About
Steven Burke has been reporting on the technology industry and sales channel for 30 years. Burke joined CRN in 1993 and has teamed with fellow editors numerous times to win American Society of Business Publication Editors and Jesse H. Neal journalism awards. He is passionate about the role of partners using technology to solve business problems and has spoken at conferences on channel sales issues.
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Women Of The Channel Pioneer Laurie Dasher Mourned As ‘Heart And Soul’ Of Dasher Technologies
by Steven Burke
‘The biggest thing about Laurie is she had the biggest heart in the world,’ says Chris Saso, who met Laurie in the early nineties and was employee No. 4 at Dasher. ‘Laurie was always looking out for others. Laurie was passionate about the Dasher family. She built a business family that was like her personal family. She took so much pride and joy in that. She was the heart and soul of the company.’
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Datto Board Member Steps Down Before $561M IPO
by Steven Burke
Vista Equity Partners Co-Founder and President Brian Sheth, who has served on the Datto board since the MSP platform provider was acquired by Vista three years ago, has given up his board seat.
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Aruba, WWT Score Comcast Business Secure Work From Home Deal
by Steven Burke
“Work from home has become a strategic imperative,” said Keerti Melkote, founder and president of Aruba, an HPE company, in an interview with CRN. “Hybrid work is the way of the the future…Remote AP and the (Aruba) work from home products have become very important in a post pandemic world.”
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Partners: Hope-Hunter Duo Is A ‘One Plus One Equals Three’ HPE GreenLake Game Changer
by Steven Burke
‘I think the appointment of George Hope working with Paul Hunter is a huge deal,’ says Advizex Technologies President C.R. Howdyshell. ‘Putting George Hope in that role demonstrates HPE’s significant commitment to the channel. George teaming with (former HPE Worldwide Channel Chief) Paul Hunter amounts to one plus one equals three for HPE’s GreenLake strategy. Those two together are going to drive shoulder to shoulder selling with partners on GreenLake.’
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Distribution’s Edge Is Reaffirmed By New GTDC Route To Market Research
by Steven Burke
“EBITDA (Earnings Before Interest Taxes, Depreciation and Amortization) goes up dramatically for technology companies taking advantage of the two-tier distribution model,” said GTDC CEO Frank Vitagliano in an interview with CRN. This data shows the competitive edge technology companies get by working with distributors.”
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‘Smart Move:’ IBM Splits In Two With Blockbuster Managed Infrastructure Services Unit Spin-Off
by Steven Burke
‘Now is the right time to create two market-leading companies focused on what they do best,’ says IBM CEO Arvind Krishna. ‘IBM will focus on its open hybrid cloud platform and AI capabilities. NewCo will have greater ability to design, run and modernize the infrastructure of the world’s most important organizations. Both companies will be on an improved growth trajectory with greater ability to partner and capture new opportunities—creating value for clients and shareholders.’
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Government Game Changer: How HPE GreenLake Cut Storage Costs By 42% For A California County
by Steven Burke
‘These are hard dollars that we saved,’ says Mac Avancena, chief information officer for Kern County, who was grappling with storage costs that were rising at a 40 percent annual clip before moving to the HPE GreenLake on premise cloud pay-per-use service. “Part of the reason we were able to do this is because we finally put some guardrails around our consumption.”
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Another Office 365 Outage: Does Microsoft Have A DevOps Problem?
by Steven Burke
“It looks to me like they have a DevOps problem,” says a channel source impacted by one of the outages. “It looks like they are pushing out software updates that are causing the outages. They have so much going on right now, rolling Teams out at a breakneck pace. I think they are running into an issue where code tested out fine but there is a configuration problem when they deploy it.”
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Microsoft Blames Software ‘Code Issue’ For Office 365 Outage
by Steven Burke
“It’s amazing to me that a change in code could cause a platform as big as Azure to go down,” says a senior executive for one of Microsoft’s top partners, who did not want to be identified. “It sounds like someone wrote some code that was merged into a production environment and it broke authentication. That’s ridiculous. If you can’t get into email or documents for five hours it’s pretty bad.”
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George Hope Named New HPE Worldwide Channel Chief
by Steven Burke
‘We have been building everything around being the edge to cloud Platform-as-a-Service company,’ says Hope in an exclusive interview with CRN. ‘We are doubling down on the edge because 70 percent of the data that is being created is at the edge. Being able to give that cloud experience whether you are on-prem, off-prem or at the edge is key. We are making that a reality. My job is to bring the channel on that journey. We need our channel to be purpose-built for that vision.’
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Partners Are HPE ‘Family And We Need to Feed Our Family:’ HPE’s George Hope
by Steven Burke
‘We have partnered consistently for 80 years,’ says new HPE channel Chief George Hope. “We are not partner yes, partner no, year after year. We have been very, very consistent with how we have partnered with the channel.’
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HPE Has Plan To Put GreenLake Into Distributor Cloud Marketplaces
by Steven Burke
‘We have been working closely with a lot of the top distributors on how to plug in to their marketplaces because that is their scale engine out to their resellers and customers,’ says HPE GreenLake Cloud Services Senior Vice President and General Manager Keith White. ‘We have got the teams working on a set of APIs. We are starting to test those now to allow them to take and integrate GreenLake into their marketplaces.’
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HPE Is ‘Years Ahead’ Of Competitors In Everything- As-A-Service Channel Battle: HPE GreenLake GM Keith White
by Steven Burke
‘I have huge expectations for the channel in fiscal year 2021, but I am also going to put our money where our mouth is and make sure they have the resources, tools, enablement, incentives and people to help them be successful,’ says White.
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‘Massive’ GreenLake Blitz: HPE Is Tripling Channel Investment
by Steven Burke
“I have huge expectations for the channel in FY 2021,” said HPE Senior Vice President and GreenLake Cloud Services General Manager Keith White. “But I’m also going to put our money where our mouth is and make sure that they have the resources, tools, enablement, incentives and people to help them be successful. … I think the channel is going to have a huge impact for us in fiscal year 2021.”
