Monday Morning Impact – February 24

SolarWinds Report Shows MSPs have Growth Opportunity in Advanced Security

SolarWinds, a North Carolina-based provider of IT management software, has released the findings of its annual “Trends in Managed Services” report, providing insight into potential growth opportunities for IT providers in North America and Europe. The research provides comparisons on revenue, profit, service selection, sales capacity, customer engagement, and growth potential.

“Our research has revealed that 97% of respondents offer some form of managed services—which is a clear demonstration of the managed services transformation remaking the technology channel. It’s safe to say the state of managed services is strong,” said John Pagliuca, president of SolarWinds MSP. “This latest research also underscored the major growth opportunities we’re already looking to help our MSPs leverage including automation, security, and operations.”

In North America, respondents were most comfortable offering and using antivirus (89%), firewalls (83%), data backup and recovery (81%), and endpoint security (75%). In Europe, respondents were most comfortable offering and using antivirus (93%), data backup and recovery (82%), firewalls (82%), and anti-spam (80%) as solutions.

However, MSPs have room for growth in some of the more advanced security solutions and offerings, as respondents were less confident in the more complex controls offerings. European and North American respondents selected the same top three solutions they were least comfortable with: biometrics, cloud access security brokers (CASBs), and digital rights management. On the services end, European respondents were least comfortable with penetration testing (52%), auditing and compliance management (39%), and risk assessments (36%). North American respondents were least comfortable with auditing and compliance management (53%), penetration testing (47%), and security system architecture (39%).

The results also showed MSPs are starting to increase the use of automation to handle day-to-day tasks such as patch management and backup, but don’t feel comfortable with automating the advanced tasks. Another key finding showed core business operations are still amongst the biggest growth obstacles for MSPs including lack of resources/time, sales, and marketing.

Channel Impact^®
The data provide the opportunity for MSPs to get increased visibility on where they stand in relation to their peers.

Chef Introduces New Global Partner Program Purpose-Built for Open Source Software

Chef, a Seattle-based DevOps company, today has rolled out a new, three-tiered channel program to support its open source business model.

Chef’s strategy is to drive collaboration through code to automate infrastructure, security, compliance and applications. Used by more than half of the Fortune 500, Chef develops its software as open source under the Apache 2.0 license. “Chef Enterprise Automation Stack” is developed solely from that open source code and unifies security, compliance, infrastructure and application automation.

“One of the strongest drivers for Chef’s business model shift in April 2019 was to optimize alignment of our partners’ efforts to engage global enterprises with the full capabilities of Chef Enterprise Automation Stack,” said Vikram Ghosh, vice president of business development for Chef. “This new program helps ensure that customers get the most out of their Chef deployments, not only in terms of features and functions, but also with regards to partner-delivered services, content and ongoing collaboration from Chef and its partners.”

Program benefits include a recurring revenue model, a co-sales model for partners who do not offer product transactions within their services model, co-marketing support, Not-for-Resale licenses, special discounts for conference sponsorships/attendance, and training enablement tools.

Channel Impact^®
Partners at each level of the new program the tools, training and incentives necessary to engage existing and prospective customers on the full Chef Enterprise Automation Stack in order to accelerate their digital transformation initiatives.

CloudGenix and CISSDM Forge SD-WAN Partnership

CloudGenix, which specializes in enterprise SD-WAN, and CISSDM (pronounced as “System”), a solution provider of SD-WAN deployments and managed services, have announced a new partnership to deliver Managed SD-WAN and Managed cloud-delivered branch services.

“By combining CISSDM’s industry leading SD-WAN integration design, deployment, and managed services capabilities with CloudGenix award-winning SD-WAN products, the two companies are delivering predictability, security and agility for remote office digital transformation initiatives,” said Matt Miller, President of CISSDM.

“By combining the CloudGenix Autonomous SD-WAN and the CloudBlades platform with CISSDM’s managed services capabilities, customers gain cloud-scale economics for the branch,” said Kumar Ramachandran, founder and CEO at CloudGenix. “Together, we are leading a revolution with the cloud-delivered branch model and eliminating customers’ reliance on branch routers, hardware firewalls, voice appliances, WAN optimization appliances, etc. to run a branch office.”

The service is immediately available for enterprise customers and to channel partners.

Channel Impact^®
Enterprises gain cloud-scale economics for the branch with the freedom to use any WAN, any cloud, and virtually any infrastructure service. Customers can now consume branch infrastructure including SD-WAN, security and performance management as managed cloud services.