The Year So Far

Compiling a list of the 17 biggest news stories for 2017 (so far) proved to be a relatively easy task. It's been an eventful six months in the IT industry and the channel – but then, isn't it always?

As is often the case, acquisitions, mergers and divestitures accounted for some of the biggest news stories in the first half of the year. That included the merger of CSC with Hewlett Packard Enterprise's enterprise services business, HPE's acquisitions of SimpliVity and other companies, and Verizon's buyout (finally) of Yahoo. In some cases the news wasn't the acquisition itself but the aftermath, as with the launch of the Dell EMC partner program after Dell's $65 billion acquisition of EMC last year.

Not all the big news stories were deliberate events. Widespread Amazon Web Services and Microsoft cloud outages, SSD component shortages and massive ransomware attacks disrupted wide swaths of the industry in the first six months of the year.

And then there were the big-picture stories, the trends sweeping the industry, led by the efforts by just about every vendor and solution provider to get positioned for the coming Internet of Things revolution.

What do you think have been the biggest IT industry news stories of 2017 so far? Take a look at our list, concluding with the most important story, and see if you agree.

(For more on the "coolest" of 2017, check out "CRN's Tech Midyear In Review.")