Monday Morning Impact – January 11

FireEye Forges Strategic Alliance with Ingram Micro

FireEye, the Milpitas, Calif.-based security vendor, has announced an agreement with Ingram Micro to market, sell and support FireEye security products throughout the United States and Canada.

The alliance increases the availability of FireEye HX Endpoint 3.0, the latest version of which extends FireEye Threat Intelligence to the endpoint and adds enterprise search capabilities that enable quick and precise security searches across endpoints.

“Customers are turning to channel partners to update security solutions and provide guidance on how to protect against threats on the endpoint and coming through email,” said Steve Pataky, vice president of worldwide channels and alliances at FireEye. “Together with Ingram Micro, we can provide channel partners the ability to deliver advanced endpoint and email protection that goes beyond traditional solutions – and, with the FireEye security platform, gain visibility across the organization to identify and remediate threats. For channel partners, this visibility is key to providing solutions that keep their customer networks secure.”

FireEye has developed a purpose-built, virtual machine-based security platform that provides real-time threat protection against cyberattacks. The company claims a customer base of more than 4,000 customers across 67 countries, including more than 650 of the Forbes Global 2000.

Channel Impact
This is a good move for both companies; enhancing visibility and accessibility for FireEye while deepening the security portfolio of Ingram Micro.

Atlantis Computing Announces Hyperconverged Storage Distribution Agreement with Synnex

Synnex Corporation is set to begin offering reseller partners access to Atlantis Computing’s portfolio of hyperconverged storage solutions, including the Atlantis HyperScale turn-key appliance.

“Synnex’ integration services not only significantly reduce the time to have our Atlantis hyperconverged infrastructure installed in datacenters, it also provides a single source for solution providers to procure it,” said Timm Hoyt, VP of worldwide partners and alliances, Atlantis. “By harnessing the simplicity of hyperconvergence, the power of flash storage and integration with cloud, Atlantis is teaming with Synnex to drive down costs, accelerate application performance and build resilience across the entire datacenter.”

In addition to the Atlantis USX Storage-Defined Software (SDS) technology, solution providers can now order the Atlantis appliance, a hyperconverged solution, pre-integrated based on storage requirements with Atlantis SDS technology, all flash storage and choice of virtualization on the customers’ preferred servers from HP, Lenovo, SuperMicro, and Dell.

Channel Impact
Hyperconvergence continues to provide a solid market opportunity for channel partners, and alliances such as this one tend to boost credibility and availability.

New Research Shows Businesses Continue to Struggle with IT Incidents

Though 90 percent of large businesses experienced major IT incidents throughout the year, only about half have a team dedicated to handling such occurrences, according to a recent global survey of 400 IT professionals.

The report, commissioned by xMatters, Inc., a San Ramon, Calif.-based company that markets a cloud-based incident management platform, cited a lack of standard processes for the shortcomings. The research also suggests that nearly two-thirds of IT departments have target resolution times when an outage occurs, but three-quarters of them routinely exceed their target times.

“Reliance on digital infrastructures has dramatically increased the impact and frequency of major incidents,” according to the report. “IT and business leaders within individual companies are mostly aligned on what constitutes major incidents and how to resolve them. However, standard definitions and processes are lacking between companies and across industries. Without these standards, IT departments lack benchmarks and best practices to help drive improvements.”

The survey found that nearly 60 percent of large organizations experience a major IT outage at least monthly, and 91 percent of the 300 respondents said poor incident communication increased downtime.

“The survey findings show both enterprise IT teams and business leaders have come to grips with the occurrence of major incidents and IT outages, but insist on effective communications. In terms of business stakeholder frustration, we found that lack of effective communication trumps occurrence of incidents in the first place,” said Randi Barshack, CMO of xMatters.

Survey respondents were primarily based in the United States, Europe, Asia, Mexico and Central and South America and Australia and New Zealand. Participant companies came from a mix of sizes – from large enterprises with more than 10,000 employees to medium-sized businesses with 1,000 employees – and from a variety of industries, including financial services, manufacturing, technology, healthcare and education.

Channel Impact
Partners are constantly looking for new opportunities to serve their customers, and incident response platforms can serve as a source of differentiation.