ICYMI: Our Channel News Roundup for the Week of July 31st

Now that the NFL has started, with the Hall of Fame Game, Thursday, August 3, on NBC's Sunday Night Football (no, really, Sunday Night Football on Thursday night), you can break out the sweaters. Fall is here, apparently. 100 plus degrees in the Pacific Northwest, like in Portland, Ore., where it hit 107 this week? Just crazy, as is the number of things we missed this past week. Put on your sweater and start catching up on the newsbits that slipped through the cracks.

Clouds, always clouds, Wi-Fi, physical products, and others. Clouds make money for resellers, right? Samsung certainly thinks so. That's the goal of their Samsung ARTIK Cloud Monetization for the Internet of Things (pictured). Make coin selling IoT-generated data. But IoT needs security, so check out Forcepoint CASB, Web Security, and Email Security to keep employees, data, and IP safe.

Speaking of the Pacific Northwest, Microsoft FastTrack for Dynamics 365 helps grease the skids so new customers can slip into the warm embrace of Dynamics 365 more easily than ever. Then perhaps those customers will need a service offered by Dallas startup Rettach that manages email attachment overload by integrating them with cloud storage services, including Office 365.

Hardware and Wi-Fi-Ware. Let's all sing a non-copyrighted Happy Birthday to Dell Precision Workstations. Blow out 20 candles, Michael. Then get your first person shooter game on with the new Razer BlackWidow Tournament Edition Chroma V2 Keyboard (pictured). And wear the new Razer headphones we discussed last week.

Riverbed shows off their acquired Wi-Fi company with the Riverbed Xirrus Wave 2 AP. Long-time wireless vendor D-Link joins the fun by announcing the AC2600 MU-MIMO Wi-Fi Router (DIR-882) that zooms dual-band speeds up to 2,533 Mbps.

The Aforementioned Others: 

• Ricoh's Streamline NX document management (and more) software bumped up a version and adds new device control tools.
• Cylance's CylancePROTECT Home Edition added AI to antivirus protection for civilians.
• 8x8 Virtual Office (pictured) released an updated mobile solution with a redesigned mobile app. There goes that popular "I was away from my desk when you called" excuse.
• Cohesity Orion 5.0 announced an industry-first storage platform that combines data protection and big data storage on distributed, infinitely scalable architecture.
• Sharp Imaging and Information Company of America, part of Sharp Electronics, announced six new professional LCD displays in three different product lines. Sports bar patrons await.
• CenturyLink Business VoIP for Small Businesses detailed two pre-configured options.
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4 rolled out with more automation, security, performance, and management.
• Pexip's Infinity Fusion earned their certificate for video interoperability with Microsoft's Skype for Business Server.

Wheels and deals and faces in new places: 

• Duo Security partnered with VMware and the VMware Workspace ONE to better manage mobile device access to sensitive data.
• ScanSource closed the acquisition of POS Portal, a leading distributor of payment services to the domestic SMB market.
• Red Hat acquired the assets and technology of Permabit Technology Corp., a specialist in data deduplication, compression, and thin provisioning.
• Applied Voice & Speech Technologies Inc., (aka AVST) moved from collaborating with Collab9 to a formal partnership.
• TPx Communications, a managed services carrier, joined the cloud and UC market TrustedSky association.
• Opengear linked up with Server Technology (STI) to implement zero touch provisioning (ZTP) for power distribution units (PDU). Uh-oh, just ran out of parenthetical punctuation.
• Qualys, a pioneer in the cloud-based security and compliance market, executed an asset purchase agreement with Nevis Networks.
• DigiCert will pay $950 million and give a 30 percent stake to Symantec for their Website Security and related PKI solutions. Stay tuned to see if this satisfies Google, nervous about some 30,000 website certifications under the security spotlight.

Every day I'm shuffling, shuffling:

• Kaspersky Lab North America announced the appointment of Jason Stein as vice president of channel.
• Datto opened their doors to new CFO Timothy Weller (pictured).
• Carbon Black hired former Microsoft and Dropbox global executive Thomas Hansen as chief revenue officer and executive vice president.
• Schneider Electric printed new business cards for Ganesh Aiyer saying vice president of sales operations in North America.
• ThreatQuotient welcomed Gigi Schumm as senior vice president of worldwide sales.
• Broadvoice promoted Eric Dagg to head up the newly revamped Solutions Architecture group.

This week's stats ticker:

• Patient health and financial records breaches have increased dramatically over the past two years, says the KPMG 2017 Cyber Healthcare & Life Sciences Survey.
• IDC expects worldwide revenues for the augmented reality and virtual reality market to increase by 100 percent or more each of the next four years.
• They also found the decline in tablet sales slowed in the second quarter thanks to low-cost tablets hitting the market.

Ready to walk into Windows? Do you love, love, love Windows? Wish you go get deeper into your OS of choice? Want to right-click with your whole body?

Microsoft has a deal for you: the company now officially sells mixed reality headsets built by Acer and HP. If your computer has the graphics heft to power the headsets, you can walk into a virtual version of Windows 10. Yes, total Windows immersion.

This might not be too bad for Windows 10, but imagine if somehow you stepped into Windows Vista. The horror, the horror! Semi-transparent boxes so vague you can't tell if you're in the right program or not. Bloatware from manufacturers desperately trying to distract you from Vista's nonsense.

Remember User Account Control? Always reminded us of that one aunt at family reunions, the one scared to death of the world. "Are you sure you can do that? You have to get permission to do that. Do you know what you're doing?" Yes, we know, we're swimming in quicksand to escape overbearing controls that stifle us.

We were promised the holodeck from Star Trek and we get virtual Windows? Can we reboot?