairman. Cohen also invested in DeepCoding, which works with existing ITSM (IT service management) ticketing tools while providing AI-related automation. Additional advisors and investors include Yossi Cohen, Ehud Weinstein, Ofir Shalvi and Ariel Maislos.

7. Funding - Data Centers: DC BLOX has secured $187 million in long-term financing led by Post Road Group and Bain Capital Credit. Proceeds will be used to refinance DC BLOX’s existing credit facilities, add liquidity to DC BLOX’s balance sheet, and provide additional capital to fund continued investments in existing and new data center capacity, the company says.

8. Funding - Cloud Backup: HYCU, an enterprise software company specializing in multi-cloud data backup and recovery as a service, has raised $87.5 million in Series A financing led by Bain Capital Ventures, the companies disclosed in March 2021.

9. IPO - Cloud Backup: It sounds like Cohesity is nearing a potential IPO...

10. Data Protection - Kubernetes Software Containers: Kasten by Veeam has launched Kubestr, an open source project to evaluate Kubernetes cluster storage configurations and performance.

11. Amazon Developing Networking Chips: Details surfaced from The Information.

12. Talent: Virtana has named Christina Richards as chief marketing officer.

B. Channel Chiefs, Partner Programs and Strategic Alliances

1. Channel Chief - PSA and ERP Software: FinancialForce has named Aaron Koenderman as VP of global partner strategy. Koenderman will define and execute a FinancialForce channel partner strategy to grow revenue and fuel success for the channel ecosystem, the company says. Additionally, he will continue to support the strategy and growth across the Global System Integrators (GSI) & Global Professional Services portfolio within the Enterprise segment.

2. Distribution: Exertis has joined the Global Technology Distribution Council (GTDC) as a member organization.

3. Distribution - ARM Servers: Zen Exim of India has agreed to distribute ARM servers from Bamboo Systems.

4. Partner Program - Edge Cloud Services: Zadara has launched a partner program for hosting providers, MSPs, VARs, and solution providers.

5. Partnership - Unified Communications as A Service: Comstar Technologies has added 8x8 Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS) APIs and embeddable applications to its existing 8x8 Value Added Reseller (VAR) partnership.

C. Channel Partner Summits, MSP Conferences and Virtual Events Calendar