Latest Channel M&A: Cisco, Nitel, ScanSource, CrowdStrike
The past month has featured channel-impacting M&A from Cisco, Nitel, Evergreen, The 20 MSP, ScanSource, CrowdStrike, Accenture and more. Read our recap.
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One of the biggest channel-impacting acquisitions announcements of 2023 officially closed last month.
Cisco says Splunk partners will form an essential part of its channel ecosystem, now that the former owners the latter in a $28 billion deal.
With Splunk, Cisco says it can offer a real-time, unified view of the "digital landscape" that helps teams proactively defend critical infrastructure, prevent outages and "refine the network experience."
“Together, we’re revolutionizing the way our customers leverage data to connect and protect every aspect of their organizations – and we’ll be doing it with our incredible partners, wrote Cisco SVP or partnerships and SMB Rodney Clark in a blog the day the deal closed.
Get the full scoop on what this mammoth acquisition means to partners.
ScanSource raised a lot of questions among partners, which we tried to answer, when CEO Mike Baur told Channel Futures' James Anderson at the 2024 Channel Partners Conference & Expo the distributor's plans to create a subsidiary that will function as an agency alongside Intelisys, its tech services distributor company.
The customer-facing agency, which it's calling "NewCo" for now, will be separate from Intelisys, but NewCo will leverage Intelisys as its source for supplier contracts.
What this means for Intelisys agents is a much-discussed topic, but for the purposes of this M&A wrap, Baur said as part of this endeavor, ScanSource will seek acquisition targets that will give the subsidiary a management team and a platform.
Nitel, the network-as-a-service provider, said it would buy WAN Dynamics for its SD-WAN expertise.
Nitel says its acquisition of WAN Dynamics will extend its technical, management and support capabilities around its managed SD-WAN offering.
The companies didn't reveal financial terms of the deal, but Nitel CEO Margi Shaw said the purchase is core to its "No. 1 priority – customer success" and that WAN Dynamics' services are complementary to Nitel's.
Read more about the deal, including what channel leader Jim Glackin has to say, here.
JumpCloud, the SSO and Active Directory company that works closely with MSPs, announced its acquisition of Resmo, the asset management and SaaS security solution.
Integration Resmo into the JumpCloud platform gives businesses an all-in-one solution to proactively meet their emerging SaaS management, IT security and asset management needs, says JumpCloud.
JumpCloud's co-founder and general manager of its MSP business told Channel Futures that partners are poised to benefit from an "extended and enhanced JumpCloud platform."
JumpCloud didn't say how much it's shelling out for Resmo, but you can get into more of the deal's nitty-gritty here.
The 20 MSP, which is in pursuit of building "the first truly national MSP," wrapped three more acquisitions in March. They are Drivetech of Massachusetts, Accurate Computer Solutions of Texas and Arizona's Blue Cactus Consulting.
The 20 MSP is a consortium with more than 150 MSP members. These latest pickups improve The 20's expertise in cybersecurity, managed print and copier services, and more.
Learn more about The 20.
Professional services giant Accenture made headlines with a pair of acquisitions.
The first was Flo Group, the Netherlands-based consultancy and Oracle business partner that specializes in global supply-chain logistics. Accenture says the deal boosts its Oracle capabilities in Europe and helps customers build more resilient and agile supply chains with end-to-end visibility.
The company also closed on its purchase of Mindcurv, which bills itself as a cloud-native digital experience and analytics company. Based in Germany, Mindcurv will help Accenture Song, the tech-powered creative group, expand its commerce services for customers around the world.
Databricks, which offers an open, unified platform for data and AI, announced its acquisition of Lilac, a scalable tool for data scientists to search, cluster and analyze text datasets with a focus on generative AI.
Lilac says it can be used for everything from evaluating the output from large language models (LLMs) to understanding and preparing unstructured datasets for model training.
Databricks leaders wrote in a blog that Lilac's mission "align with Databricks' commitment to provide customers with end-to-end GenAI capabilities.
Evergreen, the collection of managed IT services and software companies, stayed active with its wheeling and dealing in March with the acquisition of Centrered, a prominent MSP in Canberra, Australia.
This is Evegreen's first acquisition of an Australian MSP. Centrered, founded in 1996, specializes in IT support, enterprise-class cloud services, managed security and advanced communications technology.
Centrered is one of the few IT organizations in Canberra, the country's capital, that isn't government-based.
Zendesk, which sells AI-powered customer service software, got into the M&A game last month by announcing the acquisition of Ultimate, a provider of service automation.
Zendesk's goal with the purchase is to deliver "the most complete AI offering for customer experience in the market."
Ultimate's AI agents automate up to 80% of support requests, the company said. By leveraging "any knowledge source," Ultimate offers full customization to resolve difficult cases.
"With Ultimate, Zendesk is well positioned to offer AI agents that can tackle sophisticated and complex service use cases, helping resolve customer issues with personalization, speed and dynamic responsiveness," said chief analyst Daniel Newman, CEO of The Futurum Group.
Security provider CrowdStrike boosted its real-time data protection capabilities with the acquisition of Flow Security, which claims to be the industry's first and only cloud data runtime security solution.
CrowdStrike says it now can deliver the only cloud data protection platform that secures data in all states, both at rest and in motion.
“With the acquisition of Flow Security, we’re expanding our cloud leadership by protecting data in all states as it flows through the cloud and are redefining the future of data protection by securing data from code to application to device and cloud," said George Kurtz, co-founder and CEO of CrowdStrike.
Security provider CrowdStrike boosted its real-time data protection capabilities with the acquisition of Flow Security, which claims to be the industry's first and only cloud data runtime security solution.
CrowdStrike says it now can deliver the only cloud data protection platform that secures data in all states, both at rest and in motion.
“With the acquisition of Flow Security, we’re expanding our cloud leadership by protecting data in all states as it flows through the cloud and are redefining the future of data protection by securing data from code to application to device and cloud," said George Kurtz, co-founder and CEO of CrowdStrike.
The latest M&A with channel implications runs the gamut from a multibillion-dollar acquisition involving IT giant Cisco to MSPs gobbling up other MSPs and everything in between.
It also includes acquisitions that haven't happened yet, such as the plans ScanSource is laying out to create a new subsidiary that operates alongside Intelisys, its tech services distributor entity. There is a subsequent M&A plan once it establishes the "NewCo."
Furthermore, CrowdStrike announced a purchase that will enrich its cloud data protection platform and Accenture made a pair of acquisitions in Europe focused on supply chain logistics and analytics.
Nitel made its biggest acquisition since picking Hypercore Networks in 2022. We'll tell you the channel benefits of it buying WAN Dynamics.
See our slideshow above for the latest M&A impacting the channel and its variety of partner types.
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