7 Channel People Making Waves This Week at Microsoft, Rackspace, RingCentral, Avaya
Hackers targeted one UCaaS firm by impersonating the company's IT department.
August 12, 2022
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Rackspace is possibly restructuring but we won’t know until September. The managed cloud computing provider said it wouldn’t reveal new details until its analyst day. That said, Rackspace’s Kevin Jones made waves when he recently spoke to a group of analysts and said:
“[W]ith our restructuring, we are realigning the go-to-market organization.”
Knowing that’s on the way, Jones added, “we think it’s prudent to plan for a little bit of disruption in the back half of the year as the team is going to kind of work through these changes.”
But why is Rackspace restructuring? Find out via Kelly Teal’s reporting.
What kind of technologies are agent and MSP customers demanding? Although many of them still sell network and view it as a foot in the door for customers, they’ve leaned into advanced solutions. And many of them see UCaaS as their bread and butter.
However, many UCaaS platforms are indistinguishable from one another, some partners have expressed. Ryan Rowland is a partner at Adaptiv Advisors and attended the Telarus Partner Summit. Rowland made waves there for his assertion that only 10% of UCaaS vendors differentiate themselves in terms of product and service offerings. He said customers who engage in RFPs almost always remark that the different platforms are surprisingly similar.
Learn more from partners about what makes a good competitive differentiator.
Black Hat USA 2022 kicked off this week and there was a flurry of news. For one, DNSFilter announced its acquisition of Guardian, a firewall and VPN technology platform. The acquisition allows DNSFilter to provide a secure web gateway (SWG) that protects user information and secures organizations against web-based threats.
Ken Carnesi, DNSFilter’s CEO, made waves when he announced the acquisition’s benefits.
“Our partners will benefit from the increased security capabilities (e.g. URL filtering) that will come with this acquisition,” he said. “In addition, they will also have additional value-added products (e.g. the Guardian App which includes VPN capabilities).”
Bringing the DNSFilter and Guardian teams together creates a “unique security and privacy advantage with some of the top thought leaders,” Carnesi said.
Go here to see more news out of Black Hat.
Hackers have accessed Twilio customer data by tricking employees into handing over their corporate login credentials via phishing attacks. Twilio detailed the phishing attacks in a blog. It plans to update it as more information is available.
Some experts, like Tresorit’s Szilveszter Szebeni, have made waves by asserting that companies are not even safe using two-factor authentication.
“With a targeted attack, even accounts protected by 2FA can be hacked by stealing a session using a fake website. The real solution for the industry is to go passwordless. Unfortunately the industry does not support it in every use case.”
Learn more about Twilio’s response to the attack here.
Microsoft is expanding its threat protection capabilities with the launch of three additions to its Defender portfolio. The new threat intelligence tools come as Microsoft is persuading partners to provide more security services. All three draw on telemetry from Microsoft’s threat intelligence and cybercrime centers.
Vasu Jakkal is Microsoft’s corporate VP for security, compliance identity and management. She made waves just for noting that those operations now track 35 ransomware families, and more than 250 nation-states and criminals.
“This massive amount of intelligence derived from our platform and products gives us unique insights to help protect customers from the inside out,” Jakkal wrote.
Read more about the new threat intelligence tools.
RingCentral is laying off about 50 employees at its headquarters in Belmont, California.
The layoffs will include more than a dozen senior roles. Despite the cuts, this week RingCentral reported strong growth in its second-quarter earnings. It grew revenue by 28% in the second quarter.
RingCentral spokesperson Brett Smith made waves by emphasizing that it was just a small number of employees being let go.
“This was a result of making choices on where to invest to maximize impact and optimize for growth and profitability,” he said. “We continue to invest in key areas of the business and will continue to hire in those areas to fuel our growth and further strengthen our position as the UCaaS industry leader.”
Read more about the specific positions the company is cutting.
Avaya experienced a poor third quarter, with revenue down 20% year over year. In addition, the company has initiated internal investigations spearheaded by its audit committee to review circumstances surrounding the company’s third quarter financial results. Another investigation by the committee is reviewing matters related to a whistleblower letter. Analyst Dave Michels of Talking Pointz made waves this week for a letter he wrote outlining what led up to Avaya’s financial concerns. Here’s one point he made.
“The company has not clearly communicated a detailed vision or technical roadmap for some time,” Michels said. “The few significant updates that did occur were poorly communicated. Avaya possibly renamed all its products OneCloud to obfuscate the direction and health of individual product lines within its portfolio.”
Read more about Avaya’s third quarter earnings and related matters here.
Avaya experienced a poor third quarter, with revenue down 20% year over year. In addition, the company has initiated internal investigations spearheaded by its audit committee to review circumstances surrounding the company’s third quarter financial results. Another investigation by the committee is reviewing matters related to a whistleblower letter. Analyst Dave Michels of Talking Pointz made waves this week for a letter he wrote outlining what led up to Avaya’s financial concerns. Here’s one point he made.
“The company has not clearly communicated a detailed vision or technical roadmap for some time,” Michels said. “The few significant updates that did occur were poorly communicated. Avaya possibly renamed all its products OneCloud to obfuscate the direction and health of individual product lines within its portfolio.”
Read more about Avaya’s third quarter earnings and related matters here.
Channel people at Microsoft, Rackspace, RingCentral 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.)
First up, hacking. No matter how diligent a firm is, we’re all vulnerable to an attack. Unfortunately, every company that has gone through this situation knows it’s somewhat embarrassing when it has to announce publicly an attack has occurred. However, some organizations use this as an opportunity to show how proactive they are. This week we covered an attack on a UCaaS company and its actions in response were swift, as well as its public information forthcoming.
Next up, Microsoft. The company revealed to our reporter just how many ransomware families, nation-states and criminals it’s tracking. Maybe it has our UCaaS hackers in its Rolodex.
Then, layoffs. We report on more and more of these at Channel Futures. This week we covered layoffs at a firm whose third-quarter earnings were enviable.
Finally, if you didn’t catch our last 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. |
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