Channel Futures' 20 Most-Read Channel Stories of 2021
Another wild year is in the books. So what drew you to Channel Futures more than anything else in 2021?
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Following channel-changing deals with Avaya, Atos, Alcatel-Lucent and more, UCaaS giant RingCentral formed yet another huge partnership, this time in November with Mitel.
The deal gives Mitel’s global customer base with a migration path to RingCentral’s Message Video Phone (MVP), RingCentral’s cloud phone system. And with the partnership, RingCentral becomes the exclusive UCaaS partner for Mitel.
RingCentral is paying Mitel $650 million to acquire intellectual property rights and patents covering network and call management, security and infrastructure. In turn, Mitel’s investor group led by affiliates of Searchlight will invest $200 million in equity in RingCentral.
Channel Futures’ increasing focus on the Europe, Middle East and Africa led us to produce a report on the impact of ‘Brexit’ on the channel, and you responded.
Channe partners told us they anticipate anticipate delays to vendor shipments into the country from Europe, potential price increases on some products due to import charges and an increased strain on distribution caused by new requirements for exporting products to the EU.
In addition, there were concerns Brexit could worsen the IT skills gap.
Might Apollo Global Management buy Lumen’s consumer assets in a $5 billion deal? That’s the question we posed in July after a Bloomberg report said the two sides were in discussions.
Then, not long after, whaddyaknow? The mega deal came to fruition, and we sat down with new Lumen channel chief Dave Young to discuss the impact it might have on the channel.
Some cybersecurity experts came forward to question the conclusion and advice Microsoft offered regarding the internal impact of the massive SolarWinds hack. That attack, reportedly carried out by Russian hackeras, heavily impacted the federal government and cybersecurity industry.
Microsoft said none of its systems was used to attack others during the SolarWinds hack. Furthermore, there’s no evidence of access to its production services or customer data.
Brandon Hoffman, Netenrich‘s CISO, told Channel Futures that Microsoft’s conclusion came as a surprise and seems to conflict with other messages it has shared.
“As the incident response has continued, it seems they were finding more and more areas affected by the SolarWinds issue,” he said. “The fact that the investigation has concluded rather suddenly is an interesting move.”
Read more about what went into Microsoft’s statement and what others had to say about it.
As we opened up the application period for our annual MSP 501 list, Channel Futures VP of content Bobby DeMarzo offered his thoughts on what’s shaping the managed services market. And you listened.
From security opportunities to the midmarket, the education vertical to line-of-business buyers, you wanted to find out what some of the hottest trends impacting MSPs were one quarter into 2021.
Will some of the same hold true for 2022? Check them out.
One of the hottest sectors in cybersecurity is privileged access management (PAM), and one merger this year threatened to shake it to its core.
Thycotic and Centrify coming together could shake up the PAM market, according to Omdia analyst Rik Turner. (Omdia and Channel Futures share a parent company, Informa.)
“This acquisition looks to me to be a move by TPG Capital, (parent company of Thycotic and Centrify) to create a more serious challenger to CyberArk,” Turner said. “Centrify has certainly been an innovator with its more cloud-first approach rather than starting life on customers’ premises. Thycotic’s approach might be summed up as … a kind of ‘good enough’ PAM product that is designed to meet the needs of a significant part of the market.”
News of layoffs always gets your attention.
This time it was Rackspace, the managed cloud computing company, which said in an SEC filing it was cutting a whopping 10% of its workforce, or about 700 employees, as part of a restructuring plan.
The company said it comes as it “seizes the expanding market opportunity in multicloud.”
Rackspace didn’t say which roles were affected or where they were located, but did say it continues to hire globally.
The amount of money pouring into the channel and technology as a whole is staggering.
Private equity firms are betting billions of dollars on the channel; and, on the flip side, many companies are going public.
Take SentinelOne, the cybersecurity company, as an example. The company had its initial public offering in June and closed up 21% that day, the highest-valued cybersecurity IPO ever.
“Our mission is to keep the world running by protecting and securing the core pillars of modern infrastructure: data and the systems that store, process and share information,” said CEO Tomer Wiengarten.
After peaking at more than $76 per share in mid-November, SentinelOne’s stock has fallen back to earth a bit, trading earlier this week at a little less than $49, a few dollars above its peak back on June 30. Still, it’s up about 30% from its IPO.
We broke down six things you should know about the SentinelOne IPO.
Our most popular recurring segment couldn’t be left off this list.
Every month we post the biggest movers and shakers from around the channel. Who’s taking a new job or getting promoted? You always want to know.
Our most successful edition this year dropped on June 1. It featured moves at TBI, Pax8, Cisco, VMware, AWS, Avant and more. Check it out and the rest of the “CPOTM” family of image galleries and stories.
A pair of stories about the cloud giant land at No. 11 in our countdown.
First, “engagement principles” might not sound super exciting, but when they impact thousands of partners, you want to know about them.
Now-former head of worldwide channels and alliances Doug Yeum exclusively told Channel Futures that “we are posting them publicly to ensure transparency as well as to reconfirm AWS’ commitment to our partners. We also want prospective partners to understand these principles as they make decisions to partner with us.”
Two of them revolve around security and “customer obsession.” Get the details and find out the other two principles here.
Meantime, another smokin’ hot AWS story was our post on Stephen Orban taking over as AWS Marketplace head. The seven-year veteran of the company said he would “work backward from the customer with a long-term view, and build what they need.”
After months of discussion and some industry debate, the largest businesses formerly known as “master agents” came together to identify themselves by a new moniker.
They’ll from here on out go by “technology solutions brokerages,” citing the offensiveness of the word “master” and the fact that master agent/subagent doesn’t accurately describe the relationship between the two.
Get more insight into what led to this momentous decision.
One of the biggest cybersecurity stories of the year came in March when we learned that there could be thousands of victims from a Microsoft Exchange server zero-day exploit.
Chinese hackers infiltrated hundreds of thousands of on-premises Microsoft Exchange Server instances throughout the world. Microsoft, which identified the attackers as Hafnium, urged organizations running the email server to install newly released patches.
“We’re talking thousands of servers compromised per hour, globally,” said one national security adviser.
What’s in a name? Quite a bit to Channel Futures readers, apparently.
In April, IBM assigned a name to its spinoff managed infastructure services business, dubbing it “Kyndryl.” This came six months after saying the company would be “a leader in management and modernization of IT infrastructure.”
“Kyndryl evokes the spirit of true partnership and growth,” said Kynrdyl CEO Martin Schroeter. “Customers around the world will come to know Kyndryl as a brand that runs the vital systems at the heart of progress, and an independent company with the best global talent in the industry.”
More nefarious cybersecurity activities land at No. 7.
Accenture received a fair amount of praise in the industry for preventing damage from a ransomware attack launched on it by malicious hackers from the LockBit gang.
“Through our security controls and protocols, we identified irregular activity in one of our environments” said Accenture spokesperson Stacey Jones. “We immediately contained the matter and isolated the affected servers. We fully restored our affected systems from backup. There was no impact on Accenture’s operations, or on our clients’ systems.”
But one commenter to the Channel Futures website wasn’t having it.
Successfully fight off? … The fact that ransomware was able to spread in their environment to a degree where they needed to restore data is a major failure for Accenture and a win for the attackers,” someone wrote anonymously. “I don’t know how Accenture can state that there was no impact to the operations. Anyone involved in the cybersecurity market today knows that prematurely calling that none of your systems, data and customer data were affected at this stage is a suicide. Attackers are claiming they have 6TB+ of Accenture’s data. Whether that’s true or not, this should be a wake-up call for Accenture and all of their customers today.”
The enigmatic figure that was McAfee founder John McAfee makes this list posthumously, in a way.
The software pioneer who was in prison in Spain awaiting extradition to the U.S. hanged himself in June, but left a series of curious tweets to be mulled over for weeks to come.
For example, this deep thought: “In a democracy, power is given not taken. But it is still power. Love, compassion, caring have no use for it. But it is fuel for greed, hostility, jealousy… All power corrupts. Take care which powers you allow a democracy to wield.”
Go here to read more of McAfee’s final tweets and the full story behind his demise behind bars.
There are a lot of Frontier Communications partners in our audience, so the company’s divestiture in the Pacific Northwest was a hotbed of discussion in 2021 — even though it happened in 2020! Talk about a story with legs!
Our post from May 4, 2020, was still hot enough to crack our top stories for 2021. Frontier sold its assets in Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Montana as part of the agreement that brought it out of bankruptcy. The private-equity firm buyers then established Ziply Fiber, which runs the old Frontier network in the Northwest.
We got plenty of reaction to what’s working and what’s not in this transition in our comments section.
Meantime, a lot of you are still reading our timeline of how the whole bankruptcy unfolded.
Consolidation’s feverish pace was no more evident than in the security channel.
FireEye surprised many by selling its products business, including the FireEye name, for $1.2 billion. The buyer was a consortium led by private equity firm Symphony Technology Group.
The transaction separates FireEye’s network, email, endpoint and cloud security products, along with the related security management and orchestration platform, from Mandiant’s controls-agnostic software and services.
Remember that Mitel-RingCentral partnership from earlier in our countdown? Late in the year, it was blamed as the cause for a number of pending layoffs.
On LinkedIn, Richard Fry, national channel manager, announced his departure from Mitel just before Thanksgiving. And Earl Stevenson said he was out shortly thereafter. He was head of Mitel’s network operations center (NOC) and global incident management. Both cited the partnership as the reason for the layoffs.
Mitel said it continually assesses its resources and operational structure. It does so to ensure it’s “best-positioned to support our customers and address market opportunities,” the company told Channel Futures.
Diversity, equity and inclusion, as well as continuing interest in racism in the channel, in aggregate, land in the No. 2 spot in our countdown.
Channel Futures was proud to establish our first-ever DE&I 101 list this year. It honors individuals from multicultural backgrounds who are working to promote diversity, equity and inclusion in the ICT channel.
Meantime, a trio of posts about racist behavior in tech caught your eye. The first, from a story in May, involved UK-based distributor Exertis, where a former employee filed suit after allegedly being the victim of repeated bullying, including colleagues calling him an “Arab shoe bomber.”
Another, from February, involved an Alteryx CRO who posted a tweet with racist undertones. He was out of a job a week later.
And you continued to click on a similar story from 2020. It involved a racist rant by a tech CEO directed toward an Asian family at a Bay Area restaurant. That CEO resigned shortly after.
The MSP 501, the largest and most comprehensive survey and ranking of managed service providers worldwide, has long been a crown jewel in the Channel Futures portfolio. But your interest this year, unlike any other, blew us away.
For the first time, we removed the website registration gate that previously restricted access to the list, and you responded. Our MSP 501 galleries were far and away the most-clicked-on posts on our site in 2021. You wanted to see the best of the best.
For the second consecutive year, it was Arizona-based Insight Enterprises. Check out our top 25 here; the page also offers access to the remainder of the 501.
But you don’t have to be a big company to crack the 501. Stay tuned to Channel Futures and our MSP 501 page in early January for updates on how to submit an application for our 2022 class.
The MSP 501, the largest and most comprehensive survey and ranking of managed service providers worldwide, has long been a crown jewel in the Channel Futures portfolio. But your interest this year, unlike any other, blew us away.
For the first time, we removed the website registration gate that previously restricted access to the list, and you responded. Our MSP 501 galleries were far and away the most-clicked-on posts on our site in 2021. You wanted to see the best of the best.
For the second consecutive year, it was Arizona-based Insight Enterprises. Check out our top 25 here; the page also offers access to the remainder of the 501.
But you don’t have to be a big company to crack the 501. Stay tuned to Channel Futures and our MSP 501 page in early January for updates on how to submit an application for our 2022 class.
What a year. While COVID-19 continued to weigh on the world, many technology vendors and partners maintained success they built in 2020. Still others who struggled during the pandemic last year began to find their footing in 2021. Emerging tech that supports the work-from-home environment still reigns — and channel partners are reaping the benefits. In our recap of the top channel stories of 2021, you’ll find that to be evident.
Take unified communications as a service (UCaaS) for example. You wanted to learn all about RingCentral‘s massive partnership with Mitel and what it means for the channel. One thing it meant was layoffs. which you were interested in too.
But also top of mind is the increasing cybersecurity threat. A half-dozen stories in our countdown relate to cybersecurity threats or the companies working to fight them.
Our top stories of 2021 countdown also includes the Channel Futures MSP 501 and the sale of Lumen consumer assets.
But what was the No. 1 most-read Channel Futures post of the year? Check out our slideshow above to find out. Remember, these are the stories you read the most — not necessarily a ranking of stories in terms of industry impact. Want to weigh in? Leave us a comment below on what you think was one of the top channel stories of 2021!
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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