From multi-billion mergers and acquisitions, to competition heating up in the wireless arena, to the fate of Net Neutrality hanging in the balance, 2017 was a busy year in the telecom industry. Here are ten of the biggest headline-making news stories.
Frank Abagnale, who has consulted with the FBI on most of the major cybersecurity breaches in the last 15 years, says the massive breach was caused by a failure to update critical infrastructure.
Frank Abagnale, the teenage check forger turned FBI security expert popularized in the film "Catch Me If You Can," spoke with CRN about the cause of blockbuster cybersecurity breaches, why Equifax is the worst breach he has ever seen, and the revolutionary technology that could eliminate passwords.
Cisco channel executive Nirav Sheth spoke with CRN about Cisco's continuing transformation into a recurring revenue-based software company and how it is playing matchmaker between born-in-the-cloud partners and traditional partners in an effort to accelerate cloud-based business.
While broadband providers look forward to a less onerous regulatory environment following today's FCC vote to scrap net neutrality rules, some solution providers worry that they'll now have less control over the cloud-based services that depend on incumbent broadband networks.
"If the first 30 days are a litmus test, then I think we're super excited about the momentum and the net-new opportunities we're creating for our partners," said Cisco executive Nirav Sheth.
Two of Cisco's top executives, including its global sales leader, are leaving the networking giant next year as the company continues its transformation into a recurring-revenue software company.
The data center market continued to evolve in 2017 as traditional vendors had to compete with hot startups looking to steal market share. Here are the 10 biggest data center stories of the year.
Solution providers can help transform their customers' WAN using SD-WAN technology, according to Magna5 at the NexGen 2017 Conference & Technology Expo.
Companies such as Netskope, Skyhigh Networks and Symantec have set the standard for cloud access security brokers, Gartner said, but giants like Cisco, Microsoft and Oracle are in a position to funnel resources into their recent CASB acquisitions.
BluVector-as-a-Service allows partners to deliver core managed security functions like health monitoring, configuration, maintenance, patching, upgrading, and triaging high-priority alerts without allocating their own resources.
HP Personal Systems Chief Technologist Mike Nash says the company has already issued software updates at HP.com that address the Synaptics Debug tool issue. At the same time, he warned partners to make sure the issue is not impacting the laptops from other OEMs.
Solution provider CEO says there's a lot of opportunity in the whole process of moving to, managing and monitoring multi-cloud environments and he's aiming to make it easier for partners to get on-board.
The three men pleaded guilty to roles in the 2016 botnet attack, which was orchestrated as a distributed denial of service attack through IoT devices like webcams, routers and video recorders.
Channel chief and partner advocate Maurits Tichelman has moved out of his role overseeing Intel's channel business to take a new leadership job at the chip company, CRN has learned.
"For the longest time, I stood by Kaspersky and supported them. To this date, I think it is a good product," said one Kaspersky Lab partner. "But I don't know what more they can do."
With Datto and Autotask now officially merged under Vista Equity Partners, the MSP powerhouse is actively devising a go-to-market strategy around cross-selling opportunities for partners.
