Channel People of the Week: Ensono, Kaseya, NICE, More

The major SolarWinds hack affected thousands of companies a few years ago, leaving several cybersecurity systems vulnerable. But a new report implies that Microsoft had a significant role to play in the flaw that led to that eventual cyberattack. ProPublica released a report on June 14, which discovered a flaw in a Microsoft product, used by millions to log on to their work computers, that “could allow attackers to masquerade as legitimate employees and rummage through victims’ ‘crown jewels’ − national security secrets, corporate intellectual property, embarrassing personal emails − all without tripping alarms.”

While this vulnerability is concerning, it's not that surprising, say some experts.

“When profit motives take precedence over security, it creates significant vulnerabilities that can be exploited by sophisticated actors like nation-states,” Omri Weinberg, co-founder and CRO of DoControl said. “The fallout from this could be substantial, impacting not only Microsoft’s reputation, but also the broader trust in cloud services and enterprise software providers. It’s a stark reminder for all organizations to rigorously evaluate the security measures of their technology partners, and insist on transparency and accountability in how they handle potential threats.”

A part of a statement Microsoft sent us reads: "Security assertion markup language (SAML) is an industry standard for authentication supporting the majority of authentication and multiple vendors' identity services today. There are not inherent vulnerabilities in that standard, and supporting SAML itself is not a vulnerability for identity services. Many customers use SAML as the industry-standard authentication protocol to delegate trust between systems. As with others across the industry, we continue to offer that functionality to our customers, while emphasizing the importance of securing the systems that are the root of that trust.”

Read more about the breach and its implications.

Customer experience AI platform NICE has released a new bundle that will offer UCaaS and CCaaS for a singular price.

"We are thrilled to announce the launch of 1CX, our new unified-communications-as-a-service (UCaaS) solution," said NICE SVP of sales and global channels Nir Hod. The two items will be offered in tandem for $5 per month.

Learn more about the bundle and what partners think of it.

Partners are reporting double-digit growth in the sale of software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) and secure access service edge (SASE), which is giving them some momentum despite changes in the OEM landscape.

The two solutions are overlapping, according to Brian Washburn, research director of service provider enterprise and wholesale for Omdia (a Channel Futures sister company). The average large enterprise user of SD-WAN, SSE or SASE deploys an average of 3.4 such solutions, according to Omdia.

Learn more about Omdia's research on SD-WANs and SSEs.

At HPE Discover in Las Vegas, HPE unveiled a new virtualization platform that it claims will future-proof its hybrid cloud capabilities. The product will provide clients a viable alternative to VMware, although the company has avoided making that comparison directly so far. It has instead focused on describing the platform's storage, data protection and cloud capabilities.

“We think our offering is very complementary,” said Hang Tan, COO for HPE hybrid cloud. “What we're trying to do is provide choice. What we're really trying to do is provide a radically simplified operational experience. When customers look at virtualization, they're no longer just thinking about it in isolation. They're really thinking about, ‘How do I gain access to future-proof?’ Because I'm not going to spend all this investment to migrate workloads just so I can land on another virtualization platform. I want to land on the platform that allows me to also be cloud-native.”

Learn more about HPE's latest platform.

Vertical Systems Group shared its 2023 U.S. Fiber Lit Buildings Year-End Leaderboard, which details who has the lead around control of the most business fiber in the United States. AT&T remains the leader for the eighth consecutive year, while Verizon and Spectrum Enterprise were second and third, respectively.

“The number of U.S. fiber-lit sites is steadily expanding across every commercial building size segment," Vertical Systems Group principal Rosemary Cochran said.

There are a number of trends contributing to that expansion, from increased interest in cloud providers to the rise in technologies like AI and security services.

Read more about VSG's report and its implications for the market.

The pace of adoption of Kaseya's new subscription service, Kaseya 365, by MSPs, was even surprising to the company's leadership. More than 3,000 MSPs have signed up to use Kaseya 365 in the six-week period after its launch.

“We have more MSPs on Kaseya 365 than most vendors in the space have MSPs, period,” said Kaseya CEO Fred Voccola. “I don’t say that in a haughty way. But this is a big, big thing that we’ve done and it has exceeded our expectations by huge amounts. We thought we’d have maybe 3,000 or 4,000 in a year.”

Learn more about Kaseya 365 and its impact on the market.

This week, Channel Futures released the MSP 501, the most comprehensive survey and ranking of top managed service providers worldwide. That survey revealed significant healthy revenue, recurring revenue and profit growth in 2024, as well as signs of slowness that could present channels with some challenges.

“Looking back, 2023 was an outstanding year,” Ensono president Marc Capri said. “But there were a lot of macroeconomic conditions that started to reveal themselves as the year went on. And those started to drive conversations that really followed through to the beginning of 2024. Interest-rate changes are putting pressure on businesses and the idea of investing in modernization. We need to get creative on investing in modernization and future technology.”

We have the complete list of this year's MSP 501 honorees in one document.

This week, Channel Futures released the MSP 501, the most comprehensive survey and ranking of top managed service providers worldwide. That survey revealed significant healthy revenue, recurring revenue and profit growth in 2024, as well as signs of slowness that could present channels with some challenges.

“Looking back, 2023 was an outstanding year,” Ensono president Marc Capri said. “But there were a lot of macroeconomic conditions that started to reveal themselves as the year went on. And those started to drive conversations that really followed through to the beginning of 2024. Interest-rate changes are putting pressure on businesses and the idea of investing in modernization. We need to get creative on investing in modernization and future technology.”

We have the complete list of this year's MSP 501 honorees in one document.