The week in channel-land: Acquisitions, big money and fresh potential

It's been a busy week in channel-land – even if much of the action was centred beyond Kiwi shores.

Locally, Ingram Micro's Danny Meadows gave ChannelLife readers the lowdown on the distributor's plans for its unified communications business unit, and outlined the potential market for resellers. The distie stepped up its UC push later in the week, announcing it had added Polycom to its UC portfolio.

Microsoft New Zealand's $100 million revenue garnered plenty of reader interest, while Datacom provided some lessons in how to put hot business practices into practice, with the Kiwi company walking the talk to become a $1 billion success story.

We saw acquisitions continue with HPE acquiring Nimble in a US$1 billion deal which was applauded by Veeam's ANZ head of alliances, Peter Bender, who dubbed the proposed acquisition 'a smart move'.

Meanwhile, Avaya announced it's gearing up to sell its networking business with Extreme Networks the 'primary bidder'. Avaya, which filed to restructure under Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection early this year, can still accept bids from other players in the market, with a deal expected to close by the end of June. The sale will free up some much needed cash for Avaya – with Extreme's offer around US$100 million – while also enabling the company to focus on its core unified communications and contact centre solutions.

Partner programs were in the focus with Fortinet launching an MSSP partner program, Datto upping their partner program and Google joining in with a big revamp of their program. Google was also busy partnering up with other vendors, including Veritas, with the two companies expanding their partnership to combining sales and support activities and deploy solutions to enable organisations to 'extract new business value' from data.

The musical chairs that is the IT business continued, with Tim Murphy returning to Arbor Networks as ANZ country manager, Belinda Jurisic gearing up to leave her role as Citrix ANZ channel manager and Peter Hewett appointed to lead Trend Micro's ANZ channel.

Meanwhile, Gartner told us the edge will eat the cloud, while CompTIA was busy urging MSPs to get serious about IoT.

So that's another week done. We'll see you back here for more news, more moves and more action next week.