Top 20 Stories of 2023: Broadcom-VMware, Layoffs, Intelisys Shake-Up, More
Hyperscaler battles. Shake-ups at Comcast and Intelisys. Two companies emerging from bankruptcy. Layoffs galore. But what was No. 1, according to you, the loyal Channel Futures reader?
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The countdown starts with an article that hits close to home here at Channel Futures.
Our parent company, Informa Tech, bought research firm Canalys in a deal that's poised to change the way we bring you news and events.
The esteemed Canalys team of researchers and analysts will be more present on the Channel Futures and our leading events, including the 2024 Channel Partners Conference & Expo.
The powerhouse combination of Channel Futures and Canalys, as our own Bob DeMarzo put it in July, creates "the largest provider of research and insight, events and media focused on the future of the entire information and communications technology channel."
Our popular CF20 lists, published monthly by Channel Futures' own Edward Gately, feature the 20 companies that top channel analysts and our own research have determined to be the best in a particular technology.
It comes as no surprise that one of them cracked our top 20 here. Sofware-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) remains one of the industry's most evolving technologies, so it beat out all of our other CF20 lists to make this countdown.
Cisco, Fortinet and AT&T all made this CF20. See which other companies did and why.
The number of major technology services distributors (TSDs), formerly master agents, shrunk in 2023 when AppDirect bought TBI. The news didn't come without some serious ramifications.
Shortly after the news broke, we learned at dozens of layoffs at TBI. The company's founder, Geoffrey Shepstone, took a position with AppDirect and was widely criticized for allegedly promising a profit-sharing program that didn't come to fruition. AppDirect didn't make him available for comment.
The company said gaining share in the TSD market improves its telecom expertise and will ultimately drive adoption of its "relationship-based marketplace."
Not describing itself as a TSD or a so-called "superagency," holding company Capteon introduced itself to the Channel Futures audience.
Capteon is positioning itself as the alternative to private equity-funded agent M&A strategies. Companies in its portfolio will pay 7% of their net commissions to Capteon and get legal, tax and commission support resources from the holding company. Furthermore, the holding company will shoulder the heavy lifting of preparing for a sale to a strategic buyer. That sale might occur four to five years down the line.
Some of Capteon's top execs are well known in the channel. They include CEO Vic Pepe and chief partner success officer Jay Bradley, the former president of Intelisys.
Read more about this unique business model.
Perhaps buoyed by interest in Broadcom's $61 billion purchase of VMware (more to come on that in our countdown), our interview with VMware's head of product marketing for cloud storage and data at VMware Explore in August was very popular.
The main topic of that week's Gately Report was the company's focus on ransomware recovery.
"What is so challenging about these modern attacks is that it ultimately is an existential threat," said Chuang. "Unfortunately, I’ve seen articles out there literally about hospitals that have gone out of operations because they could not recover their systems within some reasonable amount of time. So anything that we can do to help our customers to shorten that recovery time of course helps them get back up to operations, but even more importantly, it helps them to get back to the business of serving their own clients and customers."
GTT Communications, the managed network services provider, emerged from bankruptcy protection the very first week of 2023, cutting $2.8 billion in debt and bringing on new investors.
The three-month process came to a close after GTT worked out a deal with key creditors to amend its reorganization plan.
CEO Ernie Ortega called it the "beginning of a new chapter for GTT."
GTT filed for bankruptcy after a number of acquisitions. As part of the bankruptcy plan, it sold its infrastructure division to a private-equity firm for $2.1 billion.
Find out more about GTT's past and future.
Always one of our most popular posts, our Channel Influencers of the Year list didn't disappoint in 2023.
We recognized Kaseya CEO Fred Voccola and Aryaka's Craig Patterson as heads of the class; Voccola for the 2022 acquisition of Datto and Patterson for his extraordinary efforts building Aryaka's partner program and moving the company to 100% channel sales.
See the remaining honorees; then, get ready for the 2024 list in February.
A big shake-up at Comcast Business in November would impact the cable company's channel in a big way.
Sources confirmed to Channel Futures that hundreds of employees at both Comcast and Masergy, which Comcast Business acquired in 2021, were being let go. Most notably, longtime channel leader Craig Schlagbaum will be retiring from the company at the end of the year. (We'll keep a close eye on where he might land.)
Matthew Fassnacht, national VP at Comcast Business Enterprise Solutions, took on the role of interim channel leader.
Telarus CEO Adam Edwards, in an interview with Channel Futures, encouraged the new leadership at Comcast to continue their investment in the channel.
Get the full scoop on this news that shook the channel.
Here at Channel Futures we've long said that speculation around a possible sale generates more interest than the sale itself. That was certainly true in the case of AT&T looking to sell its cyber business.
We followed up a Reuters report in February claiming that since AT&T's acquisition of AlienVault in 2018 had failed to live up to expectations, the carrier was considering a sale.
Eric Parizo, managing principal analyst at Omdia (Informa owns both Omdia and Channel Futures), said the acquisition was "odd" in the first place, so the rumor didn't surprise him.
Ultimately, in November, AT&T said it would create a standalone managed cybersecurity services business and accept a capital investment from WillJam Ventures to get it off the ground. The new joint venture will include managed security operations, software solutions and consulting services.
The arrangement allows AT&T to continue to offer managed security while focusing on enhanced network-based security capabilities.
Read about the February rumor, then see AT&T's announcement.
Informa Tech's channel group (Channel Futures) teamed up with JS Group, the channel consulting and research firm, to debut a first-of-its-kind report on the state of the technology services distributor (formerly known as master agent) market.
Dubbed "Unlocking the Potential of Technology Services Distributors," the report shed light on the evolution of TSDs and partners' changing expectations for them.
The report is based on a survey, finding that many high-growth partners "are in some instances outgrowing the legacy model of engagement offered by their TSD," said Janet Schijns, CEO of JS Group.
Go here to download this informative report.
What, you say? In this day and age of fiber and advanced communications technology, we're talking about copper? And it's big enough to crack the top 10?
That's right. You were all over our March 10 article on customers and their partners seeing a steady stream of price hikes and decommissions as ILECs made a retreat from copper-based plain old telephone systems (POTS) and TDM.
Rates were increasing drastically on existing contracts. In one case we told you about, an ILEC increased all business flat-rate lines to a whopping $1,000 per month for a POTS customer.
One analyst said the price hikes reflect the Federal Communications Commission allowing carriers to embrace market-based pricing for copper services.
Remember what we said a couple of slides back about M&A speculation getting more attention than an acquisition itself?
That was the case here as well, when you flocked to read our article on the possibility of T-Mobile buying Frontier Communications. That news was first reported by Reuters.
We put on our detective hats and talked to some industry insiders about if this might actually happen.
And while we're still waiting on that piece of breaking news, we turned to our sister site, Light Reading, which quoted Wells Fargo investors: "T-Mobile is the most logical communications company partner [for Frontier], in our view,” the analysts wrote. “We note that T-Mobile has an accelerating [free cash flow] story, a solid balance sheet, and has been looking at [fiber to the home] over the past year via small pilot projects.”
A job posting from a Virginia-based IT services firm harkened back to the days of segregation.
Arthur Grand Technologies got in a whole bunch of trouble from a job posting on Indeed. It was for contract work as a business analyst. It called for "only born US Citizens [White] ..." to apply.
Comments on social media ranged from "this is illegal and nauseating" to "cannot wait for the lawsuit that comes out of this."
The company denied responsibility initially, then blamed a "new junior recruiter" at the business.
Arthur Grand specializes in digital transformation services for government customers.
Read our article on the posting that caused an uproar.
The jewel of our awards programs brought you in droves to Channel Futures to see who made the 2023 MSP 501, the most comprehensive survey and ranking of managed service providers worldwide.
This year's list was comprised of companies from five continents, with Ensono landing in the top spot.
Here's a link to the top 50. You can also download the full list and see images from our MSP 501 gala at this fall's Channel Futures Leadership Summit.
Viasat, the satellite internet provider that does business in the channel, had high hopes for its brand-new ViaSat-3 Americas satellite that it launched in the spring. Unfortunately, the unfurling of the satellite's large mesh antenna went awry, significantly impacting the performance of the satellite.
With so many unknowns, the company's channel leader, Tessley Smith, didn't have a lot to say about the potential disaster in this Q&A with Channel Futures, but he did give us some updates on the inroads Viasat has made in the channel.
Later in the year, we learned that disaster had been averted. The company in October said it wouldn't need to replace the costly satellite, as it would recover enough throughput capacity for it to operate properly.
The first half of the year was a real whirlwind for Avaya, the business communications giant that the Channel Futures audience always watches carefully.
First, it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy for the second time in six years, then later emerged in what analysts told us was a better position than it was in several years ago.
Much of that could be attributed to the steady force of experience CEO Alan Masarek, who had previously held the reins at Vonage.
But the article that got the most attention was this one about the company approving a $6 million cash award to Masarek, even before the company filed for Chapter 11, something that at the time was a foregone conclusion.
In a move few saw coming, popular channel exec and president of Intelisys, John DeLozier (pictured), exited the business, along with VP of sales Chandler Legarreta.
DeLozier, who resigned, would land on his feet just a few weeks later at ConvergeOne.
This certainly wasn't the first move in the Intelisys HR department in 2023. Several high-profile execs left the business in the months prior, including VP of partner experience and marketing Jamaal Savwoir, and Northwest sales leader Michael Wolfington.
Read more about what's going on at the TSD giant.
The cloud wars tend to get the channel's attention, but no more so than this article we wrote stemming from Synergy Research Group analysis noting that Amazon Web Services' lead over Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud might be shrinking.
Most notable was AWS' 12% revenue increase in the second quarter of 2023, compared to 26% for Azure and 28% for the Googs. Keep in mind, however, that the tech giants don't separate their overall cloud numbers, so we have to rely on estimates from analysts such as Synergy.
That said, is AWS about to lose its title as "king of cloud?" It's a question we posed.
The first half of the year was littered with a litany of layoff announcements at vendors across the technology landscape. We reported on dozens of job-cut announcements and kept you up to date in our layoff tracker.
Cisco, Salesforce, RingCentral, Microsoft and Trellix were among the companies doing business in the channel that were hit the hardest.
While some of the cuts drew your eyeballs but weren't directly channel-related, others, such as those at 8x8, resulted in impacts within channel programs.
Fortunately, by midyear, the pace of layoffs had slowed, but tech wasn't completely immune in the second half.
Just how big was Broadcom's acquisition of VMware, which finally cleared its last regulatory hurdle in November? The $61 billion dollar deal was the second-largest in the history of tech in terms of dollar value.
You could also see the scope in traffic to the Channel Futures website. If we weren't combining all of the pageviews for Broadcom-VMware articles into one, this topic would've comprised 12 of our top 20 stories. That's right, 12!
It probably comes as no surprise, that based on what you read on the previous slide about layoffs, that our article on potential layoffs post-close would be the biggest of the big. And in fact, our latest tally suggests there have been more than 3,000 job cuts at the combined company in the past month.
Even after Nov. 22, there were questions about "unknowns" at Broadcom following an 18-month approval process. We'll stick close to this developing story and bring you further developments in the new year.
Just how big was Broadcom's acquisition of VMware, which finally cleared its last regulatory hurdle in November? The $61 billion dollar deal was the second-largest in the history of tech in terms of dollar value.
You could also see the scope in traffic to the Channel Futures website. If we weren't combining all of the pageviews for Broadcom-VMware articles into one, this topic would've comprised 12 of our top 20 stories. That's right, 12!
It probably comes as no surprise, that based on what you read on the previous slide about layoffs, that our article on potential layoffs post-close would be the biggest of the big. And in fact, our latest tally suggests there have been more than 3,000 job cuts at the combined company in the past month.
Even after Nov. 22, there were questions about "unknowns" at Broadcom following an 18-month approval process. We'll stick close to this developing story and bring you further developments in the new year.
Before we relegate 2023 to the annals of channel history and drop the ball for 2024, we need to look back on a year of evolution in technology, tech business and more specifically, the indirect sales channel.
The year started with grim news as big company after big company handed pink slips to employees as the economy threatened to worsen. While not all of those cuts had a big channel impact, there were those that cut channel leadership. 8x8 comes to mind, and later, Comcast Business, which went through a major restructuring.
M&A was still front and center for yet another year. No deal was bigger than Broadcom's acquisition of VMware, which took 18 months to clear all regulatory hurdles.
There were also acquisitions that didn't happen. They were only rumored, but sometimes that's all it takes to catch your eye.
Two big names in the channel, Avaya and GTT, got through bankruptcy, and according to most analysts, emerged in better shape than when they went in.
Those are just a handful of the stories you will read about in our top 20 countdown above. We assembled them based on a combination of online pageviews and results in our daily and weekly newsletters. We would encourage you to sign up for those here so your voice can be heard in our monthly and annual top story rankings.
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