Good morning, channel partners. Here are five technology news updates, insights, chatter, and plenty more to start your day for Monday, March 12, 2018.
Actually, there are 16 timely updates designed 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…
16. Dropbox IPO, Salesforce Investment: As part of its IPO, Dropbox is selling roughly $100 million in stock to Salesforce's venture capital arm. Here are the potential channel implications.
15. Investment - IT Services: Elliott Management Corp. has bought a stake in Wipro Ltd., its first ever purchase of an Indian-based software outsourcer, according to Bloomberg. The New York hedge fund acquired 1.855 million American depositary receipts, or about 0.04 percent of Wipro’s share capital, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission, the report says.
14. Microsoft Surface Hub: Microsoft is getting ready to launch the Surface Hub 2 this year. The company confirmed on Friday that it is working on a new version of its interactive whiteboard, though it is not giving away many details on the new product as of yet, according to Thurrott.com.
13. MSP Executive Talent: Thrive, a Top 100 Vertical Market MSP for 2018, has promoted Marc Pantoni to president and Michael Gray to CTO. We've got details here.
12. Innovation: ConnectWise is deeply involved in a Tampa-area innovation summit that aims to position the region as a major alternative to Silicon Valley.
11. SMB Cloud Services ROI: Small and medium businesses (SMB) can improve cash flows by up to 308 per cent as a result of the "dexterity and flexibility" enabled by adoption of cloud technology, a latest survey by Microsoft India claims, according to Business Standard.
10. M&A - Intel Acquiring Broadcom?: The revelation that Intel is considering buying Broadcom, a company valued at more than $100 billion, shows the depth to which the chip giant feels threatened by a potential tie-up between Broadcom and its rival Qualcomm, according to The Wall Street Journal.
9. M&A - Applications Management: Nutanix has acquired Netsil, which provides application discovery and operations management that enables state-of-the-art observability in modern distributed cloud environments, the companies say. Financial terms were not disclosed.
8. M&A - Contact Centers: Avaya has completed the acquisition of Spoken Communications, which develops Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) solutions and customer experience management applications.
7. M&A Rumors- IT Outsourcing: IBM and Convergys are among contenders said to be in talks for a potential $1.2 billion acquisition of Intelenet, an outsourcing company owned by Blackstone Group, the world’s largest alternative asset manager, according to Economic Times.
6. M&A - MSP: GTT Communications has acquired Accelerated Connections (ACI), a Toronto-based provider of managed networking, voice-over-IP (VoIP) and colocation services, serving large distributed Canadian enterprises. We'll share more details later today.
5. Funding - Monitoring Software: Epsagon, a Tel Aviv, Israel-based provider of automated end-to-end performance monitoring technology for serverless architectures, completed a $4.1 million seed funding round, FinSMEs says.
4. VCs Battle Sexual Harassment: Roughly 20 venture capital firms have disclosed their anti-harassment/discrimination policies as part of the #MovingForward movement. The effort comes after several VC firms were accused of maintaining hostile work environments.
3. Private Equity - IT Buyouts: Private Equity firms acquired or invested in 823 IT firms in 2017, up from 722 in 2016, according to this analysis of Preqin.
2. Private Equity Warning: Dig through this article and you'll learn how private equity borrowing practices could tank the U.S. economy. In short, it states:
If private equity firms manage to blow up their current funds by using too much borrowed money to overpay for target companies, it will cause severe disruption in the markets – and could even bring the stock market's nine-year-old party to an end.
What can we do about it? We can be aware that, in the past, when PE firms have been willing to use this much debt to pay this high a price, it indicated the party was winding down.
1. Alleged Corruption & IT Services: Corruption investigators in Ohio's Cuyahoga County have served three more subpoenas on the administration of County Executive Armond Budish. The subpoenas request records that include deleted emails from accounts of several officials, and the investigation could involve the county's relationship with IT services providers, according to Cleveland.com.
