Top Stories in August: Lumen, AWS, Microsoft, T-Mobile, Ransomware
CCaaS leaders, struggles at Citrix, questions at AWS, class-action lawsuits and more. But what was No. 1?
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Your thirst for merger and acquisition activity resulted in a lot of traffic to our monthly M&A gallery. It certainly helped that there’s been a lot of significant activity lately.
This edition included recaps of Zoom’s big purchase of Five9, HPE announcing that it’s buying Zerto (which it closed this week) and some big cybersecurity tie-ups.
Published July 30, we told you that Citrix missed revenue targets for the second consecutive quarter. That led to some changes in the company’s channel and sales group.
Citrix’s CEO said he wantes more “accurate visibility” into the sales pipeline. Specifically, the company is considering re-evaluating channel sales incentives and removing “complexity issues.”
He added that traditional Citrix VARs are focused on fulfillment and he would like to see them migrate more customers to the cloud.
One of the most notable layoff announcements of the summer, Rackspace‘s job cuts cracked our top 20 for the second consecutive month.
Published July 22, we told you how the managed cloud computing company was cutting 700 workers, or about 10% of its workforce. The internal restructuring plan comes as it debuts a strategic initiative to focus on the expanding multicloud opportunity.
Rackspace wouldn’t say which roles were impacted by the layoffs or where many of the affected employees were located. The company did say it continues to hire globally.
That’s the question we asked AWS after a series of issues cropped up at the world’s largest public cloud provider.
We asked some of the company’s closest partners about allegations of channel conflict, dug deeper into accusations around discrimination, and wondered why AWS has had so many personnel changes lately.
Here‘s what we uncovered.
In response to recent high-profile ransomware attacks on big companies in myriad U.S. industries, the Biden Administration unveiled some executive orders that will impact partners.
That wake-up call from Theresa Payton, president and CEO of Fortalice Solutions, who was speaking at CompTIA’s virtual ChannelCon event.
Payton says MSPs in particular will feel the impact, but they need to be paying attention, because there’s no timeline for the additional oversight.
“Depending on what industry you’re in, chances are you have a regulator of some sort,” she said. “So this will turn into activities you will be required to do.”
Get more detail into what could be coming down the pike.
It’s been quite the summer for FireEye, which a consortium led by Symphony Technology Group is in the process of buying.
The company rolled out its new extended detection and response (XDR) platform, which extends FireEye’s endpoint detection and response (EDR) capabilities to the network, email and cloud. It also supports log and event feeds from more than 600 applications and services. Look for the XDR platform to be FireEye’s flagship offering.
In June, FireEye said it is selling its products business, including the FireEye name, to STG for $1.2 billion. The deal separates it from Mandiant’s controls-agnostic software and services business.
There’s a lot to catch up on at FireEye.
The future of network connectivity is SD-WAN, a fact that Extreme Networks no doubt realized when it said it’s buying InfoVista’s SD-WAN division for $73 million.
Unfortunately for Infovista, the SD-WAN experience hasn’t been that fantastic. Due to some hefty competition, the company’s market share and number of customers for its Ipanema SD-WAN have declined in recent years.
But Extreme has a rosier forecast for the unit, saying that this will extend its leadership in cloud “with features that will help to reduce complexity for customers when it comes to operating and managing their increasingly distributed networks.”
Learn more about the acquisition.
Talk about your channel convergence.
Avaya and Microsoft embarked on a strategic partnership that integrates the former’s OneCloud communications platform as a service (CPaaS) with the latter’s Azure Communication Services.
In addition, the companies designed a joint global go-to-market and co-selling strategy that partners will no doubt be drooling over.
Opportunities abound, the companies say.
Early last month, we told you that former Microsoft channel chief Gavriella Schuster finally had a departure date (end of August) after her replacement, Rodney Clark, was named earlier in the year.
Then, a couple of weeks later, we learned of her plans going forward.
Most notably, she will be an adviser to various organizations, IT solution providers and other businesses. Diversity, equity and inclusion — a passion of Schuster’s — will be a focus.
She is on or will join the boards of prominent associations including Women in Cloud, Women in Technology Network, the SHE Community, the Women’s Business Collaborative and the International Association of Microsoft Channel Partners (IAMCP).
You love a good list. And if you’re on it, you love it even more.
We took a close look at two-dozen channel businesses that cracked the annual lnc. 5000 list of fastest-growing U.S. companies.
Did yours or a business you know make our recap?
You’re probably starting to gear up to attend some in-person conferences this fall for the first time in a while. One or more of those might be overseas. But what does the travel landscape look like?
We delved into that in this article. With different countries and regions having different COVID-19 restrictions and testing requirements, we wanted you to be prepared with the latest information.
It appears that the legend of John McAfee, the security company’s enigmatic founder, will continue long after his death.
Many on the internet closely scrutinized his final tweets before his suicide in a Spanish prison in late June.
“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,” he wrote.
That and more had social media-philes looking for answers. And apparently that’s true in the channel as well, as our story on these tweets is back in our top 20 for a second straight month.
A data breach involving customer information at T-Mobile drew a lot of interest last month. But it was our story on the class-action lawsuits that followed which caught your eye the most.
Customers filed a pair of class-action suits against the carrier in federal court in its home state of Washington. Both accuse T-Mobile of violating the California Consumer Privacy Act. One says the carrier violated a similar law in Washington as well.
T-Mobile acknowledged that 5.3 million current customers and 667,000 former customers had information stolen. But it said none of the files included financial info, credit card information, debit or payment info.
I think I mentioned earlier that the channel likes lists.
Our second annual “CF List: 20 Top CCaaS Providers You Should Know” spread like wildfire. Much like similar “20 Tops” we’ve given you in the past, we polled leading analysts, asking them which contact-center-as-a-service providers should be named among the best — and why.
Among them: 8×8, Avaya and Cisco. But no doubt you want to see the other 17 as well.
John DeLozier, well-known for channel chief roles at CenturyLink and 8×8, made the leap to services distributor Intelisys to become the company’s new president. He replaces Mark Morgan, who is now president of global business development software for ScanSource, Intelisys’ parent company.
In his new gig, DeLozier will oversee all aspects of the Intelisys business, including sales, supplier services, operations and marketing.
Here‘s our news story on the hire and here‘s our Q&A with DeLozier.
In a mega deal worth $7.5 billion, Lumen (formerly CenturyLink) sold a large portion of its ILEC operations to Apollo Global Management. See this as Lumen doubling down on, in the company’s words, its “core enterprise business.”
Apollo got fiber and copper networks, tower site connectivity and central offices in 20 states as part of the deal.
We thought this would be a great topic of conversation with Dave Young, Lumen’s newly minted channel chief. We polled him on that, plus changes the Lumen channel program structure and much more, despite him just being a couple of weeks on the new job.
Old faithful, Channel People on the Move, makes is umpteenth consecutive appearance in our monthly top 20.
This edition featured moves at AT&T, IBM, Fusion Connect, VMware and more. (Pictured is Emily Skaff of Avant.)
We at Channel Futures took our focus on diversity, equity and inclusion to a new level with the release of our first-ever DE&I 101 list.
The list honors people from multicultural backgrounds who are working to promote DE&I in the channel. Individuals we recognize come from organizations around the world. They run the gamut, from CEO to marketing coordinators to customer advocates — anyone in the channel who’s making a difference.
Debuting in June, the 2021 edition of the world’s most comprehensive ranking of managed service providers remained hot in August.
You were still flocking to download the complete list of MSP honorees, but in August, we also broke them down by region. You got to find out where you ranked by state and country as well.
This page, featuring top MSPs in APAC, supplies you with links to all of our regional rankings.
With cybersecurity top of mind for just about every channel organization, it probably comes as no surprise that the recent spate of ransomware attacks made it all the way to No. 1.
Specifically, our article on the LockBit ransomware group launching an attack on Accenture got you sitting up in your chair.
While Accenture noted “irregular activity in one of our environments,” the company said it “immediately contained the matter and isolated the affected servers,” claiming that there was no damage from the attack.
One commenter on our site said that was looking at the issue with rose-colored glasses, saying that “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.”
With cybersecurity top of mind for just about every channel organization, it probably comes as no surprise that the recent spate of ransomware attacks made it all the way to No. 1.
Specifically, our article on the LockBit ransomware group launching an attack on Accenture got you sitting up in your chair.
While Accenture noted “irregular activity in one of our environments,” the company said it “immediately contained the matter and isolated the affected servers,” claiming that there was no damage from the attack.
One commenter on our site said that was looking at the issue with rose-colored glasses, saying that “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.”
As you’ll see me bring up more than once in this top stories countdown, the channel likes lists.
To that point, we have six – count ’em, six – lists that appear in our monthly top 20 recap. For instance, you wanted to see the biggest M&A in a list. You also gravitated toward a list of contact-center-as-a-service (CCaaS) providers. Moreover, our top stories countdown wouldn’t even be a countdown without including Channel People on the Move. Heck, this story itself is a list — so does that mean the number is seven?
For those of you who prefer to sit down with a cup of joe and read a full-blown article rather than a list, we’ve got that too. Lumen sold the majority of its ILEC business and hired a new channel boss. Furthermore, speaking of personnel moves, you enjoyed our Q&A with new Intelisys president John DeLozier.
Meantime, Avaya and Microsoft formed a strategic partnership, while the latter said goodbye to a longtime channel executive.
People who read lists such as this tend to want to participate. Well, you’ve come to the right place. All you have to do is … read content on this website. That’s because we rank these stories by combining online traffic with results from our daily and weekly newsletters. So just a few mouse clicks and you are participating without even thinking about it! Oh, speaking of our newsletters, sign up here. If you want to catch up on news you might have missed from July, that recap is here. Pretty soon you’ll be quizzing your friends and you’ll look like the smartest channel person in the room.
So, which topic is No. 1 in our top stories countdown for August? 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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