Good times, bad times
Who has been on a high and who has been down in the dumps in the last fortnight?
Good times
Fast-growing resellers
Naysayers will tell you it's tough to grow a business in the channel these days, but perhaps they haven't seen the latest Sunday Times list of fast-growing private tech firms.
This year's Tech Track 100 was packed full of IT services firms, cyber-security consultancies, MSPs and born-in-the-cloud providers that have gone from zero to hero in the space of a few short years.
Public-sector cloud firm UKCloud, which turned over £32m last year despite having only been founded in 2011, topped the list.
Another entrant - audio-visual integrator Digitavia - only started up in 2012, making it just a year older than everyone's favourite royal toddler Prince George.
Comebacks
‘We're back'. That was the message of Veritas' CEO at its first independent Vision conference in more than a decade.
Last November, Veritas kicked off its EMEA partner summit with a grovelling apology, admitting its split from Symantec was causing "pain and frustration".
But new CEO Bill Coleman cut a bullish figure at its summit in Las Vegas last week, announcing that the vendor is building an enterprise data management platform that will be technology agnostic.
A new marketing campaign aimed at Dell with the cheeky strapline "What's worse than a lifetime of hardware with EMC? An eternity in Dell" was also unveiled.
Consolidation
There will be no resellers left by about February next year if channel consolidation continues at its current rate.
Last week alone saw £20m-turnover datacentre VAR Richardson Eyres swallowed by Telent and iomart confirm it had acquired £7m-turnover storage specialist Cristie Data. Meanwhile, in a move mirroring Adapt's acquisition by Datapipe the previous month, cloud and managed services outfit Attenda announced it has been gobbled up by US competitor Ensonso.
Bad Times
Exploding phones
UK partners were busy working with Samsung earlier this month, but not in the most profitable way. After reports that Samsung's Note 7 devices could catch fire or explode while charging it was all hands to the pump as Samsung providers and operators started to contact customers and set up handset exchanges.
A few days later the UK Civil Aviation Authority warned passengers flying with the phone to keep it switched off for the duration of their flight. Better advice would surely be to keep it switched off for the duration of ownership.
Canon
It's not a nice feeling being the geeky kid when you're told by the prettiest girl in school that you'll always be "like a brother to her", as she runs off holding hands with the star of the football team. It's a sincere attempt on her part to make you feel better, but it's not the relationship you want.
In a similar fashion, the relationship between HP Inc and Canon was cast into doubt as HP announced the acquisition Samsung's printing arm for a cool $1bn.
HP CEO Dion Weisler moved to ease Canon's fears, claiming the acquisition "does not impact the great work" done between the pair over the past 30 years but alarm bells must surely be ringing at Canon.
Standard earphones
Being ahead of the curve, as ever, Apple announced it will be ditching the perfectly fine 3.5mm headphone jack from its new iPhone 7 model. Users will be forced to fork out $159 for its wireless ‘AirPod' headphones, or use wired headphones that plug into the phone's lightning port, making standard headphones redundant and meaning you cannot charge the phone at the same time.
Apple says this has allowed them to make the phone slimmer, improve the built-in speaker and make the phone water resistant. At least you'll have peace of mind when you drop your phone down the toilet.