Category: News

Barracuda snaps up Billante

Posted on December 16, 2022 by - News

Barracuda Networks has appointed Joe Billante as its new chief financial officer after half-inching him from eBay.

Billante has been at eBay for 13 years in several businesses, finance, and analytics executive leadership roles.

Before this Billante spent 11 years at General Electric in several finance roles, including CFO for a $1bn international division of GE Healthcare.

Barracuda CEO Hatem Naguib said: “We are excited to have Joe on our team, with his deep expertise in business strategy, financial integrity, stakeholder engagement, and operational excellence.”

N-able cuts five percent of staff

Posted on December 16, 2022 by - News

N-able has cut or restructured about five percent of its workforce despite reporting strong financial results in its third quarter.

N-able president and CEO John Pagliuca said that the moves were part of the annual planning process where all roles and responsibilities were evaluated across the company and a focused action was taken to reduce and in some cases, restructure certain positions.

“Our business remains healthy and therefore this may have felt a bit unexpected.”

IGEL deepens HP relationship

Posted on December 16, 2022 by - News

Just months after moving to a software-only strategy, thin client OS expert IGEL has got cosier  with HP,

In March IGEL gave up on hardware to focus on its software and said it would develop partnerships with HP, Lenovo and LG to cover hardware.

It seems that HP has certified the IGEL OS for its Elite t655 thin clients and will be pre-installed on the devices, which started shipping today.

Cloud use skyrocketing

Posted on December 15, 2022 by - News

Beancounters at analyst outfit Kaseya predict that more than 75 percent of client workloads will be cloud-based over the next three years. This is a 25 percent increase compared to last year.

The firm found that almost all MSPs are looking to exploit emerging opportunities around cloud integration. More than 90 percent of MSPs can offer cloud-based infrastructure design and management.

Users are worried about budgets, which underlines the need for managed service players to be clear and transparent in their pricing structures.

Kaseya VP Chris McKie said these research figures demonstrated the rapid acceleration and acceptance among cloud technology businesses. More are witnessing the benefits of cloud applications, including easier collaboration between employees and improved productivity.

Attacks on Rackspace calm down

Posted on December 15, 2022 by - News

It appears that attacks on Rackspace’s email service have calmed down since the FBI started investigating.

Rackspace has confirmed that it has restored email service to two-thirds of its customers since the outage was reported nearly two weeks ago. But the company signalled Wednesday that the outage is still impacting thousands of other customers on its Hosted Exchange.

CrowdStrike has confirmed no further attacker activity within Rackspace’s Hosted Exchange environment.

The FBI’s entry into the investigation was first reported by Barron’s, which  reported that “tens of thousands” of clients were ultimately impacted by the attack.

Nutanix starts new channel referral programme

Posted on December 15, 2022 by - News

Cloudy Nutanix has started a referral programme for channel partners offering rewards across a product’s complete lifecycle.

The outfit has refreshed its Elevate Partner Programme to ensure involved partners who were not there when the deal was finally signed are recognised and rewarded.

Nutanix said the changes could work with every partner type and reward those that are involved at different stages of the buying journey, particularly those involved in helping the user develop their strategies before they settle on the final purchase order.

Nutanix sales VP Adam Tarbox said that analysts are fond of talking about how customers engage with at least seven partners across the lifecycle of any project and there are multiple touchpoints.

IBM backs down on price hikes

Posted on December 14, 2022 by - News

Biggish Blue has backed down on software price rises of 24 percent, but appears to have confused its partners and customers in the process.

Last month customers in the UK, as well Canada, Europe, Japan, Morocco and South Africa, had been told by Big Blue that they faced software rises of 24 percent. This week, IBM changed its mind saying that the rise in some SaaS products will be 15 percent.

This marks the second change in policy around price hikes by IBM since September when IBM told us that price rises in the UK would be eight percent.

Exertis becomes Seceon’s first UK partner

Posted on December 14, 2022 by - News

Exertis has been named as US cybersecurity specialist Seceon’s first UK partner.

Seceon’s claim to fame is creating AI driven cyber threat detection and fixing platforms for enterprises and MSSPs. It is based in Massachusetts, and has an MSSP roster of more than 200.

Exertis Enterprise sales boss Dominic Ryles said he was excited to have Seceon join the Exertis Enterprise – Security solution stack as it gives our channel partners the tools they need to better equip themselves for visibility and actionable insights into the types of malicious threats that are targeting organisations today.

Giganet brings staff Christmas cheer

Posted on December 14, 2022 by - News

Full fibre ISP Giganet is helping its staff as the country faces its cost of living crisis this Christmas.

As well as a cost-of-living payment to all employees earlier this year, excluding executives, the ISP is looking after its people over the festive period by investing in financial planning and health workshops, nutrition workshops and individual health checks for all interested employees at its recent wellbeing days.

The company has committed to paying the Real Living Wage, and, as a result, has uplifted salaries across its Customer Service teams and junior roles. All employees have also received a Christmas bonus payment in the form of a £150 shopping voucher, in addition to rounding off the year with festive gatherings in Fareham and Reading.

Gartner predicts governments are about to spend on tech

Posted on December 13, 2022 by - News

Beancounters at Gartner think that Global government IT spending is forecast to total $588.9 billion in 2023 which is an increase of 6.8 percent from this year.

After consulting its tarot cards, the analyst predicts government IT spending will increase across all segments except devices.  Gartner believes that governments bought enough devices when the pandemic broke out.

Software will be the highest-growing segment in 2023 (12.5 percent) followed by IT and internal services. While datacentre systems will see the most cash injection of more than $25 billion, Big G said.

Secureworks wants a “channel first” approach

Posted on December 13, 2022 by - News

Secureworks has announced that it is pursuing a channel-first strategy and building relationships with partners and distributors.

The security outfit was once an MSSP, then became an XDR specialist with a threat intelligence system that could update its defences in real-time.

Secureworks EMEA sales boss Simon Moor said that it had become clear to the firm that a channel-first approach is the key to widening its reach and growing market share.

TD SYNNEX reaches 90 percent renewable energy

Posted on December 13, 2022 by - News

TD SYNNEX claims to be switching to green energy at its Magna Park warehouse at Lutterworth  from the start of the new financial year.

The move means that – along with the planned relocation of the Basingstoke office next month – from January 2023 more than 90 per cent of the electricity consumed by TD SYNNEX in the UK will be coming from renewable sources. The outfit’s Warrington office was already using renewable sources and the Basingstoke office will move to green power when it is relocated to a nearby, more energy-efficient building in January 2023. This facility also has over 500 solar panels on the roof.

Salesforce offers Slack and Sales Cloud integration capabilities

Posted on December 12, 2022 by - News

Salesforce logoSalesforce is offering new Slack and Sales Cloud integration capabilities, designed to help sales teams drive productivity and efficiency and cost savings.

The Salesforce World Tour NYC event showed off the productivity discounted bundle and a new native Slack integration with the company’s Sales Cloud.

Slack VP  Blake Markham said companies were seeing hiring freezes, and sales teams were seeing customers they’re selling to are experiencing similar challenges.

“Companies and their employees are focused on how to contend with [those challenges] and organisations are looking at how they can meet their revenue commitments and drive growth, while minimising expenses.

Channel needs to use data better

Posted on December 12, 2022 by - News

Data needs to be used better to generate business insights, and the Channel lacks the quality of information needed to do that.

Number crunchers from data analytics specialist insightsoftware said that the channel was dealing with a gap that many still have to bridge to reach “data fluency”.

If they ever get there, insightsoftware claims, customers could understand the information they have and garner insights from it that would help in the decision-making process.

The Channel was not getting a complete picture of their data, inconsistent records and issues around accuracy, the research revealed.

Broadcom seems to be doing well

Posted on December 12, 2022 by - News

Broadcom’s fourth quarter financial results were rather good with revenues increasing by 21 percent to $8.9 billion.

Net income saw year-on-year growth of 69 percent to $3.3 billion, from $1.9 billion in the fourth quarter of 2021.

Broadcom CEO and president Hock Tan said there had been shedloads of demand from hyperscale, service providers, and enterprises.

“This growth was driven by our strong partnerships with customers and accelerated adoption of our next generation technologies.”

“As we look into fiscal 2023, our increased R&D investments during the preceding years position us to extend our leadership in next generation products within the end markets we address.”