Category: News

Security features are the top reason for Windows 10 upgrade

Posted on April 27, 2017 by - News, Products

magritte-windowThe killer reason why companies are upgrading to Windows 10 is the improved security functions, according to beancounters at Gartner Group.

The analyst outfit said that it took a long time for Windows 10 to start driving PC sales but the channel has witnessed the impact of the OS upgrades triggering hardware sales since the last quarter of 2016.

Gartner noting that the adoption of Windows 10 is faster than previous OS versions and the traditional refresh cycles are shortening. Ranjit Atwal, research director at Gartner said: “Organisations recognize the need to move to Windows 10, and the total time to both evaluate and deploy Windows 10 has shortened from 23 months to 21 months between surveys that Gartner did during 2015 and 2016.

“Large businesses are either already engaged in Windows 10 upgrades or have delayed upgrading until 2018. This likely reflects the transition of legacy applications to Windows 10 or replacing those legacy applications before Windows 10 migration takes place”.

The analyst house has found that security improvements are the top attraction for those migrating as well as the cloud integration capabilities offered by the OS.

But there are also technical problems with some users being driven to upgrade to make sure they can use the latest desktop and server processors. Meike Escherich, principal research analyst at Gartner said: “Respondents’ device buying intentions have significantly increased as organizations saw third- and fourth-generation products optimized for Windows 10 with longer battery life, touchscreens and other Windows 10 features. The intention to purchase convertible notebooks increased as organizations shifted from the testing and pilot phases into the buying and deployment phases.”

Figures from last month from Netmarketshare revealed that Windows 10 holds a 25 percent market share, which is still lagging behind the 49 percentheld by Windows 7. The number of users still using XP and 8.1 has now dipped below 20 percent

Snow goes to channel first approach

Posted on April 26, 2017 by - News

ALG-L50-073Snow Software has announced it is setting up a channel-first policy to make sure all sales happen with partners.

Snow is a Software Asset Management outfit and it expects a channel will help it meet growing demand for software asset management support.

A SAM skills shortage is looming and as a result customers will be leaning more on partners to make sure they can help them plug the expertise gap.

To support the increased channel focus the firm has launched a partner portal, updated its programmes with more emphasis on joint marketing opportunities.

The company said that it will make sure the channel can perform the function customers will be looking for the vendor is encouraging partners to use its training facilities with the Snow Academy, which is an online learning platform.

Urban Bucht, global vice president partners at Snow Software announced that he will be developing partner relationships and he will be bringing on new partners to provide greater reach in the market.

Microsoft takes on Salesforce with LinkedIn data

Posted on April 25, 2017 by - News

microsoft-in-chinaSoftware King of the World, Microsoft, is rolling out upgrades to its sales software using data from LinkedIn.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said that the cunning plan was central to the company’s long-term strategy for building specialised business software.

The move means improving Vole’s sales software Dynamics 365, so it can take on market leader Salesforce.com.  It is the first thing to come out of Microsoft’s $26 billion acquisition of LinkedIn, the business-focused social network.

The new features will comb through a salesperson’s email, calendar and LinkedIn relationships to help gauge how warm their relationship is with a potential customer.

The system will recommend ways to save an at-risk deal, like calling in a co-worker who is connected to a potential customer on LinkedIn.

“The artificial intelligence, or AI, capabilities of the software would be central. I want to be able to democratize AI so that any customer using these products is able to, in fact, take their own data and load it into AI for themselves,” Nadella said.

LinkedIn has 500 million members globally, one of the first big milestones for the business social network since its acquisition.

Mid-market positive despite Brexit

Posted on April 24, 2017 by - News

Divorce Just Ahead SignCloud and data centre player Node4 has issued a market report which shows that the mid-market is feeling rather optimistic despite Brexit.

The mid-market has long been one of the number one target areas for the channel and it is believed that budgets in that segment will rise this year.

Node4 said that while Brexit is a dark cloud which is causing some concerns with business leaders worried about the impact that the process to leave the EU will have on their prospects, most mid-market firms are optimistic.

More than 77 percent of mid-market firms are expecting budgets to rise this year with 22 percent of that total looking forward to more than a 10 percent increase.

Hosted and cloud-based services are scooping up most of the cash with IaaS and security as a service the two top areas. Managed services and disaster recovery as a service are expected to follow suit.

A third of those quizzed had Brexit concerns and many thought that the channel could be doing more to support them through potentially challenging times.

Paul Bryce, business development director at Node4 said that mid-tier companies were the UK economy’s engine and so it was promising that investment was taking place in the IT infrastructure that will help to fuel further growth.

“It is no surprise that mid-market companies are embracing the cloud, which affords a huge opportunity to drive efficiency, agility, scalability, and to empower workforces,” he said.

Amazon wrestles Oracle in handbags at dawn duel

Posted on April 21, 2017 by - News

cda0b487bcbf9c72a65ee8106e695603While you would not really expect Amazon and Oracle to see eye to eye, it appears that the two are having a very public hand-bags at dawn duel.

Two months ago Oracle co-CEO Mark Hurd called Amazon’s cloud infrastructure “old” and claimed his company was gaining market share.

Now Amazon Web Services chief Andy Jassy slammed Oracle for locking customers into painfully long and expensive contracts.

“People are very sensitive about being locked in given the experience they’ve had the last 10 to 15 years,” Jassy told Amazon’s AWS Summit in San Francisco.

“When you look at cloud, it’s nothing like being locked into Oracle.” Jassy was addressing a cultural shift in the way technology is bought and sold. No longer does the process involve the purchase of heavy proprietary software with multi-year contracts that include annual maintenance fees.”

Jassy claims that the cloud is about choice and ease of use, including letting clients turn things off if they’re not working.

Tanium hits back at poor press

Posted on April 20, 2017 by - News

-1x-1The security outfit is being battered more than a Mars Bar in a Scottish chippie lately with stories that   it exposed a hospital’s network during demos and allegations of staff mistreatment.

In letter to customers, Orion Hindawi had to answer allegations that Hindawi mistreats staff, and then by a Wall Street Journal report claiming that it exposed a hospital’s network in demonstrations without its permission.

Hindawi said that that many would be “tired of waking up to the bad Tanium press stories hitting your inbox in the last week.

“I don’t think they’re painting an accurate picture of our company, so I’m reaching out directly to all of you to give our side of this,” he wrote.

Hindawi stressed that Tanium did not have access to its customers’ on-premise installations of Tanium – it is an on-premise solution – unless they have explicitly provided it to the vendor.

It cannot demonstrate customer environments with Tanium, although it could have done more to obscure and anonymise the identity of the specific hospital in question.

But viewers “didn’t connect the demo environment to that customer for years, and we do not believe we ever put our customer at risk with the data we showed”, he said.

Hindawi also addressed reports alleging that he fired workers before they could acquire shares and ridiculed staff in front of their co-workers.

“It is true that I personally can be hard-edged, and that I’ve had to apologise to people at Tanium when I’ve gotten too sharp at times,” he wrote.

“What is not true is that we have a toxic culture. Mission-oriented, hard-charging, disciplined, even intense, but not toxic. We do not belittle each other at work, and it is completely untrue that we fire people to save a few shares of stock.”

Cylance may have over egged performance

Posted on April 18, 2017 by - News, Products

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Anti-virus outfit Cylance appears to have been caught out trying to create false positives in clients machines as part of a sales gimmick.

According to Ars Technica  the scheme was rumbled when a systems engineer at a large company was evaluating security software products when he discovered something suspicious.

Cylance had provided him with 48 malware files in an archive stored in the vendor’s Box cloud storage account. The idea was to show the company how good its Protect, a “next generation” endpoint protection system built on machine learning really was.

Protect identified all 48 of the samples as malicious, while competing products flagged most but not all of them. But when the engineer took a closer look at the malware files in question—and found that seven were not malware.

He reasoned that Cylance was using the test to close the sale by providing files that other products wouldn’t detect—that is, bogus malware only Protect would catch. Cylance claims Protect uses AI to train itself using “the DNA markers of 1 billion known bad and 1 billion known good files.”

But over the past year, competitors and testing companies have accused Cylance of using product tests that favour the company. These critics have also accused Cylance of using legal threats to block independent, competitive testing.

Cylance executives reply accuses testing companies of running tests that inaccurately represent performance.

Ars says that the Cylance appears to be “re-packing” existing malware samples and turning them into “fresh” malware mostly using packers to convert executable files into self-extracting archives or otherwise obscure their executable code.

Cylance executives said there is no foul in that, because that is exactly what hackers do – share malware and repackage that malware to evade signature-based detection. The files that only Cylance caught in the test were all repacked in some way; five of the files were processed with MPRESS and the remainder were packed with other tools, including what appears to be a custom packer.

Of the nine files in question, testing by the customer, by Ars, and by other independent researchers showed that only two actually contained malware. One of the MPRESS-packed samples appeared to contain a copy of the MPRESS packer itself. The remainder of the MPRESS files contained either “husks”—essentially empty files—or samples that had been corrupted in packing. Two others crashed on execution, after opening a bunch of Windows resources without using them.

Gartner warns of currency woes

Posted on April 17, 2017 by - News

Databroker_scrooge_mcduckGartner has warned that currency headwinds will cause the market some major headaches and have already reduced IT spending forecasts

Gartner’s analysis of IT spending this year has been downgraded as a result of the position of the dollar. The analyst house is still expecting things to be up on 2016 but only by 1.4 percent instead of the previously expected 2.7 percent .

There should be about $3.5 trillion spent on IT this year but billions have been shaved off the potential amount because of ongoing issues around the dollar.

John-David Lovelock, research vice president at Gartner said that the strong US dollar has cut $67 billion out of his 2017 IT spending forecast.

“We expect these currency headwinds to be a drag on earnings of U.S.-based multinational IT vendors through 2017.”

The big US firms have already been forced to react to exchange rates with price rises and the chance of more problems will not be welcome to resellers or users.

Gartner is hoping that with the benefit of its warnings the industry can deal with the challenges and try to mitigate some of the impact.

The other headache that the analyst house has identified is the move away from physical servers towards hosted cloud services. The trend is helping the data centre market return to growth after being in a negative position in 2016, but it is hitting some of the established hardware brands.

“Enterprises are moving away from buying servers from the traditional vendors and instead renting server power in the cloud from companies such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft. This has created a reduction in spending on servers which is impacting the overall data center system segment,” said Lovelock.

Breaking down the forecast further there will be a dip in IT services, coming in at 2.3 percent in 2017, compared to 3.6 percent a year earlier.

On the hardware front the tablet demand will continue to wane but those selling Windows 10 business PCs will continue to enjoy growth as more customers invest in that technology.

VMware partners rub paws as the outfit buys Wavefront

Posted on April 13, 2017 by - News, Products

vmware-partner-link-bg-w-logoIn what is being seen as good news for VMware’s partners, the outfit has decided to buy Wavefront.

For those who came in late Wavefront, makes multi-cloud monitoring and management technology on the application level.

This is seen as good news for VMware partners who can now offer a live-streaming look at all of the data from the cloud and from the applications in the cloud including user behaviour.

It can also handle a multi-cloud strategy to turn VMware into a cross-cloud management platform.

It should reassure customers about the risk of their cloud based strategy. VMware is effectively claiming to be able to monitor that entire cloud application delivery experience right down to the end-user behaviour.

VMware revealed its plan to acquire the Palo Alto, Calif.-based startup Wednesday. Wavefront, named to CRN’s 10 Coolest Big Data Startups of 2016, develops a cloud-hosted, real-time analytics platform that monitors and manages cloud applications. It provides monitoring to optimise clouds and modern applications by delivering insight using millions of data points per second in real time.

Wavefront’s metric monitoring for applications complements VMware’s vRealize Operations platform for monitoring, troubleshooting and capacity planning across virtual environments, according to VMware. Wavefront also will complement VMware’s vRealize Network Insight and vRealize Log Insight products.

Ajay Singh, senior vice president and general manager of VMware’s Cloud Management Business Unit claimed that VMware set the standard for monitoring virtual environments with VMware vRealize Operations platform, and will set the standard for cross-cloud and modern application monitoring with Wavefront.

Huawei goes after public cloud market

Posted on April 12, 2017 by - News, Products

huawei-liveChinese smartphone maker Huawei has announced that it will compete with Amazon and Alibaba as a global provider of public cloud services.

The Shenzhen-based outfit said it will expand in cloud computing with a dedicated division that will recruit 2,000 more people this year.

President of the new unit, Zheng Yelai, said that Huawei used to focus on private cloud and did well.

“Now the purpose is to strengthen our public cloud offering.”

Consultancy Gartner expects the market for public cloud services to reach $383 billion by 2020 from $247 billion in this year.

Huawei hopes to continue developing software-based revenue at a time of slowing growth in smartphone sales and reduced spending on telecommunication infrastructure.

In China, its biggest rival is Alibaba Cloud, while the latest market entrant is conglomerate Dalian Wanda Group Co Ltd in partnership with Big Blue.

Huawei deputy chairman Eric Xu said the company’s global network of telecoms clients give the firm a unique advantage.

“I believe we can build upon our advantages accumulated over the years,” Xu said, referring to carrier partnerships in Europe and a strong presence in developing countries. Compete and coexist with AWS and Microsoft, I believe that is the trend we are going to see.” Xu said.

Xu also said Huawei would not compete for market share by offering services at extremely low prices.

“Our strategic focus will be on our telecom partners’ cloud transformation”,  Xu said.

Curse of the dollar plagues IT spending

Posted on April 11, 2017 by - News

dollarSoothsayers at Gartner group have been examining the entrails of a fat ram and are warning that the dollar will provide a major headache for IT spending.

Gartner’s analysis of IT spending this year has been downgraded as a result of the position of the dollar. The analyst house is still expecting things to be better than 2016 but only by 1.4 percent instead of the previously expected 2.7 percent.

On the plus said that is $3.5 trillion spent on IT this year but billions have been shaved off the potential amount because of ongoing issues around the dollar.

John-David Lovelock, research vice president at Gartner said that the  strong U.S. dollar has cut $67 billion from our 2017 IT spending forecast.

“We expect these currency headwinds to be a drag on earnings of U.S.-based multinational IT vendors through 2017.”

The big US firms have already been forced to react to exchange rates with price rises and the chance of more problems will not be welcome to resellers or users.

Gartner is hoping that with the benefit of its warnings the industry can deal with the challenges and try to mitigate some of the impact.

The move away from  physical servers towards hosted cloud services is not really helping much. The trend is helping the data centre market return to growth after being in a negative position in 2016, but it is hitting some of the established hardware brands.

“Enterprises are moving away from buying servers from the traditional vendors and instead renting server power in the cloud from companies such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft. This has created a reduction in spending on servers which is impacting the overall data center system segment,” said Lovelock.

Breaking down the forecast further there will be a dip in IT services, coming in at 2.3 percent in 2017, compared to 3.6 percent a year earlier.

On the hardware front the tablet demand will continue to wane but those selling Windows 10 business PCs will continue to enjoy growth as more customers invest in that technology.

Google offers piles of won to LG

Posted on April 10, 2017 by - News

google-ICGoogle  has offered to invest at least one trillion won ($880.29 million) to help LG Display boost its output of organic light-emitting diode (OLED) screens for smartphones.

According to the Electronic Times Google offered the investment to secure a stable supply of flexible OLED screens for its next Pixel smartphones.

Samsung Electronics’s flagship Galaxy smartphones use the bendable displays, while Apple is expected to start using them in at least some of its next iPhones. It is thought that this will create a short supply in the industry, which Google wants to head off at the past.

The story has not been confirmed by any of the parties involved. The Pixel does not really sell well enough to cause Samsung or Apple any problems.  It is more of a reference phone designed to attract the interest of other partners, although Google has been slammed for trying to do a lot more with that concept than it should.

Still Google i

Amazon Business might be a new reseller channel

Posted on April 7, 2017 by - News

amazonsThe UK launch of Amazon Business might provide some resellers with another way to reach SMEs.

Most people don’t see Amazon as a channel, but the online bookseller’s move to step up its B2B sales might make it more useful.

Amazon Business means that sellers can sell via the etailer to businesses offering VAT pricing and invoicing and special offers and discounts.

The retailer has been running its Amazon Business operation in the US since 2015 and seen a billion dollars of sales to 400,000 customers in its first year. It also enjoyed decent levels of success with the German launch last December.

All this means that the channel could get a different route to reach SME customers that are using Amazon to buy other things and would happily add items like laptops and consumables to their shopping baskets.

Bill Burkland, Head of Amazon Business UK said that whether you are a sole trader, a buyer in a mid-size company or a Chief Procurement Officer in a large multi-national organisation, Amazon Business has the products and capabilities to serve your needs.

“Amazon Business combines more than one hundred million business products with a new set of unique business features – from reporting and analytics to spending limits and purchasing workflow approvals – making it everything you love about Amazon, now for business,” he added.

Amazon is offering free one day delivery on orders of £30 or more and will give customers the chance to use its business analytics tools to track their spending.

Fintech could poach business from bankers

Posted on April 6, 2017 by - News


Bank CrisisLarge financial institutions across the world could lose 24 percent of their revenues to financial technology companies over the next three to five years.

Beancounters at PriceWaterhouseCoopers have added up some numbers and divided by their collective shoe size and decided that the finance industry is about to get a big kicking from FinTech outfits.

Of the more than 1300 financial industry executives polled by the professional services firm, 88 percent said they feared their business was at risk to standalone financial technology companies in areas such as payments, money transfers and personal finance, the study found.

PwC’s annual Global FinTech Report said that consumer services such as personal loans, were seen as most at risk.

The new companies take advantage of new technologies to offer better digital services to customers, in areas ranging from financial advice to life insurance.

To counter the threat, financial institutions expected to increase their collaboration with fintech companies, with 82 percent of respondents saying partnerships with tech-savvy firms would increase over the next three to five years, the PwC report found.

To improve their digital offering and remain competitive, large firms have been looking to work more closely with young technology companies through a number of initiatives such as corporate venture arms and innovation centers.

In his annual shareholder letter published on Tuesday, JPMorgan Chase & Co chief executive Jamie Dimon highlighted some of the bank’s most recent collaborations with fintech companies in areas including mortgages, small business lending and payments.

While collaboration is on the rise, entrepreneurs and executives often note that several hurdles are hindering more effective cooperation. IT security, regulatory uncertainty and differences in management and culture, were cited by respondents to PwC’s report as major challenges hindering partnerships.

While adoption of the nascent technology is not expected to happen quickly, the survey found 55 percent  of respondents planned to adopt it by next year, and 77 percent by 2020.

Intexit McAfee looks to channel for new life

Posted on April 5, 2017 by - News

mcafeeHaving escaped Intel’s clutches, security outfit McAfee is looking to its channel to provide it with a way forward.

Intel bought McAfee for $7.7 billion back in 2010 and announced last September that it had agreed to sell its stake to TPG Capital for $4.2 billion. Thoma Bravo has also become an investor through an agreement with TPG and former Intel Security general manager Christopher Young has been named McAfee CEO.

McAfee is sticking with a current partner programme that runs through until 2018 along with its existing product plans.

But the outfit is claiming that the “new” McAfee will be reacting differently to threats and creating more opportunity for its channel partners.

The firm has a well-established and loyal channel and a brand that is already well known by partners and customers.

Young indicated what could lie ahead saying that as a standalone company with a clear purpose, McAfee gains the agility to unite people, technology and organisations against our common adversaries and ensure our technology-driven future is safe.