Category: News

Broadcom wants to speed up VMware approval

Posted on October 19, 2022 by - News

Broadcom wants to speed up antitrust approval from the European Union on its $61 billion VMware acquisition.

Apparently, it is using market rivals Amazon, Microsoft and Google dominance to claim that the move is necessary to create more competition in the cloud market.

The European Commission’s four-month-long second phase investigation and for it to go to phase two, there has to be a real competition problem – horizontal, vertical, foreclosure risk.  Broadcom argues that with the big names in the market, its buy out is nothing to worry about.

After the news broke it was met with uncertainty among some VMware partners who were left with mixed feelings and were concerned it might harm the UK channel.

Tech Data brand mothballed

Posted on October 18, 2022 by - News

It is the end of an error as Tech Data has changed its name to TD SYNNEX.

Tech Data and SYNNEX created the world’s largest IT distributor when they closed their $7.2 billion merger last September.

The rebrand  applies to the wider European region, Latin America and the Caribbean.

TD SYNNEX  CEO Rich Hume said: “In this new phase, we will double down on our commitment to delivering higher value to our ecosystem partners through our end-to-end technology portfolio and our comprehensive services offerings, all underpinned by the passion, commitment and deep knowledge of our 22,000+ co-workers around the world.”

 

Sage completes Spherics takeover

Posted on October 18, 2022 by - News

ERP outfit Sage has completed its acquisition of Spherics, which will give it the power to help businesses slash their environmental impact.

The ERP software vendor claims the deal “reinforces” its commitment to sustainability, having pledged to fight climate change and help protect the planet by halving its own emissions by 2030 and becoming net zero by 2040.

Sage EVP of cloud operations Amaya Souarez said the acquisition of Spherics was an important milestone in the company’s sustainability strategy.

Companies pull the plug on cloud-based XaaS projects

Posted on October 18, 2022 by - News

Cloud-based XaaS projects have fuelled a dip in the global IT outsourcing market according to beancounters at ISG.

The annual contract value (ACV) of the commercial outsourcing contracts ISG tracks fell by three per cent to $23.2 billion in the three months to 30 September 2022.

ISG keeps tabs on large managed services, and XaaS deals with an ACV of above $5 million. For those not in the know, this is the first annual fall its index has registered since the final quarter of 2016.

Print market expected to improve

Posted on October 17, 2022 by - News

The maker of expensive printer ink HP expects the print-hardware market to pick up over the next 12 months.

HP thinks that the triggers will be that customers want more sustainable products. It will not be a surprise then that it has just released its super sustainable LaserJet Managed E700/E800 series.

The multifunction printers are being pitched as a solution that meets hybrid working needs. Features include the ability to edit documents before printing at the final stage to increase productivity.

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Check Point launches new MSSP programme

Posted on October 17, 2022 by - News

Israel Checkpoint

Israeli security outfit Check Point has a new MSSP programme to boost partner growth.

It claims the new programme will be a partner service-led approach and “removes administrative burdens.”

It says this is done by simplifying operations with faster customer “onboarding”, streamlined quoting, technical “onboarding”, pipeline development and “go to market” (GTM) alignment.

“These operational improvements, additional MSSP training courses and enablement services will strengthen partners’ ability to manage the sophisticated cyber defence requirements of customers today”, the vendor said.

Babble close to buying Activereach

Posted on October 17, 2022 by - News

Cloudy Babble wants to buy activereach as part of its cunning plans to improve its security and connectivity products.

Formed in 2008, activereach is a provider of cybersecurity and connectivity solutions and serves customers across the UK.

The deal is the cloudy comms provider’s seventh acquisition of this year.

Babble chief executive Matt Parker said: “This deal is one of the most exciting things we have done as a business and it enhances us with amazing people and new technological capability. Bringing activereach into Babble is a huge step forward in the growth of the Cyber portion of our business and with this new expertise we’re equipped to further help our customers.”

HPE has high hopes for Greenlake

Posted on October 14, 2022 by - News

HPE CEO Antonio Neri claims GreenLake is now a $7.7 billion business and is growing at 86 percent annually.

For those who came in late, GreenLake is the vendor’s as-a-service offering and Neri thinks it will be a  “North Star” for HPE customers, with the “entire company inside GreenLake”.

In HPE’s 2021 full-year results, the vendor revealed that it had added $1.5 billion of GreenLake total contract value in the preceding year, bringing the total to more than $5.7 billion. More than 900 partners sold HPE GreenLake, making it “one of the largest partner of ecosystems selling as-a-Service offerings in the industry”.

SCC is second largest IT services company in France

Posted on October 14, 2022 by - News

British group SSC toppled IBM from the leading three in TOP 2022, a ranking of the 170 largest French Digital Services (ESN) and Engineering and Technology Consulting (ICT) companies by revenue.

The list is compiled by Numeum and KPMG shows SCC outdoing several other giants such as Atos, which placed third, Sopra Steria (fourth), Accenture (fifth), IBM (sixth), Econocom (seventh) and Computacenter (thirteenth).

Capgemini took the top spot in 2022’s rankings with revenues of €3.8 billion.

Kyndryl helps customers get onto public clouds

Posted on October 14, 2022 by - News

Global infrastructure services provider Kyndryl has expanded its ability to help customers run or migrate their mainframe workloads to public clouds.

There are two ways that Kyndryl can do this. The first uses its Microsoft Ignite presence and create a new cloud product which mixes its managed services expertise with Microsoft Azure Stack HCI software and Dell Technologies hardware.

The idea is to help businesses with on-premises, remote or third-party data centre workloads accelerate their cloud transformation projects. The Microsoft Azure Stack HCI supports mainframe modernisation by connecting to on-premises mainframe or distributed computing infrastructures.

The second idea sees Kyndryl working with Google Dual Run, a service introduced Wednesday by Google as a way to migrate workloads off mainframes and onto the Google Cloud by letting the workloads work on both the cloud and on the mainframe until customers feel the time is right to take them off the mainframe altogether.

Channel does not need to fear price rises

Posted on October 13, 2022 by - News

HPE CEO Antonio Neri has told the Channel that there is nothing wrong with raising product prices, in fact his company has been doing it for years.

Speaking to the gathered throngs at The Channel Company’s XChange Best of Breed event in Atlanta, Neri said channel partners should take HPE’s lead and raise prices amid soaring inflation and demand for digital transformation.

He said: “One of the reasons why HPE has delivered at this level of performance and profitability…is because we have raised prices consistently. We are always the first to raise prices. Look at Dell. They follow just like that. But they’re never the first movers—never.”

“We are the market leader of raising prices. And you have to. There’s no way around it,” he added, as he expanded on a topic already discussed at the same conference by his IBM counterpart Arvind Krishna.

Neri said that the outlook for IT spending in 2023 isn’t as bad as the wider economy.

Microsoft security is a leaky lifeboat

Posted on October 13, 2022 by - News

CrowdStrike CEO appears to have got Microsoft all cross when he dubbed its security approach a “leaky lifeboat”.

George Kurtz told the gathered throngs at XChange Best of Breed conference in Atlanta attributed a majority of cyberbreaches to Microsoft products, compared the software behemoth’s total security offerings to a “leaky lifeboat” and its authentication architecture “a mess”.

“The Microsoft environment is the only environment that I know of that you can take a password and just reuse it. Right? And it’s a huge architectural issue. That was in 1999. You can do that today. … You can take those passwords out of memory and basically just do the same technique in 2022. And it’s even worse now because there‘s a hodgepodge of syncing and you know that you have SAML tickets and golden SAML tickets. I mean, it’s a real mess.”

Taxman wants to update his applications

Posted on October 13, 2022 by - News

The Crown Commercial Services (CCS) has published the contract notice for the Digital and Legacy Application Services (DALAS) framework to update the aged legacy applications used by the HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC).

The contract’s value might reach £4.2 billion over four years.

The DALAS framework is to provide HMRC with a strategic gateway to support the delivery of future application services and to move it toward an application services support model that is less dependent upon legacy technologies.

The framework will provide a commercial vehicle to replace current contractual agreements that are set to expire between September 2023 and January 2025.

The framework will be accessible to Central Government departments and all other UK public sector bodies, including Local Authorities, Police, Fire and Rescue, Health, Education and Devolved Administrations.

IBM leans more on partners

Posted on October 12, 2022 by - News

A not so mobile X86 PCBiggish Blue does not have nearly as many direct clients and leans heavily on its channel these days, according to CEO Arvind Krishna.

Krishna told the gathered throngs at the Channel Company’s 2022 Xchange Best of Breed (BoB) conference  that the number of clients IBM serves directly has fallen from around 5,000 to 400 in two years.

IBM is growing above the four percent standard market growth rate (with Q1 and Q2 2022 revenues growing eight and nine percent, respectively), with the bulk coming from “the long tail”.

PC sales look a little sick

Posted on October 12, 2022 by - News

Beancounters at IDC say that PC sales have continued to slide with total global shipments shrank 15 percent to 74.3 million units.

IDC blamed the contraction on “cooling demand and uneven supply”, but stressed that shipment volumes remain “well above pre-pandemic levels”.

Market leader Lenovo’s share fell slightly from 23.1 to 22.7 percent as its shipments sagged from 20.1 million to 16.9 million.

HP and Dell, meanwhile, lost more than three and four percentage points of marketshare, respectively, as their shipments hit 12.7 million and 12 million.

Only the fruity cargo cult Apple saw its numbers rise 7.2 million to 10.1 million but it was a long way behind he main players. ASUS rounded out the top five with 5.5 million shipments.

IDC’s Mobility and Consumer Device Trackers research manager Jitesh Ubrani said consumer demand remained muted though promotional activity helped soften the fall and reduce channel inventory by a couple of weeks across the board.