8 Channel People Making Waves This Week at AWS, Elastic, Nextiva, the UK Government, More
Two layoff stories unfortunately made the top picks this week.
December 9, 2022
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Park Place Technologies will do more for and with its partners via its latest acquisition from CentricsIT, an IT services provider based in Atlanta, Georgia. It acquired the company’s professional services and third-party maintenance (TPM) assets.
Kelly Greene is Park Place Technologies’ vice president of corporate development. She made waves when she said that the timing of this acquisition was prompted by an intensifying global demand for professional services. They are being driven by economic conditions and a highly apparent IT skills gap.
“Park Place Technologies has maintained an aggressive acquisition strategy over the past six years, with this latest CentricsIT purchase marking the company’s 22nd acquisition since 2016,” she said. “Definitely expect to see more from us on the M&A front in 2023.”
Learn here how the company continues to optimize its data center experience.
Mark Ryland, AWS’ director of the office of the CISO, and Ryan Orsi, AWS‘ worldwide cloud foundations partner lead for security — MSSP/identity/ops/management, spoke to Channel Futures’ Edward Gately for the Gately Report about a range of security issues. These included the kind of security threats AWS is facing.
“We deal a lot with the distributed denial of service (DDoS) issues,” Ryland said, who made waves for discussing AWS’ approach to those attacks.
“We’re building and engineering our capability, and our networking facilities and presence to deal with that effectively. So actually, many customers come to the cloud precisely because we can actually help defend them much more successfully, because of our scale, than they could do on their own or with a smaller hosting provider. So that’s a good example.”
Learn more here about how AWS’ partner ecosystem is growing.
The U.K. government will classify managed service providers (MSPs) as critical service providers to try to stop supply chain attacks.
The government recently announced it will strengthen the U.K.’s Network and Information Systems (NIS) regulations. The NIS regulations were established to improve the cybersecurity of firms providing critical services, energy companies and the NHS.
The U.K. government said MSPs are also “key to the functioning of essential services that keep the U.K. economy running.”
“The services we rely on for health care, water, energy and computing must not be brought to a standstill by criminals and hostile states,” said U.K. cyber minister Julia Lopez. She made waves when she added the U.K. would be strengthening cyber laws against digital threats.
“This will better protect our essential and digital services and the outsourced IT providers which keep them running,” she said.
Read Christine Horton’s article to learn more about how the industry reacted to these regulations.
Broadcom CEO Hock Tan is reiterating to VMware customers and partners that Broadcom won’t raise VMware product prices or neglect SMB customers.
Broadcom in May announced its monumental $61 billion acquisition of virtualization giant VMware. The deal, recently approved by shareholders to close in its just-started fiscal year 2023, has sparked the interest – and concern – of the channel.
They have a track record, partners have said both on- and off-the-record, that involves heavy cost-cutting and layoffs, price increases and a narrow focus on enterprise customers.
However, Tan has denied any plans to raise prices.
Richard King, chief strategy officer, KeyStone Solutions, said Tan’s words give him hope for KeyStone’s VMware customer base, which includes SMBs.
“As an MSP and IT service supplier of the SMB market, we are always concerned and sensitive to price fluctuation — especially involving mergers that are, as in this case, large,” King told Channel Futures. He made waves for his candor. “Looking toward the future, it appears that the Broadcom/VMware merger will just bring more value to the SMB market that is often overlooked in these transactions. I commend Broadcom and VMware CEO Hock Tan for stating this position clearly.”
However, discover how others reacted here.
Elastic is laying off 13% of its workforce, or nearly 390 workers globally, citing decreased customer spending.
As of April 30, the security, observability and search vendor had nearly 3,000 employees in more than 40 countries globally. In addition to the layoffs, Elastic is reducing costs in other areas, including optimizing how it uses office space.
Elastic CEO Ash Kulkarni made waves when he posted a blog detailing the layoffs.
“We are fortunate that security, observability and search are mission-critical to our customers,” he said. “However, it has become clear that the global macroeconomic environment is forcing our customers to tighten budgets and review investments more closely. This is especially true in certain segments of the market like small and medium businesses where the current appetite to spend in uncertain times is limited.”
Elastic will focus on those areas of the business that are most critical to its future and finding more efficient ways to service some parts of its business, Kulkarni said.
Learn here what the next two years look like for Elastic.
The Rackspace outage, which put thousands of email users offline over the weekend due to a cybersecurity event, is a lesson for partners in disaster planning and customer support.
The yet-to-be-disclosed security incident took down Rackspace’s Microsoft Hosted Exchange environments. The cloud services provider early Monday morning announced that it had resorted email services “to thousands” of Microsoft 365 customers, but partners and customers continue to voice their concerns about the vendor’s response to the crisis.
Details remain to be seen about the actual security incident and any security posture from Rackspace that may have led to the problem. However, partners have pointed to systemic failings. This includes Tom Lawrence, who runs the Michigan-based MSP Lawrence Technology Services.
“Just from the standpoint of them not being able to get the systems back up in a reasonable amount of time and running shows there is some type of failure in their disaster recovery process,” said Lawrence.
He made waves when he said that Microsoft’s slowness to respond with a method for patching the issue compounded the problem.
Learn more here about the customer impact.
Just a few short months after her appointment, Nextiva has laid off Hilary Gadda from her role as head of partner development. She’s among numerous Nextiva workers that have been let go this week.
Nextiva has laid off 14% of its workforce impacting many departments. It also reportedly cited challenging economic times. The layoffs started around Thanksgiving and continued this week.
Nextiva verified cutting 14% of its workers. However, it didn’t comment further on the layoffs.
Gadda made waves on LinkedIn when she described her decision to leave TPx, where she was director of national channel sales and development, to take her role at Nextiva.
Learn here how the layoff impacted other employees as well.
Just a few short months after her appointment, Nextiva has laid off Hilary Gadda from her role as head of partner development. She’s among numerous Nextiva workers that have been let go this week.
Nextiva has laid off 14% of its workforce impacting many departments. It also reportedly cited challenging economic times. The layoffs started around Thanksgiving and continued this week.
Nextiva verified cutting 14% of its workers. However, it didn’t comment further on the layoffs.
Gadda made waves on LinkedIn when she described her decision to leave TPx, where she was director of national channel sales and development, to take her role at Nextiva.
Learn here how the layoff impacted other employees as well.
Channel people at AWS, Elastic, Nextiva, the U.K. government 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.) It’s also a recap of the most-read stories on our website.
First up, Park Place Technologies. The company has acquired 22 firms since 2016 and isn’t stopping in 2023. There are several economic conditions driving Park Place’s recent push for deals with IT services providers. Read more about that in our lineup.
Next, Broadcom’s CEO has faced a lot of heat about whether the company will raise VMware’s product prices or neglect SMB customers. We’ve all been reassured they will not. However, some partners are still uneasy. Yet, others are more confident about the future. Get the range of reactions in the reporting by our editor James Anderson.
Lastly, our No. 1 story details the casualties of another layoff in the channel. A prominent official was let go from her role as head of partner development at Nextiva. The company says it has laid off 14% of its workforce across several departments. They weren’t alone. Another organization’s layoff made our No. 3 story of the week.
From AWS to Elastic, that’s a wrap. And, if you didn’t catch our previous 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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