StorageCraft Technology Corp. is bolstering its business continuity platform with technology from a company in the Upper Midwest that prioritizes which data gets backed up.
"This is all about being smarter -- don't just store everything over and over again," said StorageCraft CTO Scott Barnes of the company's acquisition this week of Gillware Online Backup. With the deal, StorageCraft gets Gillware's file backup solution, its data analytics tool for determining what data to back up, a rules engine for prioritizing backups and about 15 employees.
The company's founder and president, Wes Gill, will continue operations in Madison, Wis., as Gillware Data Recovery, which specializes in recovering data from mechanically failed storage devices and counts Western Digital and Dell among its major clients. While terms of the deal were not disclosed, StorageCraft CEO Matt Medeiros said in a statement that funding came entirely from recent growth in operating cash flow rather than debt.
Barnes said the Gillware file backup technology may be worked into hybrid backup and recovery solutions along with StorageCraft's flagship image-based solutions, but that the deal was mostly about the analytics and the rules engine.
"Analytics is something that we didn't have. For us, image was everything," Barnes said. "Our new tagline is, 'Not all data is equal and therefore you shouldn't treat it as equal.'"
Current trends like BYOD make prioritizing backup more important than it used to be, said David McConkie, senior director of product management at StorageCraft. "You don't want to give the QuickBooks database file the same level of backup as the picture of the neighbor's dog," he said.
Gillware's tools and rules engine will help StorageCraft focus on three things -- speed of recovery, mitigating liability to a business and better understanding of the total cost of ownership, McConkie said.
Gillware, which has a partner network of its own, had been a StorageCraft provider and reseller. StorageCraft partners have access to Gillware's products through the Gillware portal immediately, and the products will be part of StorageCraft's partner portal in November.
Posted by Scott Bekker on September 21, 20160 comments
With its $2.6 billion acquisition of the Technology Solutions portion of Avnet Inc., Tech Data Corp. would bolster its datacenter business and gain a toehold in the Asia-Pacific region.
The blockbuster distribution deal, announced Monday and involving a mix of $2.4 billion in cash and 2.785 million shares of Tech Data common stock, is expected to close in the first half of 2017.
From a revenue standpoint, the deal would make Tech Data about a third larger. Pro forma revenues for the 12 months leading up to July 31 would have been $35 billion for the combined company rather than Tech Data's $26 billion.
Avnet Technology Solutions (ATS) is a much smaller operation with about 40 vendors and 20,000 customers compared to Tech Data's 600 vendors and 105,000 customers. But ATS' focus on converged and hyperconverged infrastructure and other next-generation datacenter technology is a big part of what Tech Data found attractive.
According to the companies, in the year leading up to July 31, "revenue attributable to complex, higher-margin datacenter offerings" would have accounted for 45 percent of total revenue for the combined companies, compared with 29 percent for Tech Data alone. Operating income would have more than doubled over the same period, on a pro forma, non-GAAP basis while accounting for some expected cost savings, the companies said.
The move also gives Tech Data some presence in the Asia-Pacific region where it doesn't currently compete. The company would go from having operations in 21 countries today to 35 countries upon close. Tech Data's current revenue mix is 61 percent in Europe and 39 percent in North America. With ATS included, the mix would be 53 percent in Europe, 44 percent in North America and 3 percent in Asia/Pacific.
Posted by Scott Bekker on September 19, 20160 comments
The long process of integrating the Dell and EMC partner programs will begin in earnest next year.
Dell on Wednesday announced completion of its acquisition of EMC Corp., creating a $74 billion, 140,000-employee giant called Dell Technologies that the company says is the world's largest privately controlled tech company. Businesses within Dell Technologies include Dell, Dell EMC (another new brand as of Wednesday), Pivotal, RSA, SecureWorks, Virtustream and VMware.
The way the new company will be structured means the biggest immediate impact will be on Dell and EMC partners.
Some of Dell's existing business will move into a Client Solutions Group with products retaining the Dell brand. Servers, storage and some other Dell products will merge with EMC into the new Dell EMC brand under an Infrastructure Solutions Group, headed by President David Goulden, a longtime EMC executive who has been CEO of EMC Information Infrastructure since 2014. Goulden's group will also include Virtustream and RSA, according to a slide shown during a press and analyst call Wednesday.
The services business from Dell and EMC is now also its own business unit, under President Howard Elias, a former EMC executive who led the transition from the EMC side.
Several of Dell Technologies' other companies will stand alone as business units, including VMware, Pivotal and SecureWorks.
As of now, things will stay the same for Dell and EMC partners. "There will be no changes to our partner programs. Upsell and cross-sell opportunities will be identified after the close. Two separate deal registration programs will remain in place (with a deal desk to ensure only one partner holds registration)," a company spokesperson said in an e-mail exchange.
Although Dell and EMC are being split across business units, the vision for 2017 involves combining the partner programs. "We also plan to provide one unified partner program with a centralized channel structure, one approach to deal registration, and robust incentives on incremental and net new accounts. Our intent is to create the best possible program for our alliance and channel partners so they can be successful in servicing their customers," the spokesperson said. "This future business partner program will bring together the best elements of the Dell PartnerDirect Program and EMC's Business Partner Program. "
For other Dell Technologies companies, including the two now in the Infrastructure Solutions Group, it wasn't clear if changes would be coming to their partner programs related to the merger.
Comments during the call by Dell Technologies Chairman and CEO Michael Dell seemed to indicate that partners of those businesses shouldn't expect major near-term changes.
"The rest of our family, Pivotal, RSA, SecureWorks, Virtustream and VMware will continue to keep their independence and retain their freedom to develop their own ecosystems. That's part of our commitment to providing openness and customer choice, foundational principles at Dell Technologies, and, I believe, of any successful technology company," Dell said.
A spokesperson for VMware echoed those points and indicated that Dell Technologies-driven changes to the VMware channel program weren't on the horizon.
"A key to VMware's success is the open ecosystem that it has carefully cultivated over the last decade and a half. Dell Technologies recognizes that VMware thrives on its vibrant ecosystem of partner networks including OEM partners, systems integrators, solution providers, resellers and customers. Dell Technologies intends to support VMware's continuing success as an independent company. Dell Technologies will support VMware's open ecosystem and not place any limitations on its ability to partner," the spokesperson said via e-mail.
Posted by Scott Bekker on September 07, 20160 comments
When VMware ships its new generation of desktop virtualization software next week, the upgrade will be free for many existing customers.
VMware plans a half-step incremental release of VMware Fusion and Fusion Pro, which run on Mac computers, and Workstation Player and Workstation Pro, which run on Windows and Linux. The main enhancement of the version 8.5 release of the Fusion line and the 12.5 releases for Workstation is the addition of support for Windows 10 Anniversary Edition and Windows Server 2016 within virtual machines.
"We hear from our users year on year that having to pay for something as small as a minor operating system release gets a little long in the tooth year after year," said Michael Roy, VMware's product line marketing manager for Fusion, Workstation and Horizon Flex, in a telephone interview from the VMworld conference in Las Vegas this week.
The free upgrade compares to current 8.0/12.0 upgrade costs of $50 for Fusion, $80 for Fusion Pro and Workstation Player, and $150 for Workstation Pro.
VMware is also extending the upgrade offer back further than the two releases that upgrade pricing normally permits, Roy said. The free upgrade will be available for users with Fusion 4 or later and Workstation 7 or later.
Part of the reason for saving customers an upgrade fee in this release cycle is that VMware is working on a future dot-zero release with significantly more changes, Roy said.
Nonetheless, Fusion users will see more than just new Windows version support in 8.5. This version of Fusion now supports tabbed virtual machine windows and Siri integration.
Posted by Scott Bekker on August 31, 20160 comments
SMB-focused distributor D&H Distributing is expanding the amount of credit it offers to resellers by nearly 50 percent, the Harrisburg, Pa.-based company said Monday.
The expansion applies to D&H's Business Assurance program, which combines funding from D&H's vendor partners. The credit expansion applies to nearly 850 reseller customers, who have good credit standing with D&H and show growth potential. The credit lines can go up from $2,500 to $100,000, with typical increases of about $25,000 per reseller, the company said.
In total, the increase in available credit is close to $23 million.
The credits come in addition to a separate Incentive Rewards program, in which resellers earn points for purchases that they can exchange for Visa gift cards, travel certificates, golfing equipment and other items. Purchases made through the credit programs can count toward the incentive points.
D&H executives hope the program will boost overall business in the SMB channel, which they view as an underserved market. In a statement, Tony Warfield, senior director of credit services at D&H, said, "Many programs in the marketplace don't necessarily focus on resellers in the SMB space, and instead direct credit toward larger accounts."
Posted by Scott Bekker on August 29, 20160 comments
Over the next two years, the Microsoft IT department plans to convert more than two-thirds of Microsoft sites to completely wireless networking.
"In the grand scheme of things, we'll be cutting over 90 percent of our end-user network infrastructure," said David Lef, principal network architect at Microsoft IT, in a blog Q&A this month.
Lef is participating in a series of posts about the broader transition of Microsoft's internal network, which supports 220,000 employees and vendors, 886 sites, 2,500 apps and processes, and 1.2 million devices. The whole series is worth a read. You can find the first and second installments here and here.
But the wireless transition is interesting as a partner opportunity. If a company with the scale and high-level demands of Microsoft can trust wireless networking for the bulk of its infrastructure, a lot of smaller companies with less-demanding environments might feel more comfortable about cutting their cables.
For a company like Microsoft, which is always trying to create technology markets, showing the way toward a business goal is always part of the internal motivation for IT projects. That's the case here, as Lef said. "It's driven primarily from the high-level goal of cloud first, mobile first."
But it's been bottom-up, too. Microsoft employees have voted with their network connections that they want the flexibility of wireless. "Traffic and use analysis showed that the wireless network was very quickly becoming our main network infrastructure, from a user's perspective," Lef said, adding, "At many of our information worker sites, wired port utilization is less than 10 percent. If you average it out across all of our user sites, it's closer to 30 percent, but when you do the math, it still ends up being a lot of investment in network infrastructure that simply isn't necessary."
Lef expects a wireless-first, rather than wired-first, network will save money on upgrades, additions to the networking environment, equipment and maintenance.
Plenty of challenges remain. For one thing, Microsoft IT will finish rolling out 802.11ac across the company before removing any wired infrastructure. Some desktop PCs need wireless adapters. There are all the usual device and driver issues. Ensuring adequate bandwidth is a constant concern, especially with bring-your-own-device and the Internet of Things.
Challenges aside, the pilot stage is complete. Some 200 sites, including datacenters and engineering centers, will keep their wires and networking hardware. But for 660 sites worldwide, Microsoft will spend the next two years ensuring wireless readiness and then weaning them off their cables.
Posted by Scott Bekker on August 25, 20160 comments
The détente between Microsoft and the open source community seemed to reach a new level this week at LinuxCon North America in Toronto.
The list of the show's sponsors itself (see below) seemed an inversion of the old order, with Microsoft in the top Diamond tier while more traditional Linux heavyweights Red Hat and SUSE occupied the next tier down.
The speaker list was thick with Microsoft executives. Wim Coekaerts, Microsoft's new corporate vice president of Enterprise Open Source, gave a major keynote about Microsoft's evolving approach to Linux and open source. Technical Fellow Jeffrey Snover talked about PowerShell, which Microsoft last week released in an open source version and became available for Linux and Mac. Rob Dolin, whose titles include "Technical Diplomat" for Microsoft, took the stage with an IBM colleague to discuss an Open Container Initiative (OCI) certification program. Ross Gardler, who works on the Azure Container Service in Microsoft's Linux Compute Team, held a session on the next generation of containers. The list of Microsoft speakers goes on.
A graphic from Jeffrey Snover's LinuxCon presentation offers a "PowerShell loves Linux" twist on the "Microsoft loves Linux" graphics Microsoft has displayed recently.
The ultimate symbol at this show was a brief embrace between Coekaerts and Red Hat President and CEO Jim Whitehurst as the two passed each other on stage in the interval between their back-to-back keynotes.
"It was cool to be with Jim Whitehurst on stage. Microsoft and Red Hat together; that's a big difference from many years ago," said Coekaerts, who came to Microsoft after a long stint running open source engineering at Oracle, later in his keynote.
The "many years" portion of that quote is critical, as Microsoft has been generating "turning the industry on its head" reactions for some time now.
Coekaerts put up a slide during his keynote showing the journey. Highlights included:
- July 2009: Contributed 20,000 lines of code to Linux kernel
- April 2013: Launched Azure Virtual Machines running Ubuntu on Day 1
- October 2014: Announced that Docker would be fully supported in Windows Server
- November 2014: Announced .NET for Linux
- April 2015: Unveiled Visual Studio for Linux and OS X
- May 2015: Introduced PowerShell DSC for Linux at Ignite Conference
- September 2015: Launched HDInsight on Ubuntu at AzureCon
- November 2015: Announced Red Hat and Microsoft partnership
- March 2016: Announced SQL Server on Linux at Data Driven
- August 2016: Announced PowerShell for Linux
As Coekaerts' list shows, Microsoft's embrace of open source isn't new, but has certainly grown tighter since late 2014. Some skeptics remain concerned about whether this embrace represents a genuinely new attitude or a variation on the old embrace, extend and extinguish.
Coekaerts is busy making the case for his new employer. "Over the past few months I've been asked more times than I can count, 'Wim, why did you join Microsoft?'" he wrote in a blog post timed to LinuxCon this week. "As a Linux guy who has watched the company from afar, I am the first to admit that Microsoft hasn't always been the most open company. After talking to some of the executives at the company, I found that the days of a closed Microsoft are over."
RCP will be doing a deeper dive on open source and the Microsoft partner community in the next print issue. Drop me a line at [email protected] and let me know how the mixture of Microsoft and open source is playing out in your business.
Posted by Scott Bekker on August 24, 20160 comments
A virtual assistant tuned for scheduling meetings through natural language in e-mail, SMS, Twitter or chat is the latest tuck-in acquisition by Microsoft as it continues to advance its Office 365 cloud productivity platform.
Microsoft on Monday announced a signed agreement to acquire Genee for an undisclosed sum. The San Francisco-area startup was founded in 2014 and had raised $1.45 million in first-round funding last August. Founders Ben Cheung and Charles Lee will join Microsoft.
The Genee bot joins Cortana, Microsoft's flagship personal assistant technology, which is becoming more and more of a platform as AI and chat-based technology get increasing focus from Microsoft.
Still in beta, according to the company Web site, Genee's main use case is an e-mail to set up a meeting. Addressing an e-mail to the person or people the user wants to meet with, the user would cc [email protected] as if Genee were a live personal assistant. Sample text, according to an example message on the Genee site, might be, "Hi Adam -- looking forward to launching the marketing initiative next week. Genee, please find availability to meet for 60 minutes any day next week in the afternoon."
From there, Genee takes the natural language request and compares calendars it has access to and sends links of available times to those whose calendars Genee can't view.
Microsoft Corporate Vice President Rajesh Jha described it as especially useful for scheduling meetings among large groups and in cases where you don't have access to someone's calendar.
The Genee service will shut down on Sept. 1, according to a blog post Monday by the Genee co-founders. Details about when the Genee service will spin up as part of Office 365 or under a Microsoft brand weren't immediately available.
Posted by Scott Bekker on August 22, 20160 comments
Cisco plans to eliminate about 7 percent of its global workforce in order to increase its focus on security, Internet of Things (IoT), collaboration, next-generation datacenter and cloud.
The networking giant announced the cuts as part of its first quarter earnings report on Wednesday evening. The restructuring to eliminate up to 5,500 positions will begin during the current financial quarter.
Discussing the restructuring during an earnings call, Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins described the past year as a "challenging environment" in which Cisco "executed extremely well." Cisco reported a 3 percent revenue gain for the year to $48.7 billion and an 8 percent non-GAAP earnings-per-share increase to $2.36.
"Today's market requires Cisco and our customers to be decisive, move with greater speed and drive more innovation than we've seen in our history. Today we announced a restructuring enabling us to optimize our cost base and lower growth areas of our portfolio and further invest in key priority areas, such as security, IoT, collaboration, next-generation datacenter and cloud," Robbins said on the earnings call. "We expect to reinvest substantially all of the cost savings from these actions back into the businesses and we'll continue to aggressively invest to focus on our areas of future growth."
Chief Financial Officer Kelly Kramer said the restructuring will result in pretax charges of $700 million, of which $325 million to $400 million will be recognized in the first quarter of the fiscal year and the rest hitting during the rest of the year.
Posted by Scott Bekker on August 18, 20160 comments
After building up a sizable installed base of managed service providers (MSPs) with its mobility-focused remote monitoring and management product, Pulseway is making a formal push into the MSP market.
The 5-year-old Dublin, Ireland, based vendor this week launched Pulseway MSP specifically for managed service providers.
The product's baseline capability is to monitor systems such as Windows and Linux servers, Windows and Mac desktops, or .NET and Java applications and send alerts to administrators, who can drill into specifics and take many types of corrective actions remotely from a Web browser or native app on iOS, Android or Windows Phone.
Pulseway is offered in both SaaS and Enterprise architectures, with the Enterprise version combining SaaS with an on-premises central server.
To date, Pulseway has about 3,000 customers in 80 countries, with the majority of its business in the United States, said Pulseway CEO and Founder Marius Mihalec in a telephone interview.
"At this time, we have quite a lot of MSPs, especially early-stage guys with two to three [employees] starting the business," Mihalec said. "Pulseway comes in at a very affordable price; we find that it fits quite well."
Mihalec estimated that about half of the company's 3,000 customers already are MSPs or IT consultants.
As Pulseway prepared to deliver an MSP product, it has been gathering feedback from the MSP half of its customer base on what would be useful.
Some enhancements to the base product for the MSP edition include more scripting capabilities; the ability to provide customizable and white-labelled reports to customers; integration with a Pulseway Business Management Software, which is a professional services automation package; and collaboration features.
Pricing for Pulseway MSP starts at $2.40 per monitored system per month with discounts based on volume and on annual agreements.
Posted by Scott Bekker on August 17, 20160 comments
Cloud-to-cloud backup vendor OwnBackup, a major player in the Salesforce.com AppExchange, this week announced it has added Microsoft Azure as a cloud-based backup target for Salesforce.com and other Force.com applications.
The SaaS-to-IaaS/PaaS backup solution was initially released last year with Amazon Web Services (AWS) as the target. OwnBackup, with offices in Fort Lee, N.J., and Herzliya Pituach, Israel, also offers cloud-to-cloud backup solutions for ServiceNow and corporate social media accounts.
The Azure release is a first step in the Microsoft ecosystem for OwnBackup, which participated in the Microsoft Accelerator program and the 2016 Microsoft Global Startup Roadshow.
"We plan to continue to deepen our relationship with Microsoft so we can offer an easy and effective way for all enterprises to protect business-critical data in the cloud," CEO Sam Gutmann said in a statement. Although the cloud-to-cloud backup market is crowded, Gutmann is no stranger to its ins and outs. Prior to OwnBackup, he was founder and CEO and then-chairman of Intronis.
OwnBackup has partner programs for systems integrators and ISVs.
Posted by Scott Bekker on August 10, 20160 comments
BCM One Inc., a 25-year-old New York-based technology integrator, expanded its growing footprint of Microsoft services this week with the acquisition of CloudStrategies Group, one of Microsoft's first born-in-the-cloud partners.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
BCM One started out helping clients manage telecommunications solutions and over time expanded into managed services around the entire technology and networking stack. The company first became a formal Microsoft partner about two years ago.
Pete Zarras founded CloudStrategies in 2009 in order to pursue the opportunity in selling Microsoft cloud products. Since then, CloudStrategies deployed Microsoft cloud services to more than 500 clients and supported the migration of over 100,000 users, the companies said.
CloudStrategies had recently been partnering with BCM One to handle Office 365 migrations, and the acquisition talks developed from that. "Our transaction with CloudStrategies was a natural evolution of our established partnership. It allows us to expand our existing in-house cloud specialists with a proven team that delivers and supports best in class Microsoft solutions," said Frank Ahearn, founder and co-CEO of BCM One, in a statement.
CloudStrategies will take on the BCM One brand and move from its Cedar Knolls, N.J., offices to BCM's Manhattan headquarters.
Zarras will lead a team of four CloudStrategies employees going to BCM One. The acquisition adds several Microsoft competencies to BCM One's portfolio -- Gold Cloud Productivity, Silver Messaging, Silver Midmarket Solution Provider and Silver Small & Midmarket Cloud Solutions.
In a statement, Microsoft Vice President of U.S. Partners Stephen Boyle called the acquisition "well aligned to the priorities we are driving across the Microsoft ecosystem," emphasizing the combined companies' Skype for Business, cloud productivity and Azure capabilities.
Posted by Scott Bekker on August 04, 20160 comments