5 Channel Partner Program and MSP News Updates: 05 May 2021

Here  are five (actually, more) technology news updates, insights, chatter, and plenty more to start your day for Wednesday, May 5, 2021. Sip up.

What’s In Our Daily Brew?

A. What’s Brewing Today: Technology News

1. MSP Still Up for Sale: CompuCom disclosed falling revenues and cyberattack cleanup costs. Parent ODP has been seeking a buyer for the struggling MSP since late 2020.

2. Talent - Global IT Consulting: Accenture has named Jill Kramer to succeed Amy Fuller as chief marketing and communications officer, effective June 1, 2021. The move is part of a planned transition amid Fuller's plan to retire. Kramer oversaw Accenture's global brand ahead of the transition. Accenture has been one of the world's most successful and active IT consulting firms in recent years. The company ranks among the Top 250 Public Cloud MSPs and Top 250 MSSPs, and has also been very active acquiring IT consulting firms and MSPs that specialize in big data analytics, digital transformation, cloud services, SaaS applications, cybersecurity, managed security and more.

3. Talent - Remote Desktop Software: TeamViewer has hired OpenText and SAP veteran Patricia Nagle as president of TeamViewer Americas. She succeeds Finnegan Faldi, who has exited the company to pursue a new opportunity.

4. IT Service Management (ITSM): Symphony SummitAI has updated its ITSM platform to include a business rule designer, help desk ticket auto-assignment, integration with Microsoft Teams, dynamic forms based on incident context, SMS notifications, and a "tagging" feature so analysts can add relevant information to incidents and service requests, the company says.

5. Hardware as a Service (HaaS): Hewlett Packard Enterprise announced various HPE GreenLake storage as a service options. The moves surfaced one day before Dell announced its APEX as a service offerings...

6. Microsoft Outlook Security: Avatier has released Avatier for Outlook, providing users with passwordless Single Sign-On (SSO) and unified Identity Access Management (IAM) from within Outlook to make remote work more secure, the company asserts.

7. Collaboration - Facebook Workforce vs. Microsoft Teams: The Facebook Workplace tool has reached 7 million paid subscribers, up more than 40% from a year earlier, Reuters reports. Workplace had 5 million paid users in May 2020, the report says. In stark contrast, Microsoft Teams has 145 million daily users, versus 115 million in October 2020, Reuters adds.

B. Channel Chiefs, Partner Programs and Strategic Alliances

1. Talent - Channel Chief: ZeroNorth has named Dan Beauregard as VP of strategic alliances. Beauregard will build out ZeroNorth’s ecosystem of go-to-market partners across AppSec and DevOps, leading efforts around the organization’s technology alliance and channel partner programs, the company says.

2. Partner Program - Email Security: IRONSCALES has relaunched its channel partner program with enhanced benefits. As part of the refresh, IRONSCALES has "refined its tiering structure to feature platinum, gold, silver and transactional levels. The new program also defines achievable goals for partners and dedicates additional internal resources via its partner portal, marketing support, campaign assets, joint event opportunities and webinars to help drive revenue and maintain or boost levels," the company says.

3. Partner Program: Pegasystems has launched Pega Partners – a new "streamlined partner program that will help clients rapidly accelerate their digital transformation (DT) initiatives," the company asserts.

4. Partner Program - Edge Computing: Stratus Technologies has launched a new program to enable system integrators (SIs) to develop Edge Computing competencies and deployment expertise, the company says.

5. Partner Program - Contact Centers: Genesys has announced the Ascend Partner Program -- which is designed for global systems integrators, channel partners, technology partners and independent consultants that are "eager to participate in the ecosystem developing around Experience as a Service."

6. Integration - Government Clouds: Nutanix now supports AWS GovCloud, providing a "unified cloud platform across Nutanix on-premises and bare metal Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances running on Amazon Web Services (AWS) GovCloud region," the company says.

C. Channel Partner Summits, MSP Conferences and Virtual Events Calendar