Monday Morning Impact – August 19

Study: July Tech Hiring Tempered by Telecom Job Losses

U.S. technology sector employment grew by an estimated 11,400 jobs in July despite telecom companies shedding some 5,100 positions, according to an analysis by CompTIA, a suburban Chicago-based industry association.

The job losses in telecom were offset by a solid month of hiring in the employment category of technology services, custom software development and computer systems design, based on CompTIA’s analysis of data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Employment Situation report. Employers added an estimated 10,600 new hires in the services and software category.

“Despite the telecom losses and some softness in job posting data, it was a reasonably solid month for tech,” said Tim Herbert, executive vice president for research and market intelligence at CompTIA. “Digital transformation is an ongoing process, where the mix of investment, skills requirements and business alignment are never static.”

Telecom has now experienced nine consecutive months of employment declines with an estimated 22,800 jobs eliminated so far in 2019. Without the telecom losses, IT industry employment growth for the year would be approximately 98,000 positions.

July employment gains in the tech sector were also recorded in computer and electronic products manufacturing (+ 2,600), other information services, including search portals (+ 2,000) and data processing, hosting and related services (+ 1,300).

Across the entire U.S. economy last month, tech occupations expanded by an estimated 135,000 positions. There tends to be a higher degree of variance with the monthly Bureau of Labor Statistics data at the occupation level, so the monthly occupation figures should be viewed as directional.

The unemployment rate for IT occupations inched down in July to 1.3 percent, continuing to be at or near historic lows. By comparison, the overall national unemployment rate remained unchanged at 3.7 percent.

Channel Impact^®
The data offers a good news/bad news situation that bodes well for the broader industry at the expense of telecom. However, companies looking for telecom talent may find themselves in a buyer’s market.

StorONE Launches Storage-as-a-Service Initiative

StorONE, a New York-based storage software platform vendor, has announced the launch of its new S1-as-a-Service (S1aaS), a use-based solution integrating StorONE’s enterprise-class S1 storage services with Dell Technologies and Mellanox hardware.

The value proposition speaks to cloud-like simplicity and the pricing flexibility of a cloud-based model with the performance and control of an on-premise infrastructure.

“S1aaS is going to change the economics not only of storage but of the entire data center,” said Gal Naor, CEO and co-founder of StorONE. “S1aaS makes enterprise-class all-flash array performance and data protection and control available for only $999 per month.”

One of the key components contributing to the reduced price point is the StorONE Total Resource Utilization (TRU) capabilities. TRU maximizes the communication channels and balance between storage media and CPU utilization. All storage services (high-performance, hyperconverged infrastructure, scale-out file storage, backup and archive/long-term retention), all protocols (block, file and object), and all media types are supported on a single platform.

In terms of data protection, StorONE’s S1 architecture accelerates drive rebuild times, replaces dedicated hot spares with their abstracted system based balanced resource utilization model which offers more granular resiliency levels. In addition, S1aaS also provides unlimited, nestable, writeable, and persistent snapshots based on patented algorithms guaranteeing zero performance impact.

“Advanced storage solutions like this require high-performance, programmable and intelligent networks,” said Motti Beck, Senior Director Enterprise Market Development, at Mellanox. “The combination of StorONE’s S1 software and Mellanox Ethernet Storage Fabric solutions eliminate the traditional bottlenecks that have been associated with server to storage communication and supports critical storage features, which improves date center efficiency and ensures the best user experience available.”

(S1aaS) starts at $999 per month for an 18-terabyte all-flash array that delivers up to 150,000 IOPS. Customers may cancel or modify their plan with a simple thirty-day notice.

Channel Impact^®
The solution is intended to drive a new level of storage economics and resource utilization while preventing storage media from becoming a performance bottleneck through the use of high-performance SAS and NVMe flash drives.

SugarCRM Announces New Customer Support Offering

SugarCRM of Cupertino, California has rolled out “Sugar Serve,” a new offering for automation of customer support processes from a single console.

“This introduces extensive new capabilities for customer service agents unlike any application on the market today,” said CEO Craig Charlton. “With our service console, we’ve put all the critical information for resolving a support case into a single panel, helping our customers reduce case resolution times, improve SLA achievement, increase customer satisfaction and improve support experiences. And that puts them on the path of cultivating customers for life.”

Features include SLA Management, ensuring SLA achievement, and measuring support performance through the coordinated management of complex SLAs, multi-region business centers, and business hours; an automation component that prioritizes, routes, reassigns, and escalates cases; a customer portal; and reporting and analytics.

Channel Impact^®
The company’s strategy is to drive effective customer experience by anticipating customer needs through tightly integrated support offerings.