Channel Brief: CrowdStrike CEO Will Answer to Congress, Wiz Rejects Google Buyout Bid

Good morning, folks!

The hits just keep on comin' for CrowdStrike. CEO George Kurtz has been asked to testify before Congress about last week's outage. The impact of the outage continues to reverberate, but it's not the first time Kurtz has experienced something like this. He was CTO of McAfee in 2010 when the anti-virus software company crashed tens of thousands of machines worldwide because of a faulty update.

Wiz has said 'Thanks, but no thanks,' to Google parent company Alphabet's acquisition bid, new research shows that cyber risk tops the list of business challenges, Linux is the top OS on Azure and SAP posts solid quarterly results. 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. CrowdStrike CEO Called to Testify Before Congress on Outage: AP reported late Monday that U.S. House leaders called on CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz to testify to Congress about the cybersecurity company’s role in sparking the widespread tech outage that grounded flights, knocked banks and hospital systems offline and affected services around the world. CrowdStrike said a “significant number” of the millions of computers that crashed on Friday, July 19, 2024, and caused global disruptions, are back in operation. Now, it seems customers and regulators await a more detailed explanation of what went wrong. Read full coverage across our network here:

2. Cybersecurity Risk Tops List of Threats: Data and analytics company Global Data released research that showed cyber risk is now deemed the most significant threat to the insurance industry, surpassing natural catastrophes and political risks. With cyberattacks on the rise, insurers face mounting pressure to enhance proactive risk management and convince businesses of the critical need for robust cyber protection strategies, according to GlobalData research. GlobalData ran a poll across Verdict Media’s insurance business websites and found that over a third of respondents expect cyber risk to be the leading threat over the next three years.

3. Linux is the Top OS on Microsoft Azure: In a talk given earlier this year at the Linux Foundation Open Source Summit, two Microsoft Azure Linux Platforms Group program managers, Jack Aboutboul and Krum Kashan, revealed that Linux is the top operating system used on Microsoft Azure. That's astonishing -- as The New Stack reported, "As of today, there are hundreds of Azure and Azure-based services running on Linux, including the Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), OpenAI, HDInsight, and many of the other database services ... Overall, there are about 20,000 third-party software-as-a-service (SaaS) packages in the Azure marketplace that rely on some Linux distribution. And when things go wrong, it is the Azure service engineers who get the help tickets. The company keeps a set of endorsed Linux distributions, which include Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Debian, Flatcar, Suse, Canonical, and Oracle Linux and CentOS (as managed by OpenLogic, not Red Hat). [...] Overall, the company gets about 1,000 images a month from these endorsed partners alone. Many of the distributions have multiple images (SUSE has a regular one, and another one for high-performance computing, for instance)."

4. Wiz Rejects Google's Acquisition Bid: Cloud security firm Wiz has rejected Google Alphabet's bid to acquire the company, instead saying the company will strive to achieve $1 billion in annual recurring revenue and take the company public. In a note sent to Wiz employees Monday, CEO Assaf Rappaport wrote, "While we are flattered by offers we have received, we have chosen to continue on our path to building Wiz."

5. SAP Posts Solid Results: SAP SE posted Q2 revenue and operating profit that beat analyst expectations and also raised the company's 2025 operating profit projections, Silicon Angle reported. Revenue was $9.02 billion from $8.22 billion in last year’s second quarter and beat forecasts of $8.98 billion. Cloud and software revenue was $7.82 billion, up from $7.09 billion year-over-year. However, software license revenue fell 27% as customers shifted to cloud subscriptions, the company said. SAP's operating profit rose to $2.11 billion from $1.59 billion. Analysts had expected $1.97 billion. SAP said its current cloud backlog rose 28%, to $16.12 billion, and cloud revenue grew 25% on the strength of 33% growth in the company’s cloud-based enterprise resource planning suite. The share of more predictable revenue, an important indication of business stability, grew two percentage points, to 84%. Cloud gross profit rose 29%. Earnings per share jumped 59%, to $1.20.

In-Person MSP and Channel Partner Events