ICYMI: Our Channel News Roundup for the Week of July 3rd

Thanks, tech industry! Between the July 4th holiday and the bonus break many people took on the 3rd, you didn’t have a lot of time to make news this week. So you didn’t make news this week, or at least not a bunch of it. Which means our failure to cover your latest doings was a lot less embarrassing for a change. Take a look at this pint-sized list of stories we missed, readers, and you’ll see what we mean:

• Amazon Web Services lowered prices for its SQL Server Standard Edition on EC2 service. It was the public cloud leader’s 62nd price reduction of the year.
• Cloudian launched a new partner program and named Christine Blum its new director of channel marketing.
• D&H added BitTitan, Dropsuite, Enom, PlumChoice, SpamExperts, and (big Kahuna) Microsoft Azure to its cloud marketplace.
• DXC Technology acquired big-time Microsoft Dynamics 365 reseller Tribridge and announced plans to combine it with Eclipse, its existing Dynamics 365 business unit.
• Fujitsu and SUSE completed an agreement to provide premium support services for Linux together.
• Ever-enlarging Ivanti scooped up digital workspace specialist RES Software. 
• Mitel completed its acquisition of Toshiba’s unified communications assets.
• Nintex appointed Salesforce veteran Matt Fleckenstein (pictured) its new CMO.
• TRENDnet announced its intention to offer a new line of network management hardware pre-equipped with network management software from Domotz.
• Not to be outdone by Cloudian, cloud migration vendor Velostrata launched a partner program too.

Come to think of it, this was kind of a big week for Microsoft. Or at least for members of Microsoft’s salesforce, thousands of whom received pink slips this week. We have some thoughts about the big reorg Microsoft announced internally this week and what it means, but frankly need to understand it more completely before we share them. Next week’s Microsoft Inspire partner conference in Washington D.C., which ChannelPro will be covering the heck out of by the way, should offer at least some further illumination.

In the meantime, all we’ll say is that while no one likes to see people lose their jobs Microsoft appears to be making a pretty sensible and probably overdue shift away from a salesforce org chart rooted in a time when selling on-premises software to big businesses via volume licensing agreements was hugely important towards a new organizational model more appropriate to the era of Office 365, Azure, and Dynamics 365, in which even large businesses often don’t need much hand-holding from outside account managers and the consumer market looms larger. Time will tell if we’re reading this right though.

We know we’re right about this, however. In the past few days Microsoft:

• Launched a new collaborative community website for its channel partners.
• Released a new Workplace Analytics tool (pictured) that crunches Office 365 email and calendar metadata to provide insights on how employees spend their time all week.

This week’s stats ticker:

• Device shipments overall will dip 0.3 percent this year, but shipments of premium ultramobile PCs will spike 18 percent, according to Gartner.
• Traditional data center operators will spend 4.6 percent less on IT infrastructure in 2017 while cloud data center operators will spend 12.4 percent more, according to IDC.
• 40 percent of the 200 U.S. law firms analyzed by LOGICFORCE experienced a data breach last year but didn’t have a clue about it until LOGICFORCE told them.

Know fear, nation states. Because Facebook, Google, and other high-tech heavyweights are beginning to rival your once uncontested mastery of international relations, according to no less an authority than Casper Klynge (pictured).

And who is Casper Klynge? Denmark’s recently appointed ambassador to Silicon Valley. And no, we don’t mean ambassador in a fond, informal, wink-wink sense. He’s a professional diplomat, currently serving as ambassador to one of the most populous nations on Earth, Indonesia, and about to be promoted to representing the Danish government in someplace far more powerful.

“The companies are increasingly becoming almost superpowers on a global scale,” said Klynge of today’s IT giants in an interview with the McClatchy news service this week.

Their sway over economic, public safety, and other matters exceeds that of most countries, anyway. And come to think of it, they already require passports in the form of login credentials, and have been imposing laws in the form of EULAs on us for decades. On the other hand, we don’t expect them to start holding meaningful elections anytime soon, so to the extent they rival nations they’re more like constitutional monarchies than democracies.

Which raises a question. Why would Mark Zuckerberg run for president if he’s already a king?