While definitely quieter than last week (perhaps everyone was out celebrating St Paddy's Day), there was still a lot going on in the Kiwi channel this week.

Locally, Ingram Micro's cloud referral program hit the New Zealand shores, enabling resellers to earn additional commissions on Office 365 subscriptions.

Nextgen Distribution signed a deal to distribute CA Technologies in New Zealand, opening the doors to capitalise on CA's large legacy customer base in New Zealand.

Atlas Gentech announced their Simply Leasing finance business is gearing up for a relaunch.

Exeed revealed they've moved to a significantly larger warehouse, enabling them to offer resellers new services, including third party logistics – with new vendors also likely in the wake of the move.

Dimension Data won the contract for Frucor that will see it help the drinks company transition to the cloud, while the New Zealand branch appointed Wayne Yarr to head up the local business, following chief executive Jo Healey's departure earlier this year.

Duo made the call to resellers to step into more of a thought leadership position as demand for security soars across New Zealand business.

Microsoft New Zealand announced the finalists for their much anticipated and fast approaching Partner Awards – we also spoke to some previous winners to get their thoughts on the event.

Further afield, Microsoft's cloud push is paying dividends, with the tech giant continuing to hold a clear lead in the burgeoning enterprise software-as-a-service market although Oracle and Google are growing fast.

Alcatel Lucent Enterprise, Hitachi Data Systems and F5 Networks all announced the expansion of their senior leadership teams in Asia Pacific (APAC) with the appointments of Pierre Samson, Adam Judd, and Michael Zutenis, respectively.

Negotiations are continuing for Datatec – the parent company for Westcon Comstor and Logicalis – in a ‘significant transaction' first flagged in January.

Genesys recognised its top performing partners at its annual APAC conference, with Dimension Data coming out on top.

Tech Data announced a distie deal with Zadara Storage to make their solutions easily accessible to channel partners worldwide through its Avnet Cloud Marketplace.

So another week full of acquisitions, deals and appointments bites the dust. We'll see you back here for more action next week – provided you've overcome the hangover from St Paddy's of course.