Top 20 Countdown: Zoom-Five9 Busts, Ransomware, Citrix for Sale?
Also, a demand to scrub the term "master agent." But what was No. 1 in September?
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The popular Channel Partners podcast, Coffee with Craig and James, featured new Lumen channel chief Dave Young. Among many topics, he weighed in on what the company’s big ILEC sale could mean for the partner community.
Plus, the guys interviewed a pair of agents to get their perspectives on trends impacting partners in the second half of 2021.
Click here to listen to the podcast. And be sure to subscribe so you can hear other episodes.
Cybersecurity is on fire right now for obvious reasons. And one of the hottest sectors within security is security information and event management (SIEM).
A new report named names, identifying who’s the best in the business in SIEM. It also predicted the value of this segment to by $6.4 billion by 2027.
See who Valuates Reports says is tops in SIEM.
Zoom, which has made a huge push in the channel as its platform has become widely adopted over the past year-and-a-half, hosted its Zoomtopia Partner Connect event.
Coinciding with the summit was the unveiling of a new reseller partner program for Zoom Phone. The program offers new sales opportunities for resellers and flexibility for customers, the company said. Resellers can sell Zoom Phone “Bring Your Own Carrier.” They can also connect customers who use cloud peering to access the PSTN to Zoom Phone Provider Exchange.
Learn more about this partner program update.
Some MSPs wanted answers when it was reported that the FBI waited three weeks to release the decryption key connected to a ransomware attack on Kaseya, its MSPs and some customers.
The Washington Post was the first to report the allegation.
Erich Kron of security company KnowBe4 was critical of the reported hesitation.
“The FBI had the means and ability to assist by simply sharing a digital key, but chose not to, a decision that had no bearing on the activity of the REvil group and gained them nothing in return,” he told Channel Futures. “This was not a case of the FBI being unable to help due to lack of staffing or any other reason, but the simple sharing of a digital key to the victim organizations.”
Read more about this controversy.
The top individual story about someone on the move last month was about Corey Cohen. The longtime TBIer, most recently VP of partner experience at the service distributor, joined Intermedia as its senior director of global channel marketing.
Learn why Cohen made the move.
Lumen (formerly CenturyLink) continued its dominance at the top of Vertical Systems Group‘s Carrier Ethernet Leaderboard. It’s a position the company has held since 2017 when it acquired Level 3 Communications. AT&T was second.
No surprise, but COVID-19 has hampered carrier Ethernet growth in the past year.
See who else ranked among VSG’s top carrier Ethernet providers.
With reports of the latest headline-making ransomware attack coming weekly, if not more often, we didn’t think anything could surprise us. But this did.
In the second quarter, there was a 55,240% increase in ransomware activity. Not only are attacks becoming more common, they’re more damaging.
Those were just a couple of stats from Nuspire’s 2021 Q2 Quarterly Threat Landscape Report. Read more about these staggering numbers.
Our signature “CF List” series in September featured 20 top email security providers you should know.
We polled some of the industry’s top security analysts to identify the best in the business in email security.
Research firm Gartner still wields quite a bit of influence in the channel and the tech industry as a whole.
The company in September released its Magic Quadrant for the WAN edge. In its report, Gartner says more and more enterprise customers want to rely only on the public internet for the connectivity.
Whom did Gartner place where? Find out here.
Another rankings list here, with the Dell’Oro Group identifying who’s best in SD-WAN.
They named Cisco as No. 1, with VMware slipping from No. 2 to No. 3. See who jumped them, plus the rest of the list.
Security finds another spot on our countdown here. An attack hit Bandwidth and a number of critical communications service providers, but this wasn’t ransomware. It was distributed denial of service (DDoS).
Cybercriminals flooded networks with malicious traffic that kept Bandwidth from operating normally. Regular traffic came to a halt.
Learn what Bandwidth did to offset the attack.
A couple of weeks before Zoom and Five9 decided to call off their $14.7 billion merger, we reported how an analyst said Five9 shareholders should reject the deal.
In a research note, analyst Scott Berg called the proposed transaction “fundamentally flawed.”
Berg and his team considered the companies to be headed in opposite directions, with Zoom’s biggest success during the pandemic having plateaued and Five9’s contact center fortunes on the upswing.
You got two pieces of news in this story.
First, we told you about a Bloomberg report that Citrix is considering selling. It’s not the first time the workspace provider has been at the center of the M&A rumor mill. The company had no comment on the speculation.
Also significant, Citrix named a new channel chief. Mark Palomba replaced Bronwyn Hastings, who recently jumped to Google Cloud.
After a flurry of news about the potential for “master agents” to change their name for a number of reasons, one of the most significant being the word “master’s” connotations to slavery, at least one advocacy group in the channel thought the issue had quieted down a little too much.
Therefore, the Xposure Inclusion and Diversity Council said it was drafting an open letter to challenge the brokerage and sourcing firms we’ve come to know as master agents to change their name. The replacement name they’re suggesting is “technology services distributors.”
Read more about this controversy. Then, be sure to register for the Channel Partners Conference & Expo, where we will tackle this topic on the keynote stage.
Our monthly review of new products and services to sell caught your eye even more than usual last month, no doubt due to some of the big names we featured.
This edition featured all of the new stuff, as well as the goods available to more groups of partners for the first time.
Companies included Verizon, Kaseya, IBM, Synnex, Windstream and more.
Published on the last day of August, we told you about the first significant changes to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) partner program in three years.
The cloud giant unveiled a pair of new incentives — one a rebate, one a discount. The rebate rewards partners for getting existing customers to adopt more AWS services and infrastructure. Thr discount targets new customers.
M&A remains one of the hottest topics in the channel, as evident by the popularity of our monthly roundup of mergers and acquisitions.
This edition featured Avaya, Lumen, Comcast, Check Point, Cisco, Microsoft and more — running the gamut of the telecom and IT channels.
It wouldn’t be a countdown without Channel People on the Move, our most popular recurring list of all time.
If you didn’t see it, you missed personnel moves at Palo Alto Networks, Lumen, Microsoft, Mitel and more.
We may have published this list in June, but the fervor for the most comprehensive ranking of managed service providers worldwide continues into the fall.
We offer two different options for reviewing the list. You can download the full list here, or see the winners broken down 25 at a time by going here.
This offshoot of our MSP 501 list was the most popular story of September.
Much like the Inc. 5000, we broke down our 501 into the fastest-growing of the MSPs, the companies we see as pace-setters likely to become household names in the partner community in the years to come.
This offshoot of our MSP 501 list was the most popular story of September.
Much like the Inc. 5000, we broke down our 501 into the fastest-growing of the MSPs, the companies we see as pace-setters likely to become household names in the partner community in the years to come.
Look no farther than this month’s top 20 countdown to see the impact cybersecurity is having on the channel.
The topic of ransomware comes up twice. First, a report that it jumped a staggering 55,000% in the second quarter. That’s not a misprint. Then, another report citing the FBI’s reluctance to hand over a ransomware decryption key to Kaseya’s MSPs and their customers.
More cyber: Our list of the top email security providers was hot. Also, a DDoS attack on Bandwidth and other providers got your attention.
In all, five stories about cybersecurity were among our most popular in September. But there’s a lot more here. The Xposure Inclusion & Diversity Council demanded that the industry drops the term “master agent.” Citrix named a new channel chief among rumors it’s on the auction block. Zoom and Five9 saw hopes of a merger come to a close. And Gartner released its latest Magic Quadrant showing who it thinks is best in WAN.
So, which topic is No. 1 in our top 20 countdown for September? You’ll have to click through our slideshow above to find out.
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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