Last Week's News, By The Numbers

From security and servers to acquisitions and restructuring plans, here's a look at five news stories of interest to the channel from the week of Sept. 19-23, focusing on key numbers within those stories.

260 – Number of employees Kurt Salmon, a New York-based consulting firm that solution provider giant Accenture has agreed to purchase in an effort to help top retailers and private equity firms deal with digital disruption. The retail industry is also grappling with rapidly rising consumer expectations, industry convergence and low barriers to entry, Accenture said.

45 percent – Share of revenue that distributor Tech Data expects will come from its announced $2.96 billion acquisition of Avnet Technology Solutions, up from the current 29 percent. A top channel executive, who did not want to be identified, told CRN that the deal signals the start of an "open season" campaign by rival distributors to pursue the business of IBM and HPE partners currently committed to sourcing data center products from Avnet.

3,000+ - Number of installations of VCE's flagship Vblock converged infrastructure systems, account for about $3 billion in revenue. Last week, CEO Chuck Robbins of Cisco Systems, which owns 10 percent of VCE, and Michael Dell, his counterpart at Dell, which owns a majority of VCE after Dell's purchase of EMC, reaffirmed their companies' commitments to the VCE alliance.

58 – Number of data center facilities owned by Monroe, La.-based CenturyLink. A group of four private equity firms -- GTCR, Charlesbank Capital Partners, Berkshire Partners and Stonepeak Infrastructure Partners – is reportedly ready to jointly bid for those data centers. CenturyLink partners are pondering how a potential sale by the telecom carrier would impact their cloud, hosting and co-location revenue.

$7.51 billion – Expected size of the cloud access security brokerage (CASB) market by 2020 (up from $3.34 billion in 2015), according to research firm Markets and Markets. Oracle last week made a splash in the CASB market by announcing the acquisition of Palerra. Its Loric security platform aims to help enterprises automate the process of threat detection, incident response, analytics and more around cloud and Software-as-a-Service offerings.