Category Archives for "Managed Services News"

D&H Distributing held its first in-person technology conference since 2019 last week. Its Mid-Atlantic Thread event took place in Hershey, Pennsylvania.

The company created a four-day program with dedicated tracks it targeted to a range of D&H’s customers. These tracks included its Partnerfi engagement community, its VAR and MSP partners, and a segment of retail/consumer partners.

Executives from Microsoft, HP, Dynabook (formerly Toshiba), Intel, Acronis, Proofpoint, NVIDIA, and Google participated. Other vendors that exhibited at the event included Acer, ASUS, AMD, AvePoint, Brother, Cisco, Dell, Lenovo, Lexmark, Seagate and Western Digital. Keynotes were from David Allen of Intel and Kate Swanborg of DreamWorks, plus speakers from Google, Microsoft, Cisco, Lenovo, HPE, among others.

The event attracted upward of 500 channel partners and more than 75 participating manufacturers across the separate programs. There were close to 50 educational sessions, workshops and mainstage presentations.

D&H’s Jennifer Walcott

Jennifer Walcott is vice president of marketing at D&H.

“We’re thrilled that travel and live events are once again a possibility for many of our MSP and VAR partners. It’s extraordinary to be able to provide the tools, training and products firsthand, from subject-matter authorities. Our partners have been eager to commune in person. We’ve worked diligently to expand our trade event and customer engagement experiences,” Walcott said.

Hybrid work, UC collaboration, ProAV, and cybersecurity continue to present a high sales potential for D&H Distributing’s partners, Walcott said. The company will develop new ways to support them in its ongoing mission to meet the needs of this market. Read more about the conference by viewing the slideshow above.

D&H Distributing held its first in-person technology conference since 2019 last week. Its Mid-Atlantic Thread event took place in Hershey, Pennsylvania.

The company created a four-day program with dedicated tracks it targeted to a range of D&H’s customers. These tracks included its Partnerfi engagement community, its VAR and MSP partners, and a segment of retail/consumer partners.

Executives from Microsoft, HP, Dynabook (formerly Toshiba), Intel, Acronis, Proofpoint, NVIDIA, and Google participated. Other vendors that exhibited at the event included Acer, ASUS, AMD, AvePoint, Brother, Cisco, Dell, Lenovo, Lexmark, Seagate and Western Digital. Keynotes were from David Allen of Intel and Kate Swanborg of DreamWorks, plus speakers from Google, Microsoft, Cisco, Lenovo, HPE, among others.

The event attracted upward of 500 channel partners and more than 75 participating manufacturers across the separate programs. There were close to 50 educational sessions, workshops and mainstage presentations.

D&H’s Jennifer Walcott

Jennifer Walcott is vice president of marketing at D&H.

“We’re thrilled that travel and live events are once again a possibility for many of our MSP and VAR partners. It’s extraordinary to be able to provide the tools, training and products firsthand, from subject-matter authorities. Our partners have been eager to commune in person. We’ve worked diligently to expand our trade event and customer engagement experiences,” Walcott said.

Hybrid work, UC collaboration, ProAV, and cybersecurity continue to present a high sales potential for D&H Distributing’s partners, Walcott said. The company will develop new ways to support them in its ongoing mission to meet the needs of this market. Read more about the conference by viewing the slideshow above.

Nitel is buying Hypercore Networks in an acquisition that strengthens Nitel’s international ambitions and brings together two like-minded channel organizations.

Chicago-based Nitel and Texas-based Hypercore have signed an agreement that will bring Hypercore under the Nitel brand. The companies did not reveal the financial details of the deal, which they say will close in the next few weeks. All of Hypercore’s founders will remain at the combined company, according to Nitel.

Nitel’s Margi Shaw

Nitel CEO Margi Shaw said the acquisition reflects the aggressive expansion Nitel has embarked on following its private equity investment from Cinven. The carrier is expanding its network-as-a-service and cybersecurity offerings as well as its international capabilities.

“Our goal is to grow the business aggressively to expand our service footprint and product lines,” Shaw told Channel Futures.

Shaw said talks with Hypercore commenced earlier in 2022.

“I was extremely impressed with the breadth of their product lines, as well as the growth that they’ve achieved in a six-year period of time,” she said.

Differences and Similarities

Hypercore and Nitel resemble each other in a few key ways, executives told Channel Futures. They said both providers offer a deep national network connectivity footprint. However, Shaw said Hypercore has established strong international contracts that will support Nitel’s ambitions for international expansion. In addition, Hypercore runs a network operations and service delivery center in Costa Rica, which diversifies Nitel’s operational footprint as well.

“We’re also building out international POPs and expanding our global footprint. So we can leverage all of that work that Hypercore has done,” she said.

Both deliver managed services in SD-WAN and cybersecurity.

“We overlap to some degree on platforms, but there is some best-in-breed in the platforms that between the two companies we’ll start to build more capabilities around,” Shaw said.

However, Hypercore’s portfolio differs in that it provides a deeper set of voice services. That includes a NetSapiens-based feature server and platform.

Hypercore’s Josh Dickinson

“[Voice is] something we’ve never really spent very much time on. We’re looking forward to having those voice services added into the product line,” Shaw said.

For Hypercore and its chief revenue officer, Josh Dickinson, Nitel possesses automation and APIs that Hypercore lacked. Dickinson said Nitel’s capabilities will enable “one-click automation” that customers and partners haven’t experienced before.

“It saves five days off the provisioning process immediately for Hypercore,” Dickinson told Channel Futures.

Shaw said Hypercore also was following an ambitious growth plan.

“And the proof is in the pudding,” she said. “They’ve really been able to grow their business aggressively.”

She also noted that Hypercore, like Nitel, has built strong relationships in the agent community.

Channel Impact

Shaw and Dickinson agreed that the companies’ channel strategies resemble each other’s. Both describe themselves as channel-only.

They said Hypercore and Nitel largely partner with …

D&H Distributing held its first in-person technology conference since 2019 last week. Its Mid-Atlantic Thread event took place in Hershey, Pennsylvania.

The company created a four-day program with dedicated tracks it targeted to a range of D&H’s customers. These tracks included its Partnerfi engagement community, its VAR and MSP partners, and a segment of retail/consumer partners.

Executives from Microsoft, HP, Dynabook (formerly Toshiba), Intel, Acronis, Proofpoint, NVIDIA, and Google participated. Other vendors that exhibited at the event included Acer, ASUS, AMD, AvePoint, Brother, Cisco, Dell, Lenovo, Lexmark, Seagate and Western Digital. Keynotes were from David Allen of Intel and Kate Swanborg of DreamWorks, plus speakers from Google, Microsoft, Cisco, Lenovo, HPE, among others.

The event attracted upward of 500 channel partners and more than 75 participating manufacturers across the separate programs. There were close to 50 educational sessions, workshops and mainstage presentations.

D&H’s Jennifer Walcott

Jennifer Walcott is vice president of marketing at D&H.

“We’re thrilled that travel and live events are once again a possibility for many of our MSP and VAR partners. It’s extraordinary to be able to provide the tools, training and products firsthand, from subject-matter authorities. Our partners have been eager to commune in person. We’ve worked diligently to expand our trade event and customer engagement experiences,” Walcott said.

Hybrid work, UC collaboration, ProAV, and cybersecurity continue to present a high sales potential for D&H Distributing’s partners, Walcott said. The company will develop new ways to support them in its ongoing mission to meet the needs of this market. Read more about the conference by viewing the slideshow above.

Channel people at Splunk, Telarus and Parasol Alliance are just a few of the individuals making waves this week. Channel Futures’ Channel People Making Waves highlights those who have made an impact over the last seven days.

One CEO received criticism for laying off a sizeable portion of his workforce. It’s not necessarily the layoffs that are of issue in and of themselves, but the justification he gave for them. The company had record growth. Read on to find out which firm is in the hot seat.

We feature two Telarus executives (one tenured and one new) mainly because they show comradery and team spirit in the wake of an acquisition. Who are these channel leaders?

Finally, it’s a list within a list. Our No.1 “story” is actually a rundown of the top channel companies within an industry. Click on the above slideshow to find out more.

And if you didn’t catch the previous roundup, you can find it here.

Mordor Intelligence predicts a 21% compound annual growth rate for hybrid cloud through 2026. IBM is calling it a $1 trillion market with plenty of opportunity for channel partners to cash in.

In this edition of Channel Futures TV, live from Channel Partners Europe in London, we caught up with David Stokes. He is the general manager for IBM’s partner ecosystem in EMEA.

Here, Stokes discusses the channel’s great value to his company, including the three biggest opportunities for partners today; plus, he delves into the various partner types IBM works with and how they can all make money with Big Blue.

Rahul Bhavsar

The big three hyperscalers today, Amazon AWS, Google GCP and Microsoft Azure, loom large over the cloud market. Already with a combined market share of 64%, they collectively continue to expand their presence by about one percentage point per quarter.

The trend has become clear: these public cloud providers continue to pursue a consolidation strategy, seeking to acquire smaller cloud providers and independent software vendors (ISVs) to expand their platforms. In doing so, they will further increase their revenue share in the $89 billion cloud infrastructure industry, a market expected to double in the next three years.

As hyperscalers continue to expand their market influence and sell their services directly to customers, it’s fair to consider whether their growth could take business away from MSPs. Recognizing this possibility, it’s worth asking how MSPs can best adapt to these market shifts?

Expanding Cloud Market Challenges

Let’s look at the three biggest challenges and opportunities the expanding cloud market holds for MSPs.

Finding the next niche: There’s increasing competition among the three large hyperscalers over control of the retail market. As each attempted to expand their market gain through single-cloud retail collaborations with Walmart, retailer ASOS and PayPal, these tensions also indicated a change in their consolidation strategy. The big three will now target entirely new industries. They will also increasingly focus on improving their direct-to-consumer (D2C) marketplaces to make their services more attractive for the big brands they want on board.

To stay competitive in this new environment, MSPs will need to figure out how to leverage industry-specific knowledge. Savvy MSPs must remember that hyperscalers are excellent infrastructure providers capable of landing retail giants like Walmart and Walgreens. At the same time, however, they’re too big to waste their time looking for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) in the $50 million range. As most MSPs can serve companies of this size comfortably, they should find ways to deepen their expertise and carve out deeper niches.

For instance, an insurance provider in the health care market will initially be interested in connecting with specific MSPs that serve that health care segment. These providers know how insurance companies operate, are familiar with common applications and regularly work with connectivity providers that serve this market segment. This synergy between niche industries and MSPs is a unique competitive advantage they have over hyperscalers. The ability to deploy, integrate and educate the end customer on infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offerings that fit their industry must become part of the new value proposition of MSPs.

MSPs must switch their revenue mindset: Today’s MSPs evolved out of value-added resellers (VARs), who made their profits from reselling technology products. However, the days of wholesaling computer monitors and LAN networks are long gone. Over the past decade, VARs have evolved into managed service providers (MSPs) by offering IT services, including the integration, management and support for IT products. This has allowed them to generate recurring revenue beyond the margins from reselling hardware or technology alone. But with the ongoing market shifts, it’s time for the next stage of MSP development.

Cloud infrastructure marketplaces have emerged, and the big three also invest in a direct-to-consumer sales strategy. As a result, MSPs need to change their mindset from focusing on reseller margins to …

D&H Distributing held its first in-person technology conference since 2019 last week. Its Mid-Atlantic Thread event took place in Hershey, Pennsylvania.

The company created a four-day program with dedicated tracks it targeted to a range of D&H’s customers. These tracks included its Partnerfi engagement community, its VAR and MSP partners, and a segment of retail/consumer partners.

Executives from Microsoft, HP, Dynabook (formerly Toshiba), Intel, Acronis, Proofpoint, NVIDIA, and Google participated. Other vendors that exhibited at the event included Acer, ASUS, AMD, AvePoint, Brother, Cisco, Dell, Lenovo, Lexmark, Seagate and Western Digital. Keynotes were from David Allen of Intel and Kate Swanborg of DreamWorks, plus speakers from Google, Microsoft, Cisco, Lenovo, HPE, among others.

The event attracted upward of 500 channel partners and more than 75 participating manufacturers across the separate programs. There were close to 50 educational sessions, workshops and mainstage presentations.

D&H’s Jennifer Walcott

Jennifer Walcott is vice president of marketing at D&H.

“We’re thrilled that travel and live events are once again a possibility for many of our MSP and VAR partners. It’s extraordinary to be able to provide the tools, training and products firsthand, from subject-matter authorities. Our partners have been eager to commune in person. We’ve worked diligently to expand our trade event and customer engagement experiences,” Walcott said.

Hybrid work, UC collaboration, ProAV, and cybersecurity continue to present a high sales potential for D&H Distributing’s partners, Walcott said. The company will develop new ways to support them in its ongoing mission to meet the needs of this market. Read more about the conference by viewing the slideshow above.

D&H Distributing held its first in-person technology conference since 2019 last week. Its Mid-Atlantic Thread event took place in Hershey, Pennsylvania.

The company created a four-day program with dedicated tracks it targeted to a range of D&H’s customers. These tracks included its Partnerfi engagement community, its VAR and MSP partners, and a segment of retail/consumer partners.

Executives from Microsoft, HP, Dynabook (formerly Toshiba), Intel, Acronis, Proofpoint, NVIDIA, and Google participated. Other vendors that exhibited at the event included Acer, ASUS, AMD, AvePoint, Brother, Cisco, Dell, Lenovo, Lexmark, Seagate and Western Digital. Keynotes were from David Allen of Intel and Kate Swanborg of DreamWorks, plus speakers from Google, Microsoft, Cisco, Lenovo, HPE, among others.

The event attracted upward of 500 channel partners and more than 75 participating manufacturers across the separate programs. There were close to 50 educational sessions, workshops and mainstage presentations.

D&H’s Jennifer Walcott

Jennifer Walcott is vice president of marketing at D&H.

“We’re thrilled that travel and live events are once again a possibility for many of our MSP and VAR partners. It’s extraordinary to be able to provide the tools, training and products firsthand, from subject-matter authorities. Our partners have been eager to commune in person. We’ve worked diligently to expand our trade event and customer engagement experiences,” Walcott said.

Hybrid work, UC collaboration, ProAV, and cybersecurity continue to present a high sales potential for D&H Distributing’s partners, Walcott said. The company will develop new ways to support them in its ongoing mission to meet the needs of this market. Read more about the conference by viewing the slideshow above.

D&H Distributing held its first in-person technology conference since 2019 last week. Its Mid-Atlantic Thread event took place in Hershey, Pennsylvania.

The company created a four-day program with dedicated tracks it targeted to a range of D&H’s customers. These tracks included its Partnerfi engagement community, its VAR and MSP partners, and a segment of retail/consumer partners.

Executives from Microsoft, HP, Dynabook (formerly Toshiba), Intel, Acronis, Proofpoint, NVIDIA, and Google participated. Other vendors that exhibited at the event included Acer, ASUS, AMD, AvePoint, Brother, Cisco, Dell, Lenovo, Lexmark, Seagate and Western Digital. Keynotes were from David Allen of Intel and Kate Swanborg of DreamWorks, plus speakers from Google, Microsoft, Cisco, Lenovo, HPE, among others.

The event attracted upward of 500 channel partners and more than 75 participating manufacturers across the separate programs. There were close to 50 educational sessions, workshops and mainstage presentations.

D&H’s Jennifer Walcott

Jennifer Walcott is vice president of marketing at D&H.

“We’re thrilled that travel and live events are once again a possibility for many of our MSP and VAR partners. It’s extraordinary to be able to provide the tools, training and products firsthand, from subject-matter authorities. Our partners have been eager to commune in person. We’ve worked diligently to expand our trade event and customer engagement experiences,” Walcott said.

Hybrid work, UC collaboration, ProAV, and cybersecurity continue to present a high sales potential for D&H Distributing’s partners, Walcott said. The company will develop new ways to support them in its ongoing mission to meet the needs of this market. Read more about the conference by viewing the slideshow above.