A report from Quocirca said that print specialists will have to increase the volume of remote working.
Quocirca has been charting the changes, with the analyst firm releasing its tenth edition of its insights into the managed print services (MPS) landscape. The latest report is dominated by the impact of the coronavirus pandemic and has discovered that, according to business leaders, there are going to be some long-lasting repercussions.
Cisco has started a partner apprentice programme.
The pilot programme will see an intake of 15 students work with five partners and the vendor over a three-year degree apprenticeship programme, with a view to giving them chances to get experience across the various elements of the industry.
SoftwareONE has reached a strategic agreement with Microsoft to accelerate growth for application services and SAP on Microsoft Azure globally.
Under the arrangement:
• SoftwareONE will expand its application services and SAP on Azure capabilities by hiring and training up to 5,000 additional specialists by the end of 2023, in line with the SoftwareONE and Microsoft business plan and expected revenue growth over that period.
Windsor Telecom is bringing CityFibre’s full-fibre services to businesses in Reading, Maidenhead, Slough and Bracknell.
CityFibre, the UK’s third national digital infrastructure platform, has appointed Windsor Telecom as a City Champion for Reading, Maidenhead, Slough, and Bracknell – continuing its commitment to driving the full fibre message out to as many businesses as possible in the region.
For Windsor Telecom, the agreement, it’s claimed, provides the opportunity to offer the fast speeds and reliability of full-fibre to its customers at an attractive price; a proposition that companies in these four economically-strong areas will welcome.
CityFibre Head of Wholesale Andrew Wilson said: “We’re pleased to welcome Windsor Telecom as a City Champion. We’ve made significant investments to bring full-fibre to the Thames Valley area and want to do everything we can to give businesses the opportunity to take advantage. With its strong reputation and presence in the region, Windsor Telecom is ideally placed to help us reach our goals and make use of CityFibre’s full-fibre infrastructure to deliver the bandwidth and performance that companies need to compete effectively.”
Cloudy outfit CloudBolt Software is rolling out its new Rainmaker channel partner programme which it claims will enable channel partners to increase relevance to their business and customers.
The company said the Rainmaker rollout correlates with and facilitates the accelerating shift to an “all things as-a-service” market landscape, where enterprises need a wider variety of technologies and services to meet customers wherever they are on their hybrid cloud, multi-cloud journey. Pushing software and hardware is no longer the value play, but instead delivering white-glove levels of service is the focus. Whatever any of that means,
Cloudbolt Senior Vice President Larry Kraft said: “Our partners are at the core of every decision we make as a business…from lab creation to marketing to the potential for partners to maximise their revenue growth. Our recent acquisitions provide us a breadth and depth of capabilities to solve the top challenges in the hybrid cloud market, and our partners can take advantage of this to enhance their offerings and drive sustainable growth.”
Software outfit Deltek has launched its new partner programme – the Deltek Partner Network.
The company announced this new programme to enable partners in expanding their business supported by new tools, streamlined business processes and a new partner platform.
The Deltek Partner Network is made up of three individualised programmes : Solutions Partner , Marketplace Partner and Advocate . Each is designed to align with different go-to-market approaches that enable partners to expand their business in a way that best fits their needs and the needs of their customers.
With the launch of the Deltek Partner Network comes a brand-new portal for Solutions Partners, designed to make doing business with Deltek easy. This best-in-class portal features on-demand access to resources and information critical to running a business ─ available anytime, anywhere. It features what it describes as a streamlined interface to register and track opportunities, consume enablement resources, leverage marketing tools and access new partner programme benefits.
Sharp Europe has formed a new European IT Services division following the acquisition of ITpoint.
For those who came in late ITpoint was a Swiss IT Services Company that provides a suite of integrated solutions and managed service for the workplace. This acquisition further expands Sharp’s service offering. The formation of Sharp’s European IT Services division establishes its status as a digital transformation provider.
Sharp’s new European IT Services division will be led by founder of CIT, Colin Blumenthal, who is the newly appointed Vice President IT Services Europe.
Blumenthal said: “This is an important strategic milestone which will transform Sharp’s business in Europe, and enable us to continue to invest and focus on growing a service portfolio that adapts to the changing needs of our current and future customers. Further expanding this new division of our business is a strategic priority, and we are excited to bring these new offerings and add value to our customer base across Europe”.
Analysts at Gartner have added up some numbers, thrown some runes, and reached the conclusion that the social software and collaboration market will rack up $4.5 billion in revenues in 2021 with double-digit growth expected through 2022.
The analyst firm claims remote home working and social software integrations within other enterprise applications has driven significant growth, forecasting a rise of 17.1 per cent from 2020.
Gartner research vice president, Craig Roth said that use cases for the social and collaboration market, such as coordinating a distributed workforce and providing a ‘virtual water cooler,’ got a sudden jolt from the pandemic and such tools went from a ‘nice to have’ to a ‘must have’ within a matter of weeks.
The research firm added that additional investment in technologies will continue even as office work returns, in order to “facilitate, capture and organise open conversations and information sharing”.
A report from ISG said that large and mid-sized enterprises are embracing intelligent automation at a rapid pace.
ISG Head of Intelligent Automation and AI Wil Harris said that some of this was due to COVID-19 which forced companies to find ways to remain competitive and still deliver value to customers.
He said that pre-pandemic, most AI and automation projects were focused on IT infrastructure operations and traditional back-office tasks such as finance and accounting.
“Now, however, automation is moving to the front office, with customer service, sales and marketing and supply chain automation all introducing automation to make them more efficient”, he said.
Most companies are not interested in reducing headcount but increasing productivity.
Tech Data and Synnex are to merge in a $7.2 billion deal that would make them larger than Ingram Micro.
It will mean the end of the days of Tech Data being behind Ingram together, Tech Data and Synnex will boast Pro-forma annual revenues of around $57 billion and a head count of more than 22,000.
Tech Data CEO Richard Hume will become CEO of the new company.
He said: “This is transformational for Tech Data, Synnex and the entire technology ecosystem. Together, we will be able to offer our customers and vendors exceptional reach, efficiency, and expertise, redefining the experience and value they receive. The combined company will also benefit from significant financial strength to invest in its core growth platform as well as next-generation cybersecurity, cloud, data, and IoT technologies, which are experiencing explosive growth due to work from home and return to office trends.”
Research from Grist indicates that customers can see the benefits of working with external advisors to sort out their problems.
The firm found in its The value of B2B survey that C-suite executives were increasingly preferring to talk to external advisers rather than get advice from their peers.
This is unusual as previous surveys have had industry peers in the top three sources for executives looking for advice, but this time around it has dropped, with only a third of respondents seeking out those opinions, to be replaced by independent industry experts.
There were also signs that customers were open to getting ideas via video and online events, as well as traditional content.
GCI Group has today become Nasstar Group in what it bills as a major new identity change. GCI becomes ‘Nasstar’ and Modality Systems changes to ‘Modality’.
For those not in the know, Nasstar Group is one of the largest providers of managed services in the UK employing 700 and approaching £120 million in revenues with overseas offices and customers in the US, Australia, and Malaysia. Nasstar delivers a suite of services from cloud computing to networking and communication solutions. Modality is a global Microsoft partner, creating and managing stuff for enterprise customers using Microsoft Modern Workplace and Azure.
Exclusive Networks saw an eight percent increase in revenues to £2.23 billion.
CEO Jesper Trolle said that demand for cybersecurity during the pandemic boosted the outfit’s bottom line and ruled out a change in trading conditions until the fourth quarter.
“We think there will be a gradual opening in the latter half of the year, so beginning late third and fourth quarter will probably be where we see a bit more normalised trading environment.”
During its FY 2020, Exclusive scored 17 new vendors, and grew its footprint in 10 new central and eastern European countries, via the acquisition of €300 million Polish distributor Veracomp.
Veeam’s latest Data Protection Report shows that most customers’ back up and restore plans run on hopes and prayers.
The firm has revealed that at least 31 per ent of all backups are non-restorable in UK organisations, meaning any attempt to pull the information back would end in errors or complaints and 26 percent of restorations that could be done would fail to meet SLAs.
More than 14 percent of UK customers did not back their data up at all.
Veeam channels and alliances manager Alex Walsh said that customers were looking at how they make sure they’ve got an airtight solution because a lot of those backup jobs failed.
“The pandemic’s highlighted to a lot of businesses that there was always competition in any industry, but unfortunately the output of the pandemic has been that a lot of businesses aren’t here and a lot of businesses now moving to be online, which means that they’ve got to make sure that data is recoverable at all times and applications are up and running”, he said.
COVID-19 has caused IT to be viewed more strategically in their organisations, according to a new Nutanix report
Nutanix’s third annual Enterprise Cloud Index Report found that more than 70 percent of respondents believed COVID-19 has caused IT to be viewed more strategically in their organisations – even the public sector which has struggled with IT modernisation efforts.
While public sector organisations have historically grappled with regulations that deter home working, the pandemic forced them to take necessary steps to securely support a remote workforce. Nearly half of global public sector respondents said their organisations had no employees working remotely one year ago. However, since the onset of the pandemic, the sector has scaled its number of remote workers, with only 15 percent of respondents reporting employing zero remote workers today.
Organisations have begun strategically evaluating their cloud models – with more than 82 percent of global public sector respondents identifying hybrid cloud as the ideal IT operating model for their organisation, the report said.
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