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Hammer and tongs in the Aussie channel – this week’s highlights
Fri, 31st Mar 2017
FYI, this story is more than a year old

Another working week in Australia's channel comes to a close today, so what went down? Here's some of the highlights.

Ingram Micro announced ‘significant' new capabilities for hosting service providers and new tools for Microsoft Azure, as part of the latest release of the Odin Automation Essentials platform. Meanwhile, Ingram Micro Australia sealed a deal with enterprise mobility management vendor SOTI, in a move the two companies say will help support mobility management  – including the next wave of IoT devices.

Cirrus acquired Melbourne's NGage Technology Group for $2.5 million expanding the Perth-based IT solutions provider's geographical footprint into Victoria, while Endpoint Focus, the Melbourne-based reseller, announced a deal with CrowdStrike.

The Federal Court of Australia dismissed Telstra's application for a judicial review of the ACCC's fixed line services pricing determinations, which required a drop in access prices.

ServiceNow held its inaugural ANZ Partner Summit in its newly opened World Square office in Sydney.

Musical chairs in the channel continued, with Commvault and Big Switch Networks both announcing a bulking up of their ANZ teams with the former appointing Andrew Goodlace (formerly VMware) as a new sales director, and the latter appointing Steve Coad (formerly Aruba) as ANZ managing director.

We spoke with StorageCraft's director of sales, who says it's time to change the backup and disaster recovery conversation to a security conversation.

Vocus sold its Macquarie Telecom shares – equating to 16% of the company – for $41 million.

Shopping mall operator Scentre Group embraced digital transformation thanks to a project with Microsoft and Dimension Data.

Big data is certainly the hot topic at the moment, as Telsyte research revealed 83% of Australian CIOs plan to invest more on big data this year, with platforms and managed services topping the shopping lists.

A Frost - Sullivan study revealed the crucial part that software-defined wide area network technology (SD-WAN) will play in the future, and how managed service providers can ignore it at their own peril.

There were also a flurry of findings from IDC, including Internet of Things in healthcare heating up, hyperconverged systems clocking 87.3% growth in an otherwise declining converged systems market in Q4, Aussie IoT decision makers putting a high priority on open standards for data and connectivity, and line of business buyers forecast to have nearly equal IT spending as their IT department come 2020.

Outside of Australia, Virtustream announced a partnership with Dell Technologies Business to make its enterprise cloud platform and services widely available in the Asia Pacific (APAC) region, while Red Hat celebrated its 60th consecutive quarter of revenue gains.

And Aussie companies did exceptionally well at a couple of overseas partners events, scooping up some of the most coveted awards at both the Gigamon APAC Partner Conference in South Korea and the TIBCO APAC Partner Excellence Awards in Singapore.

And with that the week is done. We'll see you back here next week for more action in the Aussie channel.