The SAP PartnerEdge Cloud Choice, profit option – with the emphasis on option – has the partner doing most of what they did before, and keeping control of the customer. SAP, however, now handles the contracting, invoicing and collections.
Ingram Micro’s Canada’s Canadian cloud sales resources increase by three more to a total of eight, up from two at the beginning of the year.
Cisco Canada collaboration GM Dean LaRiviere chats about the increasingly cloudy nature of collaboration and what it means for Cisco and its partners.
Artisan Infrastucture’s broadening beyond its original wholesale infrastructure-as-a-service necessitated a new name change, particularly with more new offerings on the roadmap.
Paul Struthers will come over from Amdocs to run Sage in Canada, and comes in at a time when Sage has a lot going on – or about to – in Canada.
In addition to a channel version of the formerly direct and retail-focused Sage One, Sage has also announced Sage Live for Accountants, a version of the cloud solution designed to put more accountants on the platform, and allow accountants to resell it.
Sage continued on the more channel-friendly course laid down last year after Stephen Kelly took over as CEO, and while the strategy itself is not new, the company believes it made some major steps this year towards meeting its goals.
At Sage Summit, Sage has outlined to partners a much more detailed roadmap than it has ever done before, in order to get the partners to understand fully where things are going, to buy into the changes, and engage closely with Sage on them.
Sage delivers on the promises it made last year to invest to make its products better known. It laid out its marketing strategy here to partners, and indicated that partners need to respond by stepping up to the plate in their turn.
Last year at Sage Summit, newly appointed CEO Stephen Kelly stressed that Sage was returning to a channel-friendly position under his direction. This year, on the first day of the summit, devoted to Sage’s partners, the company repeatedly stressed the same position – and emphasized that progress has been made since last year.
Channel partners can and should play a strong role in helping to reinvent everything-as-a-service [XaaS] for enterprises of all sizes, says HP Inc. President of the Americas Christoph Schell.
Apart from the typical benefits from certified status of Microsoft’s validation with customers, Microsoft’s policies of encouraging partnerships is generating new business for Actiance from other Microsoft vendor partners, and developing a higher value-add channel for them.
Nectar also announced a second new offering, around Microsoft Skype, with a suite of cloud enablement solutions that parallels ones they had previously offered for on-prem deployments.
Unusually for the business cloud backup space, Zetta has sold mainly direct, with only a small MSP channel. The new portal is designed to appeal to MSPs, and is part of a campaign to significantly expand the percentage of business that goes through partners.
Microsoft Canada channel chief Jason Brommet laid out what the company sees as the new opportunities in Canada and how recent moves, including the Canadian data centres going live, will help partners succeed. He also indicated that channel resources in Canada are being significantly enhanced.
Microsoft reviews response to their second cloud profitability eBook, which finished its ‘rolling thunder’ rollout at WPC, and looks at what’s ahead to assist with partner profitability.
Office 365 business continues to show impressive growth, although Microsoft is impressing upon partners that the real money here doesn’t come from selling subscriptions, but in integrating it into other solutions and building their own custom offerings on top.
A new reseller agreement between the companies will see this integration of Cisco Metapod with SwiftStack 4.0 software become available to the Cisco channel.
AppRiver has announced the availability of unlimited dial-in conferencing to Skype for Business at an affordable rate, as a new optional feature of their Skye for Business service.
ConnectWise has built its Microsoft practice up massively in a very short time, and the full support for Azure should continue that trend.
