May's Top 20 Stories: Lumen Layoffs, Dell AI, Cisco Fakes

It's the first mention of AI on our countdown, and it won't be the last.

Channel Futures was at the Red Hat Summit in Denver where CEO Matt Hicks told the crowd his company is all-in on artificial intelligence.

Ai was at the center of the open-source software company's product launches at the event, and Hicks focused on AI during his opening keynote.

Hicks noted how “the rate of innovation has only accelerated every month, every week, every hour.”

Get up to speed on what Red Hat is doing with AI.

Kaseya CEO Fred Voccola described the launch of the Kaseya 365 subscription service as more impactful than the IT management software company's acquisition of Datto two years ago.

The service includes remote monitoring and management (RMM), cybersecurity and backup for an introductory price of $3.99 per endpoint, per month.

Canalys analysts noted that Kaseya's RMM rivals already offer discounts for MSPs buying multiple products, but the price point has the likes of ConnectWise and N-able on alert.

Learn more about what the future holds in the IT management space.

We are less than two weeks out from the beginning of the reveal of the 2024 Channel Futures MSP 501, the world's largest and most comprehensive ranking of managed service providers.

That has you feeling nostalgic for last year's list, which you can download here.

Be sure to register for our MSP 501 webinar on June 20, where we'll get you caught up on the latest trends impacting MSPs that we gleaned from our survey.

When billionare investor Warren Buffett speaks, people tend to listen.

So it was particularly interesting to the channel when Buffett last month commented on the distribution industry, describing distributors' value as workmanlike, saying that what they do is like "selling jelly beans."

Buffett's company, Berkshire Partners, made an offer five years ago, pledging $5 billion to buy Tech Data. Ultimately it lost out to Apollo Global Management, which made a higher bid.

The "unique opportunity" as Buffett put it, wasn't to be.

That said, who doesn't like jelly beans?

Security giant Palo Alto Networks made headlines by announcing the acquisition of IBM's QRadar SaaS assets, including QRadar intellectual property rights. It's part of a new partnership between the companies to deliver AI-powered security offerings.

The acquisition drew a positive review from Omdia analyst Eric Parizo, who called it a "bombshell" acquisition.

Palo Alto Networks and IBM plan to streamline and transform security operations through the acquisition, and stop threats at scale with an AI approach.

You'll want to know more about this significant M&A.

It was a busy month for Channel Futures editors who also were on scene for Nutanix Next in Barcelona.

We landed an exclusive interview with CEO Rajiv Ramaswami, who told us the hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) vendor is courting partners who might be confused about Broadcom’s policies for Nutanix rival VMware.

“We certainly have seen a lot more interest from partners wanting to sign up to become Nutanix partners,” the Nutanix CEO said. “Things are starting to become clearer for them."

Read what else Ramaswami told us.

Layoffs never seem to escape our top 20, even if there were fewer in May than in previous months this year.

Lumen Technologies made headlines when it said it would cut 1,000 employees, or 7% of its workforce, in an effort to "right-size" its debt position.

"Lumen is transforming itself and that often includes difficult changes. We are taking steps to reshape and right-size our business through automation and AI, aligning our resources to our new service delivery models and growth-oriented priorities," a Lumen spokesperson wrote in an email to Channel Futures.

See what else Lumen had to say here.

Speaking of layoffs, customer experience platform Sprinklr had its second round in less than a year.

The customer experience platform said it's cutting roughly 3% of its global workforce, or some 116 employees. It was just a year ago that the company cut its staff by 4%.

We also told you how the company hired Jim Nairn as head of its channel partner program. 

ScanSource investors got a chance to hear about the distributor's plan to build a customer-facing agency business. "NewCo" will officially launch with an acquisition in the upcoming months, and will complement ScanSource's initial foray into the agent/advisor space with tech services distributor Intelisys.

ScanSource CEO (and interim Intelisys CEO) Mike Baur has vowed to put more investment into the tech services distributor (TSD) as it navigates margin pressures and consolidation in the TSD marketplace.

Here's how he described the controversial plan during an earnings call.

The channel last year was stunned by revelations that a Florida man had allegedly run a massive operation trafficking fake Cisco equipment.

Now it's no longer merely alleged.

40-year-old Onur Aksoy will have to pay $100 million in restitution to Cisco and to other victims. He must also destroy millions of dollars' worth of fake Cisco equipment seized from his businesses.

Learn more about this intriguing case.

In the third industry event to make our May countdown, CEO Steve Lucas of Boomi, the infrastructure-as-a-service provider, detailed the company's newest acquisitions to partners and customers at the company's Boomi World event in Denver.

One was APIIDA, and the other was Mashery's API management business, which it got from Cloud Software Group. Boomi expects both purchases to help the company "introduce capabilities that allow you to move data seamlessly at high scale, at high volume, in and out of your data lakes and warehouses,” Lucas said.

Read more about these acquisitions here.

Always one of our most appealing recurring segments, you wanted to see who the analysts we polled claimed were 20 of the most important SD-WAN providers serving the channel.

It was our seventh annual list featuring some big names and some niche players. Cisco, Palo Alto Networks and Comcast Business all made it. See who else did.

With more than two-dozen years under his belt at Cisco, chief customer and partner officer Jeff Sharritts decided to call it a career with the IT giant.

Cisco's Jeff Sharritts

It's the latest executive move at Cisco that's impacting the partner community. Rodney Clark just last fall replaced Oliver Tuszik as the head of Cisco's channel.

Find out what Cisco is saying about Sharrits' future after he steps away in mid-July.

The rivalry among the top tech services distributors in the business always rises a notch when one hires someone away from the other.

That happened last month when Intelisys appointed Eddie Acosta its new VP of sales for the company's Central region. He most recently was at competitor Avant, where he was VP of sales strategy for North America.

It's a homecoming of sorts for Acosta, who left Windstream for Intelisys in 2014, moving up the ladder from senior manager of partner development to senior director of sales.

Learn what led Acosta to take the new gig.

In one of many events Channel Futures attended in May, Dell Technologies CEO Michael Dell invited Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, the world's hottest AI company, to the stage at Dell Technologies World.

Dell said he wants to create an "easy button" to help customers leverage AI because it is "a generational opportunity for productivity, innovation and growth."

Learn more about what Dell and Huang had to say about AI.

You were interested to learn just which former RingCentral exec we were talking about.

It's Jason Uslan who steps into the newly created role of VP of global sales at Wildix, the cloud-based unified communications provider.

"I'm keen to hit the ground running and apply my hard skills and deep wisdom of the UC market to help drive even more success, for both Wildix and our partners," Uslan told Channel Futures.

Our monthly recap of the biggest hires and promotions in the channel lands at No. 4.

This edition features personnel moves at RingCentral, Spectrum, Palo Alto Networks, Verizon and more.

Broadcom, which has had a lot of partners up in arms since its acquisition of VMware and subsequent axing of the traditional VMware partner program, appeared to make some concessions to these partners in May.

The changes impact VMware's cloud service provider partners. First, the company is expanding access to its Premier tier. Existing members at that level will keep their status, while existing and qualified Registered partners get it too.

Broadcom further plans to consider special exception requests from partners who aren’t yet signed up with the program “and that may have unique regulatory constraints or country-specific sovereign data requirements (example: European Economic Area and United Kingdom),” said Ahmar Mohammad, VP of partners, managed services and solution sales.

Dig through the other changes.

Channel Futures did a deep dive into the pain of plain old telephone service (POTS) transformation as copper retirement expands nationwide and prices spike.

The FCC in 2022 paved the way for the rapid retirement of copper in favor of fiber-based technology via regulatory decisions. Not only is fiber faster and more efficient, it's less costly for carriers to operate.

With that shift comes a big increase in cost for POTS lines, which customers and the channel partners they work with are seeing in a big way.

Our James Anderson broke down the impact.

Our most-read stories of the month revolved around T-Mobile's $4.4 billion acquisition of UScellular wireless assets.

Speculation on May 9 was that T-Mobile and Verizon were considering a split acquisition where they would both take a chunk of the UScellular pie. It was something seen as more digestible for regulators who would be less likely to frown on such a significant consolidation by one company.

But Verizon was not part of the deal on May 28, when T-Mobile solely announced that it will buy "substantially all" wireless operations from UScellular. It includes certain spectrum licenses as well as UScellular's customers and stores. UScellular will keep its cell towers as well as some of its spectrum.

Look for the deal to close next year if it passes regulatory muster.

Our most-read stories of the month revolved around T-Mobile's $4.4 billion acquisition of UScellular wireless assets.

Speculation on May 9 was that T-Mobile and Verizon were considering a split acquisition where they would both take a chunk of the UScellular pie. It was something seen as more digestible for regulators who would be less likely to frown on such a significant consolidation by one company.

But Verizon was not part of the deal on May 28, when T-Mobile solely announced that it will buy "substantially all" wireless operations from UScellular. It includes certain spectrum licenses as well as UScellular's customers and stores. UScellular will keep its cell towers as well as some of its spectrum.

Look for the deal to close next year if it passes regulatory muster.