Communication confabs, bellwether earnings reports, and MSP certification changes are all in store for the SMB channel in the week ahead:
Monday, January 25th
- ITEXPO, the giant communications technology show, opens at the Greater Fort Lauderdale/Broward County Convention Center in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Senior execs from Cisco’s Internet of Things group and IBM’s cloud computing division, as well as ShoreTel’s CMO, are among the scheduled keynoters. The conference runs through January 28th.
Tuesday, January 26th
- All eyes are on tech industry titan Apple Inc., which reports financial results for the final, holiday season quarter of 2015. Still the most valuable company of any kind in the world, with a market capitalization approaching $534 billion—with a “b”—when stock exchanges closed last Friday, Apple has seen its share price drop by some 12 percent over the last three months amid widespread fears that sales of the new iPhone 6s and 6s Plus have been disappointing.
Wednesday, January 27th
- Managed services industry association MSPAlliance announces changes to its MSP/Cloud Verify certification program. Be on the lookout for details, which remain confidential at present, here on ChannelPro.
- CommVault, Juniper Networks, Qualcomm, and SanDisk all issue quarterly earnings reports, but most Wall Streeters will focus their attention on EMC and Citrix. The former will be issuing numbers for the first time since news broke of its pending acquisition by Dell. The latter will be sharing results for the first time since announcing its intention to spin off its GoTo collaboration product group, lay off 1,000 employees, and name ex-Microsoft exec Kirill Tatarinov its new president and CEO, following the retirement of long-time prior CEO Mark Templeton.
Thursday, January 28th
- Earnings season rolls on as two of the biggest names in IT, Amazon and Microsoft, both post results for Q4 2015. All signs point to a blow-out quarter for Amazon, whose Amazon Web Services division reported a 78 percent year-over-year revenue gain three months ago, and which more recently boasted that sales of its Kindle, Echo, and other devices this holiday season were twice as high as the previous year’s record-setting pace.
- Microsoft’s numbers are harder to handicap. On the one hand, worldwide PC shipments were 10.6 percent lower last quarter than in the same quarter of 2014, according to analyst firm IDC, portending weak results for the company’s Windows operating system. On the other hand, Microsoft’s cloud computing business is booming: Office 365 revenue jumped nearly 70 percent year-over-year in the first quarter of its 2016 fiscal year, which began July 1st.
- Also releasing quarterly reports today are Extreme Networks, NetSuite, Proofpoint, ShoreTel, and Super Micro.
Friday, January 29th
- Seagate Technology PLC and Xerox Corporation round out a busy week of financial pronouncements.
