Top 20 Stories in December: Tech Industry Layoffs, Avaya, AWS, Rackspace Outage
We also recognize channel leaders, relive AWS re:Invent and explore mega trends. But what was No. 1?
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We admit, it might seem odd to start a top stories countdown with a top stories countdown, but that’s the way the cookie crumbled.
Published late in December, you wanted to see which stories got the most attention on Channel Futures for the entirety of 2022. Just a hint: the cloud wars, job cuts, M&A, awards and lists. But you’ll have to check out the countdown to see which was No. 1.
How do you define influence? You might ask the managed service provider executives who made our list of the most influential MSPs of the year.
Our list, which included Krishna Rajagopal of AKATI Security and Sue Kozak of MNJ Technologies, featured the companies and executives from the Channel Futures 2022 MSP 501 who really stood out and moved the needle.
See who else we selected for this list of influencers and why.
Speaking of the 501 … despite it launching last June, you’re still downloading the complete list of honorees.
Hundreds of articles on other topics since its release but it still managed to land at No. 18 on our December countdown.
We followed Broadcom’s proposed acquisition of VMware since the semiconductor and infrastructure software solutions provider announced its intent to purchase VMware in May.
The $61 billion deal would be one of the biggest in tech history, but it faces some bumps in the road, which we will dig into more a little later in the countdown.
This story got a lot of interest — Broadcom CEO Hock Tan’s promise that post-acquisition, there would be no price increases. He also said that SMB customers would not be neglected.
Read more about the CEO’s vow.
8×8’s contact-center-as-a-service offering might be quite attractive to its rival, RingCentral.
What would be a blockbuster deal might be nothing more than speculation, but a source told Investing.com last month that RingCentral is working with an investment bank to evaluate such a transaction.
Blair Pleasant, president and principal analyst of COMMfusion, told Channel Futures that acquiring 8×8 would give it its own CCaaS offering, as well as communications platform as a service (CPaaS). A pretty nice incentive.
Read about this speculation that has made our countdown two months in a row.
We were there at AWS re:invent in Las Vegas in late November when the cloud giant unveiled a heap of partner-related news.
The article we posted on Nov. 30 caught your eye all December long. At the heart of it were announcements from VP of worldwide channels and alliances Ruba Borno’s keynote.
“I think our partners are full of optimism,” Borno told Channel Futures.
Here’s what partners can expect from AWS in the coming year.
(Pictured above: Swami Sivasubramanian, AWS’ VP, database, analytics and machine learning.)
Amplix, which just Wednesday announced its first acquisition, only formed last month when New England tech firms ROI Communications, Blue Front Technology Group and allConnex joined forces under the Amplix brand.
The merger of the three firms, backed by Gemspring Capital Management, closed on Nov. 15. Its leaders now describe it as one of the largest partner businesses in America. It plans to corner the New England market and cross-sell into existing customers as it expands into new accounts across the country.
Read more about this tie-up.
Channel Futures debuted its “Leaders” lists in the fall of 2022, recognizing channel leaders across the industry in a variety of categories. Two such lists tied for No. 13 on our December countdown.
First, we named 20 top cloud channel leaders. Among them: Ruba Borno of AWS and Karl Fahrbach of SAP. See who else made our list and why.
Then we turned our attention to the channel leaders who work closely with MSPs. Think of Steve Biondi at Lenovo or Jennifer Bodell at Pax8, and others. To see the rest of that list, go here.
Not exactly a fun way to ring in the holidays, but our year-end IT-telecom layoff tracker, published shortly before Christmas, made it as high as No. 12.
We detailed second-half-of-the-year job cuts at HP, Oracle, RingCentral, Intel, 8×8 and more.
See which other companies were letting people go.
The Channel Futures editorial team put their heads together and consulted some of the industry’s top experts to talk trends.
Just what can the channel expect in the new year? A lot.
Our mega trends focus on a litany of topics, from companies reducing their cloud spending to a renewed focus on small and medium business customers. Also, marketplaces should take another step into the channel’s consciousness and you should expect to see even bigger UCaaS M&A.
We break that all down here.
Like RingCentral-8×8 at No. 16, file this one under speculation, but again, very interesting speculation.
This time it was Bloomberg‘s sources that said HPE is interested in buying cloud computing/hyperconverged infrastructure provider Nutanix. Supposedly, the two have had “off and on” talks about a tie-up in the last few months. But an agreement over price might be the sticking point.
The rumor broke two months after the Wall Street Journal said Nutanix was looking actively for buyers.
Get caught up on the latest M&A chatter.
Do you know Mission Cloud?
If not, you might be in the minority, as our profile of the AWS-only cloud services provider cracked our December top 10 at No. 9.
Channel Futures’ Kelly Teal sat down with the company’s senior VP of people and culture to see what Mission is doing right and to discuss the industry at a time when so many tech companies are cutting jobs.
Airtable, the enterprise software company that just last spring landed Laura Padilla from Zoom as its new VP of partners, said it was letting go of 20% of its workforce, which amounts to 254 employees.
The company’s co-founder and CEO called this restructuring a “major evolution” in its transition to focusing on “bringing connected apps to large enterprises.”
Airtable lost its CRO, chief people officer and chief product officer, all of whom left the company.
Get the full scoop on the upheaval.
8×8, the unified communications provider, decided to make a leadership change. Dave Sipes is no longer CEO, replaced by Samuel Wilson, most recently the company’s CFO, who will be interim CEO.
Kevin Kraus, senior VP of finance, is moving up to interim CFO.
8×8’s stock price has fallen 85% over the past two years after peaking in the pandemic year of 2020.
Read more about the company’s recent struggles.
While the entire tech community has been hit with layoffs in the last few months, the situation has been especially hard on employees at cloud companies.
Oracle Cloud, Salesforce, Tencent, SADA and more announced job cuts impacting a significant amount of their workforces.
We dug into what’s causing this, and perhaps more importantly, if it will continue into 2023.
Broadcom-VMware, the subject of No. 17 in this countdown, holds an even higher position here.
You want to know if and when this mega deal is going to close, and we learned last month that it’s going to take a while longer.
The European Commission, the regulatory branch of the EU, said it would launch a full-scale antitrust investigation into the proposed acquisition. Expect that to last four months.
Read more about why the EU is especially scrutinizing this one.
It turns out a malicious hacker with ransomware was to blame for disrupting email service for thousands of Rackspace’s Hosted Exchange customers in mid-December. The company didn’t offer a lot of details but said the bad actor was financially motivated.
Rackspace early on Dec. 2 said it was investigating connectivity and login issues in its Hosted Exchange environments. The investigation expanded over the next two weeks before the announcement came that the company was the victim of ransomware.
Hopefully next month’s top 20 won’t feature as many layoff stories, but that was just the state of the industry through the fall and into the winter.
This one was at Nextiva, the cloud-based business communications collaboration company. Of particular note was the elimination of Hilary Gadda’s job. The longtime channel veteran of TPx had just three months prior landed there as head of partner development.
In all, Nextiva slashed 14% of its workforce. Get the full scoop here.