5 Companies That Came To Win This Week

The Week Ending Sept. 28

Topping this week's roundup of companies that came to win is Dell Technologies, which stands to benefit from the trend of businesses moving IT workloads off of public cloud systems to on-premise IT systems.

Also making the list this week are Hitachi Vantara, which at one-year-old is flexing its technology muscles in the digital transformation arena; DXC for a savvy acquisition in the Salesforce market; Telecom Brokerage for providing its channel partners with some comprehensive marketing assistance; and industrial IoT startup Falkonry for launching its first partner program.

Not everyone in the IT industry was making smart moves this week, of course. For a rundown of companies that were unfortunate, unsuccessful or just didn't make good decisions, check out this week's Five Companies That Had A Rough Week roundup.

Dell Benefiting From Repatriation Of Workloads From Public Cloud To On-Premise Systems

The IT pendulum may be swinging away from public cloud and back toward on-premise systems — and Dell Technologies appears well positioned to be a major beneficiary of the trend.

This week Dell Technologies CEO Michael Dell told CRN that there is a “significant” amount of IT workload tasks being moved back to on-premise systems from public clouds with customers citing cost, performance and security as the reasons why.

Dell said the economics of today’s software-defined data centers and hyper-converged technologies are leading to “repatriation” of workloads from public clouds to on-premise systems.

Dell said he predicted such a shift years ago and said it was a major driver behind Dell Technologies’ moves to assemble its current portfolio of data center offerings, including the acquisition of EMC storage and VMware software.

Hitachi Vantara Makes Digital Transformation Pitch, Touts Its Data Center, IoT And Business Analytics Lineup

Hitachi Vantara has been assembling a product portfolio of data center, Internet of things and business analytics technologies since its establishment one year ago. This week, at the Hitachi Next 2018 conference, executives made clear they intend to leverage that product lineup in the growing market for digital transformation solutions.

Hitachi Vantara CEO Brian Householder, in a keynote at the conference, noted that the company (previously named Hitachi Data Systems) and its Hitachi Ltd. parent have expertise in both information and operational technology, making Hitachi Vantara uniquely positioned for the digital transformation arena.

Hitachi Vantara's technical prowess in the data center were on display at the Hitachi Next conference where the company augmented its converged and hyper-converged system offerings with a new all-flash storage addition to the Unified Compute Platform. Also unveiled was a new GPU-based Hitachi Advanced Server and enhancements to the UCP Advisor IT management and orchestration software.

Hitachi also launched Lumada Maintenance Insights, a new IoT application that uses machine learning to make industrial system maintenance and repair recommendations; and announced expanded multi-cloud governance and data protection capabilities for its Hitachi Content Platform.

DXC Expands Salesforce Capabilities With Aussie Acquisition

DXC Technologies took a significant step to strengthen its competitive hand in the Salesforce arena when it bought System Partners, a solution provider with offices in Sydney and Melbourne, Australia and in New Zealand.

System Partners, a certified Platinum Salesforce solution provider, has more than 100 Salesforce certified experts.

DXC said the acquisition builds on its digital transformation strategy and cloud-first focus. System Partners is expected to provide DXC with expanded capabilities in Salesforce implementations and managed services, especially in financial service, government, communications, media, utility and education sectors.

TBI Provides Channel Partners With All-In-One Marketing Platform

Master agent Telecom Brokerage Inc. wins kudos this week for its move to give its channel partners a helping hand with their marketing efforts with the Partner Marketing Center platform.

The PMC will provide partners – even one-person shops – with a single system they can use to develop their marketing strategies and digital marketing initiatives.

The system will specifically assist partners with social media initiatives and help them launch email campaigns and improve website content with co-branded assets. It will also provide CRM and lead-tracking capabilities.

TBI is also making its own marketing team, including a strategist, a digital marketer, a graphic designer and a copywriter, available to assist partners.

IIoT Startup Falkonry Enters Channel With Machine Learning Tech

Industrial Internet of Things startup Falkonry wins applause this week for launching its global partner program, which aims to enlist OEMs, systems integrators, resellers, distributors and referral partners to sell its predictive analytics tools for industrial companies.

The new partner program will initially focus on international growth in Japan, Korea, Europe and Latin America. The company is expected to ramp up its channel efforts in North America sometime in the first half of next year.

Falkonry says its predictive analytical software with machine learning capabilities can help industrial companies improve operations, throughput, quality and safety while also reducing operational downtime. The company says the software doesn't require data science expertise as predictive analytics software often does.