2019's 12 biggest channel stories - defined by CRN readers!

As 2019 winds down, we've trawled our server logs to find biggest channel news of the year, as defined by how many of you read it!

We've focused on stories about partners - even though other stories about things like the NBN or vendor misbheaviour can attract more eyeballs.  

So click on ahead to learn what got you and your peers clicking on CRN Australia during 2019.

Telstra has spent years buying service providers without ever quite explaining how they all fit togehter. That changed in September when it combined its acquisitions under a new brand: Purple. 

MSY's super-no-frills retail model may not have obvious appeal. Yet the discounter has annual sales over $100m and 23 stores!

When news broke that it was in acquisition talks with a listed mining company, CRN readers were intereted to know what on earth was going on!

When the transaction stalled over regulatory concerns, we again appreciated the traffic.

MSY's suitor, Lanka Graphite, remains suspended from the ASX while the bourse figures out if the transaction is more than an attempt at a back-door listing. 

Arq group had a very difficult year and when CEO Martin Mercer departed, the industry wanted to know why.

CRN readers were keenly intersted in news that Deloitte would acquire Presence of IT, Yet that wasn't even the biggest acquisition story of 2019. We summarised the rest here.

When NTT announced that its brand would take over from the venerable DiData, plenty of you clicked to mark the passing of a lineage that went back to the days of ComTech and its legendary Forum event.

When we found an AWS style guide that laid down strict and slightly-ridiculous rules about how its partners are allowed to behave - like not being allowed to mention multi-cloud - we suspected readers would be interested.

And you were! The story even garnered international attention. 

When NBN reseller Prime Broadband cratered, readers wanted to know why.

It's unusual for any vendor to slap down a partner in public, but in November Telstra called out some of its partners for unscrupulous sales made to people who just could not afford some of its services.

When Infosys beat Accenture and IBM to one of the year's biggest deals - Centrelink's new payment engine - mouse fingers twitched, hard. 

When Google-cloud-centric ISV wowq.io couldn't get timely tech support from the search giant, it took out ads in frustration and targeted them at Google staff. The result? Lots of you read the story and Google fixed things up.

When Corrective Services NSW trumpeted the success of a prison labour program that sees inmates refurbsihing PCs, it thought it was a fine example of practical rehabilitation.

The PCs are only used behind bars, so they're probably not competing directly with partners that specialises in hardware refurbishment and recycling.

It's not every day that a global giant reaches down to Australia to acquire a listed channel player. But that's what happened in October when Fuji Xerox acqiured CSG. No wonder plenty of you got clicky with it and read our coverage.