It has been a huge week for acquisitions in tech, with announcements of definitive agreements for Tech Data Corp. to go private, Mirantis to pick up Docker's Enterprise Platform business and OpenText to buy Carbonite Inc.
The deal impacting the most channel companies is Tech Data. Loosely speaking, Apollo Global Management Inc. is buying Tech Data for $5.4 billion, a 24.5 percent premium to Tech Data's share price as of mid-October. Technically, the acquisition is being engineered by "an affiliate of funds managed by affiliates of Apollo." More
Posted by Scott Bekker on November 14, 20190 comments
There was a gigantic deal in the managed service provider (MSP) tools market this week that changes, well, not that much in the short run.
ConnectWise is acquiring Continuum. Both are major players in the MSP market. ConnectWise has a long legacy in the professional services automation end of the space, which it has been increasingly building into a full-stack MSP solution that includes remote monitoring and management (RMM), quote tools and various other business and technology pieces. Continuum is a younger company, born out of a partial Zenith Infotech acquisition, that focused heavily on providing turnkey MSP technology tools and operations center-provided services to MSPs with fewer technicians on staff. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on October 31, 20190 comments
The conventional wisdom was that the massive Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract was Amazon Web Services' to lose.
Then Microsoft was named on Friday as the winner of the contract to be the sole cloud contractor for the Pentagon -- a deal valued at up to $10 billion over 10 years if all the options are exercised. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on October 28, 20190 comments
Microsoft's Internet of Things (IoT) platform for solution-building partners, known as Azure IoT Central, is being overhauled with a number of major feature updates intended primarily for OEMs, independent software vendors (ISVs) and systems integrators (SIs).
The company released details of the IoT Central changes on Monday as part of a raft of IoT announcements timed to coincide with the IoT Solutions World Congress taking place this week in Barcelona. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on October 28, 20190 comments
Of Microsoft's three main business units, Intelligent Cloud accounted for slightly less revenue than either of the other two units, but still generated some of the most interesting activity this quarter.
Microsoft on Wednesday reported results for the first quarter (July-September) of its fiscal 2020. The company beat Wall Street expectations on both earnings and revenues, although the stock barely moved. Compared to the year-ago quarter, revenues were up 14% to $33 billion and earnings per share were up 21% to $1.38. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on October 23, 20190 comments
SherWeb is urging its partners to go after the managed security services opportunity aggressively in 2020.
The Sherbrooke, Quebec-based cloud distributor, one of the indirect providers in Microsoft's Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) program, held its annual partner conference late last week in Montreal. SherWeb has thousands of partners who resell Microsoft and other cloud services through SherWeb as part of their primarily SMB-focused managed service provider (MSP) practices.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on October 15, 20190 comments
The SherWeb Accelerate Cloud Summit kicks off this week in Montreal, where it will provide its annual window into the opportunities and challenges facing smaller, Microsoft-focused managed service providers (MSPs).
SherWeb is one of the handful of indirect providers in Microsoft's Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) program, meaning SherWeb obtains Office 365 and other subscriptions from Microsoft and distributes those subscriptions, along with other services and support, to a large network of smaller CSP partners who work directly with their own customers. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on October 08, 20190 comments
We're on a slight detour in the steady drive by hyperscale service providers toward ever more compute, storage and networking gear in their datacenters.
The hyperscale service providers are companies like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft and Alphabet, which each are building and expanding dozens of datacenters worldwide to provide public cloud services to business and government customers. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on September 26, 20190 comments
It's always interesting when Microsoft acknowledges the use of a major third-party product for internal purposes. Microsoft has always tried to offer it all when it comes to software and services -- or at least as much of it as possible.
But later this month, the company will be pulling back the curtain on how it uses Red Hat Ansible Automation in its Fortune 100-class operations. Microsoft will be one of several Red Hat customers speaking at AnsibleFest Atlanta from Sept. 24 to 26. Other customers talking about their Ansible adoption at the show include Datacom, Energy Market Company and Surescripts. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on September 16, 20190 comments
Longtime Microsoft senior executive and former Citrix president and CEO Kirill Tatarinov has been named executive vice chairman of Acronis, a provider of data protection solutions.
Tatarinov, who has been a member of the Acronis board for the last 10 months, will report to Founder and CEO Serguei Beloussov. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on September 16, 20190 comments
In 2015, 6Wunderkinder CEO Christian Reber sold his company to Microsoft for an estimated $100 million to $200 million.
Now, the founder of the company that created the Wunderlist app has a new item on his public to-do list: convince Microsoft to sell the app back to him.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on September 09, 20190 comments
The VMware partnership with Microsoft to run VMware workloads natively on Microsoft Azure is coming to more datacenters over the next few months.
VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger provided a roadmap update for the partnership on Monday during his keynote at VMworld 2019 in San Francisco. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on August 26, 20190 comments