Top 20 Channel Stories in April: Tech Murder, Racist Job Posting, More Layoffs
Murder? Racism? Layoffs? That's right. But which was No. 1?
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Nothing like a good party to get the countdown started.
Just published last week, our preview of the biggest parties and expo hall giveaways at the Channel Partners Conference & Expo breaks in at No. 20.
The big TSDs are all having bashes, while at least two-dozen other companies want you to win something.
Marty Bauerlein has been in traditional distribution nearly his whole career, so it’s only appropriate that he finishes it there.
Bauerlein joined the team at D&H Distributing after a lengthy career at Ingram Micro and Tech Data, and a year-and-a-half at AMD before becoming D&H’s chief commercial officer.
We caught up with him in this article.
The biggest news coming out of last week’s Kaseya Connect Global event might have been the IT and security management platform provider’s acquisition of audIT. It’s a SaaS-based presentation system that its developer says makes it easier and quicker to create non-technical sales and business review presentations for SMB and midmarket enterprise customers.
audIT founder Frank DeBenedetto described his creation in more detail.
The high-stakes cloud wars reached a boiling point when Google Cloud’s parent company, Alphabet, went after Microsoft for what it called anticompetitive cloud computing practices.
Google has asked antitrust regulators in the European Union to examine Microsoft’s acquisition pursuits in the region.
That story was part of Kelly Teal’s cloud roundup.
This one has legs.
Now almost seven months after its publication date, our story about the formation of the Cloud Software Group, of which Citrix is now part, continues to crack our top 20.
Citrix is one of six privately held software businesses that are part of the organization. Those include Tibco, the business intelligence and application and data integration provider.
Layoff stories have hit us like a ton of bricks this year, and unfortunately, this countdown has a few of them.
Take, for instance, F5 Networks, the multicloud security and application delivery company, which said it was cutting 620 jobs, or about 9% of its workforce.
The news drew swift criticism on TheLayoff.com, where one apparently laid-off worker said “it was a joke they did this on my day off…”
Read the full story here.
Around here, we call it the power of the 501.
That’s because the 2022 Channel Futures MSP 501 list, which we published last June, is in the countdown once again.
We offer you — and plenty of you continue to take the opportunity — a downloadable PDF of the entire list of honorees.
Here’s your chance if you’re one of the few who hasn’t seen it. The application period for the 2023 MSP 501 just closed, with the unveiling of this year’s winners coming in June.
Not a layoff story about an individual company, but one that takes the pulse of the entire tech industry.
A Janco and Associates report, released in March, revealed that nearly 45,000 IT jobs had been lost in a two-month period, and it was actually the first loss in the number of working IT professionals in 27 months. The boom was lowered.
The report further revealed that there are more than 145,000 unfilled jobs for IT pros. Why? A lack of qualified candidates.
Read the news here.
No one likes to see layoff stories in our top 20, but it might be more discouraging to see one from January still cracking our list.
This one is OpenText, the cybersecurity giant, which said it was cutting 8% of its 14,000 employees in 60 offices worldwide.
The information came at the bottom of a press release announcing the closing of OpenText’s $5.8 billion acquisition of British rival Micro Focus.
CEO Mark Barrenechea had a lot to say about the acquisition, but less about the job cuts.
Layoffs can certainly cause controversy, and there was no shortage of them to pack into our semiannual conflict and controversies roundup in late March.
But we also got you up to speed on Avaya’s bankruptcy, the fallout from AppDirect’s purchase of TBI, the ransomware attack on Dish Network, and much more.
Our monthly CF20 lists are always a hit with our audience, but few match the interest that our annual list of top UCaaS companies draws.
Once again, we polled top industry analysts as to whom we should include as the best in unified communications as a service. This time, Microsoft, Avaya, Cisco and Zoom all made the cut.
Reporting on crime is a rarity for a channel publication, so when an MSP is arrested for murder, it gets a lot of attention. And it was a high-profile murder at that.
Police detained Nima Momeni on suspicion of killing CashApp founder Bob Lee. Momeni owns Expand IT, a managed service provider.
It was a case that made national headlines. We offered details on the stabbing death of Lee.
It could be the next business model that shakes up the channel.
We went in-depth on how former Intelisys president Jay Bradley was teaming with Vic Pepe, CEO of Capteon, on a new venture that could be an alternative to some of the recently established, private-equity funded M&A strategies.
Not a TSD. Not a so-called “superagency.” Capteon is a holding company that claims to shoulder the heavy lifting of preparing for a sale to strategic buyer.
The channel mourned the death of Carole Lehnerz, a channel champion and member of the Alliance of Channel Women. She died in late March after an accident at home.
Lehnerz’s history in the channel included jobs at Qwest and CenturyLink, Spectrum Business and Fusion Connect. Her last position was national channel manager at Fusion.
Tech giant CDW pink-slipped hundreds of workers, according to reports, after its CEO called its first quarter “a period of intensifying economic uncertainty.”
Estimates of job cuts are between 600 and 700.
Criticism once again was rampant on TheLayoff.com, where one worker wrote, “It feels like sometimes the management can’t see the forest from the trees.”
It probably makes sense with the number of layoff stories in this countdown that our IT-telecom layoff tracker, where we keep you current on layoffs at companies that do business in the channel, landed in our top five.
Most of the job cuts we’ve already mentioned happened after we updated the tracker, which includes layoffs at Dell, Zoom, Twilio, Accenture and more.
On a happier note, there’s our monthly wrap of new hires and promotions, Channel People on the Move, at No. 4.
This edition featured personnel moves at Sangoma, Red Hat, Ingram Micro, Nextiva and many more.
We’ve been updating the ongoing developments surrounding Broadcom‘s attempted acquisition of VMware, and it’s pretty common for at least one article about it to make our monthly top 20.
In this case, it was an April 4 update, when we told you that the UK’s regulatory arm, the Competition and Markets Authority, decided to probe deeper into the proposed $61 billion acquisition.
There’s a good chance that delays approval by another six months. One analyst now pegs approval odds at just 50-50.
File this one under: What was someone thinking?
No one really knows — or isn’t saying, anyway — how a job posting for Virginia-based IT services firm Arthur Grand Technologies called for only white people to apply.
Naturally, outrage ensued. One Reddit user called it “illegal and nauseating.” A Twitter user said they “cannot wait for the lawsuit that comes out of this.”
The company denied responsibility for the posting but had previously blamed it on a “new junior recruiter” at the firm.
Get the full scoop on all the hubbub.
As you might have predicted, a layoff story comes in at No. 1.
Kyndryl, the infrastructure services provider that spun off from IBM in 2021, initiated layoffs of what the company called a “small percentage” of its workforce.
That being said, Kyndryl has 90,000 workers, so a “small percentage” could be a significant number. The news came after former parent IBM said it would be laying off 3,900.
This article will get you up to speed on the cuts at Kyndryl, including one worker’s statement on TheLayoff.com, which read in part, “It doesn’t take an MBA to see that [Kyndryl] is not a profitable business. IBM let it go for a reason, and the No. 1 cost is always the flesh and bone.”
As you might have predicted, a layoff story comes in at No. 1.
Kyndryl, the infrastructure services provider that spun off from IBM in 2021, initiated layoffs of what the company called a “small percentage” of its workforce.
That being said, Kyndryl has 90,000 workers, so a “small percentage” could be a significant number. The news came after former parent IBM said it would be laying off 3,900.
This article will get you up to speed on the cuts at Kyndryl, including one worker’s statement on TheLayoff.com, which read in part, “It doesn’t take an MBA to see that [Kyndryl] is not a profitable business. IBM let it go for a reason, and the No. 1 cost is always the flesh and bone.”
It’s not often you see murder and racism making channel headlines, but they do in our top stories countdown for April.
The former refers to an MSP owner who police say stabbed to death CashApp founder Bob Lee. The latter is about a job posting by a tech company that asked only whites to apply.
If that’s not enough grim news, our ranking of top stories – those most-read on Channel Futures last month – includes plenty of companies laying off workers. We’ve been keeping you up to date all year on the carnage in the tech sector.
Fortunately, while these troubling stories were lowlights for the month, there are highlights in our top 20. Take Marty Bauerlein, for instance, a longtime distribution leader, landing a new job. And perhaps the ultimate high is our gallery featuring the parties and giveaways at this week’s Channel Partners Conference & Expo.
We’ve got it all in the slideshow above, which counts down the top stories in April that you, our loyal reader, determined. We look at online pageviews and the most-read articles in our daily and weekly newsletters to figure out what makes the list. You can throw your weight around by signing up for those aforementioned newsletters.
Miss our top stories countdown for March? It’s here.
Want to contact the author directly about this story? Have ideas for a follow-up article? Email Craig Galbraith or connect with him on LinkedIn. |
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