Top 20 Stories in September: HPE, Cisco, Fake Partners, Broadcom-VMware
Cisco said it would buy Splunk. A fake Avaya reseller pleaded guilty. But what was No. 1 in September?
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Dell, which recently announced a “partner-first” strategy for its storage business, caught the attention of another IT giant, HPE.
Channel Futures was there at HPE’s partner festival in the U.K. last month when Matt Harris (pictured above), managing director for the U.K., Ireland, Middle East and Africa, took a subtle jab at his company’s rival.
“You’re not going to see us make flippant changes to our strategy when we’re under pressure,” Harris said.
Read some of his other candid comments.
Two in a row for Hewlett-Packard Enterprise kicking off the countdown.
We interviewed Simon Ewington, the company’s new VP of worldwide channel and partner ecosystems about the launch of the new HPE Partner Ready Vantage program on Nov. 1.
Among many things, Ewington told us that it’s crucial for HPE to bring MSPs and cloud service providers into the new program as the company drives sales of its GreenLake platform.
Learn more about the changes at HPE.
Oh, generative AI, how do we feel about ye?
On one hand, it can simply mundane tasks and boost productivity, but security provider Darktrace says cybercriminals are licking their chops as the technology becomes more and more advanced.
Darktrace has found evidence of malicious hackers using AI and automation to their advantage for phishing attempts. The Darktrace data indicates that the threat actors are moving on from impersonating executives an instead prioritizing the impersonation of others within a business — notably IT reps.
After all, we trust when our IT guy/gal asks us do something with our system, don’t we?
Our monthly wrap of the biggest channel-impacting mergers and acquisitions struck a chord with you last month.
We broke down Cisco’s purchase of a mobility services platform, Check Point’s acquisition of Perimeter 81 and its “cybersecurity experience platform,” and updated you on the latest with Broadcom’s pending $61 billion purchase of VMware.
Here‘s where you can get all of that information and more.
Lisa Del Real (pictured above), who led the 8×8 channel for about two years, left the company in September, only to land at Clio, a legal technology firm based in Canada, a couple of weeks later.
That opened the door for Michael Quince, who had recently been promoted to VP of North America channel sales, to take over as interim channel leader.
Here’s our article on Del Real’s exit and Quince’s ascension. And here’s the post on Del Real’s new gig.
Channel Futures told you the inspiring story of Chris Palermo, a major figure in the tour de force that is Upstack.
Palermo suffered a stroke in February and he’s been on a long road to recovery since.
“I am spending more time in the day-to-day business of Upstack, participating in more meetings and even beginning to travel again,” Palermo told us last month.
Learn how Palermo recognized the signs of stroke and more about his recovery.
Channel Futures was there in Nashville at Ingram Micro One when the distributor made one of its biggest announcements of the conference.
Xvantage, the digital platform Ingram designed to create a unified experience for partners, suppliers and employees, is going mobile. It will be live on the Apple App Store and for Google Android by the end of this month.
Ingram Micro previewed the Xvantage mobile application on stage at the event. It shows product recommendations and information on quotes, credits and other business information.
And that’s just scratching the surface.
We told you about a new venture called XCV Partners, a new technology services distributor (TSD) that wants to attract partners focusing on selling to enterprises.
Doug Tolley and Roger Blohm, former leaders at VXsuite and Telarus, are behind the effort. They call it a boutique TSD that isn’t trying to replace the big national TSDs.
The company has been busy working to lock vendors into agreements. Lumen is one of them.
Get more information on this new business.
Eric Parizo, managing principal analyst at Omdia, called Cisco’s $28 billion acquisition of Splunk, the security information and event management (SIEM) company, a “true bombshell move.” (Omdia shares a parent company with Channel Futures.)
An acquisition so large could take months to approve, but Parizo told us that the deal “will immediately make Cisco one of the dominant players in next-gen SIEM.” It’s a market segment Omdia predicts will reach $4 billion in global annual revenue four years from now.
Cisco says Splunk’s security capabilities complement its existing portfolio and will provide even more opportunity for partners to offer a comprehensive security solution.
Read moreabout one of the largest tech acquisitions of the year. Then check out the article we wrote on partner reaction to the acquisition announcement.
Everybody loves a winner — probably why our articles on awards get so much attention.
In this case, it was Salesforce handing out partner honors to the likes of PwC, Slalom, Infosys and many more.
Take a look at these winners and the categories they represented for excellent work with Salesforce.
Just about every industry can be vulnerable to fraud, and certainly technology is no different.
In this case, three people pleaded guilty for their role running a fake Avaya reseller business. You heard that right. They were distributing stolen Avaya licenses.
Specifically, the former Avaya employee and his spouse were found guilty of wire fraud. They were involved in stealing their employer’s licenses and passing them on to what is now a “de-authorized” Avaya reseller.
Learn more about this case that shocked the channel.
Red Hat, the open source software giant, announced a revamped partner program that is set to debut in 2024. The changes, the company said, will better reflect its full ecosystem of partners.
Red Hat wants partners to be able to move outside their existing tier or category within the program, noting that “many partners are not a single contract type.”
Stefanie Chiras, SVP of partner ecosystem success, said the company “wants to make sure that the partner program is modular, so it’s easy for partners to engage in [different] modules.”
See what else Red Hat has in store with the new program.
Here’s a nearly year-old article that surfaced in our top 20, perhaps because the anniversary of the Canalys Forum in Barcelona was rapidly approaching last month.
At the event last October, Computacenter CEO Mike Norris was pretty plain-spoken when he criticized the as-a-service business model as “sh**.”
That’s right.
“Anybody that thinks that as-a-service is great for customers, I think they’re smoking dope,” said Norris. “I really do. I think they’re just on the wrong planet. It’s a factor. It’s great. We have to embrace it. The vendors want to do it. I’m not saying it’s not going to conquer the world. It’s [just] not very good for customers.”
Read the other edgy things he said.
We took a look at a blog from Google CEO Sundar Pichai and thought it was worth some analysis.
The exec was reflecting on the furst 25 years of the company and looking to the future, pointing out Google’s investment in artificial intelligence, which Pichar said is in its DNA.
“We were one of the first to use machine learning (ML) in our products, starting in the early 2000s, for spelling corrections, improving the quality of ads, and showing suggestions and recommendations,” he wrote.
Now, for the future. Find out what he said about what’s in store on the AI front in the coming years.
Each year we publish a series of lists, sourced from the Channel Futures MSP 501 rankings, that feature the best cloud partners, security partners and those MSPs that excel in other areas.
One of the most popular is our fast-growth rankings. Similar to the Inc. 5000, we organize our MSP 501ers by who has grown the fastest over the past year.
In addition to the numbers, we provided you with some data on how the companies got there. We also offered up a case study.
It’s not the most uplifting of updates, but our telecom-IT layoff tracker, which we have refreshed every couple of months in 2023, caught your eye again in September — enough to get it to the fifth spot on our countdown.
The latest update includes recent cuts at Cisco, Ingram Micro, Trellix, T-Mobile and more. But it also features all of the tech companies that have issued pink slips this year.
He’s one of the best known leaders in the channel, particularly on the traditional telecom side, so it’s no surprise to see John DeLozier land at No. 4.
DeLozier, whose departure from Intelisys we reported on just weeks prior, landed at ConvergeOne, now known better as C1, where he will be chief revenue officer.
C1 is a billion-dollar company that boasts 10,000 customers and 5,600 technical certifications held by thousands of engineers.
C1 bills itself as a customer experience solutions provider.
Read about DeLozier’s new job; then, check out our Q&A with the man himself.
Channel People on the move fills its usual top-five position.
This edition featured new hires and promotions at Verizon, HPE, Intelisys, Pax8, RingCentral and more.
We already talked about our layoff tracker at No. 5. Fortunately, only one individual article about job cuts cracked our top 20 countdown — a rarity for 2023.
This one comes courtesy of Slalom, the global business and technology consulting company that operates in seven countries and 44 markets. Nine hundred people are impacted.
Slalom’s CEO cited “significant shifts within the industry” as a reason behind the layoffs. At the same time, in a LinkedIn post, he touted the company’s success of growing from a “small 100-person company with big dreams in 2001 to a 13,000-team-member global services company.”
Get the full scoop on layoffs at Slalom.
The article you read most on Channel Futures in September was actually a roundup of cloud computing news. But we have little doubt what it was that got your attention.
Broadcom’s pending acquisition of VMware has been a constant presence on our countdown since the purchase was announced many months ago. The article in question involved the latest hurdle for Broadcom in its $61 billion quest — a snag in approval from China.
But that wasn’t the only Broadcom-VMware article that caught fire on Channel Futures. You were also interested in what a leaked email revealed about paths for VMware employees when the acquisition closes, most likely at the end of this month.
Furthermore, a story from early August about rumored VMware layoffs continued to generate traffic.
The article you read most on Channel Futures in September was actually a roundup of cloud computing news. But we have little doubt what it was that got your attention.
Broadcom’s pending acquisition of VMware has been a constant presence on our countdown since the purchase was announced many months ago. The article in question involved the latest hurdle for Broadcom in its $61 billion quest — a snag in approval from China.
But that wasn’t the only Broadcom-VMware article that caught fire on Channel Futures. You were also interested in what a leaked email revealed about paths for VMware employees when the acquisition closes, most likely at the end of this month.
Furthermore, a story from early August about rumored VMware layoffs continued to generate traffic.
As the last of the summer holidays passes and our big vacations are in the rearview mirror, the pace of news tends to pick up after Labor Day. And 2023 is no exception, as our top stories countdown for September will show you.
M&A was front and center last month. For example – and it’s a big example – Cisco said it would buy Splunk in a $28 billion deal that will bring the latter’s SIEM solutions into the former’s fold and give Cisco partners an even more complete security package to offer customers.
Speaking of M&A, you continue to be fascinated by what we publish on Broadcom’s pending acquisition of VMware. That deal is even bigger than Cisco-Splunk, coming in at $61 billion, which, if finally approved, will be the second-largest tech acquisition of all time.
Dell recently announced a “partner-first” initiative in its storage business, and rival HPE was all over that — but in a subtle, not-naming-names sort of way.
And how about this one? Three people pleaded guilty for their role running a fake Avaya reseller business. They were distributing stolen Avaya licenses. Now they’ll be distributing sludge in the prison cafeteria.
After you have reviewed our slideshow above for the top stories in September, be sure to sign up for our newsletters. That’s an extra way you have a role in determining which Channel Futures articles are the most popular each month.
Want to contact the author directly about this story? Have ideas for a follow-up article? Email Craig Galbraith or connect with him on LinkedIn. |
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