What You Missed During the Holidays: UCaaS Predictions, Master Agent Recap, SD-WAN Advice

It’s time to catch you up on the channel now that you’ve returned from vacation.

The newswires went a little quiet as businesses closed up shop at the end of December and employees opened up their inboxes to activate out-of-office replies. No splash acquisitions or channel-impacting layoffs came down the pipe while you were relaxing, but the Channel Partners team pumped out content nonetheless.

Below we’ve listed seven projects that our editors published over winter break. You’ll find a smattering of galleries that reviewed 2019 and previewed the year ahead. Take a look, and consider yourself good to go for 2020.

Edward Gately finished his three-part UCaaS series by offering up several considerations that partners should keep in mind when selling.

Experts from Telarus, Sandler Partners and other companies helped compile the 10 issue, which include bandwidth availability, billing and QoS expectations.

Learn about the issues.

The final installment of our SD-WAN spotlight series offers up multiple technologies that fit nicely with an SD-WAN platform.

Security, for example, is a huge question mark for customers that are planning to upgrade their network. The most successful partners won’t stop at SD-WAN; they’ll use it as a stepping stone for growing their customer share.

An analyst, a vendor, a telco and a channel partner offered cross-selling suggestions.Take a look at their advice.

Craig Galbraith assembled a year-end review of our website’s hottest articles. That includes the Avaya–RingCentral partnership, Verizon’s copper plans and several layoffs. We’ll leave the top story as a surprise.

See more of these highlights.

Users continue to get themselves and their companies in trouble by using weak or recycled passwords, Buffy Naylor writes.

The latest Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report showed that 80% hacking-related breaches came through a password. “123456” was the code of choice for 23.2 million hacked accounts, according to one study.  Really, guys?

The gallery offers 10 recommendations for people who want to tighten up their password security.

Check out Naylor’s helpful piece.

AppSmart cast a heavy shadow in our latest master agent review. The B2B marketplace purchased two master agents in the third and fourth quarters to establish its technology and partner bases as some of the deepest in the industry.

But all of the masters were on the move in 2019 — not just AppSmart. Not a week would pass when we didn’t see a personnel or supplier announcement, and multiple companies announced plans to expand geographically.

Check out the master agent recap.

Jeffrey Schwartz writes that laptop manufacturers increased battery life and upgraded processing in their products last year.

Dell, Lenovo and Microsoft are among the vendors that rolled out hot new laptops and tablets and 2019. Many businesses may be exploring the market for a laptop as Microsoft plans to end technical support for Windows 7.

Enjoy Schwartz’s gallery.

CPaaS is here to stay.

Edward Gately kicked off 2020 with another insightful unified communications piece that shares observations from analysts and vendors about the upcoming year. One analysts predicts product suites that integrate collaboration, conferencing and video will gain the advantage over point solutions.

Read more about the 2020 UC landscape.