Category Archives for "Managed Services News"

IBM Cloud and CenturyLink have extended their partnership, first launched in 2018.

On Tuesday, the companies announced that IBM Cloud now features connectivity through CenturyLink’s agnostic Cloud Connect Dynamic Connections. This is the platform that allows businesses, or their channel partners, to do self-service and real-time provisioning for adding Ethernet to (or removing it from) cloud and data center environments through a portal or API integration. It also features usage-based billing, by the hour and month.

A little more than a year-and-a-half ago, Big Blue and CenturyLink teamed up to deliver dedicated and private network connectivity to the IBM Cloud through CenturyLink Cloud Connect solutions. Tuesday’s news serves as an extension of that alliance.

The addition of IBM Cloud to Dynamic Connections rounds out a veritable who’s-who list of public cloud vendors that channel partners may access and manage on behalf of their customers. That roster also includes Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Azure Government, Google Cloud Platform, Oracle and more than 2,200 data centers. CenturyLink offers the portfolio through North America, Europe and Asia Pacific.

Now, businesses may access the connections they need to link their workloads – think Salesforce, Office 365, Google Apps and so on – and sync up with data centers through CenturyLink and IBM’s Cloud Direct Link services (as well as the other, aforementioned providers).

CenturyLink said IBM Cloud, in particular, gives businesses advantages including:

• Dedicated, private connections from any public internet access.
• Low-latency connectivity with consistent performance.
• The ability to add and remove connections, and increase and decrease bandwidth allocation to match demand.
• Usage-based billing, by the hour and month.

Security acts as a core focus for all these capabilities. CenturyLink said that when it comes to enterprise cloud and data-center locations, Cloud Connect Dynamic Connections protects data to and from the hybrid cloud. The service achieves this by taking businesses off best-effort public networks and moving them to secure, private connections; this minimizes exposure to external threats.

On the whole, “extending Cloud Connect Dynamic Connections to IBM Cloud helps more businesses deploy hybrid cloud solutions and transform their network ecosystems as application and infrastructure requirements change,” said Paul Savill, senior vice president, enterprise product and services at CenturyLink.

IBM’s Gabriel Montanti

Gabriel Montanti, network product leader at IBM Cloud, agreed.

“We’re providing businesses the capabilities they need to accelerate their hybrid cloud strategies,” he said. “Through our Direct Link services, customers can take advantage of customizable offerings that allow them to move complex workloads, including mission-critical workloads, across hybrid cloud environments to IBM Cloud.”

In other words, Montanti noted, CenturyLink business customers now may “easily access IBM Cloud and modernize their offerings to stay ahead of the competition.”

Plus, as Savill pointed out, enterprises (or their channel partners) gain control over performance and cost through self-service tools that enable quick and easy changes to cloud connections.

To that point, yes, channel partners may provision the new IBM Cloud capabilities via Dynamic Connections to their customers.

CenturyLink’s Garrett Gee

“CenturyLink is focused on enabling our partners to help their customers connect data and workloads wherever they need them,” Garrett Gee, senior vice president of indirect sales at CenturyLink, told Channel Futures. “This includes combining cloud, network and technical expertise to connect, migrate, manage and modernize enterprise applications across a range of hybrid cloud environments.”

When deploying IBM Cloud services, partners may opt for CenturyLink’s help, too.

“We can assist partners with building a reference architecture, and both high-level and low-level designs for IBM Cloud networking,” Gee said.

Cameyo is targeting managed service providers with its latest offering.

The cloud-native vendor has launched Cameyo for MSPs, a platform for building and scaling virtual application delivery to customers. A number of organizations still rely on legacy programs – in particular, those based on Windows – that don’t play well, or at all, in cloud settings. Cameyo overcomes this limitation by using HTML5 browsers, rather than virtual desktop infrastructure or containers. The new Cameyo for MSPs, then, eliminates the need for partners to go onsite to install customer apps.

Cameyo’s Andrew Miller

“To successfully compete, channel partners and MSPs must maximize services while reducing their costs to provide their customers with the best possible solutions at the lowest price,” Andrew Miller, co-founder and CEO of Cameyo, told Channel Futures.

Cameyo aims to make that happen for partners through its MSP product. No longer do partners have to rely on expensive and complex VDI or DaaS products, which “are notoriously hard to implement, are expensive, and are overkill if you just need to run Windows applications to any device and don’t need a full virtual desktop,” Miller said.

Likewise, going PC by PC calls for difficult scripting, or physically visiting each device to update it with the latest version of the Windows application.

“Both options are untenable from a cost and management perspective, eating into already tight margins the MSPs rely on for profitability,” Miller said. “In addition, many of the partner programs offered by the VDI and DaaS vendors are complex and confusing.”

Cameyo’s solution? Enabling MSPs to provision Windows applications from the browser to any device and from any environment — cloud, hybrid or on premises. The platform also features an administrative console for managing all customers.

How It Works

Using Cameyo for MSPs is pretty simple. First, MSPs install Cameyo’s self-hosted server in their own data center, on any Windows Server 2016 R2 server or above. Next, through the Cameyo admin console, they add new customers, then choose which Windows applications each client requires. Cameyo acts as the application delivery control plane, handling the cloud orchestration, load balancing, data persistence and system configuration. Deployment takes place instantly.

MSPs have another option, too. Those who want more extensive capabilities may provision Cameyo through their own Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud environments. This allows MSPs to take advantage of elasticity and usage optimization, reducing cost by spinning servers up and down, depending on demand. MSPs also may opt for Cameyo’s Session Sync technology, where a user’s settings and files follow them from session to session.

Either way, from there, MSPs only pay for their clients’ actual usage. Cameyo has debuted the Service Provider License Agreement (SPLA) model; this plan provides a monthly report of the number of active MSP customers. MSPs then pay Cameyo.

“Cameyo is giving MSPs the flexibility they need to quickly add and delete users, and to spin up infrastructure as needed — all while ensuring they are only billed for the number of users who actually access the service,” Miller said.

Overall, MSPs not only streamline their own costs with Cameyo’s approach to virtual application delivery, they …

VMware last year said much of its future would be centered around the Kubernetes container management platform. That vision is taking off now as the company announced a full slate of Kubernetes news, from the rebuilding of vSphere 7 around Kubernetes to a myriad of other applications which are getting the Kubernetes treatment.

In what VMware is calling a top-to-bottom effort to help its customers modernize their applications and infrastructure, the company also has introduced an expanded VMware Tanzu portfolio, a new VMware Cloud Foundation 4 platform and a wide range of related features and services.

VMware’s Pat Gelsinger

“Today’s news around app modernization is we’re taking that next click up the stack and … reaching the developer in profound and meaningful ways,” Pat Gelsinger, CEO of VMware, said in a telephone briefing about the new offerings. Twenty years ago, he said, Java was the new technology that was leading a revolution in IT; today, the latest innovations are being fueled by Kubernetes.

“Now it’s the central role of this transformational technology and Kubernetes and both the effectiveness as the new consumption interface for infrastructure and cloud, but also the new enabling layer for applications, CI/CD and modernization of how people build and deploy their applications,” said Gelsinger. “The news of this announcement … is that we’ve been building the assets to say we really now can help people build, run, manage, connect and protect across any app, any cloud and any device vision. And then … run this journey to be the ubiquitous essential infrastructure to enable our customers’ digital transformation.”

The new applications and services aim to help customers develop modern new applications while also modernizing existing applications and infrastructure, he said.

The new version of VMware vSphere 7 is the biggest evolution of vSphere in a decade, according to the company, including its re-architecture as an open platform using Kubernetes APIs to provide a cloud-like experience for developers and operators. The new version, which is a foundational component of the growing VMware Tanzu portfolio, is built to support both modern and traditional applications using any combination of virtual machines, containers and Kubernetes.

Also unveiled is the new VMware Cloud Foundation 4 hybrid cloud platform, which now supports both traditional VM-based and container-based applications, and an expanded Tanzu portfolio that includes VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid, which is a Kubernetes runtime that helps customers install and run a multicluster Kubernetes environment on the infrastructure of their choice. VMware Tanzu Mission Control, which is a centralized management platform for consistently operating and securing Kubernetes infrastructure and modern applications across multiple teams and clouds, is another new part of the suite.

Craig McLuckie, vice president of VMware’s modern apps platform business, said the VMware Tanzu and VMware Cloud Foundation Program components are seen by the company as a complete stack for traditional and modern application modernization. They offer a high enough level to hide away the specifics of an infrastructure and a low enough level to be able to run pretty much anything, he said.

VMware’s Craig McLuckie

“As we look at Kubernetes, it has been an incredibly powerful unifying capability that elegantly bridges the world of the application development teams and the world of the infrastructure teams,” said McLuckie. “We are all in on Kubernetes. We see this as being an incredibly powerful unifying force in the industry today. It provides an elegant way to span the best that vSphere has to offer.”

Greg Schulz, principal analyst with StorageIO, told Channel Futures that the expanding Kubernetes strategy from VMware is …

2020 is being touted as the year of 5G, with more operators set to switch on their next generation networks in the coming months.

5G is expected to enable faster speeds and connect approximately 1 million devices per square kilometre. Research company GlobalData estimates that, by 2024, more than a quarter of all data traffic will be carried over 5G, up from less than 1 percent in 2019.

Of interest to the channel is the expected impact of 5G on business. According to a report by GSMA Intelligence, 5G will become the first generation in the history of mobile to have a bigger impact on the enterprise than consumers. It also forecasts that private enterprise networks will explode and become a competition battleground between telcos and cloud companies.

Disconnect with Telcos

So what is the opportunity for the channel when it comes to 5G?

A good starting point is a 2019 study by global consulting firm Accenture, which suggests that both business and technology executives are underestimating the disruptive potential of the technology. Moreover, nearly three in four businesses say they need help imagining the future possibilities and use cases of 5G, indicating there may indeed be a role for channel partners to help their customers cut through the hype and better understand the benefits – and challenges – of the technology.

Similarly, a recently released report by BearingPoint//Beyond, found that telcos are failing to come up with the business-focused solutions that will be vital to 5G’s commercial success.

The research suggests a major disconnect between what operators want to sell when it comes to 5G – connectivity and hardware – versus what business customers want to buy, which is sophisticated, complete solutions made up of multiple technologies, including 5G.

BearingPoint’s Angus Ward

“Businesses want to buy 5G; CSPs want to sell 5G. The problem is that CSPs want to just sell connectivity and standardized ‘connectivity plus infrastructure’ products, while businesses want to buy more sophisticated, complete solutions that better fit their needs and require the integration of multiple technologies from multiple players,” said Angus Ward, CEO of BearingPoint//Beyond, who is based in London.

Developing Skills

There appear to be several existing areas of expertise that partners can develop and apply to 5G.

Ireland-based 4site, part of the Indigo Telecom Group, helps its wireless customers as they commence rollout of 5G technologies.

“All of the key skills, from survey and design through to property negotiation and structural analysis, are the key factors for rolling out new technologies such as 5G by our customers,” Eoin Callaghan, 4site 5G solution architect, told Channel Futures.

“From our perspective, rolling out 5G technology is similar to the way that all wireless technologies are rolled out in that they require extensive working with our customers to define the design rules and guidelines on how the network is to be deployed in the most economical manner with the least impact on the existing site configuration.”

Elsewhere, Colin Knox, head of community engagement at SolarWinds MSP, says 5G creates a need for …

The Channel Futures MSP 501 opened for submissions Monday, kicking off the 13th year of the IT channel’s first, largest and most comprehensive survey and ranking of managed service providers (MSPs) worldwide.

Some very interesting things happened with the 501 in 2019 as a result of new market forces driving the managed services industry. We had a 35% year-over-year increase in applications from 2018 to 2019 that reflected a new maturity in the MSP market and an marked uptick in enthusiasm and show of support from vendor communities. 

The nature of the list itself also shifted. Two in five companies on the 2019 list weren’t on the 2018 list, an interesting evolution that surprised us all. Rocking the boat (in a good way) were entries from nontraditional channels or new MSP applicants, which caused the list to look vastly different than in previous years.

Many of our 2019 501ers were and are in the beginning of a strong pivot toward managed services, but one wouldn’t necessarily categorize them as a true MSP. Of the top 10 MSP 501 winners in 2018, seven identified as MSPs, two as VARs and one dubbed itself an IT service provider. Comparing this to last year, four were VARs, only three were pure-play MSPs, one was a telco service provider, one was an IT business consultant and the aforementioned IT service provider.

This shift in diversity isn’t a fluke. Many of these nontraditional MSPs are sophisticated, large businesses in their own “home” markets that are making a concerted and strategic effort to build out their managed service practices, form relationships in this space, and promote their solutions.

Since these businesses are already fairly mature, their annual revenue is a great deal higher than our average 501ers of old, which also greatly altered the list. Between 2018 and 2019, the average annual revenue for a 501er grew by about one-third, from $28.8 million to $42.3 million. Since the 501 rankings were still solely based on annual revenue, albeit with the weighted methodology, that meant these new, bigger companies pushed a lot of our longtime 501ers off the list.

So what did we do? We knew it was time to re-evaluate our methodology and align it with market trends. Concerning the 2020 application, we have some exciting new judging criteria and a new methodology this year to judge applicants based on market trends and business best practices. 

Additionally, in response to demand from telecom agents, resellers, digital agencies and other non-MSP channel partners that are spinning up managed services practices, we are excited to this year launch the NextGen 101, an MSP 501 list. The NextGen 101 will recognize outstanding partners from outside of the traditional managed services business model that are devoting energy and resources to building out recurring managed services revenue streams and creating the channel partner powerhouses of the future.

Interested in earning a coveted spot on the NextGen 101? Just apply for the 2020 MSP 501 and be automatically submitted for both lists.

Applications close on Friday, May 31, so get in there, you 501 fiends. Get ready to stand and be counted among the industries best and brightest managed service providers! Still curious about the survey? Check out the Channel Futures MSP 501 landing page, the 2019 report or last year’s rankings of the world’s top MSPs. 

For any questions about the survey, rankings or report, direct inquiries to [email protected]. 

Much has been written over the last several years concerning the growth and business value potential of the Internet of Things (IoT) and related trends such as edge computing. For example, Gartner forecasts that the enterprise and automotive IoT market will grow to 5.8 billion endpoints in 2020, a 21% increase from 2019. By the end of 2019, 4.8 billion endpoints are expected to be in use, up 21.5% from 2018.

However, if you take a step back, IoT development remains immature, and large-scale deployment still seems far away. Although there are clear use cases that are working and providing value, the IoT trend hasn’t yet achieved mainstream acceptance. Most hospitals, buildings, manufacturing sites and even homes have yet to implement IoT in a big way.

Evaluating the Progress of IoT among Diverse Stakeholders

I am a member of a cross-industry IoT advisory board. At our quarterly meetings, about 30 of us discuss the state of affairs as it pertains to the evolution of IoT. We share what’s happening in our space with respect to IoT, and we learn from each other. I think our meetings reflect the current evolution of the IoT trend, and I wanted to share our general observations:

1. IoT is bringing together a new, wider set of players from diverse backgrounds.

Our advisory group meetings are attended by the major technology players that most people would expect—IT and physical infrastructure providers such as Cisco, Dell, Schneider Electric and HP. However, some of the most influential voices are coming from smaller component suppliers (like providers of sensors and printers, small software firms and non-IT platform providers) and customers who are consuming the IoT solutions. Although the meeting attendees represent a broad swath of players, we all share the same issue: Each of us is dependent on all the others to achieve IoT deployment success.

2. IoT in and of itself has potential for business value creation, but all the players must work together to extract that value.

Most players agree that, as a whole, IoT opportunities can be massive. However, in many cases, if that holistic opportunity is analyzed piece by piece, some vendors, initially, may not see much revenue. For example, a use case was discussed that involved $20 million in revenue and 86 different vendors. For some of those vendors, like a cabling parts supplier, the IoT rollout represented only a thin $20,000 slice of that total revenue pot. Yet, without that part, and the commitment of the organization that supplies that part, the opportunity will not successfully convert into business value for the customer. On the other hand, that parts supplier also needs to realize that the scale of the initial opportunity is likely to accelerate quickly, supplying a steady and significant revenue stream in the future. The ecosystem of vendors needs to work together at a more intense level than is traditional to achieve the anticipated success of both the client and the vendors.

3. The way collaboration occurs and is executed must be simplified to drive efficiencies.

Most IoT deployments involve a high level of complexity from both an integration and coordination standpoint. The current gap, however, is not on the technology integration side, but in the way the collaboration between technology providers occurs. The management of the relationships that enable the delivery of the various parts and pieces is critical. Consider, for example, the specific area of contracts. Traditional drafting of contracts between two large entities can take weeks and months. These robust legal agreements address all the different types of engagements that might happen over an extended period. In an IoT world, lightweight, rapid execution contracts are needed. Experiments involving new micro-contracts are taking place. These are contracts that are quickly drafted to address only the specific activity between vendors that needs to be executed. This allows the players involved to move rapidly to the next set of requirements, involving yet another set of vendors, that need to be collaboratively fulfilled. Therefore, in a collaboration-intensive IoT solutions environment, even the simple exchange of monies requires a new and unique approach.

Contributions from All Players Are Needed

The process of accelerating IoT business value is complex. All key players will need to contribute. The work will require the ability to leverage the expertise of others to uncover new ideas. Our company, Schneider Electric, for example, has introduced a new, open platform called Exchange. It’s an ecosystem that combines the power of the marketplace with an active online community. Participants identify their domain of expertise, and the application allows them to display their capabilities. The system then matches them up with partners and clients who require that specific expertise. Exchange is not a channel for addressing technical support questions; it’s a problem-resolution approach that engages a community of problem solvers.

To access additional resources that can support your IoT-related implementations and provide Certainty in a Connected World, visit our edge computing page.

Jamie Bourassa is the Vice President of Edge Computing & Channel Strategy for the Secure Power Division of Schneider Electric. Jamie is responsible for enabling the Secure Power Division commercial strategy and ensuring that Schneider Electric aligns to the market evolutions related to Edge Compute, IoT, and other disruptions that increase the criticality of local computing for customers across all commercial and industrial segments. With a global career in IT Channels Strategy, Sales Operations and Offer Management, Jamie brings a unique set of competencies needed in evaluating and delivering on the current disruptions in the market.

This guest blog is part of a Channel Futures sponsorship.

Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of Salesforce.com, once said: “The only constant in the technology industry is change.” Many of us feel this day in and day out in the various sectors of the tech industry as we constantly adapt our business models, shift gears with product development, tweak our marketing strategies and try to get ahead of the competition. This reality is not mutually exclusive for CSPs and MSPs, and lately has rung all too true as Microsoft’s vision for partners continues to change.

So how can service providers stay relevant and profitable, all while adapting to the constant flux in Microsoft partner dynamics? In this article we’ll explore the nuances, opportunities and tools necessary to navigate the ever-changing Microsoft Office 365 business arena.

The Changing CSP Landscape

Over the years, Microsoft has modified its CSP program, forcing partners to adapt their operations accordingly. Major changes to the Direct CSP service provision model were first announced in 2018, but changes to both Direct and Indirect CSP programs have started to become a reality. One Microsoft partner, AppXite, predicted that only 20% of Direct CSPs would keep their status throughout this shift. Here are some of the changes to requirements and benefits of the Direct CSP program:

• Microsoft support contract required ($15,000/year for ASfP or $50,000/year for Premier)
• Partners must have infrastructure to support billing and provisioning infrastructure
• Partners must provide at least one managed service, IP service or customer solution application
• Updated incentive rates and direct rebate payments reduced, with 40% going toward co-op fund incentives (impacts both Direct and Indirect)

In 2019, we also saw some partners grappling with change related to the new “Microsoft Customer Agreement” (MCA) model for Azure. At renewal time, the MCA encourages and easily opens the door for customers to purchase their licenses directly from Microsoft, with partner activities consigned to mostly “value-added presales services and post-sale solutions for your Azure services.” Since this is the new approach for Azure, one has to wonder if Office 365 will follow.

Given these changes, the next logical step for CSPs is to create unique value-add services around licensing. This approach allows you to build your own margins, which offers more flexibility and provides a better safety net if Microsoft decides to change its CSP programs even further.

Stephen White, Research Director for Gartner said it best: “Microsoft has begun making the line in the sand more visible–providing licensing without services, and lightweight services providers seeking to leverage the transaction may be on the wrong side of that line moving forward.” Differentiating is critical in order to stay relevant and competitive, and to stand out in an already crowded Microsoft Office 365 space.

New Opportunities Created for MSPs

These changes might not sound like the best news for your traditional CSP partner, but they do provide some big opportunities for MSPs, where the business approach is often holistic and already includes services. While Microsoft’s new direction has led partners to explore new and expanded service opportunities, a shift in customer buying preferences is also impacting the types of services MSPs are offering.

In recent years, we’ve seen a trend developing around large enterprise customers gravitating toward turnkey solutions for all IT needs that fall under the managed services umbrella–licensing, IT services, support, software sourcing and service desk capabilities. Their preference is to bundle services and work with fewer vendors if they can, to lessen the overhead and burden of dealing with different vendors’ contracts, billing cycles and SLAs. The operational efficiencies of reducing overhead and simplifying costs is not only highly attractive, but also has become somewhat of a crucial commodity.

Another reality is that customers don’t want

Esports is an emerging opportunity for partners that at least one distributor, D&H Distributing, is encouraging partners to explore.

No, esports isn’t about betting on the ponies or wrestling matches. For channel partners, esports is about connecting high school and college teams with trusted reseller and managed service providers (MSPs) who can outfit esports organizations with cutting-edge technology.

There’s a group called the High School eSports League (HSEL) whose mission is to make esports available to every student as a legitimate varsity-level sport in high schools across the nation. HSEL contends that through organized esports competitions, students will tie their commitment to gaming to their success in academics and future careers. The National Association of Collegiate eSports (NACE) does similar work at the college level.

D&H Distributing’s Tina Fisher

“We came about esports through our K-12 reseller partners — they’re the biggest vertical that we service,” Tina Fisher, executive director, vendor business management at D&H, told Channel Futures. “These partners are starting to get questions from their schools about esports, products for an esports environment, and which vendors have products that work together. Schools are looking for someone to help them be their consultant to pull it all together.”

An esports environment might vary from school to school. It might be a portable environment that’s set up in a gym or a computer lab that becomes a makeshift computer/esports gaming lab.

“Or, they recognize the opportunity … may have funding coming in through STEM grants, and they’re recognizing that this could become something bigger such as a team sport type of environment as much as their baseball, basketball and football teams are,” said Fisher.

Esports scales from a lab in a K-12 school, to colleges, where it first got started; in fact, Harrisburg University’s eeports team, known as The Storm, placed first in last May’s Collegiate Esports Championship. A D&H customer, the university honored it as its distributor business partner of the year for the work it did with the local university on esports.

According to a recent piece on NPR, more than 170 colleges and universities participate in esports, and there’s more than $16 million in college scholarships available. No wonder high schools are gearing up.

An esports environment includes a gaming desktop and monitor, mouse, keyboard and headset, and furniture such as gaming chairs and desks. Outfitting a medium or small arena, there’s also an opportunity for a pro audio/visual environment, including large format displays, projectors and screens, and speakers — and then there’s the networking. The role for partners goes beyond the hardware. Esports requires an integrated solution.

D&H lists esports equipment by categories such as complete systems, components and accessories, monitors and displays, ProAV, and power and networking.

“There’s a lot of opportunity for a reseller to help with a solution,” said Fisher. “And, in that environment, there’s a constant refesh cycle because they want the latest and greatest.”

Some vendors in play in esports include Acer (Predator), HP, LG, Nvidia, Termaltake, ASUS (ROG), Intel, Logitech, Poly, ViewSonic, Dell (Alienware), Lenovo (Legion), MSI, Samsung, Corsair, Kingston (HyperX), NEC, Sennheiser, Aruba and Netgear.

According to IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Gaming Tracker, 3Q19, shipments of gaming desktops, notebooks reached 10 million units, a year-over-year increase of more than 10%. Shipments of gaming monitors grew more than 76% in one year, to 2.2 million units. IDC defines gaming PCs as desktops or notebooks hat have a Premium or Performance grade GPU, including the mid-range and high-end offerings from Nvidia and AMD. Professional-grade GPUs such as the Quadro or Radeon Pro are excluded from this category. Gaming monitors are those with a refresh rate of 100 Hz or higher.

Demand for partners in esports is building. D&H has an esports landing page, is working on an esports playbook for partners and is offering webinars, as well as other education to help partners learn and get involved in this growing market segment.

The global managed security services market is surging as businesses scramble to neutralize cyberthreats and address a dearth of skilled IT talent.

In this Channel Futures FastChat, Stephan Tallent — Fortinet’s Senior Director of MSSP & Service Enablement — shares his insights on the evolution of the MSSP marketplace, outlining the critical steps to developing a healthy, profitable security business and identifying the key opportunities for growth in the months and years ahead.

WatchGuard Technologies is beefing up its security platform with the acquisition of Panda Security, a Spain-based provider of advanced endpoint protection.

The combined company will provide centralized management of advanced threat detection and response functionality fueled by AI, behavior-profiling techniques and security event correlation. Financial details of the acquisition, which is expected to close next quarter, weren’t disclosed.

A WatchGuard spokesperson tells us endpoint detection and response, threat hunting, endpoint antivirus (AV), email security, patching, data compliance and encryption are all cited as top areas for investment by IT decision-makers.

“Short term, the acquisition of Panda makes these products accessible to our customer base through a trusted vendor and their IT solution provider of choice,” the spokesperson said. “Longer term, our customers will enjoy the additional benefits that come from these solutions being tightly integrated with the core WatchGuard offering — centralized management, security event correlation, etc.”

The full portfolio of WatchGuard and Panda products will be available to both customers and partners this year, providing opportunities for the combined organizations to take on new product offerings and work together to provide greater value to all sectors served by WatchGuard, the spokesperson said. The two leadership teams will begin work on a cross-selling timeline with the goal of having tentative dates soon after closing.

“WatchGuard has continued to deliver on its vision of providing a complete security portfolio of products and services that protect users both inside and beyond the network perimeter, including secure Wi-Fi solutions, multifactor authentation (MFA) and now most recently user-focused security services,” the spokesperson said. “The acquisition of Panda fuels that vision and expands the company’s portfolio of user-centric threat detection and response products and services.”

Rik Turner, principal analyst at Omdia, tells us WatchGuard is a well-known security vendor in the SMB market, where it offers network security, secure Wi-Fi, MFA and network intelligence. It also has ambitions in the enterprise segment, particularly with its Firebox next-gen firewall product. That said, a more serious foray into enterprise requires a broader portfolio, which is where the Panda acquisition comes in, he said.

The acquisition is the latest move in the emerging XDR segment, in which detection and response capabilities are offered across network, endpoint and beyond, he said.

“After a veritable explosion of endpoint security vendors in the mid-2010s, the last couple of years has seen considerable consolidation, with Invincea (bought by Sophos), Cylance (Blackberry), Bromium (HP), Endgame (Elastic), and Carbon Black (VMware) all being acquired,” Turner said. “WatchGuard’s move on Panda is the latest in this trend, and is recognition that enterprise security needs the XDR capabilities outlined by Omdia two years ago, rather than silos of endpoint, network and cloud security. The Panda acquisition certainly positions WatchGuard for an XDR play and thus makes it a more relevant competitor in enterprise security. Omdia will now be watching the enlarged entity to see how it expands its XDR offerings into security for the cloud.”

Panda was the first endpoint protection platform (EPP) vendor to offer a 100% attestation service, certifying the legitimacy and safety of all running applications. The company also recently launched a threat hunting service available for direct enterprise consumption and for MSSPs who resell Panda services.

WatchGuard’s Prakash Panjwani

“Businesses today face an increasingly sophisticated and evolving threat landscape, scarcity of trained security professionals and an increasingly porous perimeter,” said Prakash Panjwani, WatchGuard‘s CEO. “By bringing the companies together, we enable our current and future customers and partners to consolidate their fundamental security services under a single brand, backed by the innovation and quality that is a core part of both companies’ DNA.”

“We are thrilled to merge with WatchGuard because of the new scale and portfolio access it provides to our customers and partners,” said Juan Santamaria Uriarte, Panda‘s CEO. “We are also excited to see our innovative product portfolio be delivered via WatchGuard’s strong global network of partners. Together, we look forward to building a security platform that bridges the network and user perimeter, with capabilities that are unmatched in the cybersecurity market.”