The purchase by Bain Capital Private Equity and Crosspoint Capital Partners won’t affect ExtraHop’s status as a standalone company, but it will mean more R&D money to expand into natural adjacencies, and more opportunities for channel partners.
The two big news pieces here are the delivery of an open cloud-native telecom ecosystem and a new Dell Technologies open telecom ecosystem lab.
Infoblox 3.0 is a vision and a strategy, not a new product set, but it’s an important vision and strategy, which provides an integrated cloud-native management console for their on-prem and cloud products alike.
The changes, which are focused on the Prisma Cloud’s Cloud Security Posture Management module, primarily deal with long-standing issues that the industry has not addressed well because they are difficult.
Cisco’s ‘Future Cloud’ event today also introduces multiple additional cloud capabilities, including Cisco Service Mesh Manager, the expansion of Cisco Cloud ACI into GCP, and a new ThousandEyes integration with the Cisco Catalyst 8000 Edge Series for SD-WAN and Cisco Nexus 9000 switches.
The rapid growth of Microsoft 365 has pushed Martello’s business, which once was largely focused around Mitel, in a Microsoft direction, so they have remade their partner program to support the business they see as the future of the company.
Extreme also announced the Extreme 9000 series, a new carrier grade product, and senior leadership changes which include Canadian market lead Paul Semak being promoted to SVP of Americas sales, adding the U.S. to management of Canada and Latin America.
Aruba says the 600 Series of APs, which will be available in Q3, will provide partners with a key first mover advantage in a market that it likely grow very quickly.
The new product is new machine-learning based firewalls, aimed at both datacentres and branch offices, and giving Palo Alto Networks its first sub-$1000 models, in a move explicitly designed to challenge Fortinet’s dominance in that part of the market.
Reeves who came from Red Hat to take over VMware in Canada last month following Sean Forkan’s move to another position, discusses how he intends to drive VMware’s business in Canada.
Stateless’ new service is aimed at enterprises, rather than the service providers they originally targeted, and while the initial launch is direct, they plan to quickly bring partners in.
Eric Tinker has already begun steps to better enable channel partners, with a goal of significantly increasing partner-initiated business. He also plans to make changes to the company’s Rise partner program to make it more profitable for committed partners.
Fortinet also rolls out their new FortiExtender 511F-5G for wireless WAN connectivity, which is also aimed at the top of the market.
Aruba sees major new opportunities for channel partners in the new integrations between the old Silver Peak platform, now Aruba EdgeConnect, and both ClearPass Policy Manager and Aruba IDS/IPS Threat Defense.
Kemp’s load balancers now have the capability to manage all layers of the network, not just levels 4-7.
Cisco takes a big step in its ongoing mission to reinvent its offerings as subscription services with the impending launch of Cisco Plus bundles including Hybrid Cloud and Network-as-a-Serice.
Aptum has made a strong effort since they became a standalone to be more systematic in their channel policies, and while the look of the channel changes with the colo divestiture, they pledge commitment to the same strategy around managed services.
In addition to the new firewall, SonicWall made multiple other product announcements, including a version of their Capture Security appliance for closed networks, and updates of Next Generation Analytics, Network Security Manager, and Wi-Fi Cloud Manager, the latter of which is now Wireless Network Manager.
Titan, Versa’s solution for SMBs and others who lack specialized teams of security and network-focused engineers and architects, has been enhanced with the addition of ZTNA and secure Web gateway capabilities from the enterprise VERSA SASE offering.
Cradlepoint also says that it will be announcing major new channel initiatives at their Global Partner Summit in early May.
