7 Channel People Making Waves This Week at Datto, NetFortris, RingCentral, More
There’s a big shake-up among one company’s channel leadership team.
April 1, 2022
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An Okta data breach by the Lapsus$ hacking group may have impacted up to 366 corporate customers, or 2.5% of the company’s customer base. The breach stems from a security incident that took place in January.
Amit Yoran is Tenable’s chairman and CEO. Yoran made waves this week for writing a scathing open letter to Okta posted on LinkedIn.
“Like many of you, the first question I asked myself after learning of the Okta breach was, are we exposed?” he said. “That’s an incredibly simple, but crucial question — one that Okta customers should have had the chance to ask themselves two months ago when the company first discovered the compromise. Two months is too long.”
Okta should have disclosed the compromise when it detected it in January or after a competent and timely forensic analysis, Yoran said.
To learn more about the data breach, read Edward Gately’s story.
Enterprise Connect, the conference for unified communications organizations, presented several keynote speakers from companies such as Zoom, Microsoft and Cisco.
Kira Makagon, chief innovation officer, RingCentral, made waves for rolling out several new products for the company, including AI-based Advanced Meeting Insights and Summaries. The conference’s audience was pumped about what Makagon described. The AI-generated snippets work like ESPN sports highlights.
“You’ll never have to worry about missing a meeting because you can catch up on what you missed,” Makagon said.
Speaking of catching up, find what the other presenters had to say about newly released products.
(Enterprise Connect and Channel Futures share a parent company, Informa.)
Sometimes the top stories at Channel Futures come from our contributors. Frank Suglia is vice president of technical sales at BitTitan. Suglia made waves this week for espousing the benefits of data governance because if “data remains unregulated or ungoverned, many issues may arise that can cause severe problems for businesses.”
Suglia specifically discusses the rush to the cloud over the last two years to enable remote work.
“The quick pivot to the cloud often led to companies moving workloads without having a larger cloud strategy and governance plan in place. This often resulted in IT issues such as data sprawl – the massive creation, accumulation and storage of data – as well as challenges with data access, security vulnerabilities, increasing storage and IT costs and more.”
He said companies today are re-evaluating their cloud strategies and asking, “What’s next?”
To learn about what’s next, read Suglia’s column here.
Sangoma, the communications-as-a-service provider, acquired NetFortris for $80 million this week.
David Portnowitz is SVP of marketing at Sangoma. He made waves for his reassurances that the acquisition will not result in a change in the levels of support NetFortris’ channel partners already receive.
“All of those things are going to stay in place,” he said. “The main difference is that they’re going to have more products to sell. Sangoma comes with an entire portfolio of communication-as-a-service products including UCaaS.”
Portnowitz added that Sangoma’s channel partners will benefit from resources they didn’t have in terms of network security, SD-WAN and network connectivity.
“It’s going to open up new channels and new verticals for both partner bases,” he said.
To learn more about the deal, read the article here.
VMware plans to offer a managed storage and data management service called VMware Cloud Flex Storage.
Marc Fleischmann, VMware Cloud CTO, announced Cloud Flex Storage on the VMware vSAN Virtual Blocks blog. He made waves with his quote in this third most-read story this week.
“VMware Cloud Flex Storage intelligently combines cloud-native abstractions to deliver exceptional performance and cost across traditional and modern workloads,” Fleischmann explained. “With just a few clicks in the VMware Cloud Services Console, customers can scale their storage environment without adding hosts, and elastically adjust their storage capacity up or down as needed, for every application. Customers also benefit from a simple pay-as-you-go consumption model.”
Learn more about VMware Cloud Flex Storage service and how it will be available through VMware Cloud on AWS.
It was one of the biggest stories this week. HP said it would buy Poly for $1.7 billion (a buyout valued at $3.3 billion including debt).
Dave Shull, Poly CEO and president, is thrilled about the opportunity this represents for Poly, its partners and customers. His optimism made waves this week.
“The combination gives us an opportunity to dramatically scale, reaching new markets and channels. It supercharges our innovation with a like-minded partner. This transaction offers compelling and certain value for our shareholders and speaks to the hard work done by our teams to become a recognized leader in helping businesses everywhere meet the challenges of a generational disruption in the way people work.”
Learn more about the deal and why it may influence hybrid work.
Eric Torres, Datto’s director of channel development, has confirmed to Channel Futures that he’s leaving. It’s a big shake-up among Datto‘s channel leadership team. Speculation is swirling that other senior executives may soon leave the company.
“I am incredibly excited about the new position and the future that it holds, ” Torres said about a new role he’s taking on. “I’m staying in the channel and it’s an exciting opportunity. It will be very similar to what I’m doing – channel development – and still traveling to the industry events, presenting and helping grow another company.”
Datto reportedly is considering its strategic options, including a possible sale, after getting takeover interest from private equity firms. According to Bloomberg, Datto is working with a financial adviser to solicit interest from potential suitors. Private equity firms have already expressed interest in Datto.
Learn more about why this period is a critical juncture for Datto.
Eric Torres, Datto’s director of channel development, has confirmed to Channel Futures that he’s leaving. It’s a big shake-up among Datto‘s channel leadership team. Speculation is swirling that other senior executives may soon leave the company.
“I am incredibly excited about the new position and the future that it holds,” Torres said about a new role he’s taking on. “I’m staying in the channel and it’s an exciting opportunity. It will be very similar to what I’m doing – channel development – and still traveling to the industry events, presenting and helping grow another company.”
Datto reportedly is considering its strategic options, including a possible sale, after getting takeover interest from private equity firms. According to Bloomberg, Datto is working with a financial adviser to solicit interest from potential suitors. Private equity firms have already expressed interest in Datto.
Learn more about why this period is a critical juncture for Datto.
Our weekly Channel People Making Waves counts down the top stories of the past seven days. We highlight the individuals behind the stories, this week featuring Datto, NetFortris, RingCentral and more.
It’s one thing to have a data breach happen; it’s another to inform the public months after the fact. That’s what Okta did and why Amit Yoran, Tenable’s chairman and CEO, called out the company. You’ll find his choice words featured in this week’s roundup.
Kira Makagon, chief innovation officer, RingCentral, made waves when she rolled out a new AI-generated product that provides a highlight reel of important segments of company meetings. Never miss an office gathering again.
Also, we write about two deals this week — one for a cool $80 million and another for billions of dollars. There’s a lot of money floating around the channel as acquisitions get pricier and pricier.
Check out our slideshow above for the people who made the top stories of the week. Lastly, don’t forget to catch last week’s roundup, which you can find 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. |
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