Author: Nick Farrell

Nicole Dezen is Microsoft’s top partner officer

Posted on July 18, 2022 by - News

Software King of the World, Microsoft, has appointed Nicole Dezen as chief partner officer.

The move follows the exit from the building of Vole’s former channel chief Rodney Clark.

Alongside the newly created title, Dezen will hold the position of corporate vice president of global partner solutions, formerly held by Nick Parker who has been promoted to president of industry and partner sales.

Parker said Dezen brings a “unique perspective” to Microsoft’s efforts and a “complete left to right view” of opportunities and challenges facing partners.

He said: “Nicole’s elevation to CPO at Microsoft shows our new, deeper approach to channel and ecosystem leadership and advocacy. Nicole has built two key leadership roles that will report to her. 

Solace signs up for Amazon

Posted on July 18, 2022 by - News

Data enabler Solace has joined AWS’ Independent Software Vendor Accelerate Programme

Solace hopes its involvement in the programme will help AWS customers globally to better integrate real-time data capabilities.

Solace already works with the likes of NASA, the London Stock Exchange and Barclays to deliver and enable event-driven architecture for real-time enterprises: a comprehensive way to create, document, discover and stream events.

Solace  Chief Technology Solutions Officer Sumeet Puri said: “We value our multi-year relationship with AWS as an important element of how we help customers implement real-time event streaming across their critical business operations: “We’re excited to now offer our customers even more value by taking our work with AWS to the next level as part of the AWS ISV Accelerate Programme.”

 

PC shipments fall by 15 percent

Posted on July 15, 2022 by - News

Beancounters at Canalys have added up some numbers and found that global PC shipments fell by 15 percent in the second quarter mostly because of Chinese production issues.

The decrease took the market back to its lowest level since the pandemic began to take hold in the first quarter of 2020.

Laptops suffered an 18.6 percent drop, with consumers showing more caution with inflation and the cost of living causing some falls in demand. Desktops fared better, with a 0.6 per ent increase, driven by commercial spending on hardware.

BT wants to grow

Posted on July 15, 2022 by - News

BT is looking to hire 2,800 more workers to hubs around the UK and India.

The technology giant says it plans to “on-board” around 1,000 new UK workers around sites in Birmingham, Manchester, Bristol, Belfast, Ipswich and London.

In India, BT will recruit approximately 1,800 new people centred around hubs in Bengaluru and Gurugram.

The roles span product management, software engineering, cloud, design, data, AI and machine learning and “agile delivery”.

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Zoom appoints Todd Surdey Head of Global Channel & Business Development

Posted on July 15, 2022 by - Moving People, News

Zoom announced that Todd Surdey has joined Zoom as its Head of Global Channel & Business Development.

Surdey joins Zoom with an extensive enterprise and channel background having served in leadership roles at Google, Palo Alto Networks, SAP, Salesforce, and VMware, among others.

He brings with him an intimate knowledge of running enterprise businesses, as well as a long history with and passion for the channel, all of which will be critical as Zoom continues to scale the channel and partner business.

Kaseya denies claims by Datto founder that employees will lose benefits and see layoffs

Posted on July 14, 2022 by - News

Kaseya has denied that there will be changes to Datto employee benefits after the MSP’s founder ranted about the $6.2 billion acquisition on the interwebs.

Austin McChord accused Kaseya of “snuffing the flame” of Datto’s culture and was reducing maternity/paternity leave and paid time off as well as not treating “the office as a hub for community anymore”.

Kaseya confirmed it had completed its acquisition of Datto two weeks ago, but McChord spoke out after claiming that “many current members of the Datto team have reached out deeply dismayed”.

“There is a concern that the current trajectory from Datto’s new owners will snuff the flame that makes Datto a place to come ‘Do your life’s work'”, he wrote.

Computacenter gets all of BITS

Posted on July 14, 2022 by - News

Computacenter has acquired a US company  — Business IT Source (BITS).

The UK reseller says BITS is one of the “fastest-growing” value-added resellers in the US, with the company employing around 100 people and reporting revenues of $245 million in 2021.

It said the existing BITS leadership team will stay to run the business as a separate operating unit within Computacenter United States to “maximise the growth opportunity”.

The business and the team will be fully integrated into Computacenter’s North American operation over time.

Deskless workforce is underserved

Posted on July 14, 2022 by - News

While companies bang on about digitally transformation, remote and hybrid work, the deskless workforce is notoriously underserved according to a new report from Skedulo.

The past two years of distributed work and accelerated digital transformation have changed work for the better. Namely, today’s knowledge workers benefit from unprecedented levels of autonomy and flexibility. But at the same time, workers who sit at a desk in a traditional office setting are rare and account for just one in five employees around the world. The other 80 percent of the global workforce is deskless, traveling and operating in the field.

The findings showcase some alarming statistics concerning digital transformation for deskless workers – a proof point that companies need to start taking note of the 80 percent of the global workforce they make up, or risk losing them completely.

UK government needs to stop using private chat channels

Posted on July 13, 2022 by - News

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has told the government to conduct a review into the systemic risks and areas for improvement surrounding the use of private correspondence channels, such as WhatsApp, private email and other messaging apps by ministers and government officials.

According to the data protection watchdog, the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC), which was the main focus of its review, used these channels frequently, posing real risks to government accountability and transparency.

It said the DHSC did not have the “appropriate organisational or technical controls” to ensure that risks were properly managed. As a result, it has asked for a government-wide examination of how such channels are used across Whitehall.

Softcat top cat will quit next year

Posted on July 13, 2022 by - Moving People, News

Softcat boss Graeme Watt will step down as CEO next year and will be replaced by the company’s CFO Graham Charlton.

Watt will become Softcat’s non-executive chair, replacing Martin Hellawell who will step down from his position and from Softcat’s board.

Watt began his tenure as Softcat’s CEO in April 2018 after former CEO Hellawell moved to a chairman position. Under Watt’s leadership, Softcat has almost doubled its revenues – from £1.08 billion for the year ending 31 July 2018 to £1.94bn (gross invoiced income) in its FY2021.

Axeman cometh at Oracle

Posted on July 13, 2022 by - News

Oracle is considering letting the axeman loose in the building and implementing cost-cutting measures worth up to $1 billion by August.

The job losses would disproportionately impact thousands of staff mostly in the US and Europe in marketing for software systems that automate customer support and e-commerce functions.

The firm is increasing spending in other areas, which is why the planned layoffs, which are expected to begin as soon as August, are being made.

Two top Oracle executives CMO Ariel Kelman, who arrived from AWS two years ago and has been in charge of the team working with TikTok, and Juergen Lindner, senior vice president of marketing for SaaS, are going.

SMEs effectively banned from government work

Posted on July 12, 2022 by - News

IR35 policy changes have effectively banned SMEs from working with government, according to Brightman director Romy Hughes.

Hughes said that before 6 April 2022, Brightman was in trouble when a government agency and long term client instigated a blanket ban on working with SMEs due to their fear of IR35 enforcement action by HMRC. They were unable to approve budgets with any SMEs in their supply chain, despite these companies already being engaged in extensive, multi-year digital transformation activities.

The client did not want to terminate these contracts and the sudden termination of these projects would have been disastrous for both the organisation and its broader transformation ambitions. The whole scenario made no sense to anyone, but was being promoted from those further up the chain due to fears of making an error in their IR35 determinations.

“This was not an isolated incident, but a broader issue affecting many other public sector organisations and the professionals that work in them. It was an unofficial change of government policy, with significant ramifications for the sector and everyone it served (i.e., every taxpayer and recipient of public services)”, Hughes said.

Tollring expanding as it breaks monitoring record

Posted on July 12, 2022 by - News

Tollring’s three year growth plan seems to be working and it tells us that it now monitors over 8.4 million cloud endpoints globally across its entire portfolio of cloud business analytics, call recording and telecoms fraud protection services.

The company has expanded its business in all regions, with customer growth exceeding 50 per ent across both Europe and APAC within the past 12 months. In addition, iCall Suite cloud business customers now total over 17,000 with the average number of calls now being recorded across its cloud users now exceeding 400,000 per day, the company said.

Avassa partners with Sunlight.io

Posted on July 12, 2022 by - News

Avassa and Sunlight are partnering to build a software stack for secure, efficient, and easy management of edge environments

Sunlight.io, a provider of edge-native software infrastructure solutions, and Avassa, a provider of an edge orchestration platform will create a complete software stack, making edge environments secure, efficient, and easy for application teams to manage, it’s claimed. Such environments can include retail stores, hospitals, factories, call centres, or any other premises where data processing happens locally and compute resources are distributed across a large number of locations.

Microsoft helps Irish power supply

Posted on July 11, 2022 by - News

Banks of lithium-ion batteries at a Microsoft data centre in Dublin are set to be used to help support the growth of renewables on Ireland’s power grid.

Vole says the batteries – which typically provide backup power in case of emergency – have been certified, tested and approved for connection to the grid and are part of the data centre’s UPS.

Grid-interactive UPS systems could allow operator EirGrid to cut two million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions in 2025, according to Baringa, an energy advisory firm commissioned by Microsoft.