Good morning, channel partners. Here are five technology news updates, insights, chatter, and plenty more to sip on for Friday, January 29, 2016.
Hmmm... In reality here are 15 items for VARs, managed services providers (MSPs), cloud services providers (CSPs) and independent software vendors (ISVs) to sip on…
15. Amazon vs Microsoft Clouds: Both Amazon and Microsoft disclosed incredible cloud business growth yesterday as part of their respective quarterly results. Amazon Web Services revenues hit $2.41 billion, up 69 percent from the same quarter last year. Microsoft Azure revenue skyrocketed 140 percent, though I didn't see the company disclose a specific revenue number. Side note: Amazon shares dropped more than 10 percent because the company's spending is a bit out of control, but that has nothing to do with the AWS business.
14. The Next $1B Cloud: NetSuite's Q4 revenues jumped 33 percent to $206.2 million. At that growth rate, fast math suggests that NetSuite could become a $1 billion company (annual revenues) in 2016. Still, the company continues to lose money -- including a $32.4 million loss in Q4. The company's cloud ERP remains popular, but there was no mention of the OpenAir PSA platform in the Q4 earnings release.
13. Fast Food Poisoning: Wendy's is investigating whether the burger chain suffered a major hack involving payment cards used at some of its domestic locations. Remember when locking down the point of sale simply involved tracking the cash in the register?
12. Ingram, Cisco and Security: Ingram Micro has launched three new professional security assessment services for channel partners focused on advanced threat protection (ATP). For details, check out FirePower Network Threat Assessments -- which was developed with Cisco.
11. Do IBM Numbers Add Up?: IBM CEO Ginni Rometty is getting a $4.5 million bonus for 2015 -- despite the fact that shares dropped more than 15 percent last year and IBM revenues have declined for 15 straight quarters. Before you attack Rometty's pay package consider this: She inherited a broken company that was too dependent on traditional software and hardware sales. After moving a bit too slowly, Rometty lit a fire under IBM the past two years or so, pushing aggressively into cloud, analytics, security, mobile and more. I'm not defending her bonus. But I do think the context is important.
10. Juniper and NSA Connections?: A U.S. congressional probe will examine if the NSA was involved in Juniper Networks' recent backdoor security hole. Without some fast answers, this could turn into an ugly look at how the government is -- or isn't -- working with Silicon Valley...
9. SMB Cloud Spending: Small and midsize businesses will represent 40 percent of worldwide public cloud spending by 2019, IDC predicts. My reaction? I actually think that forecast is a bit conservative. Stop hugging servers, folks.
8. Samsung Partner Program: At the Samsung Channel Partner Summit yesterday, the company apparently introduced Marketing Concierge Services and a new training and certification program called Samsung Business Academy. We're pinging Samsung for more details.
7. Managed Financial Services: Now here's an interesting twist on the MSP market. Electronic Payment Services has acquired CISB ATM Services -- which offers managed services for banking ATM systems. The companies plan to support more than 15,000 ATMs by 2017.
6. Xerox Breakup: The company will split into two businesses -- one focused on legacy hardware and the other focused on outsourcing. Sort of ironic to see so many hardware companies buy up IT services firms -- and then stumble badly with them...
5. Shout Out: Thanks to TotallyMSP, which tracks the European MSP market, for sharing ChannelE2E's content with your followers. We're happy to return the favor.
4. Big Data Education, Certification: MapR has expanded its free on-demand Hadoop and Spark training tools. The result? More than 50,000 developers, analysts, administrators and channel partners have participated in the training and certification offerings, the Hadoop provider claims.
3. Top Channel Partner Conferences for 2016: You'll find them listed with dates and locations in our ChannelE2E Event Calendar.
2. Datto's Really Big MSP Win: No, we're not referring to a specific customer. Instead, ChannelE2E is referring to Brooks Borcherding, who joined Datto as Chief Revenue Officer in November. He previously was president and CEO of NaviSite, the big MSP and managed hosting provider that Time Warner Cable acquired in 2013. Borcherding's expertise should serve Datto well as the business continuity company seeks to help MSPs grow into the midmarket. We'll share more details soon.
1. Another MSP Software Acquisition?: Yes. I'm Secure in my belief that a deal will happen within days. You'll understand the Logic when details emerge. I just can't say much more right Now.
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