Good morning, channel partners. Here are five technology news updates, insights, chatter, and plenty more to start your day for Thursday, August 18, 2016.
Actually, there are 11 entries for VARs, managed services providers (MSPs), cloud services providers (CSPs) and independent software vendors (ISVs) and telco master agents and telco agents to sip on. Take a look…
11. ASCII: Special thanks to The ASCII Group for inviting ChannelE2E to the organization's gathering today in New Jersey. Among the speakers to know: Jay Ferron, CEO of Interactive Security Training. He sells no hardware and software, but instead focuses entirely on security services -- locking down customers' infrastructure. The result is a $24 million business. Sell customers on policy development, he asserted. We'll share more on this soon.
10. Lenovo Makes Progress: Lenovo's Q1 profit jumped nearly two-thirds as the hardware giant tightly managed costs in the PC and smartphone markets. What's less clear: How Lenovo's x86 server and hyperconverged data center businesses are performing. We're checking...
9. Intel Artificial Intelligence Chips: Intel is trying to design its Xeon Phi processors for AI applications. The chips will be optimized for data-intensive applications like speech interpretation, autonomous vehicles and more.
8. CIO Move: CIO Vic Bhagat has jumped from EMC to Verizon Enterprise. The move comes as Dell seeks to finalize its buyout of EMC, and Verizon seeks to sort out whether it will retain or sell dozens of global data centers...
7. Isn't It Ironic (Don't You Think): U.S. intelligence officials are planning to provide information including classified threat reports to companies about the risks of hacking and other crimes tied to the supplies and services they buy, Bloomberg reported. Ummm... can we trust U.S. intelligence when the feds can't even secure their own networks?
6. Azure Cloud Backup: Azure Backup, Microsoft’s backup-as-a-service solution, has gained alerting and monitoring capabilities as part of a technical preview.
5. Talent: CloudJumper, a Workspace as a Service (WaaS) specialist, has hired Scott Bechtold as channel sales manager. He reports directly to Max Pruger, chief sales officer for CloudJumper and is responsible for developing new channel partners throughout North America. Bechtold is formerly CEO of Agility IT, an MSP based in the Atlanta metropolitan area.
4. Midmarket NOC: ComputerSupport.com, a national provider of managed IT and cloud services for businesses, has launched a network operations center -- dubbed ITAnyWhere NOC -- for middle market enterprises. The NOC offers around-the-clock network, server and cloud monitoring, escalation and remediation services.
3. Small Business 401K Plans: According to Capital One’s Spark Business Barometer, only 13% of small businesses offer a retirement plan. Owners believe retirement plans are expensive, burdensome and complicated. Capital One is aiming to change that with Spark 401k -- a plan designed for businesses with roughly 100 or fewer employees.
2. Government Cloud Services: collab9 claims it is the first and only FedRAMP Authorized Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) provider in the world. collab9 was sponsored by the FCC to achieve a FedRAMP compliant ATO (Agency Authority to Operate) and verified by the FedRAMP PMO (Project Management Office), the company says.
1. Louisiana Flooding and Small Business Impact: The NFIB, one of the largest organizations serving small businesses, is striving to identify how flooding has impacted small businesses across Louisiana. The organization certainly realizes that personal priorities take precedent over business priorities at this time, but NFIB respectfully requests that businesses fill out this survey to help track the flooding's impact.
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