Channel Beat: Congressional Committee Seeks Criminal Charges Against Platte River Networks CEO

The saga of the solution provider that managed the Hillary Clinton email server isn't over yet, as the Republican congressman leading the investigation moved on Thursday to press criminal charges against the CEO of Platte River Networks.

In a letter to the U.S. Department of Justice on Thursday, Republican Committee Chairman Lamar Smith asked for the Justice Department to consider criminal charges against CEO Treve Suazo for his alleged failure to cooperate with the investigation.

The letter alleges Suazo failed to produce documents, failed to produce employees for interviews, made false statements regarding access to the documents, and obstructed the investigation. The investigation, which began in January 2016 and is led by the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, looked into Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server, managed by Platte River Networks, during her time as Secretary of State.

Solution providers said they'd add salespeople and redouble investments in cutting-edge software and services if the Trump administration's business tax reform succeeds. President Donald Trump's tax plan, released this week, calls for cutting the 35 percent corporate income tax rate to 15 percent to stimulate small business growth. The cuts would need to pass through the U.S. Congress.

Several solution providers interviewed by CRN said they anticipated tax cuts would enable them to put money back into their businesses by hiring employees in areas such as professional services, pre-sales engineering, and customer service or by bulking up their internal IT resources.

Amazon's cloud business maintained aggressive first-quarter growth despite numerous price cuts and its already overwhelming share of the market, according to the company's financial results, released Thursday.

Amazon Web Services grew by 43 percent year-over-year, generating $3.66 billion in sales and netting Amazon $890 million in profit for the quarter ended March 31, a slight uptick in margins from the same quarter of the previous year. Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky said of AWS during a conference call with Wall Street analysts, ’We’re happy with the business team,’ which is no surprise, given the continued growth and profitability of the cloud giant.

The quarter was the first to fully absorb seven AWS price decreases that were implemented near the end of last year. Only about a third of their impact was felt in the previous fourth-quarter results, Olsavsky said. Overall, Amazon brought in $35.71 billion in sales with earnings of $1.48 per share for the first quarter.