Good morning, channel partners. Here are five technology news updates, insights, chatter, and plenty more to start your day for Monday, July 24, 2017.
Actually, there are eight timely updates for VARs, managed services providers (MSPs), cloud services providers (CSPs), independent software vendors (ISVs), telco master agents and telco agents to sip on. Take a look…
8. Channel Chief Move: HP Enterprise‘s (HPE) Blaine Raddon has joined ClearCenter as senior VP of sales. Raddon, formerly senior director of worldwide partner development at HPE, brings extensive enterprise and SMB partner ecosystem experience to the hybrid IT technology company. We'll share more details soon.
7. Distribution: Lifeboat Distribution, a specialized distributor focused on virtualization, security and business continuity has agreed to offer Acronis data protection solutions and local support to its network of VARs, system integrators, and MSPs in the United States and Canada.
6. Fewer Cloud Services Price Cuts?: A study by RBC Capital last week found that Amazon AWS and Azure, the two cloud services leaders, had “minimal effective price reductions” during the June quarter, with “flat pricing” at Google, IBM and others, The Wall Street Journal reported. Moreover, the same analysts had reported notable price reductions from both Microsoft and Google in the first quarter, when Microsoft dropped its prices an average of 8 percent. Our reaction: Based on Amazon's 11 year track record, we think this is a momentary pause and more cloud price cuts are coming.
5. Office 365 Milestone?: Office 365 for the first time has outsold traditional Office in Microsoft's most recent quarter, the company says. It sounds like a massive milestone... until you realize that Microsoft has been promoting Office 365 since July 2011, and much of the world has shifted to subscription-centric services in the past five years or so...
4. SmarterMSP: Intronis MSP Solutions by Barracuda has launched SmarterMSP, a media site that contains content to help MSPs growth their businesses. It's the latest in a growing list of vendor-owned content sites for MSPs. Other sites include ModernMSP (from BitTitan) and MSP Blog (from Continuum).
3. KPIs and Acquisitions: So, you're about to buy a business. What KPIs (key performance indicators) should you study during the discovery and due diligence process? Besides the obvious financial metrics involving multi-year revenues and EBITDA, AllBusiness points to these five KPIs for potential business buyers.
2. Black Hat And Def Con: MSSP Alert, our sister site, is set to cover the massive Black Hat USA 2017 conference this week in Las Vegas. But that's not all. We'll continue our coverage as the Def Con 25 conference also unfolds in Las Vegas.
1. Cybersecurity Road Show: The SaaSMax Cybersecurity Channel Road Show makes its next stops in Chicago (September 21) and Atlanta (October 25). The evening events educate MSPs and channel partners about security as a service offerings in the SMB sector. Can't make it to one of those events? Catch up with SaaSMax at the CompTIA ChannelCon 2017 conference next week in Austin, Texas.
