Category: News

Team Collaboration wants to provide channel opportunities

Posted on October 9, 2020 by - News

The move to team collaboration has provided numerous opportunities for monetisation and support areas for the channel to be involved, according to Comms365 Head of IoT and Products Nick Sacke (pictured).

He said that there had been an influx of new entrants to the market looking to make big waves, but the Channel needs to keep them as long term, loyal customers,

Sacke said there have been multiple networking problems for businesses looking to get up and running remotely during COVID-19. Not just in terms of user bandwidth, but in resilience, reliability and security of the internet connectivity and ensuring the correct equipment is available to use. 

Biggish Blue splits

Posted on October 9, 2020 by - News

A not so mobile X86 PC​IBM has said it plans to split its business in half by spinning off its infrastructure services unit into a separate public company.

The big idea is to create two separate companies, each with its own strategic focus by the end of 2021.

IBM CEO Arvind Krishna said that “now is the right time to create two market-leading companies focused on what they do best”.

The new company will have greater agility to design, run and modernise the infrastructure of the world’s most important organisations, Krishna believes. Both companies will be on an improved growth trajectory with greater ability to partner and capture new opportunities – creating value for clients and shareholders, he said.

Veeam snaps up Kasten to protect its containers

Posted on October 8, 2020 by - News

Veeam has announced the acquisition of Kubernetes container backup and disaster recovery specialist, Kasten in a deal worth $150 million.

The company said the takeover comes at a time when businesses using containerised workloads continues to rise, with Gartner predicting that 75 percent of enterprises will be running containers in production by 2022.

Veeam CTO Danny Allan said this acquisition represents the natural next stage of the company’s Kubernetes journey.

“Veeam’s acquisition of Kasten is the next step in a strong partnership and shared sense of passion for delivering cloud data management. It represents a testament and critical milestone in our commitment to support our customers’ business transformation to future-ready architectures.”

Lenovo says PC market still kicking

Posted on October 8, 2020 by - News

Levono chief operating officer, Gianfranco Lanci (pictured) told the assembled throngs at the Canalys Channel Forum EMEA, that the PC channel had seen growth in the past few months.

He said that the pandemic has created a huge shift in how people are working, learning, socialising and consuming products.

“It does accelerate the remote working revolution and it does lead to big demands in computing and technology. Over the past several months, we’ve seen a resurgence in PC sales. Talk of the PC dying and being taken over by tablets and smartphones is over.”

Leaseweb integrates Veeam into its cloud

Posted on October 8, 2020 by - News

The hundred percent channel based hosting and cloud services provider, Leaseweb Global has integrated  Veeam-powered solutions with its Leaseweb Cloud Services.

Veeam does a lot of the back-up for for Cloud Data Management. The services are available in several Leaseweb locations in Amsterdam, London, and Frankfurt, and will be available in Washington DC before the end of the year.

Organisations that trust Leaseweb to help them expand internationally are now able to enter into different regions knowing they have Veeam’s industry-leading solutions integrated with their Leaseweb cloud services.

Leaseweb and Veeam first partnered in 2018, when Leaseweb launched its Backup-as-a-Service offering at its first cloud data centre facility in Amsterdam. Over that period.

Iland sees growth on back of Channel expansion

Posted on October 7, 2020 by - News

Cloudy Iland is reporting rapid growth and development of its secure cloud backup infrastructure due to the significant expansion of its channel partners across EMEA.

The company said that its UK partner portfolio has doubled within the last year. This has resulted in year-to-date revenue growth of 140 percent.

Cloud service demand increased during the COVID-19 pandemic owing to its cloud services having more relevancy to the UK and EMEA market.

Resellers need initiatives

Posted on October 7, 2020 by - News

Giacom’s CEO Mike Wardell says resellers need to use initiatives to help their end organisations through this rollercoaster journey, on the basis that they will be back and will continue to grow.

Wardell said that any businesses have been thrust into a virtual working world at a faster rate than expected, and adaptations have had to be made to ensure continuity for managed service providers (MSPs) and end users alike.

“But while MSPs, along with all businesses, have had significant hurdles thrown their way over the last few months, they don’t have to tackle this alone – there’s an extensive range of technology and services available to support leaders in this journey and particularly to help resellers overcome the challenges of the current economic climate”, Wardell said.

Exclusive Networks launches new online delivery channel

Posted on October 7, 2020 by - News

Exclusive Networks has launched an online delivery channel for all its cybersecurity and infrastructure products and services.

X-OD (‘Exclusive Networks On-Demand’) is part of the outfit’s transition to subscription-based consumption. The new platform marks a revolutionary shift in how cyber and infrastructure solutions and related services are bought and sold, enabling partners to meet the market need for opex-based consumption and deliver a fully digital customer experience across the value chain.

X-OD is available today in the UK, Netherlands and France, with expansion into Belgium, Spain, Germany, Finland, Ireland and Austria from November 1st and the rest of the world in 2021.

Virgin Media reaches out to partners

Posted on October 6, 2020 by - News

VirginVirgin Media Wholesale wants more partners for its connectivity project.

Virgin Media Wholesale was set up at the start of 2019 to work with the channel to handle networking and data products, along with the option to get involved with the firm’s mobile back-haul network.

Dale Parkinson, sales director of Virgin Media Wholesale, said that the business had been set up to work with the channel and to drive indirect sales.

Majority of UK firms want AI 

Posted on October 6, 2020 by - News

A survey of 430 UK companies has revealed business leaders’ perceptions of artificial intelligence (AI) and how COVID-19 has changed their attitude towards the technology.

Fountech.ai’s research also found that 45 percent of businesses are looking to implement one or more technologies that use AI in the next 12 months. The AI think tank found:

Avaya integrates Nvidia’s cloud AI

Posted on October 6, 2020 by - News

Avaya is integrating what it describes as powerful cloud AI solutions from Nvidia to increase the impact and value of visual, audible and collaborative experiences through the Avaya Spaces app.

Avaya Spaces is an all-in-one video collaboration app for the digital workplace and is used by businesses, schools, governments and organisations in nearly 100 countries to bring together distributed groups of people.

Organisations shout for cloud

Posted on October 5, 2020 by - News

Beancounters at Synergy Research said that organisations are demanding more cloud collaboration solutions.

While total on-premise spending saw a decline, there was growth in video conferencing. The largest segments for spend were IP Telephony, video conferencing, on-prem email and content management.

Teams software-as-a-service (SaaS), conferencing SaaS and communications platform-as-a-service (CPaaS) all saw the most growth out of the hosting and cloud segments. As a result of this, Slack, Zoom Twilio and Vonage all now rank in the top ten of collaboration vendors.

IDC claims coronavirus created a Unified Coms boom

Posted on October 5, 2020 by - News

The coronavirus pandemic has fuelled a boom in the use of unified communications and collaboration (UCC) tools according to beancounters at IDC.

IDC numbers covering the second quarter revealed that worldwide UCC revenue increased by 25.1 percent year over year (YoY), and 12.4 percent quarter over quarter to $11.5 billion in the second quarter.

Tools that could help workers continue to be secure and productive at home were some of the largest growers in terms of revenue. IDC broke down the categories to reveal that the UC collaboration market, which includes video-conferencing software and cloud services, produced a 46.9 percent increase in revenues. The managed/hosted voice/unified communications-as-a-service (UCaaS) market also improved by 20.4 percent YoY, and enterprise video-conferencing systems were also up by 21.5 percent.

IP telephone and on-premise UC systems segment delivered a 21.8 percent decline in the second quarter.

SAP adds Emarsys to improve its front end

Posted on October 5, 2020 by - News

Esoteric software maker SAP has entered into an agreement to acquire Austrian firm Emarsys. Emarsys produces software that businesses can use to interact with their customers ‘on a personal level’ through multiple online channels.

The deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2020, subject to regulatory approval and no one is saying how much money SAP spent.

SAP will add Emarsys’ operations to its Customer Experience portfolio, which is anchored by the Qualtrics platform. SAP acquired Qualtrics in 2018 for $8 billion, and the platform now plays an important role in the company’s cloud growth strategy as SAP aims to combine customer data with operational data.

SYNAXON canoodles with Layer 8

Posted on October 2, 2020 by - News

Channel and managed services group SYNAXON has formed a new partnership with Layer 8, a specialist practitioner in security behaviour change.

The agreement gives SYNAXON UK members access to a specialist set of services that will let them deepen and improve knowledge and awareness of the problems around digital security and data protection, and encourage best practice – amongst their own staff and their customers.

Mike Barron, Managing Director of SYNAXON UK, said that the partnership with Layer 8 is part of a longer-term plan to equip members with the capabilities they need to give the best advice to customers and set themselves apart in a busy market.