5 Companies That Had A Rough Week

The Week Ending June 16

Topping this week's roundup of those having a rough week are solution providers who find themselves increasingly dealing with product delivery delays and rising prices because of the shortage of memory and SSD components.

Also making the list this week were Cylance, which lost a top sales executive to a competitor; a Smartsheet executive sued by Amazon for allegedly violating a non-compete agreement; Google, which is facing a potentially huge fine from European Union antitrust regulators; and Mozilla, which scrambled to fix a number of vulnerabilities in the Firefox browser.

Not everyone in the IT industry was having a rough go of it this week. For a rundown of companies that made smart decisions, executed savvy strategic moves – or just had good luck – check out this week's Five Companies That Came To Win roundup.

Solution Providers Feeling The Pressure Of Component Shortages, Rising Prices

Solution providers are losing deals, worrying about order backlogs, and seeing revenue, profitability and cash flow impacted by the shortage of memory and SSD components currently gripping the IT hardware market.

The shortages and rising prices are wreaking havoc with solution providers whose customers often deploy servers, storage systems and other hardware on predetermined, sometimes tight schedules.

Solution providers told CRN this week that vendors across the board have raised or plan to raise prices between 5 and 10 percent. Dell Technologies recently said it would raise PC and server prices because of the component shortages.

Cylance Loses Worldwide Sales Chief To Endpoint Competitor SentinelOne

Cylance took a hit in the personnel department this week when a major competitor hired away one of its top executives

Word got out this week that SentinelOne hired Nicholas Warner, senior vice president of worldwide sales at Cylance, to be SentinelOne's new chief revenue officer.

Warner disclosed his move on his LinkedIn profile, saying he started at SentinelOne this month. He had been SVP of worldwide sales at Cylance for more than three years.

Cylance and SentinelOne are fierce competitors in the hotly contest endpoint security market.

Smartsheet Executive Sued By Former Employer Amazon In Non-Compete Agreement Case

A former Amazon Web Services employee found himself on the wrong end of a lawsuit this week when Amazon sued him claiming that he was bound by a non-compete agreement.

Gene Farrell now works as head of product for Smartsheet, a Bellevue, Wash.-based software developer. In the suit, Amazon said the non-compete agreement Farrell signed is actionable because it has a product that's competitive with Smartsheet's document collaboration and work management software. The agreement prevents someone from working for a competitor for 18 months.

The suit drew attention because it added to speculation that AWS is developing its own cloud-based office collaboration applications. In the court complaint, AWS said it would only provide evidence of its product out of the purview of the public.

Smartsheet said it carefully vetted its hire of Farrell and denied it is a competitor to AWS. Adding to the intrigue is the fact that Smartsheet, which has been an AWS customer, has been moving some of its workloads to Hewlett Packard Enterprise's private cloud.

Google Braces For Huge Antitrust Fine From EU Regulators

Google is expected to get hit with a massive fine in coming weeks by European Union regulators over charges that Google manipulated search results to favor its own comparison shopping site, according to reports published this week by the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and other media sites.

Reports say the fine could exceed the 1.06 billion Euro (about $1.2 billion today) fine the EU assessed against Intel in 2009 for alleged antitrust abuses. The EU ruling, expected by the end of August, could also require the company to change its business practices to give other companies a greater ability to compete.

The case is just one of three EU investigations currently underway against Google, with the company's Android mobile operating system and its advertising services also being scrutinized, according to the New York Times.

Mozilla Fixes 32 Vulnerabilities – One Critical – In Firefox Browser

Mozilla programmers scrambled to fix a critical bug in the Firefox browser that could trigger a potentially exploitable crash.

The critical bug was one of 32 vulnerabilities that Mozilla fixed when it release Firefox 54 this week, according to a report on the Threatpost website.

Along with the critical vulnerability, about a dozen of the other vulnerabilities addressed in the new release were deemed "high impact" by Mozilla.