Partner Trends #022
Your weekly source for news in the world of channel partners, strategic alliances, and partnerships.
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Around the Industry
Microsoft announced that it would acquire Nuance, the leader in speech-to-text software, for $19.7 billion. According to Microsoft, the deal's primary reason was to leverage Nuance’s presence in the healthcare vertical to accelerate its cloud offering, Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare. Nuance currently has 10,000 healthcare customers that include John Hopkins, Cleveland Clinic, and Athena Health. This is Microsoft’s largest acquisition since LinkedIn.
Everbridge, a global software provider of critical events solutions, has acquired xMatters, a service reliability platform provider, for $240 million. The two companies combined will provide an expanded set of features to discover IT issues quickly, assemble responders, apply remediation code, manage patches, and drive continuous improvement across a single pane of glass.
PAR Technology, a leading restaurant software provider, announced that it would acquire Punchh, a leader in loyalty and guest engagement solutions, for $500 million. The acquisition will allow PAR to position itself as a leader in the industry with a unified commerce platform that includes integrated point-of-sale, back office, payment, and guest engagement offerings. PAR currently works with more than 100,000 restaurants in 110 countries.
Partner Program Announcements
TrackVia, a low-code app-building solution provider for businesses and IT experts, announced its first partner program. The TrackVia Partner Program is designed to enable new business opportunities and increase profits for value-added resellers, solution providers, and systems integrators selling low-code application development platforms. The program will offer partners tiered incentives for growth, a dedicated partner team for sales support, training, and access to TrackVia’s platform to build and market their own custom applications.
Lookout, a leading cybersecurity company, announced the launch of its new global channel program. The program's new updates include a refreshed partner portal, a new training and certification track, and two new partner levels with exclusive incentives, services, and support. Partners of CipherCloud, a company acquired by Lookout, will also benefit from the new program offerings.
SoftIron, a leader in data center appliances and storage, announced its new global channel program, SoftIron+Co. The new program will allow channel partners to differentiate themselves for data center and storage customers by expanding their access to SoftIron’s open source-based data center solutions and services. Partners will receive benefits such as sales support, sales resources, and CAPEX / OPEX-based solution offers.
Bitdefender, a global cybersecurity leader, announced new enhancements to its channel partner program, Partner Advantage Network. The new enhancements are designed to maximize revenue opportunities and make it among the easiest to partner within the industry. New benefits to the program include an enhanced partner portal, new e-learning, sales training, and greater profitability and rewards for partners.
Partnership Announcements
Verizon and Honda have announced a partnership to explore how 5G and 5G Mobile Edge Computing can ensure fast, reliable communication between road infrastructure, vehicles, and pedestrians. Using Honda’s SAFE SWARM concept that allows vehicles to communicate with surrounding vehicles to share key information, the two companies will conduct tests at MCity, the University of Michigan’s test facility for connected and automated vehicles.
Celonis, IBM, and Red Hat announced a global strategic alliance to transform business execution as business leaders continue to face challenges to transform their operations digitally. The collaboration aims to help customers accelerate how they apply process mining, intelligence, and automation to the core system functions and processes that drive their business execution.
NEC and Cisco announced a Global Systems Integrator Agreement to accelerate the global adoption of 5G IP network solutions. Under the agreement, both companies will make collaborative efforts to enhance their joint solution portfolio further and optimize regional activities to advance customers' digital transformation across the globe.
Recent Articles
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