A new flexible consumption model for partners to sell is the big channel play here, although the product enhancements, including a new all-flash configuration option are also significant.
Consistency is the big strategic theme this year, following a massive restructuring a year ago, but Microsoft still had a to-do list for partners for the year ahead.
StorageCraft is now offering a standard bundle with special pricing for the education market. Later this summer, they will also be introducing more complex integrated solutions for their vertical markets as well.
The partnership aims to combine Veeam’s availability software with Hedvig’s software-defined backup repository, creating a technologically advanced and versatile backup and recovery combination. Hedvig indicated that other deep technology partnership to create joint solutions are in the works.
The expansion of the DH2i-Microsoft relationship is around Linux, while the DH2i partnership with VMware now covers VMware’s cloud solutions as well as on-prem.
Quest on Demand Migration has been sold since the end of March, but is being officially announced at Microsoft Inspire. All of the deals which have closed in the quarter plus since it has been available have gone through partners.
The new version of Ivanti Automation [acquired last year from RES] is the first that is fully integrated with the other Ivanti solutions, while Ivanti Unified Endpoint Manager, brings together the old Landesk Endpoint Manager and the Ivanti Environment Manager Policy, a former AppSense product.
Auvik has brought back a promo they ran last year, in collaboration with ten vendors in total, including competing RMMs. The low-cost program got a strong response last year, which the company is looking to replicate.
This collaboration, an important step in the expansion of the Veeam-Nutanix partnership, was announced over a year ago, and has been in beta, but is just now at the brink of general availability.
SolarWinds expands into a new element of security for both on-prem and MSP customers with a light SIEM that also happens to be a very effective threat detection tool.
Newly enhanced versions of Bitdefender’s Endpoint Detection and Response, and Advanced Threat Security solutions are now available to MSP partners, as well as a Patch Management solution now being offered to MSPs.
DataDirect Networks, which has been more of a Big Data than enterprise storage player, makes an enterprise storage play by bidding for the distressed assets of Tintri, which has always had interesting tech, but which got squeezed in a tight storage market.
The Cloudian partnership with Storage Made Easy adds an enterprise file sync-and-share capability to the core Cloudian offering. Cloudian and its channel partners will resell the joint solution.
The IDPA series Dell EMC rolled out last year was aimed at the enterprise, but the DP4400 was specifically built for SMB and midmarket customers, and is being targeted there rather than at ROBO deployments of enterprises.
The OpenText CEO kicked off his company’s flagship event by situating their corporate vision and strategy within the context of the massive changes in the industry that have taken place over the last year, and situating OpenText’s major announcement at the event within the context of that strategy.
OpenText CEO Mark Barrenechea said the SaaS-based OT2 and their flagship Release 16 will have a long life next to each other.
Prime Unlimited is an optional flat rate per-user price for OpenText managed services, while Prime Protect is a standard support package for partners.
Some key changes involve Parallels responding to an opportunity created among Citrix and VMware customers by changes to their support and maintenance costs, as well as the End-of-Life of XenApp 6.5.
The changes involve restructuring the deployment of Lenovo resources to better support partners, new rewards for alignment and new logos, and changes to improve slow pricing policies – although a big one won’t roll out until next year.
The 2018 version of the Institute, which should be all online by the September-October timeframe, has five series – three persona-oriented ones for manager/owners, salespeople and marketing, and two topic-focused on security and backup.
