Good morning, channel partners. Here are five technology news updates, insights, chatter, and plenty more to sip on for Thursday, July 28 2016.
Actually, there are 16 entries for VARs, managed services providers (MSPs), cloud services providers (CSPs) and independent software vendors (ISVs) to sip on. Take a look…
16. Oracle Buys NetSuite: The $9.3 billion SaaS buyout was announced this morning. Here are the channel partner implications.
15. IoT Channel Momentum: One-third of channel partners now generate revenue from the Internet of Things, according to CompTIA. That's up from 8 percent last year. Key IoT services involve security, analytics, managed services, custom app development and infrastructure services, the report said. We'll share more thoughts on this soon.
14. Social Opposites: Facebook's latest quarterly results easily exceeded Wall Street's expectations, while Twitter's once again missed the mark. I can't say I'm surprised based on our analytics -- and the traffic we get from each of the 'major' social media networks. Let's just say Facebook is leading the way...
13. It's All Relative: Imagine this. GoPro's revenues fell 47 percent in the company's most recent quarter -- and yet the results beat Wall Street's expectations. More proof that business success often involves managing expectations...
12. Samsung Momentum: Samsung just delivered its most profitable quarter in two years, driven by Galaxy Smartphone demand. But frankly, we're far more curious to know how Samsung's vertical-market channel push is performing. Plus, we're tracking Samsung ARTIK, an emerging Internet of Things platform... Stay tuned for more.
11. Apple iCloud Alternative: A team led by former Apple engineers is launching Upthere Home -- a consumer cloud storage system that potentially differentiates from iCloud, Google Drive, Dropbox and other established platforms, the Wall Street Journal says.
10. Telecom Layoffs: SFR Group, France's second-largest telecoms operator (behind Orange), plans to shed 5,000 staff -- one-third of the company's workforce -- from 2017 to 2019, Reuters reports. The forthcoming cuts reflect ongoing shifts in the telecom space, where operators are trying to become more than network connection providers -- though they haven't quite figured out how.
9. Digital Government Incompetence: The Democratic National Committee was warned last fall that its computer network was susceptible to attacks but didn’t follow the security advice it was given, Bloomberg reported. Hey, we're not pointing fingers here. We suspect Republican IT security is just as effective...
8. Outsourced NOCs for MSPs: The network operations center (NOC) market continues to see more business evolutions. A key example: Inbay, a white label 24/7 NOC and service desk provider based in the UK -- says it continues to expand its MSP partner footprint in the US -- though we don't have specific stats to back up that claim. Other key outsourced NOC providers that work closely with MSPs include Continuum, GMS Live Expert and Live Virtual Help Desk. (Whom did I miss?)
7. Unified Communications Adoption: The company recently announced Roughly one-third to two-thirds of small/medium businesses (SME) will either add unified communications (UC) or replace existing systems with UC in the next one to two years, according to a recent Jabra survey. The big wildcard from ChannelE2E's perspective: Will those customers embrace a range of solutions, or simply extend Office 365 with Microsoft's Cloud PBX platform? Hmmm...
6. Emerging Security Partner Program: Acalvio Technologies has raised $17 million, and the advanced threat defense startup plans to work exclusively through channel partners. Several resellers are already on board, according to a company spokesperson. A formal partner program is expected to debut later this year during Acalvio's formal product launch...
5. SonicWall Upgrade: Keep an eye on the SonicWALL Capture Advanced Threat Protection Service, a "multi-engine sandbox" that blocks suspicious files until verdict. It's available now with the new SonicWALL SonicOS 6.2.6, which also features elease also features new Content Filtering Service 4.0. Side note: Dell has sold SonicWall and other software assets to private equity firms in June.
4. Avnet Boosts Software Expert Training: Avnet has unveiled a "solutions specialist" approach worldwide to accelerate growth in software-driven technologies. Toward that effort, Avnet has dedicated more than 450 solutions specialists to empower the channel to capitalize on cloud, cognitive computing, data analytics, the internet of things (IOT), mobility, security and enterprise networking, the distributor asserts.
3. Wireless Security: Sophos has unveiled Sophos Wireless, the company's first cloud-based solution for safeguarding wireless networks. It's managed through the Sophos Central platform, which has been catching on as a security dashboard for MSPs.
2. Datto-LabTech, Part II: Earlier this week, we mentioned that Datto's business continuity management platforms now integrate with LabTech, ConnectWise's remote monitoring and management platform. Frankly, we were a little surprised that such an integration didn't exist previously. So how were Datto MSPs coping in the LabTech world until this point? Actually, ConnectWise's PSA platform has a longstanding Datto integration to help the situation, but the LabTech-Datto integration is new.
1. Advice on Ransomware: Joe Gleinser over at GCS Technologies offers up this advice on ransomware mitigation. Interesting read. If you want to hear more about how MSPs are dealing with ransomware, join our webcast today at 2pm ET/11am PT.
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