Top 20 Stories in July: AWS Protest, Layoffs, Verizon Roadshow, Microsoft, Zoom
A dust-up between Kaseya and Datto's founder; plus, a holiday weekend malware attack. But what was No. 1?
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Google Cloud reached what it’s calling an important milestone for serving governments and schools. It now has the U.S. Department of Defense’s Impact Level 3 authorization for Google Workspace.
What does this mean, exactly? Will Grannis, CEO of Google Public Sector, explained that “all customers can be confident they are collaborating securely, without having to deploy a separate government cloud limited in its capacity to support customer needs at scale.”
Google Workspace features business versions of Gmail, Drive, Calendar, Meet, Docs and Sheets.
Read the full story and its impact here.
A big personnel announcement from Microsoft came just days before its annual Inspire event.
We learned that Nicole Dezen would take the role of chief partner officer. It’s technically a new position that underscores the company’s “new and deeper approach to channel and ecosystem leadership and advocacy.”
Former channel leader Rodney Clark left the business somewhat unexpectedly earlier this year.
Learn more about the changes at Microsoft.
Some pain in the proverbial wallet for T-Mobile, which agreed to pay $350 million in a class-action lawsuit connected to a 2021 cyberattack. Some customers’ personal information was stolen.
The magenta carrier will be responsible for paying members of the class-action, as well as legal fees and administrative costs.
Get the full scoop on what led up to the settlement.
There’s AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform. But increasingly, DevOps pros are sourcing alternatives to the hyperscalers.
So says a new report commissioned by Linode (now Akamai). In it, analysts from Techstrong Research reveal that nearly two-thirds of survey respondents are considering, evaluating or are ready to buy from a cloud vendor different from the Big 3.
A feather in Google Cloud‘s cap, as the No. 3 public cloud provider lured Stephen Orban away from Amazon Web Services.
Orban, an eight-year AWS vet, was most recently VP of AWS Marketplace, partner engineering and ISVs. Google Cloud will only say Orban will take a “senior leadership position,” later this year, most likely due to a no-compete clause in place.
Read about Orban’s accomplishments at AWS.
Verizon took its roadshow to Boston, where the vendor and its partners talked channel integration, fixed wireless sales and more.
We offered up a series of photos from the event and took a deep dive into what Verizon partners need to know.
One of, if not the, biggest channel-impacting acquisitions of the year closed last month. Ericsson put the finishing touches on its purchase of Vonage.
The now-combined company touts the coming together of Ericsson’s 5G capabilities and Vonage’s UCaaS and CCaaS suite, which they expect will open the door even wider for partners to sell to their customers.
Get caught up on the deal.
After 18 years at Veritas, Geoff Greenlaw is leaving for a rival.
He’s now VP, EMEA and LATAM channel sales for Pure Storage after a long career at Veritas.
He cited his new employer’s “100% channel culture” as a driver for the move.
See what else he’s saying about his change of scenery.
The details of a technology murder case caught your eye.
Prosecutors in California will try for a third time to convict John Kevin Woodward, president and CEO of ReadyTech Corp., who stands accused of a 1992 murder stemming from a love triangle.
This time, however, they have new forensics that tie Woodward to the crime.
Read more about this cold case.
SHI International, the security, productivity, cloud and infrastructure IT solutinos provider, got nailed by a cyberattack on the July 4th weekend.
The company made the breach public on July 6.
SHI took some systems, including public websites and email, offline for a few days. Fortunately, the company said, there’s “no evidence to suggest that customer data was exfiltrated during the attack.”
Get more details on this cyberattack.
You can always count on one of our CF 20 lists to make the top 20 countdown.
Our latest features the top data center/colocation companies doing business in the channel, as determined by the analysts we polled.
Digital Realty, Equinix and NTT all made it. See who else did and why.
Amazon Web Services unveiled a new cloud WAN service with SD-WAN connectivity at its AWS Summit event last month in New York City.
But a lot of people afterward were talking about the protestors who disrupted the one-day conference.
Brandon Knight took his contact center expertise to Zoom, where his title is global head of channel-customer experience.
He spent the past two-and-a-half years leading Telarus’ contact center practice.
It’s a big role for Knight, who will “be responsible for leading what the experience of Zoom looks like today.”
Learn more about the aggressive steps Zoom is taking to bolster its contact center practice.
The layoff bug has been going around this year more than last in the tech industry.
Cloud and security vendor OneTrust confirmed it’s letting go of 25% of its workforce, or about 950 employees. The news came after other security companies, Cybereason and Lacework, announced job cuts as well.
Get the details on these cuts.
At least one research firms says Microsoft Azure has leapfrogged AWS at the top of the public cloud heap. Earlier this year, researchers at Flexera also placed Azure at No. 1.
Collectively, IDC says Microsoft, AWS, Salesforce, Google Cloud and SAP account for 40% of worldwide market share in the public cloud. Furthermore, that figure is growing by 37% per year, says IDC.
We break down the numbers here.
The behemoth of an awards program that is the Channel Futures MSP 501 continued to stay red hot in July.
The list, released in June, featured the top 501 managed service providers in the world. It helped Channel Futures reach an all-time record for traffic in a single month.
To make it easier for you to access the list, we compiled them all into a one-stop shop.
A story we first published in May became popular in July as concerns over a POTS replacement deadline of Aug. 2 drew near.
But as we made clear in the story, despite a prominent telecommunications media outlet writing last fall that the FCC had mandated POTS line replacement by that date, it turns out those assertions were based on misinformation and “scare tactics.”
While vendors, partners and customers have been eyeballing Aug. 2, an FCC spokesperson confirmed to Channel Futures that the Commission has not mandated POTS replacement by that date. Sources clarified the ruling only applies to a very small subset of POTS lines, most of which fall outside the bounds of what channel partners sell.
Former Broadcom CEO Tom Krause is moving over to Citrix, where he will be tasked with bringing it together with Tibco, the infrastucture software provider. (Citrix is in the process of being acquired by two private equity firms that own Tibco.)
Piece of cake, right? He was probably the right man for the job based on doing something similar to what he did at Broadcom–combining major acquisitions CA Technologies (2018) and Symantec’s enterprise security business (2019).
Read more about the complex job ahead of Krause.
It’s probably no surprise to see our monthly Channel People on the Move feature land at No. 2, considering the fact there have already been five individual stories on new hires in this countdown.
Our July 5 edition featured moves at AT&T, HPE, Google Cloud, Comcast and many more.
This was a doozy of a battle royale on social media.
Datto founder Austin McChord weighed in on the sale of his former company to Kaseya. Let’s just say it wasn’t overly positive.
“There is a concern that the current trajectory from Datto’s new owners will snuff the flame that makes Datto a place to come ‘do your life’s work,'” McChord wrote on a GitHub forum.
It wasn’t long before a letter to Datto employees from Kaseya CFO Kathy Wagner made its way onto social platforms. Wagner attempted to debunk the many claims made by McChord.
“The acquisition of Datto by Kaseya creates tremendous opportunities for employees as well as customers,” she wrote. “The combined company now spends over $1 billion a year on ‘stuff’ (people, technology, etc.) and that stuff will allow our company to deliver the best technology to our customers …
The channel loves its drama; hence, the story’s appearance at No. 1 on our countdown.
This was a doozy of a battle royale on social media.
Datto founder Austin McChord weighed in on the sale of his former company to Kaseya. Let’s just say it wasn’t overly positive.
“There is a concern that the current trajectory from Datto’s new owners will snuff the flame that makes Datto a place to come ‘do your life’s work,'” McChord wrote on a GitHub forum.
It wasn’t long before a letter to Datto employees from Kaseya CFO Kathy Wagner made its way onto social platforms. Wagner attempted to debunk the many claims made by McChord.
“The acquisition of Datto by Kaseya creates tremendous opportunities for employees as well as customers,” she wrote. “The combined company now spends over $1 billion a year on ‘stuff’ (people, technology, etc.) and that stuff will allow our company to deliver the best technology to our customers …
The channel loves its drama; hence, the story’s appearance at No. 1 on our countdown.
July was once again chock full of channel news worth of a top 20 countdown.
Last month brought us some evidence that Microsoft Azure has surpassed AWS, but it might depend on who’s counting. Furthermore, speaking of cloud, it looks as though more businesses are looking toward alternatives to the Big 3.
It was a big month for Channel People on the Move. We’re not just talking about our popular monthly list — of course you’ll find it on this countdown. But individual articles about new hires and promotions cracked our list as well. Take Brandon Knight’s move to Zoom, or Geoff Greenlaw’s jump from Veritas to Pure Storage.
Our MSP 501 list, released in June, continued to get your attention in a big way last month. In fact, we just unveiled a one-stop shop to see all of the slideshows highlighting our winners.
Meantime, T-Mobile’s big data breach settlement made the countdown. So did a protest at the AWS Summit, which overshadowed a big new product reveal.
The slideshow above features Channel Futures’ top 20 stories in July. Moreover, you played a huge part in selecting them! We combined online pageviews with performance of these stories in our weekly newsletters. If you want your say, you better sign up for those here.
So, the No. 1 news story in July was … The slideshow has that answer; meantime, see last month’s top 20 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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