5 Companies That Came To Win This Week

For the week ending Oct. 16, CRN takes a look at the companies that brought their ‘A’ game to the channel.

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The Week Ending Oct. 16

Topping this week’s Came to Win list is Google Cloud for snagging Nokia as a cloud services client—seen as a major win over rivals Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.

Also making the list are Apple for the much-anticipated iPhone 12 launch, McAfee for laying the groundwork for its IPO, Intel for expanding the security capabilities of its upcoming Ice Lake processors, and startup Infiot for the launch of its new edge networking platform.

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Google Cloud Snags Nokia As IT Infrastructure Client

Google Cloud scored a big win this week when telecommunications and consumer electronics giant Nokia said that it is moving its IT infrastructure to Google Cloud under a five-year deal that adds another enterprise telecom to Google Cloud’s customer roster.

Winning Nokia as a customer is a coup for Google Cloud, which is generally seen as the No. 3 cloud service provider after Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.

The deal shows that Google Cloud is able to compete for new business that only AWS could have won five years ago or AWS and Azure could have won three years ago, said Jeff Valentine, CTO at CloudCheckr, a cloud management solution provider and Google Cloud technology partner.

Nokia has already started moving its global data center operations and applications onto Google Cloud, a project that’s expected to continue for the next 18 months to two years. The effort includes migrating workloads from legacy systems to virtual machines and containerized workloads.

Apple Introduces Four New iPhone 12 Models

The iPhone has become Apple’s flagship product, so most any iPhone announcement is significant. This week the company refreshed the iPhone line with the iPhone 12 series with new designs and 5G connectivity.

All of the new devices offer vibrant OLED display (phasing out LCD displays), sport a new flat-edge design and—perhaps most noteworthy—support 5G connectivity.

The lineup includes the compact iPhone 12 Mini with a smaller display screen, the iPhone 12 Pro with advanced camera and video, and the iPhone Max with a 6.7-inch display size—the biggest ever on an iPhone.

McAfee Details IPO Plans In New SEC Filing

Security software developer McAfee filed its amended S-1 form with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Tuesday, outlining its plans to become a publicly listed company for the first time since 2011.

McAfee intends to raise up to $682 million by selling nearly 31 million shares at a price between $19 and $22 per share. Current McAfee shareholders are also looking to sell an additional 6,017,442 shares. That means the total IPO, at the maximum $22 per share, would be valued at $814 million.

The company, which had revenue of $2.64 billion in fiscal 2019, according to the SEC filing, will trade on the Nasdaq exchange under the symbol MCFE.

McAfee was a publicly traded company until 2011 when chipmaker Intel bought the security tech developer for about $7.7 billion.

Intel Xeon Ice Lake CPUs To Get SGX With Expanded Security Features

Continuing to extend the capabilities and functionality of its Xeon processors, Intel this week said it is bringing its Software Guard Extension (SGX) confidential computing technology to the company’s Xeon Scalable lineup for the first time with the upcoming Ice Lake server processors.

Ice Lake is the second phase of the third-generation Xeon Scalable launch. They will support SGX with new capabilities like larger enclaves for application isolation.

The new server processors, expected to start shipping by the end of the year, will also offer new and expanded security features such as Total Memory Encryption, cryptographic accelerators and Intel Platform Firmware Resilience.

The additional security capabilities for the Ice Lake processors will give Intel additional ammunition to compete against rival AMD, which has already introduced confidential computing capabilities for its EPYC server processors.

Edge Networking Startup Infiot Exits Stealth Backed By $15M In Funding

Kudos to a startup that exited stealth this week with a new approach to edge networking and connectivity at a time when many are working from home and demand for Internet of Things applications is on the rise.

Infiot, founded in 2018, officially launched this week with $15 million in Series A funding backed by Lightspeed Venture Partners, Neotribe Ventures, Westwave Capital and Harpoon Ventures.

Infiot offers a cloud-delivered system that uses AI to manage edge devices and applications. The company’s Intelligent Edge wireless access platform brings together connectivity, zero trust security and edge computing for remote users, sites and devices anywhere in the world.

The startup is led by networking industry veterans CEO Parag Thakore, CTO Anupam Rai and Chief Architect Sunil Mukundan—the original founding team of VeloCloud, which was acquired by VMware in 2017.