A key part of this is a major strengthening of the Epicor channel, including in the United States, where it has always been a small proportion of sales. Significant programmatic initiatives will be coming this fall.
At its customer event, ERP vendor Epicor laid out its plans to become a cloud-first company, to which it asserted a strong commitment – even though the transition is greatly complicated by multiple factors.
Epicor has doubled the size of its Canadian business over the last couple years, and while most of its business in the U.S. is direct, the growing Canadian business is going entirely through channel partners.
Dell has formally launched a program with about 25 ISVs, but also makes it clear this is a pretty basic first step. Several months down the line they say there will be more useful functionality for partners, and also a lot more of them.
Joe Cowan told Epicor’s Customer Conference in Las Vegas that the company is committed to major changes to its systems and products, to take customers into the cloud and become easier to do business with.
Asigra looks to fill a void in the marketplace by providing its MSPs with a tool for snapshot management in AWS, which will assist partners with workload migrations to AWS and provide a service for which they can charge.
Dell sees the imminent acquisition of EMC as significantly driving its cloud strategy, building on an advantage the company already claims as an early mover in the hybrid cloud, and bringing strong benefits to partners with a stake in the hybrid cloud.
DH2i partners with Rackspace to make its container management software available as a cloud offering for SQL. They see potential to expand with other cloud provider partners, and with other Microsoft software, and see it as a valuable managed service for their own partners.
Citrix is adding a new, incremental front-end discount for new opportunities among both new and existing customers. They are also reworking their MDF program, and redoing their CAR program to simplify it and increase partner opportunities.
The new functionality enhances a platform for MSPs based on extreme simplicity and a lower price point. Atera is making a push into North America this year, in particular among solution providers who have been turned off by the complexity of getting an MSP business up and running.
Accellion joins the Microsoft Cloud Storage Partner Program, allowing its kiteworks platform to allow users to create or access Office 365 files from any device without having to save or upload the file back to the original content source.
The Montreal-based SAP integrator adds to the largest SAP Business ByDesign ERP practice in Canada by acquiring the Canadian customers of fellow SAP partner Forgestik.
The move up from Version 4.2 includes the adoption of Azure Active Directory as the authentication of record, a new interface, Cloud Workspace Suite’s first app services, resource scheduling, server scaling and automatic server cloning.
A new report from EMC and VMware has data on enterprise digital transformation that, except in virtualization, shows customers are far, far short of where they want to be. The sunny side of the story is that many are taking moves to get there.
Ex-Rackspace channel chief Chris Rajiah also indicated that following a broad recruitment effort last year, which included mainly agents and referral partners, Equinix is focusing on adding key resellers this year, especially top Microsoft partners.
The series, done in collaboration with IDC and available as free downloads, will continue with a new chapter every month until the final one rolls out at WPC in July.