Author: Nick Farrell

There’s good news for MSPs – shock

Posted on February 8, 2021 by - News

Prospects for managed service providers (MSPs) this year appear to be rising across a wide range of potential customers according to a new survey.

A survey of 1,200 SMB and midmarket business leaders conducted by cloud data recovery specialist Infrascale suggests that the need for greater security is pushing organisations toward MSPs regardless of some recent high-profile breaches involving managed services.

Business executives in the education (44 percent), healthcare (51 percent), and manufacturing (53 percent) sectors cited the need for increased security as their top reason for selecting an MSP. Security and reduced costs (46 percent) tied as the top reason among e-commerce retailers, while finance industry executives cited reduced costs (57 percent) as their top reason.

CityFibre and Virtual1 team up on full fibre business services

Posted on February 8, 2021 by - News

The UK’s third digital infrastructure platform, CityFibre, and wholesale-only network provider Virtual1 have announced a collaborative partnership to serve the UK connectivity channel with full-fibre business services.

Apparently, Virtual1 is enabling its partners to access CityFibre’s differentiated business Ethernet infrastructure in its full-fibre towns and cities across the UK from February; while CityFibre leverages Virtual1’s national network to deliver fibre options beyond its own full-fibre footprint to provide ‘off-net’ choice to its partners.

LogicMonitor partners with Fusion Global Business

Posted on February 5, 2021 by - News

Cloud monitoring outfit LogicMonitor has announced a partnership with Fusion Global Business Solutions (Fusion GBS), a specialist in delivering measured outcomes for enterprise customers with AI-powered service management and operations.

Fusion joins a group of resellers, systems integrators, managed service providers (MSPs) and technology integrators within the LogicMonitor Partner Network.

Fusion GBS CEO John Mohan said: “The extraordinary strain organisations are currently experiencing in their IT environments calls for a market-leading platform like LogicMonitor to provide insights and expedite digital transformation. We chose to partner with LogicMonitor because of its robust AIOps functionality, end-to-end visibility, and user-friendly reporting.”

Dell improves cross and upsell rewards

Posted on February 5, 2021 by - News

Dell has tarted up its partner programme and increased the rewards for those that cross and “upsell” more of its portfolio.

Dell also suggested that more changes were coming, most have been informed by feedback from the channel community, and the firm’s theme of the year is “Together, we stop at nothing”.

The annual update to partners also gave Dell Technologies’ global channel chief Rola Dagher, who took up the role six months ago, a chance to thank partners for their efforts during the last 12 months in a year dominated by the coronavirus pandemic.

Dagher said that he had been watching the amazing work during the pandemic and the pace of digital transformation, and how it’s accelerating beyond anything he imagined.

 Tech Data makes Komprise deal

Posted on February 5, 2021 by - News

Tech Data has signed a pan-European agreement to offer stuff from Komprise, a company specialising in analytics-driven data management as a service.

Komprise Intelligent Data Management solutions lets people handle large volumes of unstructured data and easily analyse, mobilise, and access the right file and object data across clouds and hybrid IT environments, it is claimed.

Tech Data said the agreement comes when enterprise IT teams are already straining to do more with less, and the complexity of the data under management is exploding as they now have to work across multiple clouds and storage vendors. Komprise Intelligent Data Management is supporting enterprise IT organisations to migrate large workloads or move data across storage classes and tiers and optimise costs.

Avast gets into bed with Westcoast

Posted on February 4, 2021 by - News

Avast is teaming up with Westcoast to distribute its full portfolio of on-premise professional antivirus software.

Westcoast is the distie for Managed Security Service Providers (MSSPs), Managed Service Providers (MSPs) and other reseller partners.

The deal, signed in January 2021, is the largest regional distribution contract in Avast’s history and signals the company’s intent to help create a safe, private, modern-day workplace in our ‘new normal’ for UK businesses and their customers, it’s said.

Macro 4 partners with Charta Porta

Posted on February 4, 2021 by - News

Macro 4, a division of UNICOM Global, and Charta Porta, a value-added consultancy which specialises in document automation technologies has signed a deal which marries AI-driven Natural Language Processing (NLP) with Macro 4’s enterprise information management (EIM) suite.

The idea is to create an automated answer to handling the influx of inbound email, SMS, social media and other digital correspondence that overwhelms many businesses.

Macro 4 thinks that by automating slow, manual processing, the solution can supercharge response rates, boost customer service and enhance the customer experience while driving back-office efficiencies. Personal or sensitive data within inbound correspondence is automatically identified, allowing the correct retention, security and access rights to be applied to individual messages, complete with data redaction, in line with data privacy regulations.

HelpSystems snaps up Digital Defense

Posted on February 4, 2021 by - News

HelpSystems has bought threat assessment outfit Digital Defense.

The company said that Digital Defense’s cloud-native vulnerability scanning engine gives organisations in healthcare, legal, financial services, and other industries the ability to proactively detect infrastructure security gaps and take effective remediation steps to safeguard against internal and external cyberthreats. A

s part of HelpSystems’ cybersecurity portfolio, Digital Defense joins Core Security and Cobalt Strike to establish a security assessment toolkit.

Imperva jacks up channel support

Posted on February 3, 2021 by - News

Imperva has adopted a channel-first approach to get its security products in front of more mid-market customers.

The outfit is introducing a self-service product trial option and then sharing the leads with partners. Imperva is making subscription payment plans an option for its channel to put in front of customers.

The new subscription plans are supposed to streamline a partner’s sales process, eliminate the need for complicated sizing exercises and allow resellers to increase margins by reducing the overall cost of the sale.

Robot vendor UiPath raises more cash

Posted on February 3, 2021 by - News

Robotic vendor UiPath has raised $750 million in its Series F funding round bringing its market valuation to $35 billion.

The robotic process automation (RPA) specialist has raised a total of $2 billion in investment since 2017, with the latest round marking the largest amount it has raised so far. Its last funding round in July 2020 raised £225 million.

UiPath was founded in 2005 by Daniel Dines and Marius Tirca. Its Series A funding in 2017 raised $30 million.

Infovista appoints new channel head

Posted on February 3, 2021 by - News

Networking outfit Infovista has appointed Kristian Thyregod as President Global Enterprise, reporting directly to José Duarte, CEO, as a member of the Executive Leadership team.

Thyregod will help drive the company’s Enterprise business through accelerated expansion and customer acquisition towards sustainable growth. As part of his role, Kristian will provide executive leadership across product management, sales, go-to-market and channel strategies. Infovista Ipanema SD-WAN solutions are currently deployed at more than 100,000 sites, mainly in Europe, serving more than 400 customers.

 Tech Data promotes Watts to senior VP

Posted on February 2, 2021 by - News

 Tech Data announced that David Watts has been promoted to the role of senior vice president, UK and Ireland.

As part of a planned leadership change, Watts extends his current role as operational leader of Tech Data’s UK and Ireland business to assume the strategic development responsibilities previously held by Andy Gass. Gass continues in Tech Data’s European leadership team with an expanded role.

Watts joined Computer 2000 – which later became Tech Data UK&I – in 1998 and initially held positions in sales and management before becoming general manager of the PC division in 2003. Subsequently, he joined Samsung Electronics as head of ita UK display division before returning to Tech Data in 2007 as commercial director. He was appointed managing director, UK and Ireland, in an acting capacity in 2016 before taking the role permanently in February 2018.

Aryaka Networks scores multiple EMEA contracts

Posted on February 2, 2021 by - News

Cloudy Aryaka Networks says it is seeing major customer wins in the Europe Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region.

The new multi-year contracts span multiple verticals, across both combined managed WAN and security use cases. Importantly, Aryaka both won when competing with and partnering with global and European telcos.

Over the lockdown period, Aryaka signed several deals worth over $1million across its EMEA region, which spans from the Arctic Circle to the equator. The largest of these, with a deal value of over $10 Million, was with a financial services company with over 10,000 employees operating over 80 sites globally.

Cryptomathic and Connective team up on e-Signature and e-Sealing services

Posted on February 1, 2021 by - News

Cryptomathic and Connective have teamed up to offer governments, banks, notaries and e-ID schemes around the world can now access multi-jurisdictional advanced and qualified remote e-signature and e-sealing services from a single source.

Under the terms of the new partnership, Cryptomathic’s e-signature solution, Signer, will provide the remote qualified e-signing and e-sealing technology behind Connective’s multi-jurisdictional e-signature solution.

This will allow signatories across borders to remotely co-sign documents and transactions using up to the highest level of e-signature security and legal assurance according to their respective regulations, including eIDAS (Europe), ZertES (Switzerland) and also additional e-signature Laws from Singapore, US and others.

MSPs need to invest to recover

Posted on February 1, 2021 by - News

Prospects for managed service providers (MSPs) going into 2021 appear to be rising across a wide range of potential customers, according to an Infrascale survey.

A survey of 1,200 SMB and midmarket business leaders conducted by cloud data recovery specialist Infrascale suggests that the need for greater security is pushing organizations toward MSPs regardless of some recent high-profile breaches involving managed services.

Business executives in the education (44 percent), healthcare (51 percent), and manufacturing (53 percent) sectors cited the need for increased security as their top reason for selecting an MSP. Security and reduced costs (46 percent) tied as the top reason among e-commerce retailers, while finance industry executives cited reduced costs (57 per cent) as their top reason.