7 Channel People Making Waves This Week at Avaya, New Relic, Arctic Wolf, More
This week, one channel company cut 35% of its workforce.
September 23, 2022
![Making Waves Making Waves](https://eu-images.contentstack.com/v3/assets/blt10e444bce2d36aa8/blt98e65ae99539d1f4/6523eba87a0cbd1e3854d48a/Making-Waves.jpg?width=700&auto=webp&quality=80&disable=upscale)
Shutterstock
A social-engineering attack is behind the latest Uber data breach, which forced the rideshare giant to take several of its internal communications and engineering systems offline.
The person claiming responsibility for the hack said he sent a text message to an Uber worker claiming to be a corporate IT person. The attacker persuaded the worker to hand over a password that allowed him to gain access to Uber’s systems.
Ian McShane is Arctic Wolf’s vice president of strategy. He said Uber is “renowned for having some of the best cybersecurity in the business.”
“Nobody’s perfect and even the best managed security organizations can be compromised,” he said. “The key is how quickly you respond and mitigate the issue, which they appear to have done here.”
McShane made waves for his assessment that the Uber data breach is a pretty “low-bar to entry” attack. It’s akin to consumer-focused attackers calling people claiming to be Microsoft and having the end user install keyloggers or remote access tools.
Learn why more emphasis on employee training and testing is needed.
Attendees trained hard and played hard at the Avant Special Forces Summit this week in Austin, Texas. And that combination of effort and celebration is very much connected to the movement partners are making up-market and up the stack.
The agent space has long been associated with SMB and midmarket telecommunications. But declarations from Avant staff and vendors, and anecdotes from partners weave a picture of a partner model that has gained credibility in the eyes of the CIO community.
Take Jake Jansen, for example.
Jansen co-founded LAVA Technology Services, which focuses on helping enterprise customers procure and implement technology.
He made waves for noting that while the enterprise doesn’t necessarily understand the agent model very well, it is quite interested in it.
For instance, some prospective customers get confused when they learn that LAVA often doesn’t charge for consulting.
“We tell them how we’re paid and how it’s good for them and good for us. There’s some confusion of, ‘Can I use this?’ Where the procurement teams get involved, and they have to go to all of their executive committees and say, ‘Are we allowed to buy through this type of process?’”
But the answer, Jansen said, is usually a resounding yes.
“I’d say, in the commercial enterprise space almost all of them have no problem whatsoever,” Jansen told Channel Futures.
Find more from James Anderson’s reporting about the Avant Special Forces Summit here.
Business email compromise (BEC) is driving demand for cloud-based API-enabled email security solutions (CAPES), creating more opportunities for email security providers.
BEC is an impersonation attack where emails appear to come from within the company, or from a trusted partner or supplier, and are mainly focused on fraud. Phishers imitate legitimate senders by spoofing their email addresses or compromising their accounts. In some BEC scams, attackers impersonate coworkers or executives to persuade victims to conduct wire transfers, buy gift cards, or steal sensitive personal information like tax documents.
Jess Burn is senior analyst at Forrester.
“The pandemic saw a mass migration to the cloud and that included email,” she said, making waves for her assessment. “As more firms moved to cloud-based email infrastructure from providers like Microsoft and Google, they also moved away from secure email gateways (SEGs) and toward cloud-based email security. So we saw the rise of CAPES as an add on to the naïve security capabilities offered by the email infrastructure providers.”
Our latest CF List focuses on email security providers. Analysts with Omdia, Frost & Sullivan and Forrester weighed in on email security market trends and what it takes to be a successful provider.
Read more from the article here.
Imposter syndrome disproportionately affects women. According to a 2019 study from Heriot-Watt University and the School for CEOs, more than half (54%) of women experience feelings of imposter syndrome, while just 24% of men report the same. These intangible feelings — hesitation, lack of confidence, lack of belonging — lead directly to women being passed over for promotions and salary increases, reinforcing the most insidious aspects of the glass ceiling.
Riya Shanmugam made waves in her editorial about her experience with imposter syndrome. The group vice president of global alliances and channels at New Relic discussed her previous feelings of inadequacies in her prior roles and what she did to overcome them.
Learn more from her experience here.
Six vendors occupy the top category in Gartner’s latest SD-WAN Magic Quadrant. Among the vendors in the top spot were those running at least 60,000 SD-WAN sites, at least 1,500 SD-WAN customers or land in the top 10 in market share.
As part of their research, Gartner predicted that half of SD-WAN deals will occur as part of a secure access service edge (SASE) platform by 2025. SASE combines networking technologies like SD-WAN with next-gen security technologies into a unified platform. As of 2022, only 10% of SD-WAN purchases are part of a SASE offering, according to Gartner.
In addition, network-as-a-service (NaaS) offerings will encompass more and more SD-WAN sales. Gartner noted that almost zero percent of new SD-WAN procurements stem from a NaaS deal, but predicted that number to grow to 30% by 2026.
Idris Odutoye serves as technology advisor for professional IT consulting services firm ATA Trusted Advisors. He made waves for noting the movement toward software as a service and platform as a service has driven demand for SD-WAN and SASE.
“Customers need more visibility into what those applications are doing, and that’s where an SD-WAN/SASE product comes into play to give them that visibility,” Odutoye said.
To get more of the partner perspective, read James Anderson’s piece.
IronNet has initiated more layoffs, cutting nearly 90 employees or 35% of its workforce, and co-CEO William Welch and CFO James Gerber made waves for leaving the company.
IronNet confirmed the layoffs. The company’s shares dropped more than 47% in pre-trading last week after the company reported its latest quarterly earnings.
According to IronNet’s latest 8-K filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), due to market conditions, on Sept. 14, the company committed to and communicated a workforce reduction plan.
Learn more about how the workforce reduction is part of a broader plan by IronNet.
Our No.1 story of the week isn’t surprising. It involves Avaya’s plans to begin its fiscal 2023 with a clean financial slate. Our senior news editor Edward Gately interviewed Avaya CEO Alan Masarek and vice president of channels John Lindsley. Lindsley made waves when he assured us that Avaya partners have given the company positive feedback during financially troubling times.
“There’s a lot of work to do. I don’t want to undermine that. We’ve got a lot … to do, but partners want us to win. They’re rooting for us. And our role here is to make sure that they know how important they are in the strategy as we move forward,” he said.
Read more from Gately’s interview here.
Our No.1 story of the week isn’t surprising. It involves Avaya’s plans to begin its fiscal 2023 with a clean financial slate. Our senior news editor Edward Gately interviewed Avaya CEO Alan Masarek and vice president of channels John Lindsley. Lindsley made waves when he assured us that Avaya partners have given the company positive feedback during financially troubling times.
“There’s a lot of work to do. I don’t want to undermine that. We’ve got a lot … to do, but partners want us to win. They’re rooting for us. And our role here is to make sure that they know how important they are in the strategy as we move forward,” he said.
Read more from Gately’s interview here.
Channel people at Avaya, Forrester, New Relic, Arctic Wolf and more are among the individuals making waves this week. Channel Futures’ Channel People Making Waves showcases those who have made an impact over the last seven days. (See our slideshow above.)
One of the biggest headlines this week involved Uber’s latest data breach. The person claiming responsibility for the hack sent a text message to an Uber worker claiming he was a corporate IT person. The hack showed the public how important employee training and testing are. Artic Wolf’s vice president of strategy unpacks this breach for our readers.
On a completely different topic, have you ever experienced imposter syndrome? If you’re a woman, the likely answer is yes. More than half of women experience this feeling, including the vice president of global alliances and channels at New Relic. In her guest column for Channel Futures, she explains how she overcame those sentiments and how people can also. It was our No. 4 most-read article this week.
Finally, the article that took the top spot includes the response given by the CEO and channel leader of a top UCaaS firm facing financial difficulties. It’s one of the most-read stories of the year thus far on Channel Futures.
And, if you didn’t catch our previous edition, you can find it here.
Want to contact the author directly about this story? Have ideas for a follow-up article? Email Claudia Adrien or connect with her on LinkedIn. |
Read more about:
AgentsAbout the Author(s)
You May Also Like