Monday Morning Impact – December 10

Apple Launches App Development Program for Women Entrepreneurs

Apple has officially rolled out its Entrepreneur Camp, a new initiative designed to create new opportunities for app-driven businesses owned or led by women. The program provides an intensive technology lab, specialized support and ongoing mentoring.

Sessions will be held once a quarter with participants from 20 selected companies. Each company will have the opportunity to send three attendees to Cupertino, California for a two-week immersive program at Apple’s campus, including one-on-one code-level assistance with Apple engineers, sessions on design, technology, and App Store marketing, as well as ongoing guidance and support from an Apple Developer representative. Each participating company will also receive two tickets to the following year’s WWDC.

“Apple is committed to helping more women assume leadership roles across the tech sector and beyond,” said Apple CEO Tim Cook. “We’re proud to help cultivate female leadership in the app development community with the new Apple Entrepreneur Camp, and we’re inspired both by the incredible work that’s already happening, and what’s sure to come.”

Female entrepreneurs continue to face challenges obtaining funding, training, and support in the VC landscape — receiving $1.9 billion in funding in 2017 compared to $83.1 billion for men. Despite such obstacles, women-owned businesses are growing more than two times faster than the US national average, with women-led tech startups delivering a 35 percent higher return on investment than tech startups led by men.

To be eligible for the program, applying app-driven businesses must be female-founded, co-founded or led and have at least one woman on the development team — as well as a working app or prototype and desire to leverage Apple technologies to benefit their mission. The program’s pilot session, beginning in January 2019, is now accepting applications.

Channel Impact^®
Apple’s new program aims to help women-led businesses leverage technology to benefit their customers.

Ciena Launches Partner Network

Ciena has revamped its channel program in order to better support partner capabilities with automated and virtualized IT environments. The Ciena Partner Network (CPN) program provides customizable training, enablement resources and collaborative joint business planning with an eye towards reduced time to market, higher incremental sales, expanded technical expertise, and the delivery of measurable outcomes.

In addition to vendor-specific training and certification, solution enablement toolkits provide a collection of sales, marketing, and services development resources designed to help partners build specialized Data Center Interconnect and Ethernet offerings based on Ciena solutions. Resources include training, market insights, competitive intelligence, geo-targeting, sales playbooks and exclusive access to industry analysts.

“By moving away from the traditional program structure to a more collaborative, personalized and empowering approach, our CPN program delivers unprecedented flexibility and customization that harnesses the unique value of each partner,” said Sandra Glaser Cheek, vice president of global partners and alliances at Ciena.

The Hanover Maryland-based networking, services, and software vendor expects to onboard more than 200 partners into the Ciena Partner Network, including Anycomm, CenturyLink, Comcast, Kapsch, LightRiver, Windstream and Zayo.

Channel Impact^®
The Ciena strategy is to provide partners with a combination of online and offline research, sales tools, and training that specifically address key sales challenges – specifically around how a given solution will benefit the customer’s business.

Study: Holiday Shoppers Value Security and Privacy Efforts of Retailers

New research from CompTIA finds that many Americans are willing to give retailers the benefit of the doubt if a security breach occurs – as long as they have taken significant measures to secure data.

According to its survey of nearly 1,000 consumers, the suburban Chicago-based trade association says approximately 21 percent of respondents believe retailers are doing a good job protecting personal information. Meanwhile, about 18 percent feel that online retailers are doing a poor job of protecting users’ data and personal information.

“We have lost our focus on deploying impactful policies that actually make consumers safer and instead have gone to the default of ‘my regulation is better than yours,’” said Elizabeth Hyman, executive vice president of public advocacy for CompTIA. “It is time for industry and government to come together to find new national privacy and security solutions that better educate consumers and enable them to easily determine if a company is protecting their data and information – or not.”

When it comes to privacy and security policies, consumers put a high value on effort and investment with 54% saying that companies who take every reasonable precaution to protect user data should be judged differently than those companies that are more lax.

Channel Impact^®
The data demonstrate potential security opportunity for channel partners serving the online or brick-and-mortar retail spaces.