5 Channel Partner Updates: Tuesday 12 November 2019

Here are five (actually, far more…) technology news updates, insights, chatter, and plenty more to start your day for Tuesday, November 12, 2019.

Our Daily Brew

A. What’s Hot Today

1. Funding - Salesforce Consulting Firms: Salesforce Ventures has launched a $50 million Consultant Trailblazer Fund for next-generation cloud consulting companies and digital agencies. We'll share more thoughts soon.

2. Private Equity - Data Centers: Crestline Investors has made a $30 million debt and preferred equity investment in Evocative Data Centers.

3. M&A - Network Management: Digi International is acquiring Opengear for $140 million to $155 million. The deal will unite two companies focused on IoT connectivity products and remote network management software.

4. M&A - AI and Customer Support: Directly has acquired Kylie.ai. The combined companies focus on artificial intelligence for customers support across such areas as processing refunds, returns, cancellations and order tracking.

5. Funding - Work Orchestration: Cutover, a cloud-enabled work orchestration and observability platform, has raised $17 million in Series A funding led by Index Ventures.

6. MSPs and Endpoint Security: Bitdefender has added new endpoint defense capabilities for its GravityZone MSP platform. The improvements address email security, privacy protection, threat blocking and faster incident response.

7. Google Cloud Backup: HYCU has upgraded its SaaS-based data backup, recovery and monitoring software for Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

8. Talent - Contact Center & Workforce Management: Talkdesk has hired Salesforce veteran Kathie Johnson as chief marketing officer. Talkdesk raised $100 million in Series B funding last month, and has been busy hiring contact center as a service (CCaaS) experts in recent weeks. Key hires in addition to Johnson include Cisco and Voicea veteran Vasili Triant as chief strategy officer (CSO).

9. Talent: Capacity, an AI-native knowledge-sharing platform founded by former Answers.com CEO David Karandish, has hired Michael Hunigan as its VP of product and Andrew Wilson as its VP of analytics.

B. Partnerships and Strategic Alliances

1. AppDynamics Partner of the Year: AHEAD has been named AppDynamics Partner of the Year for the Americas.

2. Data Protection and Business Continuity: 365 Data Centers has agreed to offer RecoveryPlanner's business continuity management solutions to end-customers. BCM solutions, has partnered with 365 Data Centers, a leading provider of hybrid IT data center services, in order to offer RecoveryPlanner's RPX Business Continuity software to its customers as a complement to 365's business continuity suites, back-up and recovery solutions, and it's comprehensive portfolio of colocation, cloud, network and managed service offerings.

3. Data Management - Cloud Services: Alluxio, the developer of open source cloud data orchestration software, has bolstered its partnerships with Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform. Alluxio advanced to the Select Technology Partner status and joined the Google Cloud Partner Program as a technology partner giving AWS and Google Cloud customers the ability to accelerate analytical workloads and orchestrate data across clouds.

2. All Partner Programs: Search the comprehensive ChannelE2E Partner Program Database here. Also, submit your company information here and your partner program can be listed in the database.

C. Next Five Technology Conferences

Got news to share for our morning update? Email me: [email protected].