Good morning, channel partners. Welcome to our first blog of the New Year. Here are five technology news updates, insights, chatter and plenty more to start your day for Monday, January 4, 2016.
Actually, today's update involves eight items for VARs, managed services providers (MSPs), cloud services providers (CSPs) and independent software vendors (ISVs) to sip on.
8. Rough Start: It's not a good morning for global financial markets. Stocks across Europe and Asia are slumping after Shanghai's exchange suffered a big 7 percent dip this morning. Those setbacks will likely echo across Wall Street when U.S. markets open this morning.
7. Frivolous Lawsuit?: A shareholder is suing to block the $4.5 billion SolarWinds buyout, claiming that SolarWinds "breached their fiduciary duties to stockholders by initiating a process that undervalues SolarWinds, by agreeing to a transaction that does not adequately reflect SolarWinds’ true value," according to an SEC filing. Hmmm... From where we sit, it looks like SolarWinds spent more than 60 days negotiating in good faith with multiple bidders to generate the highest price possible for the buyout...
6. Tech Valuations: Technology startups face a new round of valuation pressure. Indeed, "tougher private funding conditions and a chilly IPO environment will pose challenges this year," The Wall Street Journal predicts. Hmmm... That's not a unique perspective. But it's a healthy reminder that it's no longer easy to find fast money from venture capitalists...
5. IBM at CES: When you think of consumer technology, IBM is one of the last names that comes to mind. Yet IBM CEO Ginny Rometty is keynoting this week's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Surely, Rometty sees the Internet of Things as a key connector between the consumer and the corporate IT world. But is it a stretch for Rometty to share some consumer perspectives when IBM has been struggling to boost sagging corporate revenues? Hmmm...
4. EMC Layoffs: The storage company has put aside about $220 million to cover the cost of forthcoming layoffs, according to an SEC filing. The move comes ahead of Dell's pending $67 billion buyout of EMC and VMware. Here's ChannelE2E's spin on the situation.
3. Extended DDoS Attack: Linode, a global data center provider, has been the target of a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack since Christmas Day. The attack has triggered multiple outages, including extended problems at the company's Atlanta-based data center. Linode's status page has been updated numerous times in recent days, showing progress (and some setbacks) against the attackers. ChannelE2E itself was impacted a bit by the attacks, and our hosting provider is in the process of moving us to a new data center -- outside the scope of the ongoing attacks. Several DDoS attacks against major websites and hosting providers unfolded around the Christmas holiday, including DDoS attacks against the BBC and Valve.
2. January Tech Events: Technology and partner conferences that we're tracking this january include Citrix Summit, Retail's Big Show, SMB TechFest Q1, USENIX Enigma and IBM Connect 2016. Check the ChannelE2E Event Calendar for all of the top partner conferences and summits scheduled for this year... and beyond.
1. Say What?: Is your company preparing to launch a new IT product or service? Got a news tip involving the IT channel? I'm all ears. Email me: [email protected].
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