Array Networks pursues virtualized network services channel

Infovista builds SD-WAN channel

Infovista, a network performance vendor based in Ashburn, Va., is making the channel the pivotal element of its SD-WAN go-to-market strategy.

The company acquired Ipanema Technologies in 2015 as its SD-WAN flagship. Infovista views channel relationships as critical for taking the application-centric Ipanema SD-WAN technology to market. The company's management team recognized that "we need to go through the channel in a way Infovista has never done," said Jon Howes, senior vice president of global channel sales at Infovista. He joined the company in March 2018.

"I looked at the revenue that came through the channel when I arrived," Howes said. "There were some huge gaps. We were hugely under distributed."

In a move to address those gaps, Infovista this week unveiled a North American distribution agreement with TELoIP, a company based in Mississauga, Ont., that partners with MSPs and resellers. The arrangement aims to boost Infovista's channel presence in the U.S. and Canada.

Partners have become a company priority.

"We're spending a lot of time engaging with the channel [and] working on business cases to be able to help our channel partners to put together offers that address digital transformation and the move to the cloud," Howes explained, noting SD-WAN and the cloud are driving distribution.

Infovista channel partners play somewhat different roles in the company's SD-WAN business. MSPs, for example, will help customers who want connectivity and on-premises SD-WAN components managed under a single contract. Customers interested in taking a more DIY approach to SD-WAN can work with value-added resellers or the SI channel, according to Howes. In addition to MSPs, VARs and SIs, Infovista plans to form sell-through relationships with telecommunications companies. It already has such agreements in place with BT Global Services and Orange Business Services.

"We're looking to add more relationships that look like the ones we have with BT Global Services and Orange Business Services," Howes said. He described the telco's role as providing a managed, end-to-end offer that includes connectivity and managed services around Infovista's technology.

Channel partners also offer Infovista's 5G and network testing products.

SolarWinds unveils IPO

IT management software vendor SolarWinds today revealed pricing for its initial public offering (IPO) of 25 million shares at $15 per share.

This is the second time SolarWinds has been listed as a public company with the New York Stock Exchange, said Joe Kim, CTO at SolarWinds, headquartered in Austin, Texas. SolarWinds first went public in 2009 and subsequently taken private in February 2016.

"Part of the reason why we went private was to start looking to how we can very quickly expand our market because at that time we were looking at selling products more towards network management folks, a lot of on-premises-geared software," Kim said. "Now what we have been able to do, as we go public today, is that we have been able to expand that market."

SolarWinds focuses on multiple software spaces: network and systems management, cloud monitoring, as well as and remote monitoring and management for MSPs. "We have ... variety in the end users that we cover, and that is what I think is going to be helping us a lot moving forward as a public company. ... We are going to get a lot more varied feedback, not just from IT operations folks but also from folks that are in the DevOps space, SecOps, MSP, MSSP, etc.," Kim said.

He noted that MSP partners are becoming increasingly important among SolarWinds' users.

SolarWind's IPO is expected to close on Oct. 23, 2018, according to the company.

Other news     

• Accenture this week disclosed what the company called "deeper investments" with SaaS vendor ServiceNow. The company said the investments will provide European clients with Accenture's full range of digital transformation and ServiceNow capabilities.
• Alert Logic debuted its Partner Connect Program, which lets channel partners add security solutions to their offerings. The program targets reseller partners that bundle services with Alert Logic security products, referral partners that provide guidance and ancillary solutions that incorporate Alert Logic, and technology alliance partners that integrate Alert Logic offerings.
• Insight Enterprises' Datalink division said its OneCall support and managed services offerings now include support for Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS, validated for the Nutanix NX, HPE and Dell XC hardware platforms. Insight said it also supports Nutanix software and Cisco Unified Computing System servers for customers deploying Nutanix on the Cisco platform. In another hyper-converged infrastructure alliance, Lenovo and Scale Computing launched a global partnership and a joint edge infrastructure offering for global retailers, distributed enterprises and small and midsize businesses.
• Inseego, a provider of IoT, mobile and cloud technology, has rolled out its Valued Inseego Partner (VIP) program for North American distributors and resellers. The program includes deal registration, product and sales training, lead generation opportunities, presales field support and quarterly attainment bonuses, Inseego said. Distributors Synnex Corp. and Novotech Canada have joined the program.
• Duo Security and Exabeam have integrated their technologies, attracting channel partner interest. Duo Security, recently acquired by Cisco, contributes its authentication and device logs to the integrated offering, while Exabeam, a Cisco investments portfolio company, provides its Security Management Platform. In a prepared statement, Ray Tam, vice president of security at Trace3, a solutions provider based in Irvine, Calif., said the integrated offering will benefit customers "by increasing the speed, certainty and breadth in which they can detect and respond to potential threats in their IT environments."
• Collabrance, an MSP that provides managed services to other channel partners, integrated its ticketing system with ConnectWise's professional services automation software (PSA), ConnectWise Manage. Through the integration, ConnectWise Manage users can share customer data with Collabrance.
• Datto's Autotask PSA now integrates with ID Agent, a dark web monitoring and identity theft protection vendor. Autotask users can configure ID Agent's Dark Web ID exposure alerts to create tickets within the console, according to ID Agent.
• OpsRamp, which provides an AI-based IT operations platform, has landed cloud managed services provider NetEnrich as a customer for its newly launched incident management offering, OpsQ. The OpsQ, an incident management, alert correlation and remediation product, includes a machine learning inference model that the company said learns the frequency of specific alert sequences and "recognizes alerts that are related by the same cause." Denny Riley, vice president of channel and partnerships at OpsRamp, said OpsQ "empowers our channel partners to start timely, relevant conversations about machine learning and artificial intelligence with their customers."
• IT management software vendor Continuum appointed Phylip Morgan as its new managing director of the EMEA market. Morgan will oversee Continuum's EMEA operations and look to expand the global reach of Continuum's security portfolio, Continuum Security, according to the vendor.

Market Share is a news roundup published every Friday.