Good morning, channel partners. Here are five technology news updates, insights, chatter and plenty more to start your day for Monday, Oct. 19, 2015.
Actually, today's update involves 11 items for VARs, managed services providers (MSPs) and cloud services providers (CSPs) to sip on.
11. Apple Pay First Birthday: How is the digital payment industry performing so far? Apple Pay's first birthday provides an important inflection point. If I was a VAR or MSP focused on payment systems, I'd certainly learn a bit about Apple Pay -- but I'd likely spend far more time focused on EMV and chip card compliance. Generally speaking, many retailers and anyone else using point-of-sale systems need more help with EMV...
10. Building Blocks: Julian Dunn, a product manager at Chef and a DevOps expert, says Legos can teach us quite a bit about software design. Hmmm... I tend to agree.
9. Oracle Partners & the Internet of Things: Sure, Oracle will tackle the Internet of Things at its Oracle OpenWorld conference later this month. For instance, keep an eye on mFrontiers, which plans to unveil the mFinity platform for end-to-end IoT solutions...
8. Data Conference: We'll be watching this week's Tableau conference closely. Roughly 11,000 data enthusiasts -- including IT consulting shops and data migration experts -- will be on hand for the event. Among the big themes -- moving from spreadsheets to real business intelligence systems. Hmmm... that's an oldie but a goodie.
7. Private Equity Acquires IT Service Provider: New State Capital has acquired a majority stake in NWN, a $350 million IT service provider that promotes NCloud hosted VoIP services and other cloud services, CRN reported. Overall, I suspect private equity firms will snap up a handful of MSPs and VARs this year. But most buyers tend to be focused on sub-$10 million acquisitions. And a growing number of deals, I suspect, will involve digital marketing agencies pushing into managed services.
6. Busy Earnings Week: Companies announcing quarterly results this week include:
- Alphabet (formerly Google), Amazon, IBM and Microsoft: We'll get a reality check on their respective cloud revenue momentum.
- CA Technologies: I'm curious to see how the Application Economy strategy is performing.
- ServiceNow: The next-generation IT service management platform provider is worth watching for a range of reasons (stay tuned to learn why...).
- Others on our radar this week include 8x8, Juniper, LogMeIn and ShorTel.
5. More Cloud Competition: Keep an eye on Huawei Technologies. The big Chinese telecom equipment provider plans to spend $1 billion over the next five years to bolster its cloud computing offerings, according to The Wall Street Journal. The move comes as IBM shows some of its source code to China, hoping to prove that Big Blue's code doesn't contain back doors for U.S.-driven spying campaigns.
4. Welcome to 2006: Walmart has open sourced its OneOps cloud technology to counter Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. Yes, Walmart has an impressive e-commerce business. But if the big box retailer truly was interested in the cloud market, a good time to make such a move would have been about a decade ago... when Amazon was first dabbling in AWS and Microsoft was laying the foundation for Azure...
3. OpenStack Meets Docker, SDN: The latest OpenStack cloud release has improved support for software containers (i.e., Docker) and software defined networking. Those are welcome enhancements. And there's certainly a good market for OpenStack consultants (example: Mirantis). But I think Amazon has serious momentum with its AWS Managed Services Partner Program...
2. Forced Windows 10 Upgrades: Microsoft is taking some heat for allegedly forcing some users of Windows 7 and Windows 8 onto Windows 10 upgrades. An online petition calls for Microsoft to change its Windows 10 upgrade policies and practices. Even though Windows 10 is largely free, it's clear that some users don't want to be force fed the operating system...
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