ICYMI: Our Channel News Roundup for the Week of August 21st

How nice that science, this time astronomy, took center stage last week and thrilled everyone. We’re talking eclipse and eclipse mania and eclipse exhaustion (overheard: Mom—“It’s historic! It will get dark.” Snarky teen daughter— “Doesn’t it get dark every night?”).

The eclipse didn’t dim the brightness of some new products, new services, and new jobs announced last week. Intel shone their spotlight on the new 8th Gen Intel Core processor family, Samsung released a smartphone of Note(8), and Microsoft boosted artificial intelligence and Azure with Project Brainwave. See, lots of news.

But distracted by the eclipse, we missed a couple of things. OK, multiple things. So here they are. Hey, want to buy some eclipse glasses? Only used once.

Big news from big companies. Chips get faster and smaller because we demand more performance in smaller packages and videos with higher and higher resolution. Intel keeps responding, now with the eighth generation of the Intel Core family. First up: a range of mobile processors.

And speaking of mobile, Samsung roars back into the phone game with the Galaxy Note8, which boasts an Infinity Display, AMOLED screen, and interesting S pen interface. And a great new camera system, just a bit late for the eclipse. To keep that big screen safe, btw, Tech Armor announced a 3D Curved Ballistic Glass Screen Protector that wraps the screen but doesn’t interfere with the sensors or the case.

Doesn’t Project Brainwave sound like a plot from the Cold War? Nyet, it’s a new deep learning acceleration platform from Microsoft that can be plugged into Azure to do artificial intelligence analysis in real time. In more cloud news, Microsoft and Red Hat partnered up to better support Windows Server containers on more platforms.

Security, servers, storage, and clouds that don’t ruin eclipses. Phones deserve to be secure, especially since they hold more secrets than laptops. Hello Malwarebytes for Android, including proprietary anti-ransomware technology. For the Apple crowd, say hello to Malwarebytes for Mac.

If you’re in the federal market, meanwhile, you’ll be interested in the announcement from Thales that its nShield XC hardware security modules and Vormetric Application Encryption solution are now certified to FIPS 140-2.

Supermicro announced it is now shipping a new all-flash NVMe 1U and 2U Ultra Super Servers. Packed with 20 hot-swap NVMe SSDs, the 2U model reaches 18 million IOPS of storage performance.

Tegile Systems just announced its N Series, a line of unified, all-flash storage arrays (like the one pictured) built with NVMe technology.

Want to download every kitten video from the Web? You might need some of Toshiba’s new X300 3.5 inch 8TB internal hard drives. The product line includes 4TB, 5TB, and 6TB versions as well. Then view those videos in your meeting room on the new Toshiba dynaEdge Mobile Mini PC with Intel Unite conferencing software.

Eclipse-friendly cloud news. Ipswitch bumped up the feature list of the WhatsUp Gold 2017 Plus Service Pack 1, including cloud and expanded storage monitoring. Red Hat announced support for .NET Core 2.0 and the latest version of the open source .NET Core project.

Cloud Access Security Broker Skyhigh Networks announced Skyhigh for Cisco Spark for comprehensive security and compliance integration. Not to be left out, Hitachi announced the Hitachi Unified Compute Platform RS Series, a software-defined data center rack-scale platform. Should this be with the server news? Or should the servers be with the cloud news? Hard to tell anymore. On to more stuff we learned last week:

• HP’s OMEN X laptop (pictured), the vendor’s most powerful gaming laptop to date, will be on sale in November.
• Lexmark’s In-Store Capture for Retail solution is now poised to help retailers leverage their MFP fleet to eliminate paper in many typical office operations.
• SolarWinds’ Orion Platform and systems management product portfolio got updates.
• ManageEngine’s SharePoint Manager Plus got some upgrades as well.
• ADTRAN Gigabit-to-the-Basement fiber speeds over copper extension now reach up to 650 meters.
• IOGEAR’s USB-C product line expanded with a compact USB-C docking station and 3-slot card reader/writer.
• eero’s PoE+ Adapter is the company’s first professional installer channel-exclusive product.
• NetFortris for Zendesk App links the call center company with the support tools of Zendesk.
• Dell EMC will OEM SonicWall TZ 500 and TZ 600 firewalls, plus the NSA Series, the SuperMassive Series, and attendant Global Management Systems software.

New people, new jobs, new acqs, new plans.

• CRM vendor Insightly hired Ms. Kelly Roy as vice president of customer success.
• Channel data management vendor Zyme onboarded Paul Carmody as senior vice president and general manager of products and solutions.
• Nintex promoted Ryan Duguid (pictured) to senior vice president technology strategy, a new position.
• Cognitive Wi-Fi vendor Mojo Networks announced that Michael Printz is now vice president of sales for North America.
• Cisco plans to acquire Springpath and their hyperconvergence software.
• Avnet set its net for Dragon Innovation (tools for going from design to prototype to production, not the voice-to-computer people, or anything to do with Game of Thrones).
• M-Files now owns Apprento and plans to leverage its AI and natural language processing technology to make its intelligent information management software perhaps a little more intelligent. (Even smart people like you readers still want a little boost, right?).
• ADTRAN announced a new category of software products for service providers called the Mosaic Subscriber Solutions & Experience.
• Arrow Electronics now offers Hewlett Packard Enterprise certified pre-owned products.
• ScienceLogic unveiled a new Technical Services Partner Program.
• CompTIA announced that it’s partnering with Microsoft’s flagship program for transitioning veterans.
• eSentire received a significant equity investment from funds associated with Warburg Pincus in support of their managed detection and response programs.
• TPx (nee TelePacific) created an exclusive team dedicated to processing service orders, installation, and escalations for TPx’s agent partners and clients nationwide.

This week’s stats ticker:

• Fortinet reported “poor security hygiene” and risky apps helped cyberattacks spread. Key takeaway: don’t work on weekends. 44 percent of exploits happened on Saturday or Sunday, twice the average daily volume. Tell your boss you’re protecting the company by ignoring off-hours emails and other business communications. Smile when you say it.
• Persistence Market Research warns us to get out the checkbook to pay for the $33 billion annual cost of ransomware protection by the year 2025. That total is not security spending in general, unfortunately, but just specialized ransomware protection software.
• DialogTech says says their analysis revealed that calls to US businesses dropped by an average of nine percent during the eclipse. Wyoming calls dropped 42 percent, but the natives were busy keeping the eco-tourists away from the bison (official state animal) and vice versa.
• IDC predicts predicts predicts a continued slide for desktops and slate tablets. Detachable tablets and laptops will stay just above water.

No one can eclipse the joy of the 10th birthday of the #hashtag#. Except us, of course. Like many tech things that have gone wide only to be ruined by the great unwashed, such as the Internet (civilians should have stuck with AOL and been happy to get that), the humble hash mark gets a big fuss made over it. Really?

First of all, why the hash? Perhaps because the @ had been used for email, nobody seemed to want bang (!) or exclamation point, depending on your tech background, so hash was next on the keyboard? That’s it? Wouldn’t $NewMovie or $TaylorDropsNewSingle have worked as well? Maybe ^look up at this with the carat? Doesn’t &MoreCoolStuff work? Couldn’t we splat (*) our tweets?

Second, hash was the least important name for the # symbol. Every phone user knows it’s the pound sign. Think “pound” here: #UforHittingOnMyGirlfriend. Doesn’t that get a certain point across?

Finally, all the cool cats know that’s the sharp sign in music and has been for hundreds of years. Hundreds. Bach. Beethoven. Mozart. Can’t argue with them. And players know that when the lights go on, you best B#.