Good morning, channel partners. Here are five technology news updates, insights, chatter, and plenty more to start your day for Friday, December 16, 2016.
Actually, there are 11 timely entries for VARs, managed services providers (MSPs), cloud services providers (CSPs), independent software vendors (ISVs), telco master agents and telco agents to sip on. Take a look…
11. Career Changes: Yes, we've heard the rumblings. Quite a few channel veterans are quietly making career moves. Some of the moves will be official this month. Others won't be announced until January. Mum's the word until the sources are ready to change their LinkedIn accounts...
10. No Rest for HP Inc.: Stephanie Dismore, HP Inc.'s channel chief, will remain plenty busy during this holiday season. In addition to her focus on business partners, Dismore drives HP's consumer channel -- working closely with major retailers. Yes, she'll be at CES 2017 -- which starts on January 5 in Las Vegas. Watch for HP Inc. to potentially demo more products that blend the worlds of consumer and corporate computing...
9. Rise of Serverless Computing?: IBM says multiple companies are now testing apps with Bluemix OpenWhisk -- an event-driven and serverless computing platform. The IBM offering is based on Apache OpenWhisk, a serverless open source cloud platform. We'll give it a closer look soon.
8. Oracle Beating Amazon? Um...: Oracle's latest financial results, released yesterday, show continued cloud services progress -- particularly in the SaaS and PaaS areas. But Chairman Larry Ellison a few months ago predicted Oracle would eventually topple Amazon Web Services. All of the evidence suggests otherwise...
7. Managed Services Talent: Verrex, which specializes in conferencing and audio-visual technology, and has named Michael Shinn as director of global managed services. Shinn will focus on Verrex’s AV-as-a-Service offerings, including cloud-conferencing and remote monitoring. He reports to Verrex CEO Thomas Berry.
6. SMB Sales Compensation Plans: Xactly has launched Strategic Services for SMBs, which helps small businesses to design their incentive-based compensation plans. The services leverage Xactly Insights -- which aggregate pay and performance data from Salesforce.com.
5. Example MSP Sales Compensation Plans: Speaking of compensation plans, you can find example sales compensation plans for MSPs and CSPs here.
4. Latin America M&A: Web.com Group, a provider of Internet services and online marketing solutions for small businesses, has acquired Latin American-focused Donweb.com, a web hosting and domain registration company. Donweb.com has roughly 90 employees. The deal is expected to close in Q1 2017. Financial terms were not disclosed. All Mergers, Acquisitions: To track all mergers and acquisitions involving VARs, MSPs and CSPs, visit the ChannelE2E Milestones section daily.
3. MSP Pricing Models for 2017: TruMethods CEO Gary Pica described MSP pricing models for 2017 in our webcast yesterday. It was a home run. Did you miss it? No worries. You can see it on demand starting Monday (or sooner...). Look for it here. Thanks again to Pica and the TruMethods team for sharing all of that pricing knowledge.
2. More Q1 2017 Conferences: Quite a few IT conferences and channel partner summits are now open for registration. Check the dates and locations by visiting the ChannelE2E Technology Event Calendar.
1. Top 100 Vertical Market MSPs 2017: Complete the ChannelE2E Survey and your company could be ranked and honored among the Top 100 Vertical Market MSPs in healthcare, retail, manufacturing, finance and more. We'll announce results in March 2017. In the meantime participate now.
More: Read all of our daily 5 Channel Partner Updates. Plus: Subscribe to our daily enewsletter. Thanks to those who already have.
