Category Archives for "Managed Services News"

A new Admin Center is at the center of the ServiceNow Tokyo release, the company’s semiannual Now platform update. ServiceNow, which started rolling out the Tokyo update to its platform last week, has added over 100 new features.

The ServiceNow Tokyo release also introduces a new Manager Hub, added automation capabilities and upgraded IT service management (ITSM) resources. Additionally, ServiceNow has added new field service management and improved many of the platform’s human resources features.

ServiceNow focused on enhancing its visualization and automation capabilities using advances in AI with the Tokyo release. Dave Wright, ServiceNow’s chief innovation officer, told Channel Futures that the new Admin Center will enable its MSPs partners to visualize conditions and map scenarios. ServiceNow added the first modules for MSPs in March with its spring release, called San Diego.

For customers, Wright said the new release offers more visibility of costs, a feature driven by the rise in inflation. Wright said customers have also requested improved supply chain visibility and compliance with mounting regulations.

According to Wright, the Admin Center also provides improved visualization of the platform’s ITSM and business services management capabilities.

“It provides a single screen that sits in the instance and allows them to go in and see everything,” Wright said. “It provides a single screen that allows administrators to go in and see everything they’ve got rights. Based on that, what we can do is we can look at how the system is behaving.”

A view of 13 noteworthy features in the ServiceNow Tokyo release appears in the gallery above.

SolarWinds channel partners have a new global leader. The company has hired Chad Reese, previously with VMware and IBM, as president of Americas sales and global channel.

SolarWinds’ Chad Reese

Reese has 25 years of experience serving in leadership positions at IBM and most recently VMware. He now leads sales at SolarWinds for the enterprise, midmarket and SMB markets, and the public sector in the Americas. He’s responsible for the company’s global channel ecosystem.

At VMware, Reese was global head of worldwide sales, commercial. There, he led his extended sales teams to drive billions in bookings worldwide.

“It’s exciting to join the talented SolarWinds team during this time of positive momentum as the company executes its growth strategy focused on delivering platform-based technologies to accelerate business transformation,” he said. “With a large, loyal global customer install base, a strong, historical renewal rate, an outstanding solution portfolio and roadmap, and a highly experienced senior leadership team, we’re well positioned for growth.”

Building a ‘Sales Engine’ with SolarWinds Channel Partners

Reese said his objective with SolarWinds channel partners is to build a “scalable, repeatable sales engine across all routes to market.”

“And I’m excited to leverage my deep channel experience to work closely with our extended ecosystem to drive customer success globally,” he said. “We have an amazing opportunity to make a difference in the marketplace. And I look forward to partnering with our teams to drive the company’s next phase of growth.”

While at IBM, Reese served as the company’s vice president of cloud and SaaS for North America. Before that, he led the IBM channel business in Europe as vice president of the business partner organization. He was responsible for driving billions in revenue across the company’s extended partner ecosystem.

Andrea Webb is SolarWinds‘ executive vice president and chief customer officer. She said Reese is a “proven sales leader” with experience serving multiple market segments around the world. He’ll be a “vital addition to our team as our model evolves and we execute our growth strategy.”

“We look forward to the impact he’ll make on our business,” she said.

TD Synnex just released its third-quarter fiscal 2022 results. The company, formerly known as Synnex Corporation, changed its name after the acquisition of Tech Data Corp. back in September of 2021. Since this merger, TD Synnex has realized significant financial growth.

TD Synnex held a conference call with investors on Tuesday, the company’s third fiscal quarter 2022 financial analyst meeting. Hume stated that the year since TD Synnex was formed has validated the value proposition that led to the merger.

Financial Growth

For the fiscal third quarter, the company reported revenues between $14.5 billion and $15.5 billion. The Zacks Consensus Estimate for quarterly revenues comes in at $15.11 billion. This indicates a tremendous 190.2% jump from the prior-year period.

TD Synnex’s Rich Hume

“The strength of our combined organization was evident in fiscal Q3, as our teams once again demonstrated solid execution, with revenue growth and increased profitability in an uncertain macroeconomic environment,” said Rich Hume, CEO of TD Synnex. “During our first year together as TD Synnex, we made significant progress on our merger integration, exceeding our targets for non-GAAP EPS accretion and cost synergy attainment. The rationale for our merger is even stronger today than one year ago, and we believe that we are well-positioned to continue raising the bar on the value we bring to our customers, vendors, and shareholders.”

Contributing Factors

According to Yahoo! Finance, the jump in demand for hardware and tools, which support hybrid working, is guessed to have boosted TD Synnex’s revenues during the quarter. This burgeoning hybrid working trend has been driving the sales of software, communication, networking, consumer electronic products, etc. Such demand likely contributed to TD Synnex’s top line in the fiscal third quarter.

This trend, along with the upped usage of online and e-commerce services, has been fanning the need/demand for cloud storage and services. As a result, data center operators are leaning in, bolstering their capacities to accommodate the demand spike. Because of this, TD Synnex’s data center servers and storage solution businesses nudged up in the fiscal third quarter.

The newly merged Tech Data Corporation business also likely had an impact on TD Synnex’s third-quarter performance. Rapid digital transformation has led to an upward tick on IT spend, also likely boosting the company’s top line. This is seemingly despite potentially diminishing aspects, such as supply chain and foreign exchange issues.

TD Synnex has also gone ahead and released its current expectations for the fiscal 2022 fourth quarter. 

“Non-GAAP financial measures exclude the impact of acquisition, integration and restructuring costs, amortization of intangible assets, share-based compensation, purchase accounting adjustments, and the related tax effects thereon. These statements are forward-looking and actual results may differ materially,” stated the company.

Fourth Quarter Fiscal 2022 Outlook

• Revenue expectation is in the range of $15.2 billion to $16.2 billion.
• Net income expectation is in the range of $138 million to $177 million. On a non-GAAP basis, the net income expectation is in the range of $259 million to $298 million.
• Diluted earnings per share expectation: in the range of $1.44 to $1.84. On a non-GAAP basis, diluted earnings per share is expected to be in the range of $2.70 to $3.10. This is based on estimated outstanding diluted weighted average shares of 95.2 million.

At Trellix Xpand Live 2022, Trellix‘s first conference since forming early this year, the company unveiled its new partner program aimed at increasing profitability, engagement and growth across its global partner ecosystem.

Trellix Xpand Live is taking place this week in Las Vegas. The company stems from the previously announced merger of McAfee Enterprise and FireEye last October. STG acquired both companies last year.

Launching in early 2023, the Trellix Xtend program is tailored to each partner’s business model and target market. It’s aimed at delivering stronger customer outcomes.

Key aspects of the revamped partner program will include:

• A sales training curriculum for the new Trellix extended detection and response (XDR) platform.
• Demand creation support to accelerate customer engagement, increase deal registration and build sales pipeline.
• Playbooks so partners can build their own managed services and incident response offerings.

Trellix’s Britt Norwood

Britt Norwood is Trellix’s senior vice president of global channels and commercial.

“Our unified partner program, Xtend, continues to reinforce our priority as a channel-first business,” he said. “We co-developed the Xtend program with our partners to create the right business model for deploying Trellix XDR. Partners can count on Trellix to help drive profitability for our partners and reward partner value.”

Trellix also announced the expansion of its XDR platform. Trellix XDR enables the company’s more than 40,000 customers to build morecyber resiliency, maximize the value of their existing security tools, and reduce mean time to detection and response.

Decades of Solving Customer Problems with McAfee, FireEye

During his keynote, Trellix CEO Bryan Palma (pictured above onstage at Trellis Xpand) said his company is focused on “how we can solve your problems.”

“We’ve had an opportunity to bring two great companies together and we’re not going to miss any of that greatness,” he said. “We’re proven. and we’re profitable. We are making the right investments and know what to invest in.”

Palma said the fact that he was once a CISO means he’s been a customer and “truly” understands customers’ missions.

“We are building this company how I would have wanted a vendor to build and sell to me,” he said.

Trellix recently surveyed 9,000 cybersecurity professions and Palma said he’s had a lot of listening opportunities being a new CEO.

“I feel like we’ve never had better insight as a company that we do now,” he said.

Four things are driving Trellix’s strategy, Palma said. Those are:

• Nation-states attacking private companies.
• The expanding attack surface.
• Targeted threats taking over.
• Overwhelmed security teams.

While ransomware attacks on big companies make the news, ransomware is “crushing downmarket,” Palma said. In addition, another concern is increasing bounty creation to get employees to give up company information.

The good news, Palma said, isTrellix has had “decades of solving problems” because of its origins with McAfee and FireEye.

“We got on this concept of living security that’s adaptable, flexible and helps you become more resilient,” he said. “The X in Trellix is XDR. We want to be the XDR market leader. This took bringing back customer and partner advisory boards, listening and developing roadmaps, something the other companies hadn’t done in awhile.”

In the coming months, Trellix will be focused on providing more automation in cybersecurity, Palma said. This will involve increasing machine learning (ML) for focused automated protection.

“We have to make real progress in automation,” he said. “We’re not going to become all automated, but we have to advance.”

Distirbutor Jenne and SD-WAN/SASE provider Aryaka teamed up to expand their technology portfolio and sales footprint, respectively.

The newly announced agreement brings together Jenne, a value-added technology and cloud services distributor, and Aryaka, a managed SD-WAN and SASE provider. Jenne’s roster of agent, MSP and reseller partners can now earn compensation for providing Aryaka’s technology to customers.

Jenne’s Sal LoSchiavo

“Jenne is excited to be engaging with Aryaka and introducing their SD-WAN and SASE solutions to our sales partners. Our joint business customers will benefit from Aryaka’s tiered support model as they transition to hybrid work environments and switch from on-premises to cloud-focused networks,” said Sal LoSchiavo, Jenne’s vice president of sales.

Aryaka built a reputation in the channel as an SD-WAN provider that actually provided its own private network backbone. However, the company expanded its portfolio last year to give partners a range of options that span from SMB-focused managed SD-WAN to enterprise-focused managed SASE (secure access service edge). Aryaka acquired Secucloud in order to gain cybersecurity capabilities it could integrate into its platform.

Dual-Nature

Interestingly, both companies take a hybrid approach in terms of accommodating both the agent and reseller partner models. Agents earn their living through recurring commissions on technology that the vendor bills and services (though some agents are moving toward owning the billing). On the other hand, resellers sell through a one-time, margin-based transaction and own the billing and services (although some resellers are moving toward an op-ex model).

Aryaka kicked off its Accelerate program last year with initiatives serving technology services distributors (formerly master agents) and their agent partners. Then in January the vendor expanded its program to better accommodate VARs, MSPs and distributors.

Aryaka’s Matt Thompson

“We’re thrilled to partner with an industry leader like Jenne,” said Matt Thompson, Aryaka’s vice president of channel sales. “Our new relationship taps into the extensive Jenne partner network, increasing our reach and end-customer touch-points. Enterprises being served by Jenne’s agents receive a one-stop shop for all their cloud services needs and can take advantage of next-generation cloud solutions like Aryaka’s cloud-first SD-WAN and SASE services.”

Jenne’s portfolio has expanded significantly in the last year, with vendors like Zoom, Talkdesk and Broadvoice signing agreements. It also hired a senior vice president of global cloud channel sales.

Jenne operates out of Avon, Ohio. Aryaka, on the other hand, hails from San Mateo, California.

Pathlock has acquired Grey Monarch, a U.K.-based specialist SAP partner focused on SAP process automation.

The combination of Pathlock and Grey Monarch will help SAP customers streamline audit, compliance and control processes. Pathlock isn’t disclosing financial details regarding the deal.

This acquisition comes after Pathlock in May announced it secured $200 million in new funding, and merged with Appsian and Security Weaver. In addition, it acquired CSI Tools and Sast Solutions.

Since 2008, Grey Monarch has developed expertise in SAP security, segregation of duties, SAP licence optimization, SAP background processing automation and secure managed file transfer. With this acquisition, the SAP community will benefit from SAP process automation advice, implementation skills, and software and training capabilities. It will also gain improving levels of security.

Securing Sensitive Financial and Customer Data

Pathlock’s Piyush Pandey

Piyush Pandey is Pathlock’s CEO.

“We’re thrilled to complete the acquisition of Grey Monarch,” he said. “We continue to see a strong demand for our globally recognized application security and controls automation solutions, and know that with Grey Monarch’s specialization in SAP process automation, we can continue to enable our global customers to revolutionize the way they secure their sensitive financial and customer data.”

David Lloyd is Grey Monarch’s director and co-founder.

“It’s now more imperative than ever for organizations to utilize a holistic view of user access and privileges so they can be managed, monitored and controlled to ensure the maximum protection of data, business processes and intellectual property,” he said. “Combining Grey Monarch’s capabilities with the Pathlock family of expertise, resources and product portfolio will provide our customers, existing and new, with an unsurpassed visibility into their business applications.”

Pathlock has successfully doubled in size in terms of revenue and employees. It’s now servicing over 1,400 customers across all major industries on a global scale. It has offices across the United States, Belgium, the United Kingdom, Germany, Israel and India.

The technology advisor space, also known as the agent channel, is seeing a constant stream of financial transactions.

The agent partner model continues to grow its adoption with vendors and customers. In the meantime, investors are showing more interest in partners than ever, and agents are making moves ensure their long-term financial stability. They might need the capital to scale or in many cases need a retirement option. Some agents are joining private equity-fueled rollups with their peers. Others are making one-off moves to buy or be bought by a fellow agent. Still, others are accepting financing or “partner” status from their distribution partner.

All three types of deals occurred in the last month. The first story involves Upstack, which on Tuesday added to its list of agent acquisition. The second story, announced last Friday, involves Minnesota-based Renodis purchasing Pennsylvania-based Eric Ryan Corporation. The third story doesn’t land in the proper category of M&A, but it involves Bridgepointe Technologies putting its investment from Charlesbank Capital Partners to good use.

Go through the images above to see the latest agent-related M&A.

Managed service providers (MSPs) have reason to be optimistic as tech spending remains strong going into 2023.

The Spiceworks Ziff Davis (SWZD) 2023 State of IT report explores IT budget plans and tech trends. Despite widespread recession fears, it shows tech spending in North America and Europe is on course to grow by 13% year-over-year (YoY).

Spiceworks’ Peter Tsai

Additionally, Peter Tsai, head of technology insights at SWZD, said businesses will “shift more of their budgets towards managed services.”

Firms will look to managed services to maintain and optimize technology stacks amid difficulties in hiring IT talent. “Expected spending on managed services will rise to 18% of total IT budgets in 2023, up from 15% before the pandemic,” he explained.

The largest share goes to managed business applications, managed security, managed hosting, and managed hardware support and maintenance.

“This shift is good news for MSPs,” said Tsai. “Especially those with offerings in high-growth areas such as managed security services.”

Firms with managed IT services budget increased from 8% in 2021 to an expected 11% in 2023. Budget for managed business applications grew from 9% in 2021 vs 11% in 2023.

While 83% of businesses are concerned about a recession in 2023, 51% plan to increase their overall IT budgets in 2023. This is compared to a narrow 6% that plan to reduce their tech spend.

The report highlights the need to update infrastructure and increased priority on IT projects as primary drivers for budget increases.

Click on the slideshow above to discover more findings on future B2B tech adoption and tech spending plans.

Jacques Lopez

Secure software is a growing priority for organizations. In fact, the application security market is projected to reach $22.6 billion by 2026, up from $5.5 billion in 2019* This represents a significant opportunity for partners looking to build their practices and establish themselves for future success.

It’s an increasingly crowded market for partners. So how can they enhance their position and achieve sustainable growth? To optimize performance across core functional areas of the business through strategic partnerships with application security vendors, partners should consider three key principles.

#1 – Achieve Go-to-Market Alignment

A successful partnership begins with a mutually developed and agreed-upon go-to-market plan that benefits both parties. This plan becomes the framework, which directs marketing activities and identifies the milestones for success. Subsequently, alignment between teams throughout the planning process, with buy-in at the executive leadership level, is crucial.

Partners and vendors should identify goals and objectives that leverage shared resources to optimize marketing efforts and drive sales pipeline. It’s important to ensure the results of the campaign are in alignment with a “win” for both sides. This helps set the correct priorities for focus.

Agreement upon key metrics and performance indicators to measure success and highlight customer wins serves as validation of the “Better Together” story. Staying focused on priorities will ensure team collaboration throughout the customer journey from initial lead identification, qualification, discovery, trial, and adoption. Quarterly business reviews help identify what is working well, along with areas for improvement and future marketing investment.

#2 – Enable Teams to Be Successful in Their Efforts

A vendor’s partner program must include a comprehensive team enablement program that builds skills and knowledge, as well as providing best practices to streamline and optimize processes. This can be accomplished by implementing a role-based training and certification program that delivers ongoing education and access to security competencies aligned to industry requirements. A role-based training program should feature curriculum paths that provide updated content for sales, marketing, technical, and services teams to deliver the most pertinent information to the right people at the right time.

These best practices should be reinforced through customized, ongoing tools and resources to drive self-sufficiency, allowing partners to internalize the vendor story and apply it to their role in the organization. The result: partners benefit from an enablement program that is repeatable and scalable, educates the team, and improves ability to leverage the vendor story as appropriate for their business model. Partner teams will, in turn, become subject matter experts for their vendor’s solutions and earn trusted advisor status with customers to build long-term relationships.

#3 – Ensure Ongoing Engagement and Collaboration

Partner management teams should engage regularly with their vendor peers to leverage key solution updates and market insights. This can help improve overall win rates, identify expansion opportunities, and continue integration of the vendor in their customer value proposition. Having access to regular vendor product roadmap updates enables the team to understand the vendor product vision and strategy, along with their differentiators in the market, improving their ability to sell against competitors.

Partners should leverage surveys, advisory boards, focus groups, partner conferences, and regular meetups to share ideas and recommendations with their vendor. For application security vendors, the goal is to capture real-time feedback—with partners representing the voice of the customer—to gain a better understanding of emerging market requirements. This gives the vendor a chance to incorporate feedback into future product planning discussions, leading to greater customer value.

To maximize their market reach (application security platform + partner application security services + technology integration partner solutions), partners should also capitalize on the full suite of solution functionality and capabilities available in their vendor’s entire partner ecosystem. Application security can be a complicated landscape and this alignment is important to mutual understanding of the differentiators and value created through this “better together” story. Account mapping sessions with the vendor then become much more focused and the paths to provide customer value begin to surface more organically.

Better Together

For partners, there is immense potential to grow their AppSec security practices over the next few years. By working closely with their application security vendor, they can harness the power of the entire technology stack. Partners should view their vendors as strategic allies and look beyond their solution offerings to realize the full potential of their investments. Adopting a teaming approach in these technology partnerships paves the way for ongoing success. In the words of Henry Ford, “If everyone is moving forward together, then success takes care of itself.”

Jacques Lopez leads the Veracode North American Channel team with a focus on aligning its top-tier application security technologies to partner’s security portfolios. You can follow him on LinkedIn.

Hurricane Ian is expected to become a Category 4 hurricane before its Florida landfall this week. Officials in Hillsborough County, where Tampa is located, ordered more than 300,000 residents along its coastal regions to evacuate Monday. They also recommended a voluntary evacuation of an adjoining area.

Hillsborough Emergency Management Director Tim Dudley told a group of reporters that, “this is not a drill.”

For Tampa Bay businesses in the channel, preparations began long ago for the possibility of a major storm. Although Tampa hasn’t experienced a catastrophic hurricane in 100 years, large companies located in Florida are often well equipped for natural disasters.

ReliaQuest’s Brian Murphy

Brian Murphy is CEO and founder of Tampa-based ReliaQuest.

“ReliaQuest closed its Tampa offices Monday at 12 p.m. through Friday of this week,” he said. “Because of our global footprint with five operating centers outside of Tampa, we can operate normally without disruption to our customer base. Our first priority is always the safety of our people, and we continue to focus on that through the storm.” Murphy said.

Murphy added that the company’s architecture is designed to not be dependent on a single geography. This is to protect against natural disasters, power disruptions and other catastrophes to the highest extent possible. Additionally, Murphy said the technology will always matter less than the impact on the people trying to shelter in place or evacuate.

Keeping Businesses Running

TD Synnex’s Bobby Eagle

Bobby Eagle is director, external communications for TD Synnex. He said the company’s Clearwater headquarters’ building will be closed through the duration of the storm. It will remain closed until it is deemed safe by authorities to reopen.

Like ReliaQuest, TD Synnex will depend on its business network to avoid interruptions the hurricane might cause to the company.

“We have in place business continuity plans and teams strategically located across the Americas to ensure minimal impact on our business and the service we provide. We also have backup power for our infrastructure in Clearwater and the ability to transition operations based there from backup locations in other states,” Eagle said.

He added: “The TD Synnex crisis management team continues to closely monitor the progress of Hurricane Ian with the safety of our co-workers and continuity of service to our vendors and customers as our top priorities. We will continue to communicate proactively with our co-workers, vendors and customers as the situation develops.”

Out-of-State Infrastructure

ConnectOn’s Unnar Thor Gardarsson

Unnar Thor Gardarsson is CEO of ConnectOn, a 40-year-old MSP based in Tampa. He said the longevity of his company has meant they have had many years to lay out contingency plans for times of disaster.

For example, the company utilizes out-of-state data centers for computing specifically because of Florida’s risk of hurricanes.

“I suppose the advantage that we have our is that our infrastructure is hosted out of the state,” Gardarsson said. “Obviously, some of our customers have locations outside of Tampa. They’re going to be able to continue business as usual and work with our systems and we’ll be able to monitor and respond to tickets.”

That may not be the case for other MSPs in Tampa who rely on Florida-based data centers. Gardarsson estimates that at least 50% have all their assets located in Tampa.

“There are a lot of MSPs in this area, and a lot of them are smaller. So, they’re not going to have the infrastructure, the ability to pay for the kind of infrastructure, that’s needed to have the type of support that we’re talking about,” Gardarsson said.

ConnectOn sent staff outside of Florida to work in anticipation of the storm. As for those in Tampa, they plan to communicate through SMS and even radio communications if they need to during Hurricane Ian.

Preparedness and Protocols

ConnectWise’s Jason Magee

Jason Magee is CEO of Tampa-based software provider ConnectWise. The company is using its network of global offices to keep partners up and running securely during the storm. Internally, the company has protocols in place to ensure the safety of employees located in the path of the storm.

“Emergency preparedness is a core component of a resilient security posture,” said Magee. “ConnectWise has activated our own backup resources to manage impacts from the storm and ensure our partners feel as little impact to their services as possible. We’ve also increased our product support for partners in the potential path of the storm: granting expanded Help Desk resources and up to 10 free licenses of ConnectWise Control throughout the duration of the storm and recovery period.

“Internally, we always put our colleagues’ safety first. We are regularly communicating with our colleagues to ensure they’re aware of protocols during and after the storm. The beauty of a having a global team is the ability to lean on one another when an issue arises; per usual, ConnectWise colleagues are already doing just that!”