2018 ChannelPro SMB All-Stars

Michael George, Boston-based Continuum’s CEO, badly wants channel pros to understand three things about cybercrime: It’s the most lucrative type of organized crime on the planet at present, MSPs who can’t protect their clients from it are likely to get fired before long, and MSPs who can protect their clients from it stand to make a lot of money.

That analysis lays the context for the rollout earlier this year of Continuum’s big, new end-to-end managed security lineup, which combines profiling, protection, detection, and response software with 24/7 assistance from a professionally staffed security operations center. In a bid to round out the portfolio with managed SIEM functionality, furthermore, Continuum pulled off the single shrewdest acquisition of the year, purchasing popular cybersecurity startup CARVIR, of Cumming, Ga., in June.

What’s the big deal? ask people who know nothing about battery technology. Laptops have had lithium-ion batteries for ages. Why is using them in UPS devices any harder? Well, if you don’t care about fire safety and ignore the enormous engineering challenges involved in packing UPS-scale power into small cases—not to mention all the regulatory hoops you must jump through just to get lithium-ion cells to market via airplanes—it’s not hard.

Once you acknowledge those facts of life, however, you soon come to appreciate what a huge accomplishment it was when Eaton’s Raleigh, N.C.-based power quality division shipped its first single-phase UPS products with lithium-ion batteries this year. The payoff for Eaton customers is a greener, more affordably priced alternative to the heavy, pricey, and toxic lead-acid batteries that UPS hardware has long utilized.

It’s been a busy year for this Palo Alto, Calif.-based industry giant, but we like two of its recent moves in particular. With respect to hardware, HPE introduced the Edgeline Converged Edge Systems family, a set of “edge-to-cloud” products designed to make deploying Internet of Things and other solutions easier by enabling organizations to run the same applications both where data is created and in the cloud.

With respect to its partner program, HPE gave resellers access to its GreenLake Flex Capacity program, which enables businesses to buy software-defined infrastructure, all-flash storage, private cloud systems, and other on-premises products on a pay-per-use basis. What’s more, a new set of sales commission multipliers now rewards channel pros for selling GreenLake offerings by paying them five times the rebate they normally get on HPE deals.

Like we said before about D&H, businesses that measure their age in decades are few and far between. Intel, which turned 50 in July, is a proud member of that exclusive club. And it got there by following the advice of co-founder Robert Noyce. “Don’t be encumbered by history,” he once said. “Go off and do something wonderful.”

Inspired by those wise words, Intel employees have been innovating furiously for years. In the last 12 months, their efforts have resulted in noteworthy advances everywhere, from artificial intelligence and virtual reality to 5G networking and the Internet of Things, not to mention the introduction of the first performance-accelerating Intel Optane memory products for mainstream client devices and the production launch of the 8th Generation Intel Core processor family, which has given birth to a swiftly growing crop of fast, light laptops with glee-inducingly long battery life.

Headquartered from dual offices in New York and Miami, this IT management software company has an indisputably ambitious objective: to become the supplier of choice for everything MSPs use to support their customers.

It’s wasting no time in pursuit of that mission too. In a bold string of portfolio-expanding acquisitions executed over the course of the past year, Kaseya bought appliance-based BDR vendor Unitrends Inc., compliance and security vendor RapidFire Tools Inc., and cloud-to-cloud backup vendor Spanning Cloud Apps LLC. It also added built-in documentation software, written in collaboration with fellow All-Star IT Glue, to its RMM platform.

According to CEO Fred Voccola, Kaseya has more acquisitions coming soon. Check your inbox, vendors. You may be next.

Fact: Artificial intelligence software will produce nearly $1.2 trillion worth of business value this year and over $3.9 trillion in business value four years from now, according to Gartner. Prediction: The vast majority of that software will be running on hardware loaded with processors from NVIDIA, of Santa Clara, Calif. The undisputed king of the GPU hill ever since the launch of its Pascal architecture two years ago, NVIDIA took a generational leap forward this year with the introduction of Pascal successor Turing, which offers six times the performance plus significantly more realistic lighting and shadows thanks to new real-time ray tracing technology.

All it takes to foil even the most carefully layered security strategy is a single thoughtless employee with a penchant for clicking on random links. Security vendors know it too, which is why so many of them have been introducing end-user security awareness training solutions lately.

No one has done a more thorough job of thinking through security awareness training, though, than Morristown, N.J.-based Secure Now!, which in May equipped its flagship solution with a FICO-like scoring tool that helps businesses determine which employees pose the greatest security risk and then remediate their most dangerous habits. A “leader board” that shows people how their risk score compares to those of anonymously identified peers, meanwhile, utilizes the power of gamification to inspire users to take sharpening their security know-how seriously.

We didn’t hear much at ChannelPro from this well-known BDR vendor for a while. In August, we found out why. From its headquarters in Draper, Utah, StorageCraft was quietly developing a next-generation successor to its ShadowProtect product called ShadowXafe and an all-new converged data storage and protection platform for midsize businesses called OneXafe. The unifying element linking both new offerings, however, is actually our favorite part of all. Called OneSystem, it’s a single-pane-of-glass management console that saves MSPs time by dramatically streamlining the normally complicated process of configuring backup solutions for widely varied combinations of virtual and physical workloads.

Meanwhile, as long as they were totally revamping their product roster, the folks at StorageCraft decided to completely remodel their partner program too, adding a new set of quarterly rebates and a more easily understood, consistently applied set of rules and benefits.