5 Companies That Came To Win This Week
For the week ending July 2 CRN takes a look at the companies that brought their ‘A’ game to the channel.
The Week Ending July 2
Topping this week’s Came to Win list is Hewlett Packard Enterprise for its savvy acquisition of cloud data management and protection provider Zerto.
Also making the list this week are cybersecurity vendor SentinelONE for a successful IPO, AMD for gains made with its EPYC processor amongst the world’s fastest supercomputers, Cisco Systems for making sweeping changes to its partner program to reward them for their customer interaction roles, and Versa Networks for a successful round of funding the company plans to use to strengthen its SASE market position.
HPE To Acquire Zerto For $374M To Boost GreenLake Storage Offerings
Hewlett Packard Enterprise struck a strategic acquisition deal this week to buy cloud data management and protection software developer Zerto for $374 million.
The addition of Zerto to HPE’s data management portfolio comes as the IT infrastructure giant continues to shift its data storage offerings to its cloud-native, software-defined HPE GreenLake data services.
The Data Protection-as-a-Service market is expected to grow to $15.3 billion in 2024 from $7.7 billion in 2020.
SentinelOne Has Successful IPO, Earns $10B Market Cap
Cybersecurity tech developer SentinelOne went public on the New York Stock Exchange this week, seeing its shares rise from their initial $35 per share price and raising $1.2 billion for the company.
With its shares trading at around $40 per share, SentinelONE has a market valuation of more than $10 billion.
The company plans to use the proceeds from the IPO to expand its go-to-market efforts geographically and into new vertical markets, as well as into such use cases as IoT security and asset discovery and into managed, forensic and incident response services.
AMD Quadruples EPYC’s Share Of The Top 500 Supercomputers
In a sign of the success AMD has enjoyed with its EPYC processor, the number of systems on the list of the world’s 500 fastest supercomputers using EPYC CPUs increased more than four-fold over the last year.
EPYC processors are now powering 49 of the world’s top supercomputers, according to an updated list released this week by Top500 during the ISC high-performance computing virtual event. That’s more than double the 21 supercomputers using AMD CPUs in the fall 2020 list and quadruple the 11 on the summer 2020 list.
Intel still leads with 431 of the world’s fastest supercomputers using its processors. But that’s down from 459 in the fall and 470 one year ago – an indication of AMD’s competitive gains.
New Cisco Partner Program Focuses Incentives On Differentiation
Cisco Systems this week provided details about the company’s new partner program, initially unveiled last October, which recognizes and rewards partners for the different roles they want to play in working with customers: integrator, provider, developer and advisor.
The new partner definitions, the biggest changes to Cisco’s partner program structure in more than a decade, are designed to help partners better target product lifecycle and Everything-as-a-Service opportunities.
While Cisco will continue to offer its much sought-after Gold status across all four roles, the new partner types will offer solution providers more opportunities to differentiate themselves. Cisco also said it will be differentiating more distinctly between its Gold, Premier and Select Partners.
The program overhaul simplifies Cisco’s partner relationships by boiling down what was upward of a dozen disparate programs into one unified program centered on the partner roles.
Versa Networks Raises $84M To Fuel SASE Strategy
SD-WAN provider turned SASE specialist Versa Networks raised an impressive $84 million in Series D funding this week – capital the company plans to use to boost its go-to-market and channel partner initiatives. The new round brings the company’s total financing to $196 million.
The company plans to expand its marketing and sales teams and accelerate its go-to-market efforts with its partners: The company does nearly 100 percent of its business through the channel.
Perhaps equally important, the additional funding will help the company increase market awareness of Secure Access Service Edge or SASE, an architectural approach to IT that combines networking and security. Versa has been able to leverage its SD-WAN offerings to become a fast-growing player in the SASE arena.