Our calendar must be broken, because it says this was only the fifth week of the year. How can that be, when we’ve had two storms of the century that canceled about four million flights, the Winter Olympics got started, and the Washington Football Team bizarrely changed its name to the Washington Commodes? [Editor: Commanders]. Sorry, Commanders, but it’s still weird.
Big names, big news. Citrix shareholders will receive $104 per share as Vista Equity Partners and Evergreen Coast Capital will acquire the secure hybrid work provider for a total of $16.5 billion in cash, which includes assumption of Citrix debt. Citrix will become private but keep its name, brand, and headquarters in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
A batch of new goodies from Cisco include its first high-end Wi-Fi 6E access points, private 5G for enterprises as a managed service, and new Catalyst 9000X series switches.
Hello to Intel’s Project Circuit Breaker, an expansion of its existing bug bounty program to create a community and offer training to security researchers. Increased access and new hacking challenges should improve security if all goes to plan.
Microsoft’s Azure Firewall upgraded multiple features, including offering Azure Firewall Premium, which ups throughput to 100 Gbps. Log slogging will be easier now that policy names and more details will appear in logs.
OpenText and Google Cloud intertwined more closely, allowing customers to deploy the OpenText enterprise productivity suite on Google’s global infrastructure.
Dropbox and Amazon Web Services shook hands and added a third, as HelloSign joined in too so clients can now purchase Dropbox and HelloSign directly through the AWS Marketplace.
Security news. Master MSP IT By Design partnered with Vijilan to offer a managed extended detection and response service.
JumpCloud increased its offerings with the addition of its new JumpCloud Patch Management.
Check Point revved up its catalog with Check Point CloudGuard, a developer-first security platform made possible by the acquisition of Israeli startup Spectral.
Juniper Networks ups its SASE tools with Juniper Secure Edge, a new firewall-as-a-service offering in a single-stack software architecture.
Eseye and Armis combined their connectivity and agentless security expertise to offer a way for organizations to deploy devices that require reliable cellular (4G/LTE/5G) connections anywhere in the world.
PingOne DaVinci is a new no-code identity orchestration service Ping Identity just launched, thanks to the acquisition of Singular Key.
INKY’s Phish Fence inbound email security product now has a counterpart: Outbound Mail Protection, which includes enforcement within the email system.
Tenable.cs , Tenable’s cloud-native application protection platform now offers continuous visibility to assess cloud hosts and container images for vulnerabilities, as well as support for the Tenable.ep vulnerability management solution.
Other product news. Need a big image? The new generation of Epson Pro Series projectors offer six models with 13,000 to 20,000 lumens in ultra-lightweight 3LCD models.
Wasabi Technologies and Vultr shook hands to delver a complete infrastructure-as-a-service program that they claim costs significantly less than current hyperscale cloud providers.
LG and Userful, a software company in Canada, coordinated to offer an end-to-end, software-defined AV-over-IP tool to optimize display networks for control rooms, digital signage, and video walls.
Non-product vendor news. Extreme Networks gained new leadership in its global sales org by adding Scott Peterson as senior vice president of global channel sales and promoting Mark Dellavalle to senior vice president of global systems engineering.
The Alliance of Channel Women announced its 2022-23 Board of Directors, including Cassie Jeppson as president and Jasmina Muller as vice president.
The red carpet at Versa Networks is for its first ever Chief Revenue Officer Martin Mackay.
The Welcome Wagon arrived at UPSTACK to welcome Allison Jessee as vice president of customer success. But wait, there’s more! UPSTACK acquired IT consulting firm Lunada Partners, and founder Monica Sanchez will join as a partner and true equity stakeholder.
Keeper Security acquired Glyptodon and will fold its enterprise remote access gateway into the Keeper Enterprise platform.
Channel education firm (and Pax8 unit) Sea-Level Operations partnered with Service Leadership to offer its business coaching to ConnectWise partners.
CMIT Solutions linked with Zomentum to offer its sales acceleration application through CMIT’s network of nearly 200 franchises in the U.S. and Canada.
To improve its agent model, Cisco inked a deal with Telarus to offer Webex through thousands of contracted agents.
Welcome to Delinea, the new name of what was ThycoticCentrify, which was the new name of Thycotic and Centrify after they got together.
HelpSystems launched its new worldwide channel program for partners in North America, Latin America, APAC, and EMEA. Renee Ritter joins as the program’s managing director.
The Global Technology Distribution Council (GTDC) made room to add the Nuvias Group, a $750 million company with offices across Europe.
Infinite Group (IGI) signed the papers to acquire Pratum, an information security services firm founded in 2008.
This week’s stats ticker:
The report “AI/ML is a Top Priority for Businesses, but are They Realizing Its Value?” from Rackspace finds that artificial intelligence and machine learning are on the radar of nearly every organization, but few have done enough to tap the full potential of the technologies. A poll of 1,870 global IT leaders across multiple industries found 62% saying AI/ML is a high priority and 70% reporting positive impacts on brand awareness and reputation as well as revenue generation and expense reduction. 36% said measuring and proving the AI/ML business value remains a challenge. Even so, AI/ML ranked among the top two most important techs for organizations, alongside cybersecurity. Yet the cost of implementation rose for 33% of respondents, up from 26% last year, creating a barrier to AI/ML technology implementation.
Check Point polled 1,200 IT security professionals globally about how remote work changed security practices around users, devices, and access. 70% of organizations now allow access to corporate applications from personal devices, including unmanaged and BYOD. A sad total of 5% claim they use all of the recommended remote access security methods. 20% admit they don’t use any of the five methods mentioned to protect remote users while browsing the internet, and only 9% use all five to protect against attacks. 25% don’t have an endpoint solution to detect and stop ransomware attacks. Only 12% that allow corporate access from mobile devices use a mobile threat defense solution.
Illumio commissioned the Forrester Consulting study Trusting Zero Trust to query 362 security strategy decision makers on their current zero trust strategy. 75% said zero trust was important to combat threats, but 60% admitted they were unprepared for the pace of cloud transformation and migration. 78% plan to boost zero trust security in the new year, but only 36% have started to deploy zero trust tools, and a mere 6% have fully implemented zero trust projects.
Boom! goes the auction. Every sports gamer knows John Madden Football, right? And how every adult gamer swears their parents threw away a fortune in games, right? Turns out, they’re right.
Heritage Auctions put up a sealed copy of the 1990 John Madden Football, the very first year it was available. Yep, sealed, 1990, first of the series. Admit it, you never left behind any sealed games, correct?
If you did, you could’ve been the one to receive the highest auction price ever for a sports video game: $480,000.
In the non-sports area, a sealed Super Mario Bros. for Nintendo sold for $2 million last August.
Photo: Heritage Auctions
