Partner Trends #024
Your weekly source for news in the world of channel partners, strategic alliances, and partnerships.
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Around the Industry
MessageBird, a global omnichannel communications platform provider, announced that it had acquired the email marketing platform SparkPost for $600 million. SparkPost is widely used today by companies such as Twitter, Airbnb, and Mailchimp and is used to send over 40% of all commercial emails worldwide each year. The acquisition will give MessageBird, which has mostly been in Europe and Asia, get a stronger market presence in the U.S. market.
Private equity giant Thomas Bravo has announced that it will acquire Proofpoint, a leading cybersecurity and compliance company, for $12.3 billion. The deal is the largest private equity cloud deal since the $11 billion purchase of Ultimate Software in 2019. Proofpoint is best known for its email-based security tools and managed services in the cloud.
Stripe has announced that it acquired TaxJar, a popular provider of a cloud-based suite of tax services. Launched in 2013, TaxJar has around 23,000 customers today and is a top choice for online businesses with customers across several geographies with tax compliance. The acquisition addresses one of the most requested features in Stripe’s current offering that addresses sales tax collection and remittance.
Partner Program Announcements
Schneider Electric announced a new program to enable partners to build their managed power services practice. The Edge Software & Digital Services Program will provide financial benefits, enablement, and support for IT solution providers to create new revenue streams by monitoring and managing customers’ physical infrastructure asses in their edge environment.
Trend Micro announced updates to its partner program specifically targeted to partners selling through authorized distributors like AWS. In a move to advance its cloud security and services offerings, the updates include increased partner profits, access to platforms and tools for partners to build their cloud services, and new streamlined procurement options.
Check Point Software Technologies, a leading provider of cybersecurity solutions, announced new updates to its channel sales model. The updates to its global Check Point Partner Growth Program will enable partners to accelerate their access to benefits and rewards for sales-generating activities. The new initiatives include extra deal registration and sales discounts, a new professional services certification program, access to pre-packaged lead generation campaigns, and better insights into customer accounts in the partners’ installed base.
Partnership Announcements
GFT Group, an IT solution provider for the financial and insurance industry, announced a strategic alliance with Vodeno, a cloud-based banking-as-a-service provider, to accelerate digital transformation in the banking industry. As part of the agreement, customers who use Vodeno’s cloud platform to transition from legacy to digital technologies will have access to GFT’s development, QA testing, and implementation services.
T-Mobile announced a partnership with Zyter, a healthcare provider, to make virtual healthcare solutions available to more organizations and patients. The two companies hope to make virtual healthcare solutions more accessible to people by bringing Zyter’s platforms to customers using T-Mobile’s network.
Introhive, a sales enablement and intelligence provider, and Equilar, a leading provider of corporate leadership data solutions, announced a partnership designed to help revenue teams uncover advanced relationship intelligence insights. Through the partnership, customers will be able to gain enhanced visibility into C-level and board member relationships that drive revenue growth, identify cross-sell and upsell opportunities from connections to key decision-makers, improved marketing ROT with the enhancement of quality executive contact data.
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