Channel Beat: Optiv Loses Head Of Sales For North America

Amazon on Thursdayrevealedthe Alexa Voice Service device software development kit (SDK) with the hopes of bringing its voice tool to commercial products.

With the new SDK tool set, commercial companies can build Amazon's Alexa service into their products, enabling voice features like streaming media, speech recognition, notifications, weather reports and other voice-enabled capabilities. In a blog post, Director of Amazon Alexa, Priya Abani, said, ’We are excited to bring the AVS Device SDK to developers to make it easier to add voice to their products and get to market faster.’

Microsoftextended its partnershipwith HashiCorp Thursday to focus on comprehensively integrating the DevOps specialist's popular Terraform infrastructure provisioning tool across Azure cloud services. The cloud giant pledged to ramp up investment in joint engineering efforts to ensure HashiCorp's widely adopted open-source solution supports much of Azure's large and rapidly expanding feature set, HashiCorp CEO Dave McJannet told CRN.

Terraform and several other open source tools (Vagrant, Vault, Consul) from the San Francisco-based startup have become ubiquitous in enterprise IT environments for automating infrastructure and enabling adoption of DevOps software delivery methods.

Terraform features connectors to infrastructure, called 'providers,' built by its open-source community, which often includes the cloud providers themselves. With the latest agreement, engineering teams from both Microsoft and HashiCorp will collaborate "to make sure all the services people might want to use on Azure are available on Terraform.

Optiv Security haslost its head of salesfor North America, as executive Chris Scanlan revealed his departure from the security solution provider earlier this week. In a LinkedIn post, Scanlan, who had served as senior vice president of Americas sales, said he decided to step down after 13 years to "take some needed time off and recharge the batteries."

Scanlan said he plans to stay on sabbatical until November but will start looking at new opportunities in mid to late October. Scanlan did not reply to direct requests for comment from CRN.

Frank Vitaglianowas inductedinto the IT Hall of Fame on Tuesday evening. This all happened during a ceremony at the XChange 2017 conference held this week in Kissimmee, Fla. Vitagliano is a 33-veteran of IBM who went on to hold leadership roles with Juniper, Dell and – most recently – Computex Technology Solutions where he is president and CEO.

He is well-known in the channel for his outstanding leadership, dedication and relationship-building skills.