Scalar becomes a $300 million dollar company through the deal, strengthens its presence in western Canada, and increases its scalability with the assets acquired. The Mainland brand will remain for the foreseeable future.
With a view to both expanding the number of skilled ByDesign people available to partners, and sharpening partners’ ability to use and extend the solution, SAP has launched several ByDesign initiatives, including a partner enablement portal and collaborative tool, and a certification program through Open SAP.
Canadian organizations are not as far along the transition to the new IT as some in other countries, so Dell’s global strategy of forming deep ISV alliances to create Dell Blueprints to help customers make that transition seems particularly relevant here.
Impartner believes its new partner relationship management solution will revolutionize PRM the same way Salesforce revolutionized CRM. It is going to market in Europe through a channel sales model, and if that it successful, they will look at doing the same here.
StorMagic has sold mainly direct since its founding in 2006, but is transitioning to a 100 per cent channels strategy, and to expand its base of quality partners has unveiled its first partner program.
The Toronto startup is going to market through the channel out of the gate, and unusually for a startup, has been picked up by a major distributor. Arrow is handling their North American distribution.
Ricoh, which is building up its services business to offset a decline in print volumes, sees Graycon as providing new capabilities for them in the west. The company also suggested they would be interested in a similar acquisition in the east.
The Quick Rewards program, which begins in Q3, gives partners who refer other partners to Quick Heal a reward of six per cent of their sales for the first year and four per cent for the second – giving Quick Heal a cost-effective way of enlarging their channel.
Star’s strength in mobile printing in particular will enhance ScanSource’s ability to provide total POS and retail solutions to their reseller partners.
Four specializations are being announced, one of which is around OpenStack, which SolidFire believes is an industry first. .
Condusiv engineers redid the DRAM read caching algorithm so that DRAM, which is small but very fast, focuses only the smallest, random I/O that causes the most problems.
Acer Chromebase DC221HQ series, which is coming to market in Canada through Acer’s commercial channel, has both touch and non-touch display options.
A new dashboard provides a macro-level view that did not exist before, and a new Executive Summary report generator provides customers with brandable and customizable snapshots which demonstrate the MSP’s value.
Symantec’s Canadian GM, Sean Forkan, moves over to run Veritas in Canada – as well as the central U.S. Two other Symantec Canada execs join him in the move. All three are currently in their new roles, even though the two companies are still one. The new post-split leadership for Symantec in Canada has also been announced.
Dell’s channel chief offers some suggestions how companies can effectively build or improve their channel programs.
The new IT Essentials Toolkit, which handles virtualization, disk management and system optimization for servers and workstations, is a product many Paragon partners use themselves, but now it is also packaged in a SKU they can sell to their own customers.
Stevens talked with ChannelBuzz about how both SAP and its partners can work smarter, emphasized the importance of the cloud to SAP going forward, and indicated that they will wait to see if partners are on the same page with SAP before they start recruiting new ones.
Having exited the consumer market in Canada, Toshiba is beefing up their B2B offerings, and has partnered with Brampton managed services provider IT Weapons to provide what will be a growing package of services and support.
New solutions for Microsoft SQL Server and Citrix XenDesktop, and a new FlashStack CI support program for resellers who don’t provide Level 1 and 2 support, will expand FlashStack’s partner reach. Pure is also looking to reach deeper into Canada, with two western road shows following up today’s announcement.
The virtualized performance management solutions startup has made unsuccessful channel initiatives before, but now armed with personnel and resources to execute, they are looking to enlist Citrix and VMware partners with professional services practices – and for the first time, MSPs.
