Good morning, channel partners. Here are five technology news updates, insights, chatter, and plenty more to start your day for Thursday, January 21, 2016.
Actually, there are 13 items for VARs, managed services providers (MSPs), cloud services providers (CSPs) and independent software vendors (ISVs) to sip on.
13. Safe Harbor 2.0: U.S. and European regulators are still trying to hammer out a new privacy agreement -- the so-called Safe Harbor 2.0 -- before certain deadlines kick in at the end of January. Among other things, the pending agreement would help IT service providers to understand how to handle customer data that potentially moves between the U.S. and Europe. But U.S. lawmakers apparently can't agree on the Safe Harbor 2.0 terms they'd like to pursue, putting the January deadline in jeopardy. Ugh.
12. New Citrix CEO Faces Big Decisions: Kirill Tatarinov, formerly president of Microsoft's Business Solutions Division, has been named CEO of Citrix Systems Inc. The move comes only a few days after Citrix sold off some cloud tools and acquired some IT management tools. Citrix has also been battling activist investor Elliot Management, which wants the company to sell off some businesses and reduce costs. The next wildcard: What will Tatarinov do with Citrix's GoTo business? Last I heard a potential GoToMeeting IPO was in the works...
11. Cloud Management Partner Program: CloudBolt, which develops cloud management technology, has launched a channel partner program for system integrators, resellers and service providers. True believers include August Schell, Carahsoft, CDW, ePlus, HPM Networks, pureIntegration and Riverturn.
10. Developer Partner Program: PostSharp, which offers a pattern-aware extension to C# and Visual Basic, used by over 50,000 developers, launched a global partner program for VARs, resellers, IT consultancies, system integrators and ISPs to resell and use PostSharp products. The program differentiates between licensing partners (VAR’s and resellers) and consulting partners (IT consultancies and ISP’s), providing special incentives for both groups, PostSharp asserted.
9. MSP Performance Management: Tel-Networks USA, a unified communications specialist, is leveraging IR Prognosis to "enhance its multi-vendor hosted and managed communications and collaboration services." Tel-Networks provides UC services to midmarket and enterprise customers.
8. Google Nest and IoT Privacy Problems: Smart devices like Google Nest offerings are leaking data onto the web -- revealing user zip codes in clear text. The revelations raise fresh privacy and security questions in the emerging Internet of Things world.
7. A Single Cloud View of the Customer: Accenture has completed the first phase of an IT consolidation project for Hawaiian Telcom, using Oracle Service Cloud. In a three-month period, Accenture integrated five systems to deliver the company a configured view of each customer account anytime, anywhere. At first glance, Accenture's cloud engagements are designed for enterprise accounts. But take a closer look and you'll see the big consulting firm supporting SMB customers as well.
6. The Top 5 Hadoop Distributions: So, you're trying to wrap your arms around Hadoop -- the big data storage platform. One simple way to get started is to take a look at the top 5 Hadoop distributions -- which are Cloudera, Hortonworks and MapR, followed by IBM and Pivotal. Most of the players are building channel programs now -- though Hortonworks stumbled badly on Wall Street in recent days amid plans to raise $100 million in a secondary offering.
5. Application Performance Management: Correlsense, which develops application performance management (APM) tools for enterprises and large service providers, apparently has turned its business around. After a restructuring in October 2014 ended that year with a profitable operating model, and the momentum apparently continued in 2015 -- though we don't have exact revenue or income figures to share. Correlsense competes on some fronts against fast-growth APM providers like AppDynamics and New Relic.
4. FireEye Acquires iSight Partners: The $200 million buyout gives FireEye a range of intelligence agents who attempt to spot and mitigate cyberattacks before they happen, The Wall Street Journal notes. It's sort of ironic. At a time when machine learning and automation are expected to strengthen cybersecurity, FireEye will lean even more on human experts -- 250 of them from iSight -- to find, track and stop the bad guys.
3. Startup Valuations Fall: Welcome to the business and tech correction of 2016. While Wall Street plummets amid depressed oil prices, startup valuations have fallen to their lowest level since 2012, according to AngelList -- the crowdfunding site for angel investors.
2. Fresh Funding: Despite the cooling market for venture capital and angel investments, these tech startups have successfully raised money in recent days to fund business expansion:
- Big Switch Networks (Santa Clara, Calif.), a hyperscale networking and data center specialist, raised $48.5 million from multiple backers.
- CapLinked (Los Angeles), which develops a workflow optimization platform that secures content sharing across multiple organizations, raised $3.5 million from multiple backers.
- EiQ Networks (Boston, Mass.), a SaaS security specialist, raised $9.55 million in Series C funding led by Arrowroot Capital.
- GigaSpaces (New York), a cloud orchestration specialist, raised over $20 million led by Claridge Israel.
- QASymphony (Atlanta, Ga.), which develops a platform to help manage enterprise software development, raised $5 million in Series B funding led by Fulcrum Equity Partners.
- ScaleArc (Santa Clara, Calif.), focused on database load balancing, raised $20 million in a Series C-1 round led by Bain Capital Ventures.
- Splice Machine (San Francisco), which develops a relational database powered by Hadoop and Spark, raised $9 million in funding from multiple backers. The company is seeking to disrupt Oracle and MySQL databases.
1. Top Vertical Market MSPs: Is your company one of them? If so then earn the recognition you deserve. Complete the ChannelE2E Top Vertical Market MSPs survey. We'll announce honorees and findings in Q2 2016.
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