Channel Partners’ Top 12 Stories in June

The heat of summer is in full force in many parts of the country — and so is our list of hottest stories in June.

Channel Partners’ top 12 stories from the year’s six month include our Q&A with Rackspace (formerly CenturyLink) channel chief Blake Wetzel, images from a pair of master-agency events (Telarus, X4) and a profile of Sprint’s new business wireline unit.

As always, our top posts are determined by you! We’ve combined online page views and interest from our weekly newsletter audience.

Click through our gallery to see which story was No. 1.

June too hot for you? Click here to see our most-read posts in May.

Follow senior online managing editor Craig Galbraith on Twitter.

Cisco announced Tetration Analytics, a rack-size platform to debut in July. The networking giant says it will provide full visibility across a data center and hybrid cloud in real time.

At a hefty 39 RU cluster with 36 UCS-C220 servers and three Cisco Nexus 9300 switches running  the analytics software, the initial release is for large data centers. Later this year, Cisco will launch a smaller unit that’s more suitable for midsize companies.

MSPs could host the appliance on their sites and sell Tetration Analytics in an as-a-service model to multiple customers.

Read more about it here.

In this Q&A with Channel Partners, Dell channel chief Cheryl Cook told us that hanging onto the loyalty of both Dell and EMC partners will be a focus as the former closes its acquisition of the latter later this year.

“We are, from a channel perspective, expecting that when Day 1 [after the acquisition closes] occurs, we’re working through all the communications and messaging,” Cook said. We’ll still likely operate in parallel as independent companies when the bell rings — so they [EMC partners] are still going to process orders in their tools and we’ll process orders in our tools. We will look for any kind of integrated changes to programs or structures to occur in the February [2017] time frame, which will be at the beginning of the new fiscal year of the combined company.”

Speaking of channel chiefs, we published a gallery late last month highlighting our conversations with channel bosses from the first half of the year.

Among them: Google, Avaya, Dropbox and VMware.

June was a big month for RingCentral, which rolled out a new room video-conferencing system, expanded services into a dozen more countries and hired some noteworthy personnel.

RingCentral Rooms is a cloud-based video conferencing service aimed at taking on legacy hardware competitors like Cisco. It is compatible with off-the-shelf room cameras and is used with a visual app on an iPad. RingCentral Room Connector, available in July, enables any legacy room conferencing system to connect to other RingCentral Rooms or RingCentral Meetings participants on desktop or mobile devices.

The new people on board are Carson Hostetter, formerly Avaya’s vice president of sales, now RingCentral’s VP of enterprise sales; David Marler, formerly in leadership positions at ShoreTel and CA Technologies, joined RingCentral as vice president of customer success; and Chuck Emmette, also a former Avaya vice president, joined as head of professional services.

Read more about all of the happenings at RingCentral here.

Our image gallery from master agency X4 Solutions‘ Sales Partner Evolution event caught your eye last month.

The company welcomed partners and nearly three dozen sponsors. The event featured panels covering cloud applications and the latest carrier offerings.

You were interested to learn about the latest plans by a carrier to discontinue legacy phone services.

A regulatory filing revealed that Windstream wants to drop a number of operator-assisted services across its territories in 18 states. Expect it to happen by Aug. 16.

Those services include Bill to a Third Number, Busy Line Verify, Busy Line Interrupt, Collect Calling and Person to Person.

Customers will be affected in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Kentucky, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Texas.

We told you which big names are doing well in landline customer satisfaction – according to the ACSI’s latest numbers – and who’s struggling. 

Vonage got props for topping the list, while many of the large cable companies struggled. That being said, satisfaction overall was up, with many of those at the bottom rising several percentage points this year.

Sprint reported to us good progress since the formation of its Global Wireline Business Unit more than a month ago.

That’s meant a change in direction for its channel program, with the carrier focusing on fewer partners and launching new programs to incent activity and growth.

The unit has full profit-and-loss responsibility, including strategy, sales, marketing, product management, services engineering and operations. Sprint now has dedicated sales representatives and services engineers who sell, design, implement and support wireline services for business customers, partnering with Sprint wireless sales representatives to “ensure a fully integrated approach to communications needs for business customers.”

“The team is fully staffed and new compensation plans have been created in alignment with the business unit’s goals and objectives,” said David Falter, vice president of global wireline sales and engineering, Sprint Partner Program. “Meetings have been held with every assigned customer, focusing on migration from legacy, TDM-based products to Ethernet and IP/global MPLS solutions. Since forming the unit, growth in every aspect of the business has been accelerating in a positive direction.”

Read the full story here.

Telarus held its fifth annual Partner Summit in Deer Valley, Utah — and Channel Partners was there.

The event featured a report on the “state of Telarus”; educational sessions on VXSuite, the analytics software that the master agent bought last year; panels on hosted UC and partner best practices; an awards banquet; and more.

We shared our pictures and recapped the event in this image gallery.

Our monthly Channel People on the Move gallery took it usual place near the top of our most-read posts.

This version featured new hires and promotions at Rackspace, Nitel and PlanetOne.

In our Q&A with Blake Wetzel, the new Rackspace channel boss told us he’s already been inundated with feedback from organizations anxious to forge new partnerships.

After playing a key role in expanding CenturyLink’s indirect sales, partner program and partner ecosystem over the past seven years, Wetzel explained that the move was a real opportunity.

“No. 1, I’ve always been very impressed in the market with what Rackspace was doing … definitely the vision of the orchestration across multiple clouds and the migration of IT services to hybrid clouds,” he said. “… I left a very good group of people [at CenturyLink], a great number of partners that will not only stay as business associates, but as friends. But when I was approached about the opportunity – there were very few companies that I would ever contemplate leaving what we built at CenturyLink – and Rackspace was on a very, very short list of those companies. So when Rackspace approached me, it was a very easy decision … I really felt a good comfort level doing that.”

The cloud world is a competitive one – but can also be an overwhelming one – for solution providers.

Never fear, Channel Partners contributors Jo Peterson of Clarify360 and Michael Goodenough of BCM One were here to help.

The pair outlined a number of cloud certifications – both vendor-specific and vendor-independent – designed to equip partners with the tools to help customers succeed.