In other top stories, Cisco launches two new solutions this week. Also, Microsoft Azure suffers more outages.

At its 2014 Collaboration Summit in Los Angeles this week, Cisco highlighted some of the hottest new additions to its collaboration portfolio, in addition to a number of new partner tools and promotions to help bring those solutions to market. Here are eight products, tools and incentives set to shake up the Cisco collaboration channel.

One-click TSL Certificate Deployment will make the Internet a safer place, developers say.

Cisco Tuesday continued its midmarket collaboration offensive with the launch of the Business Edition 6000S, a new collaboration platform it says is significantly less expensive and complex to deploy than comparable Cisco offerings.

A recent survey gauges how Cisco solution providers feel about everything from the networking giant's Intercloud strategy to the eventual retirement of CEO John Chambers. Here are eight key take-aways.

Cisco CEO John Chambers says Cisco has a whole new philosophy when it comes to collaboration, realizing that some of its legacy offerings were 'too expensive and too complex.'

Cisco Intercloud hosting partners can host and deliver the app -- designed for messaging, file sharing and more -- and monetize it by offering additional management services and features.

Cisco CEO John Chambers mentioned during the company's first-quarter earnings call this week that Cisco has made big strides against one of its top "merchant-based" switching competitors.

While Cisco's first-quarter earnings were better than expected, its outlook for Q2 was lower than analyst projections, causing its shares to slip in after-hours trading Wednesday. Cisco CFO Frank Calderoni, meanwhile, is stepping down.

The departure of a top sales executive for Cisco's Invicta solid state storage unit comes as the networking giant continues to deal with technical problems with its UCS flash storage product.

Netsocket, a venture-backed vendor that sells SDN and network function virtualization technology to managed service providers, faces murky future after laying off half its staff in August.

Rich Napolitano, who led development of EMC's successful VNXe and VNX2 arrays, is looking to take software-defined networking mainstream as the new CEO of Plexxi, a developer of SDN software and configurable, photonics-based networking hardware.

VMware underestimated how hard it would be for its virtualization-savvy sales force to talk about the transformation NSX can make possible, say a number of partners interviewed by CRN.

Cisco says its three new IoT partner specializations will help solution providers capitalize on what it considers to be a $19 trillion market opportunity.

Ryan Snell, a top sales executive for Cisco's Invicta solid state storage unit, has confirmed to CRN that he is leaving the company.

Dell's new PowerEdge FX architecture combines four server modules, 16 hard drives and eight PCIe slots in a 2U rack enclosure designed for maximum configuration flexibility.

Stratoscale, a developer of hyper-converged infrastructure software designed to work on any industry-standard server, comes out of stealth mode with a $32 million round of funding.

Pica8, a maker of white-box switches and software, told CRN in a recent interview that its goal is to disrupt the networking supply chain -- with its sights especially set on Cisco Systems.

CRN asks channel chiefs their opinions on the hybrid cloud model. Executives from IBM, Rackspace and Cisco weigh in.

Channel chiefs cast their predictions around the new style of IT, ranging from the type of partners who will flourish to the number of partners that will sign onto new programs.