Channel Brief: CDK Starts Recovery After Cyberattack; HPE GreenLake Sales Rise

The massive CDK Global ransomware attack from last week continues to make headlines, even as the SaaS provider says it's starting to restore operations. That's still expected to take several days.

In other news, HPE says channel sales of its GreenLake solutions are on the rise, representing a major shift in just the last three years. Shasta Cloud is unveiling its NaaS solution for hospitality-focused MSPs at the HITEC conference, Tata and Xerox are partnering to show how generative AI and the cloud can reinvent even the most legacy of legacy tech firms and more.

As always, drop me a line at [email protected] if you have news to share or want to say hi!

Grab your coffee. Here's what you need to know today.

Today’s Tech, Channel and MSP News

1. CDK Breach Fallout Continues: Car dealership software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider CDK Global was hit by a massive cyberattack last week, which caused the company to shut down its systems and left clients unable to operate their business normally, according to Bleeping Computer. Now, as Reuters reported, CDK is beginning to restore operations, but said doing so could take serveral days. CDK Global provides clients in the auto industry a SaaS platform that handles all aspects of a car dealership's operation, including CRM, financing, payroll, support and service, inventory, and back office operations.

2. Shasta Cloud Unveils NaaS for Hospitality MSPs: This week, the Hospitality Industry Technology Exposition and Conference (HITEC) kicks off at the Charlotte, North Carolina Convention Center, and Shasta Cloud will showcase its NaaS solution for hospitality focused MSPs, the company said in a statement. Founded by longtime industry veterans, Shasta Cloud simplifies MSP customer acquisition with an all-inclusive monthly subscription that includes cloud, software, hardware and  support with no vendor lock-in, automation that speeds workflows in planning, deployment and operations, supply chain diversity and transparent pricing, the company said. If you're attending the show, check it out!

3. HPE GreenLake Sales Soar: Okay, maybe "soar" isn't exactly the right verb, but the alliteration was too good to pass up. The Register reported on a conversation with HPE channel and partner ecosystem chief Simon Ewington in which Ewington stated " ... that now all of HPE's hybrid cloud solutions 'sit on top of GreenLake.' That, Ewington said, is a shift in strategy from earlier years – like in late 2021 when we reported that HPE's attempts to get more sales of the old GreenLake into the channel were moving at a glacial pace. As of late 2021, just 900 out of HPE's 80,000 channel partners worldwide were selling GreenLake – equivalent to less than 1.25%. The company said it was planning to move all of its product portfolio under the GreenLake umbrella in 2022, and it appears that's now the case," according to The Register piece.

4. Xerox and Tata Team Up on GenAI and Cloud: IT services, consulting and business solutions firm Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) announced an expanded partnership with Xerox to showcase the potential of cloud and generative AI to improve IT services and business outcomes, the companies said in a statement. This agreement is important to Xerox’s reinvention business strategy that was initially announced this past January, and also highlights the momentum of TCS’ prioritization and success with generative AI following its recent AI study and launch of WisdomNext. 

5. DataStax Introduces New AI Tools: One of the biggest challenges to wider enterprise AI adoption is retrieval augmented generation (RAG), and DataStax is aiming to solve that problem with a set of new tools. DataStax is perhaps best known for its commercially supported version of the Apache Cassandra database, known as a DataStax Astra DB. In the last year, DataStax has increasingly focused on enabling gen AI and specifically RAG, adding vector database search support alongside a data API to build gen AI RAG apps, according to VentureBeat. The new tools include Langflow 1.0 for building RAG and AI agent workflows, a new release of Vectorize which provides different vector embedding models and RAGStack 1.0 which combines a series of tools and technologies to help enterprise production deployments, VentureBeat reported.

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