Category: News

It is a great time to be an MSP

MSP Datto has announced several key leadership positions including a new Chief Sales Officer, Managing Director of Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA), and Customer Experience Officer (CXO).

Sanjay Singh was named as Chief Sales Officer. Singh brings more than 20 years of operational and general management experience and is focused on growing the business across the globe.

Rubrik sent to Coventry

Rubrik, the Cloud Data Management company, today announced it had been selected by Coventry University to protect its user and research data across Nutanix, Microsoft and AWS environments.

The university will use Rubrik Polaris, the industry’s first SaaS platform for Data Management Applications, which includes GPS for global data management and Radar for quick ransomware recovery.

Sports proving a channel opportunity

Sports are becoming a lucrative field for vendors as venues searching for new and inventive ways to attract fans to events and engage them during games through digital technology.

According to Extreme Networks, there is a pile of technology that a digitalised sports event needs and venues could be just waiting for the right pitch.

John Brams, Director, Hospitality, Sports and Entertainment, Extreme Networks said: “Mobile connectivity is at the heart of today’s game day experience. If you don’t design your network with the ‘second screen’ in mind, your fans won’t stay ‘fans’ for long.”

HPE’s entire portfolio will be as service by 2022

Former maker of expensive printer ink HPE has promised to offer its entire product portfolio as a service by 2022.

The vendor said the move is part of its “transition into an as-a-service company”, in a move which will let customers buy on a consumption basis through its GreenLake offering.

DXC opens London innovation centre

 

DXC has opened a new innovation centre in central London and hopes that it will bring in other partners and solve customer digital transformation problems.

The firm is keen to take a collaborative approach and claims it is open minded about working with vendors, SIs and other channel partners that can come in with the skills needed to meet the needs of users. It has been expanding innovation centres across the globe, usually based close to key customers in capital cities, and officially launched the London offering this afternoon.

Ginger dog pairs with Selenity for HR health

Finance and HR cloud technology outfit Selenity has signed a partnership agreement with organisational development experts Ginger Dog.

 

The idea is that Ginger Dog’s approach to organisation health and Selenity’s cloud products could offer businesses a way to reduce their number of employee relations cases and create a more positive working environment.

Moves towards cloud email is a security opportunity

Security outfit Barracuda has been asking around and thinks that moves towards Office 365 have created a channel opportunity.

Barracuda international operations’  Chris Ross said that it had surveyed its own partners and 75 percent said that they had customers who had suffered from the growing problem of email account takeover and 57 percent had customers that had seen their brand impersonated negatively.

Ricoh and Agilitas working together

Global channel services provider, Agilitas IT Solutions, has announced a partnership agreement with a global technology provider, Ricoh UK. The idea is that Ricoh UK will use Agilitas’ expertise across IT inventory management, datacentre technology, and deploying on-site technical resources.

The partnership will let Ricoh UK  deliver specific expertise for customers, deliver on the management of parts and improve on distribution back to vendors.

DVV Solutions teams up with BitSight

Third-Party Risk Management (TPRM) outfit DVV Solutions  has signed up for a strategic managed service provider relationship with security ratings company BitSight.

The pair announced a new channel partnership agreement that will enable DVV to provide BitSight’s Security Ratings Service and add value to DVV’s Third-Party Risk Management and continuous monitoring offerings.

PwC fined £4.55 million for ‘serious lack of competence’

PwC has been fined £4.55 million after a £20 million hole was found in the accounts of  IT managed services provider Redcentric.

The auditor was found by the Financial Reporting Council (FRC) to have shown a “serious lack of competence in conducting the statutory audit work”.

Two individuals from PwC were also fined £200,000 each – discounted to £140,000. PwC’s fine was reduced from £6.5 million.

Claudia Mortimore, deputy executive counsel to the FRC, said: “The sanctions reflect the seriousness and extent of the breaches. Professional scepticism was lacking in this audit. Had it been applied, certain material misstatements would likely have been detected. As this is the second Final Decision Notice involving PwC Leeds’ office in recent years, we have mandated that the firm supplements its ongoing monitoring and support for that office, to further improve the quality of audit work in the future.”

The errors were investigated by both the FRC and the Financial Conduct Authority.

Dynasource names Marc Duijndam CEO

Dutch IT service outfit Dynasource announced that Marc Duijndam(pictured) had been named CEO and startupbootcamp leader Ruud Hendriks will also be joining the Dynasource Supervisory board. Both appointments are part of Dynasource’s cunning plan for global expansion, particularly throughout the UK and US.

New CEO Marc Duijndam was CEO at Funda for over four years until 2017 and was previously responsible for the launch of Google in BENELUX.

New Supervisory Board Member Ruud Henriks was a member of the Executive Board of Endemol and is now co-founder of Startupbootcamp.

Former CEO, Paul White steps up to support the Supervisory Board.

Advanced partners score £35 million in sales

British software and services company Advanced has revealed that partner community revenues recognised as a direct result of the sale of its products are estimated more than £35 million.

The announcement is a year after the launch of its partner programme, TruePartner.

The company said its channel partners had delivered over 120 new customers, which mean that, collectively, around 60 per cent of all their customers are now using Advanced products.

Advanced’s Channel Sales Director, Dean McGlone, has said that the Cloud, and arrival of the Generation Z cohort in the workforce have helped drive its channel sales. He explained: “The Cloud has now reached a tipping point, with the adoption of Cloud-based Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and finance applications experiencing a significant growth period. What’s more, we have seen the Cloud push out older, more traditional technology formats as Generation Z workers enter employment.

SMEs clueless about the cloud

UK SMEs are not interested in cloud technology, mostly down to them lacking knowledge about what it can do.

Numbers crunched by Close Brothers have revealed that 58 percent of UK SMEs do not used cloud-based computing for software, storage or other remote services.

Not only are that many not using the cloud for those purposes but a third of SMEs claimed that they did not use hosted technology at all.

Big Blue offers 23 month apprenticeships

IBM is launching a new 23-month apprenticeship to plug the skills gap in the UK.

The Business Partner Apprenticeship programme provides participants with the opportunity to work in the sales teams of its UK partners, from VARs to born-in-the-cloud companies. The programme will see the apprentices work with partners to sell IBM offerings to their customers.

The full-time apprentices will finish the programme with a Level 2 IT Technical Services diploma, giving participants the qualifications and practical experience needed to succeed in technology sales.

Nine23 in sync with SyncDog

UK mobile security outfit Nine23 is partnering with US  SyncDog to let mobile workforces to access cloud-based collaboration tools from their own devices with a higher level of security.

The pair are peddling FLEXContainer which combines Office 365 email client, calendar, contacts, Dropbox, SharePoint with an architecture that securely protects the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) end users through FIPS 140-2, AES 256-bit encryption.