5 Companies That Came To Win This Week

For the week ending April 23 CRN takes a look at the companies that brought their ‘A’ game to the channel.

The Week Ending April 23

Topping this week’s Came to Win list is Apple for taking a major step in its plan to build its M1 processor into all of its products.

Also making the list are data protection and management technology developer Druva for an impressive funding round, Check Point Software Technologies for a number of key sales and channel management hires, cybersecurity company Rapid7 for a strategic acquisition, and Zscaler for introducing an innovative twist on its zero trust cloud security platform.

Apple Brings M1 Chip To iMac, iPad For The First Time

Apple took a big step this week in its transition away from Intel processors when it unveiled new iMac and iPad models that incorporate Apple’s M1 in-house processor.

Apple unveiled a full redesign of the iMac all-in-one desktop and a number of updates on the iPad Pro two-in-one tablet. The company said the new Arm-based M1 chip provides major performance gains for the new iMac and iPad models.

Apple is in the midst of transitioning away from Intel processors in favor of the M1, which debuted in November. Apple now offers five products with the M1 processors including previously announced MacBook Pro, MacBook Air and Mac Mini models.

Druva Hits $2B Valuation With New $147M Funding

Cloud-based data protection and data management technology developer Druva scored big this week with a Series H round of funding that brought the company $147 million in additional financing.

The new funding, which increased Druva’s total funding to an impressive $475 million, pushed the company’s valuation over $2 billion.

Founder and CEO Jaspreet Singh (pictured) said the company is still heavily investing in the company’s growth—both in technology development and in market expansion. Druva saw a 50 percent increase in data consumption on its platform in the last year and the company doubled the number of backups delivered to customers to 2.5 billion.

Also announcing impressive rounds of financing this week were cybersecurity startup Deep Instinct ($100 million) and big data analytics startup Kyligence ($70 million).

Check Point Taps VMware Vet Geoff Waters To Run Americas Sales

Check Point Software Technologies strengthened its management ranks this week, putting in place a quartet of seasoned go-to-market executives to fuel growth in the Americas and across the company’s channel organization.

Topping the list of new hires was longtime VMware cloud sales leader Geoff Waters (pictured), who will oversee Check Point’s 750-person field sales operation in North America and Latin America. Waters has led specialty teams, field teams and channel teams at Intel and VMware, most recently leading VMware’s global cloud service provider channel and running the 500-person cloud sales organization.

Check Point also promoted Nisha Holt to Americas channel chief and hired Erick Foy from iboss and Coletta Vigh from Pulse Secure for other leadership roles.

Rapid7 Buys Velociraptor To Attack Incident Response Market

Cybersecurity company Rapid7 scored a strategic acquisition this week, buying open-source technology developer Velociraptor in a move to provide capabilities and expertise around endpoint monitoring, digital forensics and incident response.

The addition of Velociraptor’s technology to Rapid7’s offerings will give digital forensics and incident response professionals a powerful and efficient way to hunt for and monitor malicious activities across endpoints. Velociraptor’s community-driven approach will make it possible for collective wisdom to be gathered in one place and make accessible to others, Rapid7 said.

Velociraptor is Rapid7’s third acquisition in the past year. Less than three months ago the company bought early stage Kubernetes security vendor Alcide for $50 million. And in April 2020 it acquired DivvyCloud for $145 million to help customers protect cloud and container environments from misconfigurations and policy violations.

Zscaler Extends Cloud Security With New Private Edge Service

Turning to the topic of innovative technology, Zscaler this week extended its popular zero trust security platform with a new private service edge software offering that for the first time brings its game-changing cloud platform on-premises.

The new Zscaler ZPA Private Edge software is designed to prevent infected managed or unmanaged devices from spreading malware or ransomware throughout a corporate network. The new offering is sure to turn up the competitive heat on legacy VPN and network firewall security offerings.

The product addresses the concern that after working at home for more than a year, employees returning to their workplaces with their devices—sometimes unprotected —could present a security threat to company networks.