Channel Brief: ControlUp Partners With Ingram Micro for DEX, SentinelOne Simplifies Cyber Insurance

Good morning, folks! It's Thursday, and the weekend is on the horizon.

There are a number of strategic collaboration news items today, including a partnership between Deloitte and AWS to help joint customers develop generative AI solutions. This was one of many AI-related announcements made at the AWS Summit this week in New York City.

Getting cyber insurance can be a nerve-wracking process, not to mention the cost. A new partnership between SentinelOne and Aon aims to make it simpler and cheaper. Through this collaboration, Aon will use SentinelOne's Singularity platform to identify risks for underwriting and show how organizations can lock down their security so their cyber insurance costs go down.

And digital employee experience (DEX) management firm ControlUp announced a new North American distribution agreement with Ingram Micro, Inc. Ingram Micro partners now have access to ControlUp's digital employee experience platform, which helps to improve DEX, especially across remote and hybrid work situations.

In other news, FFL Partners has acquired Medicus IT, NetApp has added new capabilities for generative AI and VMware environments and Object First has appointed Eric Schott as the storage startup's first chief product officer (CPO). Congratulations!

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. FFL Partners Acquires Medicus IT: FFL Partners has acquired Medicus IT, a healthcare-focused IT service provider, from 424 Capital. Medicus provides HIPAA-compliant IT services to 6,500+ healthcare providers and more than 50,000 end users in more than 30 U.S. states with over 2,000 locations, according to PE Hub. FFL plans to grow Medicus organically through adding new clients and helping healthcare providers add cybersecurity, the company said. Medicus is the second vertical market-focused acquisition made by FFL Partners; in 2022, FFL invested in Abacus Group, which is focused on financial services.

2. Object First Names Eric Schott to CPO Role: Object First – the startup behind Ootbi, the ransomware-proof backup storage appliance for Veeam customers – announced the appointment of Eric Schott as its chief product officer (CPO). Schott has decades of product management experience and storage tech expertise and will work to evolve the Ootbi product line, according to a statement from the company. Prior to Object First, Schott was senior director of product management at Veeam. He’s also held product leadership positions at Dell, OneCloud Software and EqualLogic. Congratulations! 

3. SentinelOne Partners With Aon to Secure Cyber Insurance: SentinelOne and professional services firm Aon announced a strategic collaboration which will allow Aon to leverage SentinelOne’s Singularity Platform to more effectively profile and mitigate cyber risk and help customers secure cyber insurance, the companies said in a statement. Through this collaboration, Aon will use SentinelOne's Singularity platform to profile risk for underwriting and provide more visibility into insurability drivers. Insurers can make better decisions and reduce their overall risk and insurees get help with remediation of vulnerabilities or security issues prior to conducting the underwriting process. That speeds up the approval/renewal process and can potentially mean discounts. It's a win-win.

4. NetApp Adds New Capabilities for Generative AI, VMware Workloads: NetApp has added new capabilities designed for strategic cloud workloads, including generative AI and VMware, the company said. The intelligent data infrastructure capabilities include NetApp BlueXP Workload Factory for AWS, NetApp GenAI Toolkit – Microsoft Azure NetApp Files Version, an Amazon Bedrock with Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP Reference Architecture, Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP Enhancements and NetApp BlueXP Disaster Recovery Support for VMFS. These updates build on NetApp’s existing offerings that support storage and data operations for customers that need to implement and manage high-powered, strategic workloads such as generative AI and VMware environments, NetApp said.

5. ControlUp Partners With Ingram Micro on Employee Experience: Digital employee experience (DEX) management firm ControlUp announced a new North American distribution agreement with Ingram Micro, Inc. ControlUp's platform equips IT teams with tools to quickly resolve issues, proactively prevent help desk tickets and minimize costs for virtual desktops, physical desktops and unified communications solutions including Microsoft Teams and Zoom. The strategic relationship empowers Ingram Micro’s extensive ecosystem of resellers, system integrators, and service providers in North America to easily access ControlUp’s DEX platform. This collaboration aims to enhance user experiences, lower computing costs, and quickly solve desktop issue troubleshooting and remediation, the companies said in a statement.

6. Deloitte, AWS Partner to Build Out Generative AI Solutions: At the AWS Summit in New York this week, Deloitte announced the creation of a multi-year strategic collaboration agreement with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to help clients scale their generative AI, data and analytics and quantum computing capabilities by using AWS services, such as Amazon SageMaker, Amazon Bedrock, Amazon Q and Amazon Braket. The two organizations will establish an Innovation Lab, helping clients explore future technologies like artificial general intelligence (AGI), quantum machine learning (ML) and autonomous robotics, and work together to help joint clients solve industry-specific problems using generative AI. Deloitte and AWS will make funding available to support customers taking successful proofs of concept (POCs) into production. The effort is aligned to Deloitte’s IndustryAdvantage initiative, a strategic $2 billion investment to co-innovate with eligible clients and alliances to develop industry-focused solutions.

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