Category Archives for "Managed Services News"

As we face into the winds of Q4, M&A activity appears to still be hot, despite whispers of a slowdown. 

Private equity firms and other investors are seeing the value of the channel like never before. Indeed, 2021 was the most active year for M&A in the history of such transactions. 2022 was no exception. 

However, it will be interesting to see what happens as organizations analyze their businesses headed into 2023. Will mergers and acquisitions continue to flourish? Or will providers pump the brakes?

Deals over the last few months have spanned the gamut, from names like Valeo and Magna5 to players such as GoodSuite and GoTo.

Scroll through the images above to see a sampling of the latest mergers and acquisitions and investment deals in the IT/MSP channel in 2022.

Trellix threat intelligence leader John Fokker expects cybercriminals to take advantage of Hurricane Ian‘s devastation in Florida and other states much the same way they did during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Trellix’s John Fokker

Fokker, Trellix’s head of threat intelligence and principal engineer, spoke during this week’s Trellix Xpand Live 2022 conference. He and Doug McKee, principal engineer and director of vulnerability research, detailed how the company helped law enforcement take down the notorious REvil ransomware gang. REvil was responsible for last year’s attack on Kaseya.

“We help catch bad people,” he said. “That’s what gets me going every day.”

During his career, Fokker has supervised numerous large-scale cybercrime investigations and takedowns. In addition, he’s one of the co-founders of the NoMoreRansom Project. The No More Ransom website is an initiative by the National High Tech Crime Unit of the Netherlands’ police, Europol’s European Cybercrime Centre, Kaspersky and McAfee. It helps victims of ransomware retrieve their encrypted data without having to pay the criminals.

Trellix Threat Intelligence Leads to Better Protection

We spoke with Fokker during Trellix Xpand Live to find out how threat intelligence is helping to protect organizations from cybercrime.

Channel Futures: Tell me about your work with Trellix’s Threat Intelligence Group and how does it lead to better cybersecurity for partners and customers?

John Fokker: I have the privilege to run a team with different types of analysts where we have commercial papers, and we have analysts that go out and hunt, collect and do research on threats out there in the world. So they use our telemetry, they use our products, but they also look at scanning the internet or disseminating third-party product blogs. We also have other vendors that come out with phenomenal research. We’ll look at it and we’ll validate it, and we’ll send it out to our customers. So that’s integrated in our work stream and that goes immediately to all the products. And we like to say we collect stuff that will really help the customer tackle the threat.

Now, there’s these threat actors. They move through a network. There’s multiple ways of doing so, and they use multiple tools. So our team identifies how the threat actor operates and we’ll try to find out ways of how they do it. This is what we can give. We can connect with the respective product teams and they’re like OK, can we build protection for this? And at the same time, we give intelligence to our customers. And this is product innovation. It was tied into the product. And at the same time, we also have an option where we have commercial opportunities. So if we have a customer that really wants to go in depth on threat intelligence or the other way around, they want threat intelligence, but they don’t have a whole team, we can help them out. We can support them with their assets.

Scroll through our slideshow for more from Fokker and more cybersecurity news.

Minnesota channel partner Renodis is using M&A to ramp up its competencies in 5G, hospitality and utilities, among other growth areas.

The St. Paul-based telecom and mobility management provider wrapped its fifth acquisition last week in the form of Eric Ryan Corporation. The 20-year-old company’s inorganic growth strategy first started in 2018 but has ramped up in 2022. The agency is planning to announce two more deals by the end of the year.

Renodis’ Craig Beason

“We don’t want to grow faster than we can handle,” Renodis CEO Craig Beason told Channel Futures. “We’ve got our eyes set on getting over $100 million dollars in top line revenue with a healthy EBITA to the bottom, and I think we have a good plan,”

Background

Beason founded the agency in 2002.  At the time he held no telecom experience, other than working in a carrier’s HR division. Nevertheless, Beason said he saw an opportunity to build a telecom service model. As he saw it, business customers would benefit from someone managing their POTS lines from install to end-of-life.

Twenty years ago telecom centered around frame relay, before MPLS came into the picture.

“Telecom’s not a sexy space for enterprise clients. It’s kind of a means to the ends – the janitorial component. I felt at the time that there was a message around building and managing the lifestyle stack of the services,” Beason said. “I felt like enterprises didn’t do a great job with it. Carriers didn’t do a good job supporting it. I thought that the enterprise market would pay to have an expert come in to manage the life cycle, as well as the advisory services that go with that.”

Life Cycle Management

More and more agents brand themselves as holistic providers of technology services. That means expanding beyond vendor sourcing to walking the client through the entire life of the technology. Beason said Renodis was one of the first firms to take this approach.

“I’ve always said that this is where it’s going to go. The customers and the carriers are going to require agents to do more than brokering the services. There’s a lot of value in brokering the services. But unfortunately, as the market and the climate get that much more competitive, you’ve got to be able to offer more value-added services around it,” he said.

However, building such a practice doesn’t occur overnight, Beason said.

“I can build a website overnight and say I do it, but it’s a lot more involved than just working off a spreadsheet. If you’re doing a small client and bill $50,000 a month, maybe you could pull it off. But when you get to the enterprise, they’re looking for just a different level of tool sets and products,” he said.

Beason and his team built the practice from the ground up. He was a newly married young man when he started Renodis. His pregnant wife had recently taken voluntary severance. Cash was scarce. Growth came slowly but surely.

“Every year, every extra dollar went right back into building out products, tools and hiring people to be able to slowly morph into that outsourced model,” he said.

Beason said Renodis spent 2009 to 2013 building its in-house technology to enable itself to fully manage telecom. At the end of that stretch, a CIO approached them about the offering. The CIO wanted to help Renodis make the platform “enterprise-ready.” Moreover, they wanted to become…

As we face into the winds of Q4, M&A activity appears to still be hot, despite whispers of a slowdown. 

Private equity firms and other investors are seeing the value of the channel like never before. Indeed, 2021 was the most active year for M&A in the history of such transactions. 2022 was no exception. 

However, it will be interesting to see what happens as organizations analyze their businesses headed into 2023. Will mergers and acquisitions continue to flourish? Or will providers pump the brakes?

Deals over the last few months have spanned the gamut, from names like Valeo and Magna5 to players such as GoodSuite and GoTo.

Scroll through the images above to see a sampling of the latest mergers and acquisitions and investment deals in the IT/MSP channel in 2022.

Minnesota channel partner Renodis is using M&A to ramp up its competencies in 5G, hospitality and utilities, among other growth areas.

The St. Paul-based telecom and mobility management provider wrapped its fifth acquisition last week in the form of Eric Ryan Corporation. The 20-year-old company’s inorganic growth strategy first started in 2018 but has ramped up in 2022. The agency is planning to announce two more deals by the end of the year.

Renodis’ Craig Beason

“We don’t want to grow faster than we can handle,” Renodis CEO Craig Beason told Channel Futures. “We’ve got our eyes set on getting over $100 million dollars in top line revenue with a healthy EBITA to the bottom, and I think we have a good plan,”

Background

Beason founded the agency in 2002.  At the time he held no telecom experience, other than working in a carrier’s HR division. Nevertheless, Beason said he saw an opportunity to build a telecom service model. As he saw it, business customers would benefit from someone managing their POTS lines from install to end-of-life.

Twenty years ago telecom centered around frame relay, before MPLS came into the picture.

“Telecom’s not a sexy space for enterprise clients. It’s kind of a means to the ends – the janitorial component. I felt at the time that there was a message around building and managing the lifestyle stack of the services,” Beason said. “I felt like enterprises didn’t do a great job with it. Carriers didn’t do a good job supporting it. I thought that the enterprise market would pay to have an expert come in to manage the life cycle, as well as the advisory services that go with that.”

Life Cycle Management

More and more agents brand themselves as holistic providers of technology services. That means expanding beyond vendor sourcing to walking the client through the entire life of the technology. Beason said Renodis was one of the first firms to take this approach.

“I’ve always said that this is where it’s going to go. The customers and the carriers are going to require agents to do more than brokering the services. There’s a lot of value in brokering the services. But unfortunately, as the market and the climate get that much more competitive, you’ve got to be able to offer more value-added services around it,” he said.

However, building such a practice doesn’t occur overnight, Beason said.

“I can build a website overnight and say I do it, but it’s a lot more involved than just working off a spreadsheet. If you’re doing a small client and bill $50,000 a month, maybe you could pull it off. But when you get to the enterprise, they’re looking for just a different level of tool sets and products,” he said.

Beason and his team built the practice from the ground up. He was a newly married young man when he started Renodis. His pregnant wife had recently taken voluntary severance. Cash was scarce. Growth came slowly but surely.

“Every year, every extra dollar went right back into building out products, tools and hiring people to be able to slowly morph into that outsourced model,” he said.

Beason said Renodis spent 2009 to 2013 building its in-house technology to enable itself to fully manage telecom. At the end of that stretch, a CIO approached them about the offering. The CIO wanted to help Renodis make the platform “enterprise-ready.” Moreover, they wanted to become…

As we face into the winds of Q4, M&A activity appears to still be hot, despite whispers of a slowdown. 

Private equity firms and other investors are seeing the value of the channel like never before. Indeed, 2021 was the most active year for M&A in the history of such transactions. 2022 was no exception. 

However, it will be interesting to see what happens as organizations analyze their businesses headed into 2023. Will mergers and acquisitions continue to flourish? Or will providers pump the brakes?

Deals over the last few months have spanned the gamut, from names like Valeo and Magna5 to players such as GoodSuite and GoTo.

Scroll through the images above to see a sampling of the latest mergers and acquisitions and investment deals in the IT/MSP channel in 2022.

Jeff Gustafson recently began his ninth year as an executive at Samsung Electronics America in the company’s enterprise mobile B2B business division. Gustafson is a mobile communications industry veteran having held positions at BlackBerry and AT&T, among others.

Samsung’s Jeff Gustafson

At Samsung, Gustafson’s focus was on direct sales to strategic customers including its largest, Walmart. Late last year, Samsung asked Gustafson to assume the role of director and head of national solution providers (NSPs). John Curtis, who led Samsung’s B2B channel organization for roughly one year, left the company last December.

According to Gustafson, the move was a natural evolution of his work leading Samsung Mobile’s direct enterprise sales. On the heels of several key launches, including the company’s new foldable phones and refresh of its rugged devices, Gustafson discussed with Channel Futures his new role, and the opportunities he sees for partners.

Channel Futures: How do you like working in the channel so far?

Jeff Gustafson: It’s a fun business. I’m definitely learning how our channel partners work. It’s interesting, because at Samsung, we redesigned the way we look at our reseller community. We have our NSPs of course, and we have what we call our strategic channel partners, which are named accounts. Those are some of the VARs and some of the bigger vertical-based resellers. And then our third bucket is our emerging partners. Those are resellers that haven’t been touched a lot by Samsung’s direct support. We’ve aligned to a team now that’s working directly with them to help identify new business for us, and to replicate and scale the things we’re doing with our other partners.

CF: What are you focusing on?

JG: We’re focusing on and how we want to repeat and scale some of our big wins. Last year, when I was on the direct sales side, I led the Walmart account team. In the middle of last year, we had won a deal with Walmart, where we deployed 740,000 XCover Pros to their associates. It’s what we call the connected associate project. It was really a unique use case where they took our devices and they gave them to the associates to use them at work, but then also for personal use. It’s helping create a more productive work environment, while at the same time making employees happier and giving them something when they leave. It was a massive win. Probably one of the largest mobile wins ever. But now we want to take that win and replicate it and tell that story across our business.

CF: How do you see replicating that through the channel?

JG: Their use case is something we want to take across the channel focusing on the connected associate. That can be connected associate in retail, manufacturing or food services, health care or just a connected worker. And that could be with a phone or a tablet. What makes it unique is how you wrap it with our solutions — our software and our services. We have our whole Knox suite, which the customer could use to enhance the device — they could lock down the device, they can have specific applications launch. We’re selling those full solutions as part of this connected associate project across multiple verticals. And then of course warranty and all the services that come with it.

CF: Why is that important to the channel?

JG: The connected associate project with Walmart wouldn’t have been successful unless we worked with our partners. Working with our partners, we aligned with them, which really helped make that deployment successful and it continues to be today.

CF: How much progress has Samsung made in the rugged device market?

JG: When you refer to Samsung, people think it’s a consumer play, and we are. But over the last five years-plus, we’ve done a really good job of telling the story of how we have taken our consumer devices into the enterprise world. Initially, we would just take our consumer devices, slap some Knox software on there, and we would say: ‘Here’s an enterprise solution.’ But today, with our rugged lineup, we are truly coming to the table with a unique B2B type offering and product.

CF: Did the pandemic have a big effect on the rugged business?

JG: We saw some unique use cases come out it, including spikes from different verticals that we wouldn’t have seen before. We’re doing extremely well within the health care right now. Rugged is over 50% of our tablet business right now within mobile B2B here in the U.S. But what we’re starting to see, and a market analyst shared this with us, is that end users are spending more on the device, but total unit sales are going down. What that tells us is there’s a big opportunity to sell our premium rugged devices.  We’re not seeing a lot of value series or lower cost-type tablets sell as much as we’re seeing with our higher ASP tablets. Earlier this year, we launched our Tab S 8 Series tablets, which is our premium tablet, and it’s a huge focus for Samsung. We’re investing more, we’re retraining and refocusing on it with our partners, because that’s where we see the biggest growth market.

Minnesota channel partner Renodis is using M&A to ramp up its competencies in 5G, hospitality and utilities, among other growth areas.

The St. Paul-based telecom and mobility management provider wrapped its fifth acquisition last week in the form of Eric Ryan Corporation. The 20-year-old company’s inorganic growth strategy first started in 2018 but has ramped up in 2022. The agency is planning to announce two more deals by the end of the year.

Renodis’ Craig Beason

“We don’t want to grow faster than we can handle,” Renodis CEO Craig Beason told Channel Futures. “We’ve got our eyes set on getting over $100 million dollars in top line revenue with a healthy EBITA to the bottom, and I think we have a good plan,”

Background

Beason founded the agency in 2002.  At the time he held no telecom experience, other than working in a carrier’s HR division. Nevertheless, Beason said he saw an opportunity to build a telecom service model. As he saw it, business customers would benefit from someone managing their POTS lines from install to end-of-life.

Twenty years ago telecom centered around frame relay, before MPLS came into the picture.

“Telecom’s not a sexy space for enterprise clients. It’s kind of a means to the ends – the janitorial component. I felt at the time that there was a message around building and managing the lifestyle stack of the services,” Beason said. “I felt like enterprises didn’t do a great job with it. Carriers didn’t do a good job supporting it. I thought that the enterprise market would pay to have an expert come in to manage the life cycle, as well as the advisory services that go with that.”

Life Cycle Management

More and more agents brand themselves as holistic providers of technology services. That means expanding beyond vendor sourcing to walking the client through the entire life of the technology. Beason said Renodis was one of the first firms to take this approach.

“I’ve always said that this is where it’s going to go. The customers and the carriers are going to require agents to do more than brokering the services. There’s a lot of value in brokering the services. But unfortunately, as the market and the climate get that much more competitive, you’ve got to be able to offer more value-added services around it,” he said.

However, building such a practice doesn’t occur overnight, Beason said.

“I can build a website overnight and say I do it, but it’s a lot more involved than just working off a spreadsheet. If you’re doing a small client and bill $50,000 a month, maybe you could pull it off. But when you get to the enterprise, they’re looking for just a different level of tool sets and products,” he said.

Beason and his team built the practice from the ground up. He was a newly married young man when he started Renodis. His pregnant wife had recently taken voluntary severance. Cash was scarce. Growth came slowly but surely.

“Every year, every extra dollar went right back into building out products, tools and hiring people to be able to slowly morph into that outsourced model,” he said.

Beason said Renodis spent 2009 to 2013 building its in-house technology to enable itself to fully manage telecom. At the end of that stretch, a CIO approached them about the offering. The CIO wanted to help Renodis make the platform “enterprise-ready.” Moreover, they wanted to become…

As we face into the winds of Q4, M&A activity appears to still be hot, despite whispers of a slowdown. 

Private equity firms and other investors are seeing the value of the channel like never before. Indeed, 2021 was the most active year for M&A in the history of such transactions. 2022 was no exception. 

However, it will be interesting to see what happens as organizations analyze their businesses headed into 2023. Will mergers and acquisitions continue to flourish? Or will providers pump the brakes?

Deals over the last few months have spanned the gamut, from names like Valeo and Magna5 to players such as GoodSuite and GoTo.

Scroll through the images above to see a sampling of the latest mergers and acquisitions and investment deals in the IT/MSP channel in 2022.

Minnesota channel partner Renodis is using M&A to ramp up its competencies in 5G, hospitality and utilities, among other growth areas.

The St. Paul-based telecom and mobility management provider wrapped its fifth acquisition last week in the form of Eric Ryan Corporation. The 20-year-old company’s inorganic growth strategy first started in 2018 but has ramped up in 2022. The agency is planning to announce two more deals by the end of the year.

Renodis’ Craig Beason

“We don’t want to grow faster than we can handle,” Renodis CEO Craig Beason told Channel Futures. “We’ve got our eyes set on getting over $100 million dollars in top line revenue with a healthy EBITA to the bottom, and I think we have a good plan,”

Background

Beason founded the agency in 2002.  At the time he held no telecom experience, other than working in a carrier’s HR division. Nevertheless, Beason said he saw an opportunity to build a telecom service model. As he saw it, business customers would benefit from someone managing their POTS lines from install to end-of-life.

Twenty years ago telecom centered around frame relay, before MPLS came into the picture.

“Telecom’s not a sexy space for enterprise clients. It’s kind of a means to the ends – the janitorial component. I felt at the time that there was a message around building and managing the lifestyle stack of the services,” Beason said. “I felt like enterprises didn’t do a great job with it. Carriers didn’t do a good job supporting it. I thought that the enterprise market would pay to have an expert come in to manage the life cycle, as well as the advisory services that go with that.”

Life Cycle Management

More and more agents brand themselves as holistic providers of technology services. That means expanding beyond vendor sourcing to walking the client through the entire life of the technology. Beason said Renodis was one of the first firms to take this approach.

“I’ve always said that this is where it’s going to go. The customers and the carriers are going to require agents to do more than brokering the services. There’s a lot of value in brokering the services. But unfortunately, as the market and the climate get that much more competitive, you’ve got to be able to offer more value-added services around it,” he said.

However, building such a practice doesn’t occur overnight, Beason said.

“I can build a website overnight and say I do it, but it’s a lot more involved than just working off a spreadsheet. If you’re doing a small client and bill $50,000 a month, maybe you could pull it off. But when you get to the enterprise, they’re looking for just a different level of tool sets and products,” he said.

Beason and his team built the practice from the ground up. He was a newly married young man when he started Renodis. His pregnant wife had recently taken voluntary severance. Cash was scarce. Growth came slowly but surely.

“Every year, every extra dollar went right back into building out products, tools and hiring people to be able to slowly morph into that outsourced model,” he said.

Beason said Renodis spent 2009 to 2013 building its in-house technology to enable itself to fully manage telecom. At the end of that stretch, a CIO approached them about the offering. The CIO wanted to help Renodis make the platform “enterprise-ready.” Moreover, they wanted to become…