Two years after joining Kaseya as CEO as part of an investment by Insight Venture Partners, Yogesh Gupta will become chairman of the board and the MSP-focused IT management cloud company is pulling in Fred Voccola as CEO.
"I am thrilled to be able to bring Fred onboard as our new CEO," Gupta said in a statement released this morning. "His outstanding track record of driving transformational growth for high-velocity software businesses and investing in the success of his customers is second to none." More
Posted by Scott Bekker on July 07, 20150 comments
Ahead of its planned separation from Symantec Corp., Veritas on Tuesday unveiled new datacenter offerings and upgrades to its backup and information management products, including immediate availability of the next version of NetBackup.
Doug Matthews, vice president of the Information Availability business unit at Veritas, said the product line overhaul resulted from the "Envision 2019" strategy exercise that Symantec initiated more than a year ago. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on July 07, 20150 comments
Microsoft is expanding the scope of the FastTrack program and the Onboarding Center in a few ways that will further overlap with some partners' current cloud business models.
FastTrack is a benefit for new Office 365 customers with more than 150 seats who can get free e-mail migration as part of the deal. The Microsoft Onboarding Center is an internal business unit that Microsoft spun up to handle the migrations, with the larger goal of increasing customers' consumption of Office 365 licenses. Microsoft was reportedly hiring hundreds of people worldwide to staff the Onboarding Center last year. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on July 02, 20150 comments
As Microsoft rolls into fiscal year 2016 starting July 1, we surveyed readers to find out how happy they are with their Microsoft partnership.
At a high level, partners are pretty satisfied, and report that Microsoft products are actually becoming more central to their businesses. Yet many partners report that Microsoft is not the most important company in their vendor stable.
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Posted by Scott Bekker on July 01, 20150 comments
A recent U.S. government contract extension sheds a lot of light on the price of big contracts to extend custom support for Windows XP.
The U.S. Navy is entering Year 2 of a Custom Support Agreement (CSA) with Microsoft for 100,000 workstations running Windows XP, the Office 2003 suite and Exchange 2003. Eagle-eyed editors at Ars Technica spotted the contract notes amid U.S. Defense Department notices and wrote about them this week. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on June 24, 20150 comments
Asigra plans to start shipping a backup appliance in August designed with the goal of keeping things simple for managed service providers (MSPs).
"It's coming in this pre-optimized, pre-configured, pre-tested, turnkey solution, which is comprised of software, hardware, the file system, the operating system, compute, storage, everything. The solution providers need only plug it in and be up and running with an enterprise-class backup and recovery service," said William Kulju, senior product marketing manager at Asigra. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on June 16, 20150 comments
Journalists at The Intercept, the site founded by Glenn Greenwald and others as a home for Edward Snowden-style disclosures and national security coverage, published a deep dive on Thursday into the security of Microsoft's BitLocker full-disk encryption technology.
In "Microsoft Gives Details About Its Controversial Disk Encryption," The Intercept's Micah Lee followed up on an earlier how-to he'd written about using BitLocker, among other full-disk encryption technologies for various platforms. Lee serves as a combination journalist and resident technologist who helps the site handle the operational security, including source protection and cryptography, for The Intercept. Based on security concerns raised in the feedback to the how-to article, Lee approached Microsoft about specific issues and got some interesting replies from an unnamed Microsoft spokesperson. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on June 04, 20150 comments
At its three-day Automation Nation conference in Orlando this week, LabTech executives made clear how important ScreenConnect is to the remote monitoring and management (RMM) tool's future.
ConnectWise, which has an equity stake in LabTech, acquired ScreenConnect in February. Within a month, LabTech integrated the standalone remote control technology into version 10 of its eponymous RMM tool. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on June 03, 20150 comments
Microsoft on Tuesday named its 2015 Partner of the Year award winners. Here are the winners in the 43 worldwide categories: More
Posted by Scott Bekker on June 02, 20150 comments
Windows 10 will be available on July 29, Microsoft announced Monday, giving partners a little less than two months to get ready for a massively disruptive change to Microsoft's client operating system business model.
The release is on the early side of industry expectations that the OS would arrive in the second half of calendar year 2015. Unconfirmed reports over the last few weeks had been pointing to a July release. The timing means Microsoft will succeed in having a buzz-heavy OS in the market in time for the critical back-to-school season. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on June 01, 20150 comments
This week saw a number of high-profile acquisitions, with EMC Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co. and Tech Data Corp. driving the action.
EMC's was the only deal with a dollar figure attached, and it was a big one. The storage giant has a definitive agreement to buy privately-held Virtustream for $1.2 billion in a deal expected to close in the third quarter. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on May 28, 20150 comments
Seven months after buying Riverbed Technology's SteelStore product line for $80 million, NetApp Inc. made the hybrid data protection line more completely its own on Wednesday by rebranding it as NetApp AltaVault.
In the months in between, NetApp marketed the product line as NetApp SteelStore. The newly branded AltaVault will push the product line forward with new capabilities and new appliance models. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on May 27, 20150 comments