Top 20 in December: Mitel Layoffs, 8x8-Fuze 'Fire Sale,' AWS Outage Aftermath
From data breaches to layoffs to new partnerships, December was a busy one in the channel. But which story was No. 1?
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D&H Distributing and channel stalwart WWT said they were teaming up to help teachers and students, some of the people most impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The companies claimed to deliver more than 100,000 devices to students and educators across North America.
WWT says education has felt more pressure than most verticals considering so many schools shuttered for a period of time.
Learn more about this partnership.
Always a popular figure on the Channel Partners Conference & Expo stage, Forrester analyst Jay McBain cracked our top 20 with his keynote from the November event.
Encouraging partners to “embrace the new reality,” McBain offered up advice that could take your business to the next level.
Only a year old, the Snowflake Partner Network now serves two more partner types.
Data partners and “Powered by Snowflake” partners are now part of the fold. Snowflake is a data cloud provider.
Data partners make data sets available through the Snowflake marketplace. Powered by Snowflake is a new program for SaaS application vendors.
Learn more about the changes to the Snowflake partner program.
Rubrik, the data protection vendor, rolled out Rubrik Cloud Vault in Azure, a cloud-based managed ransomware recovery service.
The archiving service aims to enable ransomware attack recovery within hours, or even minutes. That compares to days or weeks to recover using only the capabilities offered by Microsoft, Rubrik said.
Get the full scoop on this new managed service.
Genesys, the cloud contact center provider, got a huge infusion of cash.
The company is now valued at $21 billion after securing $580 million from Salesforce Ventures, Zoom and others.
Genesys’ cloud and subscription bookings, which make up more than 90% of total new bookings, more than doubled year over year in the first half of its 2022 fiscal year.
Learn more about this booming company.
IBM’s Kyndryl, which claims the title of world’s largest IT infrastructure services provider, joined forces with Google Cloud to focus on digital transformation.
Together, they plan to apply their expertise in data and analytics, applied AI and infrastructure modernization. The goal is to help customers gain new insights and drive business.
You want to know more about this partnership.
Streaming services, apps and more went down for a while last month when cloud giant AWS suffered an outage.
It got us thinking about the steps businesses should take in light of the situation. So we asked experts at Veeam, Ocient and Disruptive Innovations to tell us.
Every few months we like to get you caught up on watercooler talk in the channel. Or I guess these days it would be video chat talk.
Our latest roundup of channel conflict and controversy included stumbles by AWS, Kaseya ransomware, anti-Semitism, and layoffs at NTT.
Get caught up on what your peers are talking about.
Are managed service providers generally optimistic or pessimistic heading into 2022?
To answer that, it seemed like a good idea to go straight to the source. We wanted to know what MSPs see as trends, challenges and opportunities — and they responded, big time.
Check out our infographic/report.
Distribution giant Ingram Micro told us that selling its Commerce & Lifecycle Services (CLS) activities will help it focus on its core business.
“This move … gives us more room to focus on the growth and expansion of our core technology distribution and cloud services capabilities,” said Paul Bay, EVP and president of global technology solutions at Ingram Micro. “With the support of Platinum Equity, we will continue to invest in growing these businesses organically and through prospective acquisitions.”
Read how else Bay expects the sale to impact the partner community.
Our readers love a good leaderboard. Combine that with SD-WAN and you’ve got a yummy combination.
This one comes courtesy the researchers at IDC, who released their latest SD-WAN infrastructure rankings in early December.
Cisco made it. So did Fortinet. This is where to learn who else is at the top of the SD-WAN heap.
8×8 announced it is buying Fuze, which the former hopes will cement itself as a UCaaS rival to Microsoft, Zoom and RingCentral.
The $250 million acquisition will reportedly bolster 8×8’s XCaaS platform and give it more enterprise customers.
Industry analyst Jon Arnold praised the acquisition, saying it gives 8×8 more clout in its battle with larger rival RingCentral.
Not everyone we talked to was so sure, with some claiming the price tag was too low — a “fire sale” of sorts.
Boomi, the integration platform-as-a-service provider, surprised some when Chris McNabb announced his retirement. The longtime CEO stepped aside and welcomed in David Meredith, the former Everbridge CEO who we just a week earlier learned had left the critical event management provider.
The executive transition comes at an interesting time as just a few months ago, Dell Technologies sold Boomi to a pair of private equity firms for $4 billion.
People stories tend to draw you in, and that was the case of an article about JG Chirapurath that we posted on Nov. 30.
He took on a big role at Microsoft as corporate VP for Azure early in 2021, but just six months later, he was moving on to SAP, following Julia White, who previously held the same role, to become chief marketing and solutions officer for its business technology platform.
It caused quite a stir at Microsoft. Chirapurath was kind enough to sit down with us and explain why he made the move.
Overall, the biggest cybersecurity story from the month of December was probably the ongoing Log4Shell vulnerability.
Sophos described to us how cybercriminals are pouncing on it with hundreds of thousands of attempts to remotely execute code.
Researchers in early December discovered a zero-day exploit in the popular Java logging library log4j. Long story short, many services, including those such as Steam, Apple’s iCloud and apps like Minecraft, are vulnerable.
Read more about what’s being done to fight it.
You would think that seven months after its initial release that our 2021 MSP 501 rankings would’ve cooled off by now.
Think again.
You were still checking out who ranked in the top 25 but the majority of you wanted to download the whole list.
Breaking late in November and gaining traction on Channel Futures in December, was the GoDaddy data breach that reportedly impacted 1.2 million customers.
The attacker(s) got access to more than 1 million email addresses from GoDaddy’s Managed WordPress users.
GoDaddy says it reacted quickly and effectively when it learned of the breach.
Each month we offer up a bevy of new hires and promotions at companies doing business in the channel. Each month, you respond by flocking to it.
So we thought we’d wrap the year with some greatest hits, some “all stars,” if you will, people well-known in the channel community who changed companies or got promoted.
And here they are.
We figured as long as we were at it …
… we would break down the channel-impacting mergers and acquisitions that we thought were the most important of the year.
From TD-Synnex to Comcast-Masergy and everything in between, many of you read our analysis. If you missed it, it’s here.
Mitel takes the top spot for what some soon-to-be former employees called out on social media as “devastating.”
“I am a husband and father of seven beautiful children (four boys and three girls). One just returned from combat operations in Iraq. On top of that I have already lost two siblings and my mother this year,” one wrote.
While Mitel wasn’t specific as to the number of layoffs or the reasons, most pointed to its recent partnership with RingCentral that was the turning point.
Get all of the details on this layoff announcement that came right before the holidays.
Mitel takes the top spot for what some soon-to-be former employees called out on social media as “devastating.”
“I am a husband and father of seven beautiful children (four boys and three girls). One just returned from combat operations in Iraq. On top of that I have already lost two siblings and my mother this year,” one wrote.
While Mitel wasn’t specific as to the number of layoffs or the reasons, most pointed to its recent partnership with RingCentral that was the turning point.
Get all of the details on this layoff announcement that came right before the holidays.
The channel closed out the year with a bang, reflected here in our top 20 stories for December.
The month started with a blockbuster acquisition — 8×8 buying Fuze. But not everyone was on board, with one analyst describing it as a “fire sale.” Then partners had to learn about the Log4j vulnerability wreaking havoc on customers.
There were some noteworthy personnel changes, particularly at the highest ranks of some companies. We assembled a “greatest hits” edition, if you will, of our popular Channel People on the Move segment.
Companies doing business in the channel got big investments; others formed new partnerships that will carry into the new year. Our slideshow above counts down the top 20 stories of December as determined by you, our loyal readers. You participate simply by reading stories on Channel Futures and by subscribing to our weekly newsletter. You can do that here.
If you missed our list of the top, most-read channel stories for all of 2021, it’s here.
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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