An interesting find: There is a CIO survey which finds Microsoft Azure will overtake Amazon AWS for Infrastructure as a Service (from July 2016).
Microsoft has been far behind AWS but then they started later too. This study shows that AWS has 45% share of public cloud infrastructure market -- more than Microsoft, Google, IBM combined.
Amazon launched a conferencing service called Chime.aws. They launched it with Vonage Business. Why? Unless the old Nexmo service is the back-end for the WebRTC voice and video and screen share. Vonage has 4 platforms - consumer VoIP; Vocalocity small biz; Broadsoft and Nexmo. I think they would have conferencing covered.
Amazon offers VPS and Hosting too. They also are a sales agent for Frontier and Comcast.
ABRY Partners owns StackPath which acquired Highwinds, a Florida based CDN company. StackPath will now offer secure CDN on top of firewall and DDoS mitigation services.
Dell announced that is unifying the Dell and EMC partner programs. Dell used partner feedback to make it simple, predictable and profitable. It is the best of both programs, says Dell. "It Preserves best of legacy Dell and EMC programs to reward partners who sell the full portfolio, including services, grow their business and win net new customers." One characteristic: "One deal registration program and a Zero Tolerance policy for deal conflicts."
Datto has acquired OpenMesh to further its pivot to be a premiere partner for MSPs. "The Open Mesh wireless access point and ethernet switching technologies will join the existing Datto Networking Appliance to create the Datto Networking line of products, optimized for small-to-medium sized businesses and delivered exclusively through Datto's global network of Managed Service Provider partners." I guess it will compete with Ruckus, Meraki (Cisco) and ADTRAn's managed wi-fi solutions.
In an interesting vertical move, "Evolve IP has partnered with Nimble Storage to provide healthcare organizations with on-premises Nimble Storage flash arrays, supported by HIPAA-compliant and HITRUST-audited hybrid cloud, cloud backup and disaster recovery solutions from Evolve IP." [channelvision]
