Category Archives for "Managed Services News"

Only halfway through the week, the cloud computing sector is exploding with news. For starters, Google Cloud has come out swinging with an avalanche of announcements. Look for deals with consultancy Dun & Bradstreet, Ingram Micro Cloud and a milestone achievement with managed service provider Softchoice.

All of those tidbits underscore that Google Cloud, still the world’s third-largest public cloud provider, is making good on its goals to gain market share against Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. It might even make a profit (the company to date remains unprofitable and executives seem less inclined to worry about that than they are to act on vision.)

Google Cloud has been making much of its headway through its indirect channel relationships. The company has appointed a new channel chief, Kevin Ichhpurani, to guide that strategy. It’s also consolidating its direct and indirect sales into one organization. (Recall that Carolee Gearhart has left the vendor after a little more than three years.) In fact, we have a Q&A forthcoming with Jim Anderson, who now leads Google Cloud’s direct sales teams. We’ll have that for you soon.

In the meantime, though, IBM has some application modernization intentions via its IBM Z as a service on IBM Cloud. This concerns the hybrid cloud. Next, MSP Ensono has achieved a cloud milestone with Microsoft Azure. And fellow MSP Thirdera, which specializes in ServiceNow, has launched a platform partners can use. Finally, Oracle Cloud has secured – no pun intended – U.S. Department of Defense approval to process sensitive Air Force data. That’s significant, given that few cloud providers hold such high-level permissions.

Finally, we already covered Akamai Technologies’ pending acquisition of Linode — read that here. As a quick recap, though, Akamai is buying the independent cloud computing provider for $900 million in cash. We’re still working to find out what this deal means for the indirect channel, since Akamai targets large enterprises and Linode aims more at smaller businesses, often through managed service providers.

Check out all the cloud computing news you need to know, in the slideshow above.

The U.S. B2B technology reseller channel saw strong growth in 2021 with year-over-year revenue sales up 12%. That’s according to researchers at The NPD Group. When comparing 2021 sales to 2019 – before the pandemic – sales grew 8%, based on NPD’s reseller tracking service data.

Over the last year, these channel sales trends highlight the importance of security and work-from-home needs. In the fourth quarter, B2B software sales were up 16%, driven by strong demand for endpoint protection software (up 27%). Despite beginning to slow, work-from-home device revenue sales remained strong last quarter. Peripherals including keyboards (up 41%) and mice (up 21%) drove growth, in place of USB cameras (down 29%) and PC headsets (up 1%).

Midsize Companies to Accelerate

NPD’s Mike Crosby

Mike Crosby is director and B2B technology industry analyst for The NPD Group.

“Following strong 2021 performance, the reseller channel may see some shifts in quarter one 2022,” Crosby said. “We anticipate device sales will slow in the education vertical – shifting focus away from device deployments to more IT infrastructure and security – and that enterprise and midsized companies will accelerate their IT spend overall with technology mix shifting away from hardware to more software, cloud and managed services.”

Small businesses continue to face headwinds. They will likely focus on refreshing critical needs until the market stabilizes more. This leaves opportunity for investment and growth further into 2022, he added.

Growth in Educational Services

In the fourth quarter, data center revenue sales were up 7% year-over-year. While this shows recovery for the segment, sales are still down 3% versus 2019’s pre-pandemic levels. Data center categories that led growth include power (up 14%), storage (up 13%), and compute (up 12%).

According to NPD’s vertical reseller tracking data, the educational services sector grew the fastest year-over-year in 2021, adding $1 billion in sales. Professional services, retail trade and information each added nearly $750 million.

Tax-filing season is approaching, and cybercriminals are gearing up with their latest tactics to steal money from individuals and SMBs.

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is reminding taxpayers to protect their personal and financial information, and watch out for IRS impersonation scams, along with other schemes that try to trick people out of their money.

Experts anticipate this year to be the most lucrative for cybercriminals, with new points of entry and seemingly simple transactions. Those include phishing scams with QR codes, notifications dubbed as easy payment methods, double and triple ransomware, and insider threats.

Tax-Filing Season Scams Lucrative Business

To learn more about what’s in store for this tax-filing season, we spoke with Grayson Milbourne, security threat intelligence director at Webroot, an OpenText company.

Channel Futures: Why is this tax season shaping up to be the most lucrative for cybercriminals?

Webroot’s Grayson Milbourne

Grayson Milbourne: It’s almost like every year seems to be the most lucrative and next best year for cybercriminals. The reality is every year we become more of a digital society where we do things online. We file our taxes online and we shop online, and the pandemic only accelerated this transformation. We forced ourselves into doing everything online, sort of the new normal way that we interact with e-commerce or with banking, or with tax season. So because of that, we see every year a really huge spike in phishing activity directly correlated to the tax filing season.

Everybody knows they have to do this task and there’s a lot of complexity to it. It’s not just filing it. There are a lot of other types of scams that associate themselves to preparation. A lot of people had stimulus payments — and there are taxes associated with those. There’s unemployment and a lot of scams associated with tax season around that. So it’s kind of the first feast of the year for scammers … and then we get the end-of-the-year holiday season and we see huge spikes then as well.

Scroll through our slideshow above for more from Webroot and more cybersecurity news.

Only halfway through the week, the cloud computing sector is exploding with news. For starters, Google Cloud has come out swinging with an avalanche of announcements. Look for deals with consultancy Dun & Bradstreet, Ingram Micro Cloud and a milestone achievement with managed service provider Softchoice.

All of those tidbits underscore that Google Cloud, still the world’s third-largest public cloud provider, is making good on its goals to gain market share against Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. It might even make a profit (the company to date remains unprofitable and executives seem less inclined to worry about that than they are to act on vision.)

Google Cloud has been making much of its headway through its indirect channel relationships. The company has appointed a new channel chief, Kevin Ichhpurani, to guide that strategy. It’s also consolidating its direct and indirect sales into one organization. (Recall that Carolee Gearhart has left the vendor after a little more than three years.) In fact, we have a Q&A forthcoming with Jim Anderson, who now leads Google Cloud’s direct sales teams. We’ll have that for you soon.

In the meantime, though, IBM has some application modernization intentions via its IBM Z as a service on IBM Cloud. This concerns the hybrid cloud. Next, MSP Ensono has achieved a cloud milestone with Microsoft Azure. And fellow MSP Thirdera, which specializes in ServiceNow, has launched a platform partners can use. Finally, Oracle Cloud has secured – no pun intended – U.S. Department of Defense approval to process sensitive Air Force data. That’s significant, given that few cloud providers hold such high-level permissions.

Finally, we already covered Akamai Technologies’ pending acquisition of Linode — read that here. As a quick recap, though, Akamai is buying the independent cloud computing provider for $900 million in cash. We’re still working to find out what this deal means for the indirect channel, since Akamai targets large enterprises and Linode aims more at smaller businesses, often through managed service providers.

Check out all the cloud computing news you need to know, in the slideshow above.

Snyk, the cloud-native application security provider, is entering the cloud security market by acquiring Fugue, a cloud security and compliance company.

A fast growing segment of cybersecurity, the global cloud security market should be worth $77.5 billion by 2026, according to MarketsandMarkets. That’s up from nearly $41 billion last year.

By joining forces with Snyk, Fugue’s capabilities will soon extend the Snyk developer security platform. That will provide a cloud security posture management (CSPM) tool designed by and for developers.

Snyk isn’t saying how much it’s paying for Fugue.

‘Unique’ Solution for Partners

Ravi Maira is Snyk’s head of product marketing.

Snyk’s Ravi Maira

“With this acquisition and the integration of Fugue’s product into the Snyk developer security platform, Snyk’s partners will be able to bring this unique, developer-focused cloud security solution to their customers that are looking to expand their use of cloud-native technologies to deploy applications and need to scale their security programs to meet the pace of innovation required in today’s digitally transforming world,” he said. “It will also allow partners to build services around implementing and optimizing this solution into DevOps and security workflows.”

Oher CSPM solutions can detect vulnerabilities in deployment, Maira said. And some infrastructure-as-code security tools can find security risks in configuration. Snyk’s solution will connect the two. Therefore, DevSecOps teams can resolve cloud security issues and get back to innovating.

Fixing Security Solutions in Applications

Snyk’s mission is to be the platform developers use to find and fix security issues in the applications they create, Maira said. The addition of Fugue will enhance this mission. It’ll provide visibility into the security of applications and the cloud services they use,” he said.

The acquisition of Fugue is Snyk’s fifth in the last year-and-a-half, following the successful integrations of CloudSkiff, FossID, Manifold and DeepCode. This latest corporate development also follows the company’s late 2021 announcement of over $600 million in Series F investment.

Only halfway through the week, the cloud computing sector is exploding with news. For starters, Google Cloud has come out swinging with an avalanche of announcements. Look for deals with consultancy Dun & Bradstreet, Ingram Micro Cloud and a milestone achievement with managed service provider Softchoice.

All of those tidbits underscore that Google Cloud, still the world’s third-largest public cloud provider, is making good on its goals to gain market share against Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. It might even make a profit (the company to date remains unprofitable and executives seem less inclined to worry about that than they are to act on vision.)

Google Cloud has been making much of its headway through its indirect channel relationships. The company has appointed a new channel chief, Kevin Ichhpurani, to guide that strategy. It’s also consolidating its direct and indirect sales into one organization. (Recall that Carolee Gearhart has left the vendor after a little more than three years.) In fact, we have a Q&A forthcoming with Jim Anderson, who now leads Google Cloud’s direct sales teams. We’ll have that for you soon.

In the meantime, though, IBM has some application modernization intentions via its IBM Z as a service on IBM Cloud. This concerns the hybrid cloud. Next, MSP Ensono has achieved a cloud milestone with Microsoft Azure. And fellow MSP Thirdera, which specializes in ServiceNow, has launched a platform partners can use. Finally, Oracle Cloud has secured – no pun intended – U.S. Department of Defense approval to process sensitive Air Force data. That’s significant, given that few cloud providers hold such high-level permissions.

Finally, we already covered Akamai Technologies’ pending acquisition of Linode — read that here. As a quick recap, though, Akamai is buying the independent cloud computing provider for $900 million in cash. We’re still working to find out what this deal means for the indirect channel, since Akamai targets large enterprises and Linode aims more at smaller businesses, often through managed service providers.

Check out all the cloud computing news you need to know, in the slideshow above.

Only halfway through the week, the cloud computing sector is exploding with news. For starters, Google Cloud has come out swinging with an avalanche of announcements. Look for deals with consultancy Dun & Bradstreet, Ingram Micro Cloud and a milestone achievement with managed service provider Softchoice.

All of those tidbits underscore that Google Cloud, still the world’s third-largest public cloud provider, is making good on its goals to gain market share against Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. It might even make a profit (the company to date remains unprofitable and executives seem less inclined to worry about that than they are to act on vision.)

Google Cloud has been making much of its headway through its indirect channel relationships. The company has appointed a new channel chief, Kevin Ichhpurani, to guide that strategy. It’s also consolidating its direct and indirect sales into one organization. (Recall that Carolee Gearhart has left the vendor after a little more than three years.) In fact, we have a Q&A forthcoming with Jim Anderson, who now leads Google Cloud’s direct sales teams. We’ll have that for you soon.

In the meantime, though, IBM has some application modernization intentions via its IBM Z as a service on IBM Cloud. This concerns the hybrid cloud. Next, MSP Ensono has achieved a cloud milestone with Microsoft Azure. And fellow MSP Thirdera, which specializes in ServiceNow, has launched a platform partners can use. Finally, Oracle Cloud has secured – no pun intended – U.S. Department of Defense approval to process sensitive Air Force data. That’s significant, given that few cloud providers hold such high-level permissions.

Finally, we already covered Akamai Technologies’ pending acquisition of Linode — read that here. As a quick recap, though, Akamai is buying the independent cloud computing provider for $900 million in cash. We’re still working to find out what this deal means for the indirect channel, since Akamai targets large enterprises and Linode aims more at smaller businesses, often through managed service providers.

Check out all the cloud computing news you need to know, in the slideshow above.

Deep Instinct has named three executives from SecurityScorecard and Okta to its global channel leadership team.

Mike Saletta joins as area vice president of Americas channels. Joe Santamorena is area vice president of global MSSP programs, and Phanneth Wood joins as director of global distribution. They’ll help advance the company’s 100% channel go-to-market (GTM) effort.

Deep Instinct’s Mike Saletta

They come to the Deep Instinct channel leadership team ahead of the company launching a new partner program this spring.

Brian Feeney is Deep Instinct’s vice president of global channels and alliances.

“I’m looking forward to what Phanneth, Mike and Joe bring to the table when it comes to growing distribution scale, building strong partner engagement and loyalty, and also managed services expertise as we continue to expand partner services opportunities,” he said.

Focused on Demand Generation

Saletta will primarily focus on alignment, enablement and demand generation for Deep Instinct’s partners. Over the course of his nearly 25 years in technology, Saletta has held a variety of sales and channel leadership positions for companies including NetApp, Bay Dynamics and, most recently, SecurityScorecard. There, he was senior director of national channels.

“The key to our channel success in fiscal year 2023 and beyond will be based on our ability to help our partners, and ultimately their customers, see how much more efficient and effective deep learning is at stopping ransomware and other malware versus machine learning,” he said. “Extended detection and response (EDR) is just not enough to properly protect a customer’s environment.”

New MSSP Program

Deep Instinct’s Joe Santamorena

Santamorena will build an MSSP program driving value and prevention for MSSPs and their customers. Prior to Deep Instinct, he held several leadership sales and GTM positions at companies such as NetApp, UiPath and most recently, SecurityScorecard. There, he was vice president of sales, Americas commercial.

“We have aggressive growth plans for our new GTM channel strategy,” he said. “And I’m looking forward to formalizing our full program over the next couple of months.”

Distributor Relationships

Deep Instinct’s Phanneth Wood

Wood will cultivate, build and lead relationships with both global and regional distributors. She brings more than 18 years of experience in strategic channel sales and operations. Most recently, she was Okta’s senior manager of global distribution. Before that, she was distribution business manager at Palo Alto Networks.

“I’m excited to be working with Deep Instinct’s distribution partners who are visionaries in helping us bring the world’s most advanced prevention platform to more resellers, customers and prospects around the world,” she said. “Scalability is all about reach, going further and faster. And distribution is the definition of force multipliers and scale in the channel. By optimizing Deep Instinct’s distribution partnerships, it will only help us to go farther, together.”

Google Cloud has undergone a lot of change since the beginning of this year, especially in terms of the idea of ecosystem and channel.

Notably, Kevin Ichhpurani replaced Carolee Gearhart as channel chief. His title, unlike Gearhart’s, contains that vital “ecosystem and channel” reference.

At the same time, Google Cloud made a commitment to combine its “ecosystem and channel sales teams into a single partner organization to bring a more streamlined go-to-market approach for our partners and customers.”

That was the word from Ichhpurani in January, when he further discussed Google Cloud’s plans to “more than double our spend” on partners over the next few years. Those efforts include more resources, incentives, co-marketing funds, and training and enablement as the world’s third-largest public cloud provider shifts toward an ecosystem mindset. This change holds industry-wide implications, something we’re exploring for upcoming coverage.

Google Cloud’s Jim Anderson

Still, Channel Futures wanted to better understand Google Cloud’s efforts to bring partners and direct teams together. To that end, we secured a Q&A with Jim Anderson. Anderson serves as managing director of the North America partner ecosystem and channels at Google Cloud.

Take a stroll through our slideshow above for our chat with Anderson to learn more about what recent ecosystem and channel changes at Google Cloud mean for partners.

Only halfway through the week, the cloud computing sector is exploding with news. For starters, Google Cloud has come out swinging with an avalanche of announcements. Look for deals with consultancy Dun & Bradstreet, Ingram Micro Cloud and a milestone achievement with managed service provider Softchoice.

All of those tidbits underscore that Google Cloud, still the world’s third-largest public cloud provider, is making good on its goals to gain market share against Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. It might even make a profit (the company to date remains unprofitable and executives seem less inclined to worry about that than they are to act on vision.)

Google Cloud has been making much of its headway through its indirect channel relationships. The company has appointed a new channel chief, Kevin Ichhpurani, to guide that strategy. It’s also consolidating its direct and indirect sales into one organization. (Recall that Carolee Gearhart has left the vendor after a little more than three years.) In fact, we have a Q&A forthcoming with Jim Anderson, who now leads Google Cloud’s direct sales teams. We’ll have that for you soon.

In the meantime, though, IBM has some application modernization intentions via its IBM Z as a service on IBM Cloud. This concerns the hybrid cloud. Next, MSP Ensono has achieved a cloud milestone with Microsoft Azure. And fellow MSP Thirdera, which specializes in ServiceNow, has launched a platform partners can use. Finally, Oracle Cloud has secured – no pun intended – U.S. Department of Defense approval to process sensitive Air Force data. That’s significant, given that few cloud providers hold such high-level permissions.

Finally, we already covered Akamai Technologies’ pending acquisition of Linode — read that here. As a quick recap, though, Akamai is buying the independent cloud computing provider for $900 million in cash. We’re still working to find out what this deal means for the indirect channel, since Akamai targets large enterprises and Linode aims more at smaller businesses, often through managed service providers.

Check out all the cloud computing news you need to know, in the slideshow above.