Top 20 Stories of 2022: Telarus, Kaseya, Broadcom M&A, AWS, Layoffs
The year was packed with M&A, job cuts, cloud wars, awards and lists. But what was No. 1?
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Now here’s one that would shake up the channel. Just the mention of the possibility late in the year was enough to crack our top 20.
A source told Investing.com that cloud communications giant RingCentral was working with an investment bank to evaluate a possible purchase of its rival, 8×8.
If such a deal is in the works, contact center as a service (CCaaS) is likely on RingCentral’s mind.
“This acquisition would provide RingCentral with easy access to its own CCaaS offering, as well as communications platform as a service (CPaaS),” COMMFusion president and principal analyst Blair Pleasant told Channel Futures. “While RingCentral’s partnership with NICE is doing very well and NICE CXone is a superior product, many people believe that RingCentral should have its own CCaaS solution.”
Read the full story that had the channel talking right before Thanksgiving.
Now here’s an acquisition that actually happened.
Consolidation among technology services distributors continued, with Telarus buying TCG. The acquisition, announced in June, brought TCG managing partner Dan Pirigyi and his team under the Telarus masthead. Telarus has been growing via acquisition in large part to an investment from Columbia Capital investment.
“When you look at culture, supplier portfolios and our respective partner support structures, it is clear just how complementary our companies are,” Pirigyi told us at the time. He now serves as Telarus’ senior vice president of strategic partners.
We asked partners what they thought of the tie-up after covering the initial news.
The cloud wars typically draw eyeballs, but when a respected reseearch firm comes out and says Microsoft Azure actually beat Amazon Web Services, you sit up and listen.
IDC’s report in June showed Microsoft taking the top position in 2021, with 14.4 market share compared to AWS’ 13.7%.
IDC ID’d Microsoft, AWS, Salesforce, Google Cloud and SAP as the top five. They captured about 40% of worldwide market share, growing 37% in aggregate year over year.
Many other analyst firms continue to rate AWS as the leader in market share.
Speaking of cloud and AWS, our feature on Mission Cloud Services, an Amazon Web Services-only partner, was a big hit with our Channel Futures audience this year.
We talked with Karoline Saffi, the company’s SVP of people and culture, in this Q&A. Among our questions, how confident is this MSP about navigating an economic downturn considering thousands of layoffs are in full swing at Amazon?
“At Mission, we have always been very data-driven, and we try to look ahead as much as possible to see how external factors will affect our plan and objectives,” she said. “This has caused us to be cautious and intentional with our hiring decisions in the good times as well as the hard times. We do our best to avoid having to lay off any staff if we can help it, so if that means hiring a little slower, we prefer to do that as we understand the impact those types of decisions can have on affected employees and their families, but also their communities.”
We published a series of articles on Avaya, the cloud and collaboration solutions provider, when it came to light this summer that it was once again in big financial trouble. In fact, by late in the year, the company’s stock price had fallen to just 15 cents, spurring talk of a second bankruptcy in five years.
But it was our story on partner reaction to Avaya’s struggles that got the most eyeballs this year.
Eric Asquino, president of Los Angeles-based ACS Cloud Partners, told us he didn’t have much confidence in Avaya going forward. He said the financial troubles were “another sign they don’t have the product set or ability to compete with the increasingly crowded field of larger well-funded cloud-based UCaaS providers.”
On the bright side, Avaya this year installed former Vonage CEO Alan Masarek as chief executive in an effort to turn the company around.
Read more about this ongoing story.
Big Cloud has already held two spots on our countdown, so let’s make it three.
Google Cloud rolled out a series of channel-impacting announcements at its annual Next event. They covered data protection, cybersecuurity, hybrid work and more.
One in particular was the expansion of Google Cloud’s partnership with Accenture, taking Accenture’s certifications with the No. 3 cloud provider to a whopping 15,000.
Painting by numbers … eight announcements on the last slide, now a 10-year anniversary at No. 14. Oh, and more cloud …
Amazon Web Services celebrated its 10th anniversary in April. At the same time, the ccompany recognized the four-month mark of Ruba Borno’s tenure as VP of worldwide channels and alliances.
We took the opportunity to sit her and then-AWS Marketplace leader Stephen Orban (now at Google Cloud) down for a Q&A.
“What I’m really excited about is the AWS mental model around long-term investments,” she told Channel Futures. “It’s not just rebates and discounts. It’s capabilities, partner talent, innovation, the ability to differentiate, investment in co-sell motions.”
The telecom channel losts a very popular figure this year in Ken Mercer. The community mourned his death in May.
The manager of customer success at Telesystem had more than 20 years of technical and business experience in the industry.
Before Telesystem, Mercer held leadership roles at MetTel, Sprint, CenturyLink Business and more. Of course, many in the channel knew him for his nearly 13 years at TBI.
“Ken meant the world to me,” said Telesystem CRO Bruce Wirt at the time. “Long before he joined my team at Telesystem, he was instrumental in helping me understand how the channel operated. He was always forthcoming with advice no matter who you were, and was refreshingly transparent with his thoughts and opinions. Ken was the kind of person that would give you his umbrella in the rain; just a genuinely good-hearted person.”
Mercer was 54.
Kaseya‘s acquisition of Datto was perhaps the most talked-about story of the year in the MSP community. So throw in a little controversy and you’ve got the makings of a spot at No. 12 on our most-read countdown.
In July, weeks after the acquisition closed, and months after it was first announced, Datto founder and former CEO Austin McChord weighed in about the deal on GitHub.
“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,” wrote McChord.
Firing back was Kaseya CFO Kathy Wagner: “Over the weekend, there was some false information published on social media about your future at Kaseya,” wrote Kathy Wagner, chief financial officer, Kaseya. “This information was ‘based’ on information from secondary sources, possibly derived from interpretation of what our CEO, Fred Voccola, said at several town halls this past week addressing our Datto employees. In light of the false statements that were posted online, I wanted to set the record straight on several facts.”
Go here to learn the “facts” that Wagner laid out.
Broadcom in October set out to fast-track its behemoth $61 billion acquisition of VMware. You flocked to that story we posted on Oct. 17.
Broadcom, according to Reuters sources, wanted the European Union to approve it quickly, noting that cloud giants AWS, Microsoft and Google are all competitors, so there would be no competitive imbalance.
Of course, much has happened with this proposed acquisition since then, including the EU saying it would go through its standard four-month, full scale investigation of the transaction.
Since that happened just last week, don’t expect to see this go final until at least next spring.
Frontier Communications workers in California held a short strike in August to protest continued subcontracting of work.
About 2,000 members of the Communications Workers of America walked off the job after several failed meetings with management.
“Our members are fed up,” said Frank Arce, CWA District 9 vice president. “We will no longer allow Frontier to line the pockets of its executives and jeopardize our members’ livelihood by hiring cheaper and inexperienced contractors who provide inferior service. We are simply asking for Frontier to respect the agreed upon protections included in our contract and we are prepared to stay out on the picket line until our demands are met.”
Frontier responded by saying the whole issue was “mischaracterized” by the union.
The workers were back on the job a week later. Read more about what caused the battle.
Our readers tend to like rankings. Couple that with the crack team at Gartner revealing those rankings, and you’ve got a recipe for traffic to Channel Futures.
Published late in 2021, Gartner said Juniper Networks, Extreme Networks and Cisco continued to lead its famed Magic Quadrant for wired and wireless infrastructure. The all reprised their spot in the “Leaders” quadrant.
Gartner didn’t add any vendors to the quadrant last year, but dropped D-Link, Dell, Ubiquiti Networks, Rhode & Schwartz and Ruijie Networks.
Look at the 2021 rankings that still had you talking in 2022.
M&A again here, as two private equity firms closed on their purchase of Citrix, folding it into the brand-new Cloud Software Group with Tibco, the business intelligence software company.
The huge deal, worth $16.5 billion, establishes a software group that divides Citrix into three entities: Citrix (virtual desktops and digital workspaces), NetScaler and ShareFile. There are three other business units that include Tibco (its core application and data integration group, Jaspersoft and Information Builders.
Many were shocked earlier in the year when Tom Krause was tapped to lead the combined software group. He was president of Broadcom and worked on its pending $61 billion acquisition of VMware.
Each fall, the Channel Futures edit team takes stock of the year that was and looks forward to the year ahead. Then we put our collective heads together to think about who reallly influenced the channel that year, and who might carry that influence into the next 12 months.
So in February, we unveiled our 50 Channel Influencers of the Year, putting a special spotlight on TD Synnex’s Rich Hume and Upstack’s Christopher Trapp. The pair led an M&A revolution — Hume leading what would become a combined Tech Data and Synnex, a now enormous distributor — and Trapp for the roughly 16 acquisitions his company made in the agent space in the course of a year. (That number is higher now.)
Go here to download our digital issue featuring all 50 Influencers and a dual cover story on our Influencers of the Year.
Remember that mention in our No. 14 story of Stephen Orban jumping ship from AWS to Google Cloud? Well, here it is at No. 6.
Orban’s new job is to develop strategy and programs for customers migrating to Google Cloud. His apt title is vice president, migrations.
Orban has been one of the leading voices in the industry on cloud go-to-market, partnerships, marketplaces and enterprise IT.
Learn more about why Orban made the move.
This one got legacy telco providers and their partners pretty fired up.
They’d been eyeing an Aug. 2, 2022, deadline for POTS replacement that the FCC enacted nearly four years ago now. Many had taken to social media to express their dismay.
It turns out that there were a lot of scare tactics and misinformation associated with the deadline. The FCC confirmed to Channel Futures that it had not mandated an Aug. 2 deadline across the board. It only applied to a very small subset of POTS lines, many of which aren’t those that channel partners sell.
“There are 38 million POTS lines still out there on various ILECs and CLECs, and none of them are mandated by the FCC to be shut off or transitioned to IP telephony,” said Jay Morris, now channel chief at KeyStone Solutions. “Not previously, not now, not in the near future.”
Let’s jump in the wayback machine to … February … when we posted some analysis on a Wall Street Journal article that said Cisco offered $20 billion to buy Splunk, a move that would’ve created one of the world’s largest cybersecurity providers.
It was pretty exciting at the time, but never came to fruition.
We went to the partner community of their thoughts. Most said the move could be a real winner for Cisco.
“Should Cisco decide to make this transaction or another similar transaction, [it] could easily bridge the gap in to the missing components of the Cisco security offering or fabric,” Chris Ichelson, CEO at MSSP 360 SOC, told Channel Futures. “A purchase of Splunk would include a leading data-driven platform coupled with a leading SOAR ‘Phantom.’ My opinion is Cisco could win back many lost security customers with this.”
Diversity, equity and inclusion continue to be important parts of a solid business strategy.
That’s probably why our second annual list of top players in DE&I in the tech industry got so much of your attention.
We highlighted 101 people from diverse and multicultural backgrounds who are driving diversity, equity and inclusion in the information and communications technology channel through their words, actions and leadership.
Speaking of lists, you aren’t going to keep the Channel Futures MSP 501 off this countdown.
Our readers pored over our list to see which managed service providers around the world made the prestigious ranking.
If you’d like to see just the top 50, that’s here.
Keep an eye out for the 2023 application to go live on Feb. 1.
The industry was definitely shaken this fall by layoffs. If we had ranked our stories on job cuts individually in this countdown, seven would have made this list.
Instead, we’ll simply tell you that Oracle, Salesforce, Avaya, OneTrust, Intel, 8×8, Cisco, Nextiva, Lacework and Asana — all companies that do business in the channel — let go of anywhere between 5% and 20% of their staff in the waning months of 2022. And keep in mind, those are just some of the ones that we covered at Channel Futures. There were also many more at tech companies around the globe.
The reasons for most of the cuts were “restructuring” as many companies planned for what could — or might not be — a considerable recession in 2023.
The industry was definitely shaken this fall by layoffs. If we had ranked our stories on job cuts individually in this countdown, seven would have made this list.
Instead, we’ll simply tell you that Oracle, Salesforce, Avaya, OneTrust, Intel, 8×8, Cisco, Nextiva, Lacework and Asana — all companies that do business in the channel — let go of anywhere between 5% and 20% of their staff in the waning months of 2022. And keep in mind, those are just some of the ones that we covered at Channel Futures. There were also many more at tech companies around the globe.
The reasons for most of the cuts were “restructuring” as many companies planned for what could — or might not be — a considerable recession in 2023.
It’s that time again when we spend time with friends and family and celebrate the holidays. But before your much deserved break, let’s take a look back at the top channel stories of 2022.
First, if you are a regular reader of our monthly top story recaps, you know how this works. We determine what cracks the top 20 countdown by combining online pageviews with click-throughs from our weekly newsletters. (By the way, you can sign up for those here.)
In the slideshow above, you’ll find some of the most impactful stories of the year. But they won’t all be there. Some are simply those that caught your eye — in some cases, surprisingly.
You’re going to find a lot of merger and acquisition activity in our countdown. There were those that happened – Telarus buying TCG – and those that didn’t – Cisco-Splunk – or haven’t yet — Broadcom-VMware.
You’re also going to read a lot about the big cloud providers. Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud all commanded your attention in 2023.
Furthermore, we have controversy, including “scare tactics” concerning POTS replacement. And some of our most popular content included annual lists such as Channel Influencers of the Year, the MSP 501 and our DE&I 101.
But we don’t want to give it all away. Check the 20 images above to see which stories you pegged as tops in the channel in 2022.
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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