Cloud adoption hits cultural snag, opens MSP opportunities
Enterprise executives ranked people-related challenges as harder to solve than technical issues in a new cloud adoption study; more IT channel news from the week.
As they struggle to overcome cultural issues while pursuing cloud adoption, some enterprises are enlisting third-party providers to help manage change.
About two-thirds of the 252 executives polled in a study published this week by NTT Data Services cited people-related challenges as harder to deal with than technical issues in cloud adoption initiatives. As for specific cultural issues, 72% of the organizations NTT Data Services deemed "next-gen cloud leaders" identified "creating integrated and cross-functional teams" schooled in techniques such as DevSecOps as their top challenge.
NTT Data Services, the Plano, Texas-based arm of Japan's NTT Group, defined cloud leaders as organizations with a higher proportion of greenfield, rewritten or rearchitected applications and a higher level of agility compared with the overall survey sample.
The cloud leaders also said they are upskilling their workforces or partnering with a cloud managed service provider (MSP) to implement changes, according to NTT Data Services. Thirty-eight percent of the leaders polled in the study said they tend to prioritize working with a specialist third-party provider to manage change.
Emily Lewis-Pinnell, vice president of cloud and application transformation at NTT Data Services, said the cultural difficulties stem from enterprises having to change how teams work together in a DevSecOps setting characterized by faster changes and quicker iterations. "The whole organization has to adjust to working in a new, agile mode," she said.
In addition to assisting with cultural change, service providers have an opportunity to support cloud adoption in other ways, including identifying suitable applications to move to the cloud, working out the ROI of such a move and then executing the migration itself, Lewis-Pinnell said. Cloud-native development is another opening for IT services firms. Late last year, NTT Data Services agreed to acquire Flux7, an IT services company focusing on cloud-native app migration and modernization.
NinjaRMM kicks off 2020 software releases
NinjaRMM, a remote monitoring and management software (RMM) vendor, has rolled out the latest update of its platform.
NinjaRMM 4.5 introduces features for managing Mac environments, including Mac OS patching capabilities through the platform's scripting engine and new Mac remote tools. The software also provides enhanced reporting, with six new types of reports and an updated report builder. Other new elements include end-user remote control permissions for TeamViewer Auto on Windows devices.
Sal Sferlazza
The company said it is ratcheting up the tempo of NinjaRMM software releases in 2020. NinjaRMM CEO Sal Sferlazza recently told SearchITChannel the company's accelerated release cycles aim to put the company on equal footing with more established players in the RMM space. "The last several years has been getting feature parity with all the big guys. I think we are coming at the end of the feature parity phase of our business and we are going more into focusing on market leadership," he said.
Sferlazza said he believes one of NinjaRMM's differentiators in the RMM market is that the software is built on a newer stack than many of its competitors, enabling greater agility. "Most of our competitors are built on much older stacks, 15 years ago," he said. "For other folks that are new like us, the way we approach feature development is that we want to make sure that every feature we build is best of breed, highest performance and most scalable with [a focus] on user experience."
NinjaRMM, which was founded in 2013, currently works with more than 4,000 MSP partners. Sferlazza noted that the company is moving "more upstream now" and expanding internationally. "We have a good spread of MSPs both in the small and medium [space] and are working our way into the large MSPs as we become more mature in the marketplace and ... international markets as well," he said.
NinjaRMM 4.5 is available in Oceania and EMEA and is slated for U.S. release on Feb. 5.
Other news
- Accenture said it will make Google Cloud the cloud technology provider for its life sciences industry platform. Accenture launched its INTIENT platform in May 2019.
- Kaseya, an IT infrastructure management vendor, unveiled a mobile platform, Kaseya Fusion Mobile App. The platform provides mobile users with functions of Kaseya's RMM and professional services automation Features include mobile ticket management, IT asset visibility and access to endpoint status information, the vendor said. Kaseya Fusion Mobile App is available for free to Kaseya VSA and Kaseya BMS users.
- Security vendor Check Point Software Technologies unveiled a new global partner program. The program adds an Elite tier to three previous membership levels. Partners can also access to support resources for product deployments and overall product experience, Check Point said.
- NWN Corp., an MSP based in Waltham, Mass., said its solution-as-a-service approach helped drive double-digit revenue expansion in the fourth quarter and "accelerated profitability" for 2019. For Q4, the company reported 25% year-over-year revenue growth. NWN's solution-as-a-service portfolio spans unified communications, contact center, devices, security and Advanced Technology Solutions.
- Rackspace and Alert Logic have banded together to offer SMBs an AWS Security Review program. Rackspace, an AWS Premier Consulting Partner, will tap analytics from Alert Logic's managed detection and response offering, to assess the state of customers' AWS environments.
- Antiphishing startup Area 1 Security said it inked a distribution deal with Synnex Corp. Synnex will provide Area 1 Security's antiphishing product, Area 1 Horizon.
- Datadobi, which providers unstructured data migration software, launched a Starter Pack for its NAS migration technology. Datadobi said the Starter Pack is available to channel partners in SMB, commercial and enterprise sizes.
- Sparkhound, an IT services management firm, released Pop-up Service Desk, an offering for supporting customers' existing help desk staff. Pop-up Service Desk aims to help customers adopt technologies such as Microsoft Office 365, Windows 10 and vertical applications, according to Sparkhound.
- Jonathan Groves will become CEO of Logicalis US, an MSP and part of London-based Logicalis Group, effective March 1. Vince DeLuca will move from CEO to chief customer experience and service transformation officer for Logicalis Group. Groves joins Logicalis from IT solutions provider ConvergeOne. He was executive vice president, U.S. East, at that company.
- SentryOne, a database performance monitoring company, said it has hired three new channel managers to grow its partner ecosystem in the U.S. and EMEA markets.
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