The mobility world went wild last month, and partners stand to benefit.
Some of the largest manufacturers in the world rolled out new products in February that represent the latest advancements in wireless technology. It’s fair to say that MWC Barcelona, formerly known as Mobile World Congress, drove much of the activity.
AT&T, Verizon and Sprint used the event to announce products — many of which channel partners will be able sell soon. There are opportunities around 5G, SD-WAN, IoT and more 5G. Partners are awaiting a massive influx of next-gen wireless tools and services that coincide with the technology’s public availability.
February offered more than just mobile news. We covered stories about 8×8 and Cisco, and our sister site Channel Futures kept close tabs on HP and StorageCraft. Scroll through the images below to view 12 highlights.
Missed the previous month’s gallery? Check out the January edition.
Verizon
The wireless carrier will offer its commercial 5G services on one of Samsung's devices.
Samsung honored Verizon and its channel partners with exclusive access to the new Galaxy 10 5G phone. AT&T, T-Mobile and Sprint will sell the phone later in 2019, but Verizon gets first dibs this summer. It's Samsung's first 5G phone.
Jeffrey Schwartz wrote about the exclusive deal.
Windstream
Windstream Enterprise said its new offering helps partners stay competitive with security and compliance.
The company launched a security information and event management (SIEM) service provides threat monitoring and response. The service, which includes log retention for monitored devices, joins Windstream's managed network security offering.
Get details about the SIEM product.
8x8
The
UCaaS provider improved its communications and contact center platform's capabilities.
X Series platform, which combines video, voice, contact center and chat, added API integrations for Microsoft, Bullhorn and Slack. The company also added advanced speech analytics and real-time contact-center dashboards.
Buffy Naylor covered the announcement.
Sprint-Cisco
Sprint Business and
Cisco Meraki are merging their respective Wi-Fi and network visibility chops.
The two companies made a cloud-based analytics and visibility dashboard for Sprint Business Wi-Fi users. The platform includes access to all of Meraki's features. The agreement comes with the expressed purpose of building an "intelligent and simple network."
Learn more about the partnership.
CiscoCisco rolled out version 12.0 of its contact-center lineup.
The enhancements include multisite supervisor support, more agents supporting specific solutions and an increased payload limit for the expanded call context function. According to a Cisco executive, the latest release allows partners not only to help existing customers upgrade systems, but also help them with "process re-engineering."
Read Edward Gately's related article.
Jenne
The value-added
distributor has a new dashboard that helps partners view cloud sales commissions.
Jenne subagents give partners login credentials to the dashboard, where they can find data and history related to their commissions, not to mention the ability to access them. The company's senior manager of cloud solutions told us that partners now have a more simplified tool for reporting these earnings.
Lynn Haber reported the news.
AWS, Azure
We saw another amalgamation of technologies in conjunction with MWC Barcelona.
AT&T will improve its 5G network through an agreement with Microsoft Azure. AT&T will deploy cloud services through Azure in order to improve network performance.
And more happened in Spain. Rival carrier
Sprint also announced a public cloud partnership. Amazon Web Services (AWS) will enhance Sprint's Internet of Things (IoT) platform.
Get the story on the partnerships.
AT&T
In a marriage of two hot technologies,
AT&T will merge its SD-WAN platform with its much heralded 5G network.
The telco plans to make the mobile network a connectivity option, whether that be primary or secondary, to which the SD-WAN platform can route traffic. VMware VeloCloud, AT&T's SD-WAN partner, will participate in the integration.
Learn about AT&T's plans.
Tech Data
The
distributor has a new "Factory" for cloud solutions.
The factory allows vendors to package together offerings that simplify the design and implementation processes for channel partners. Tech Data emphasizes being able to immediately deploy these serves for the purposes of digital transformation. The Cloud Solutions Factory is in the company's StreamOne Cloud Marketplace.
Check out Channel Futures for the details.
HP
HP's expanded its Device as a Service (DaaS) for Apple offering to 20 European countries.
The portfolio of hardware, analytics, management and life-cycle services came out in 2016 in America, and hundreds of partners now sell it, according to the company. HP made the announcement during its twice-a-year DaaS update, and it was accompanied by plans of other portfolios expanding.
Read more about the expansion.
Ruckus
Arris-owned
Ruckus Networks released a new stackable switch.
The company said the ICX 7850 meets the needs of 100 Gigabit (100 GbE) Ethernet edge-to-core enterprise networks. That's due in part to the switch making "dense aggregation" of the Ethernet Frame rates 10GbE, 25GbE, 40GbE, 50GbE and 100GbE.
To learn about what else the switch does, visit Channel Futures.
StorageCraft
The
vendor called its data platform a “vaccine” for a variety of data-related problems. The offering will serve the health-care industry, as its nickname suggests.
StorageCraft for Healthcare attacks long-term problems like spiraling data costs, malicious threats, and high insurance policy premiums.
Allison Francis wrote about the new solution.