Partner Trends #005
Your weekly source for news in the world of channel partners, strategic alliances, and partnerships.
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Around the Industry
Platinum Equity, a private equity firm, has agreed to purchase Ingram Micro for $7.2 billion. Ingram Micro is the world’s largest technology distributor with $47 billion in annual sales and has more than 35,000 employees, 250,000 customers, and partnerships with more than 2,000 vendors.
Cisco announced an agreement to acquire IMImobile PLC, a provider of omnichannel communications software, for $730 million. This acquisition will allow Cisco to enhance its Webex Contact Center solution to support customer-facing businesses with an end-to-end customer interaction management solution that will provide rich customer experiences, along with the ability to drive faster and smarter interactions and orchestrations.
Fortinet, a global leader in cybersecurity solutions, announced its acquisition of Panopta, a SaaS platform provider of full-stack visibility and health management for enterprise networks and infrastructure. The combined solution allows Fortinet to deliver the industry’s most comprehensive security-driven networking platform by adding new capabilities in network monitoring, detection, and incident response.
Springbot, a leading marketing automation and attribution platform provider, announced the acquisition of Matcha, an eCommerce blogging platform. With the combination of Matcha’s blog creator, article marketplace, and content analytics, Springbot can now offer a powerful all-in-one communication platform to serve omnichannel retailers better.
Adobe announced that it had completed its acquisition of Workfront, the leading work management platform for marketers with more than 3,000 customers and one million users. This acquisition will bring efficiency, collaboration, and productivity gains to marketing teams with siloed work management solutions. Both companies are established partners with over 1,000 shared customers.
Partner Program Announcements
AppDirect, the leading subscription commerce platform company, announced updates to its Add-On Store. The Add-On Store currently includes close to 40 complementary partner solutions and integrations and now includes five new tech partners: Walkme, Aptitude Software, Cloud Elements, BlueSnap, and Spiria. Additional updates also include UI improvements that will provide a richer experience with improved product profiles, fully customizable pages, and a focus on customer success stories.
Agiloft, the global standard in contract and commerce lifecycle management, launched a revamped partner program redesigned to expand service delivery capabilities and accelerate growth. The new program will consist of three partner types, Reseller Partner, Service Partner, and Technology Partner. With this revamped partner program, Agiloft aims to triple channel revenue while extending its reach in international markets.
Amazon Web Services ramped up offerings for its public sector partners with the expansion of its Think Big for Small Business, Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning (AI/ML) Rapid Adoption, and Authority to Operate on AWS programs. Updates include more resources to achieve AWS competency, updated go-to-market help, and additional access to discounts. The AWS Public Sector Partner Program grew 45% year over year and now has more than 1,600 partners.
Product Updates
Outreach, the number one sales engagement platform, announced the launch of Outreach Insights. Outreach Insights featuring Buyer Sentiment Analysis will introduce a first of its kind artificial intelligence capability that captures buyer emotions in real-time to accurately measure sales engagement versus activity metrics like reply, click, and open rates. The public beta will be available at the beginning of 2021 and generally available later in 2021.
AppOmni, the leading provider of SaaS Security Posture Management, announced the expansion of their platform to include Github and Slack. The new additions will join the list of solutions that include Microsoft 365, Microsoft Teams, Salesforce, Box, and Zoom currently covered by AppOmni’s platform. With AppOmni, customers can quickly create security guardrails to prevent data exposures and misconfigurations.
Firebolt, the world’s fastest cloud data warehouse, unveiled a new class of cloud data warehouse as a service purpose-built for high-performance analytics. Firebolt delivers the fastest analytics performance - up to 182 times faster than other data warehouses. This dramatically improves the ROI for collecting data because companies can now analyze multi-terabyte/petabyte data sets easily at a significantly lower cost.
Copper announced a partnership with Square to offer invoice and payment management inside Copper CRM to create the first omnichannel invoice and payment solution that automatically updates in a CRM. Businesses supporting their clients online or in-person will now manage customers and their payments without switching applications.
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