Monday Morning Impact – July 22

Microsoft and ServiceNow Extend SaaS Partnership for Government Sales

ServiceNow has announced plans to house its full SaaS product offerings on Azure in addition to its own private cloud. Through this expanded partnership, the companies intend to make it easier for customers to integrate and optimize across the two companies’ products and platforms, and further enable enterprise customers in certain highly regulated industries, as well as government customers, to accelerate their digital transformation.

U.S. government agencies will be able to access the ServiceNow portfolio through “Azure Government,” which was purpose-built to address the capabilities, performance and compliance needs of U.S. government customers and their partners seeking to use integrated cloud services backed by analytics and an open application platform.

“There is an enormous opportunity for customers — including in the public sector — to apply the power of the cloud to become more efficient and responsive,” said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. “Our partnership combines ServiceNow’s expertise in digital workflows with Azure, our trusted cloud, so that customers can accelerate their digital transformation, while meeting their security and compliance needs.”

“Expanding our strategic global relationship with Microsoft enables ServiceNow to more fully leverage and integrate our platform and products with Microsoft’s leading enterprise technology and capabilities,” said John Donahoe, president and CEO of ServiceNow. “Together, ServiceNow and Microsoft will help our enterprise and government customers accelerate their digital transformation, creating great experiences and unlocking productivity.”

As part of a separate deal announced concurrently, Microsoft will implement ServiceNow’s IT & Employee Experience workflow products across its own business in an effort to improve operations, enhance employee experiences, and deliver stronger business outcomes.

The expanded partnership will also elevate ServiceNow to one of Microsoft’s strategic partners in its Global ISV Strategic Alliance Portfolio.

Channel Impact^®
This move should raise ServiceNow’s game within the government sector while also providing Microsoft with a much wider range of options with which to serve its government clients and build related market share.

Tech Data Announces Solution Catalog for Analytics and IoT

Tech Data has launched its new Analytics and IoT Solution Catalog, featuring more than 30 market-ready, vetted solutions for specific use cases in healthcare, industrial, retail, transportation and logistics, and smart cities.

Examples of the use cases include for real-time medical patient monitoring, resolving unforeseen equipment failure in the manufacturing sector, fleet tracking and asset monitoring, and public safety surveillance in Smart Cities environments.

Inclusion in the catalog starts at the concept level by placing technology in the context of addressing a specific business issue. The solution then goes through a reference architecture, rigorous testing, specific functional requirements, and finally customer-centric use case and repeatability identification.

The Clearwater, Florida-based distributor is also announcing an analytics and IoT enablement program for approximately 200 partners in North America and Europe seeking to build a practice around these technologies. Under the program, selected partners are invited to undergo a readiness assessment, followed by a strategy development workshop and subsequent build period of 90 days, after which they will be ready to take their analytics and IoT solutions to market.

“Some of the main challenges in executing analytics and IoT solutions are that they are both often highly customized to solve a specific customer business problem and are complex in nature. The ability to scale is very important in realizing revenue from these solutions,” said Patrick Zammit, president, Europe, and global analytics and IoT solutions, at Tech Data. “With Tech Data’s Solution Catalog and our series of strategy development workshops, we are facilitating repeatable solutions and outcomes for partners to help them quickly enter the analytics and IoT market and generate repeatable sales as they become their clients’ go-to resource for state-of-the-art, industry-specific solutions.”

Channel Impact^®
The Solution Catalog lowers partners’ barriers to entry and speeds their time to market in IoT and Analytics.

Unitrends’ Cloud and Disaster Recovery Survey Reveals Data Loss Remains Stubbornly High

Unitrends, a Boston-based backup and continuity division of Kaseya, has released findings from its fifth annual Unitrends Cloud and Disaster Recovery Survey, comparing current trends with data from past years to reveal best practices for enterprise protection and DRaaS.

Since the survey’s inception, Unitrends has found that 30 percent of responding organizations report losing data as the result of a data center outage. This remains stubbornly high, even as new data protection tools have emerged such as cloud workloads, DRaaS, and greatly improved data backup and recovery appliances. More than 40 percent of respondents reported having a period of downtime in 2019.

The use of the cloud as a tool in data protection strategies has greatly increased over the last four years, according to the report. Sixty percent of responding organizations report using cloud features such as short-term data storage, cloud archiving, and/or DRaaS as a backup location. Of the 40 percent of organizations not currently using the cloud for data protection, 53 percent plan to adopt it within the next year. Companies are also increasingly protecting mobile workforce PCs and laptops using the cloud. And, for the first time in the life of the survey, protecting SaaS applications like Microsoft Office 365, G Suite and Salesforce with cloud-based backup made the list of the top five cloud-based data protection technologies deployed.

The most widely deployed role for the cloud in data protection is off-site data and file storage. The number of organizations reporting that they are required to protect over 100TB of data jumped from 11 percent in 2016 to 31 percent in 2019. The overall increase in data volumes requiring protection has prompted organizations to look for new strategies to control storage costs and reduce the capital expenses of physical storage devices.

More than 400 respondents from organizations of all sizes and industries took part in the survey, which additionally addresses recovery time objective (RTO), data loss, and the growing use of cloud-based DraaS.

Channel Impact^®
This year’s survey offers insights into the challenges and trends that IT departments and admins face when protecting data from downtime and disasters as data volume and importance grow. The findings also underscore the importance of cloud and DRaaS solutions as organizations continue to be tasked with protecting more and more data.