Five Companies That Came To Win This Week

For the week ending May 3, CRN takes a look at the companies that brought their ‘A’ game to the channel including Insight Enterprises, D&H Distributing, MongoDB, Intel and Sterling.

The Week Ending May 3

Topping this week’s Came to Win is solution provider heavyweight Insight Enterprises for a strategic acquisition that adds ServiceNow expertise to its services portfolio.

AI and GenAI play a big role in the rest of this week’s Five Came to Win roundup. D&H Distributing makes the list for launching a multimillion-dollar AI PC sales blitz, for example, while solution provider Sterling is investing heavily in AI solutions – including setting up an AI PC demo Center to assist customers in evaluating the new systems.

Database and development platform provider MongoDB is here for working with its technology and service partners to assemble the MongoDB AI Applications Program (MAAP), an initiative that will provide a complete technology and services stack to help businesses develop and deploy at scale applications with advanced generative AI capabilities.

And Intel makes this week’s list for its efforts to optimize more than 500 AI models for its Core Ultra processors, calling the move a “significant milestone” in its effort to position itself as the prime chip supplier for AI PCs.

Insight Buys ServiceNow All-Star Partner Infocenter

Channel giant Insight Enterprises has acquired Infocenter, one of the top ServiceNow partners in North America, with the goal of boosting its ServiceNow consulting and managed service offerings.

Infocenter is a leading pure-play ServiceNow elite partner. The Charlotte, N.C.-based solution provider was ServiceNow’s 2024 ServiceNow Americas Consulting and Implementation Partner of the Year award winner.

Infocenter is known for its industry expertise within healthcare and life sciences, financial services, manufacturing and IT services, as well as extensive certifications across the ServiceNow platform.

The acquisition was so important that ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott (pictured above) weighed in on the Insight and Infocenter deal.

“Insight’s bold move on Infocenter is a significant milestone in our joint strategy to accelerate business transformation across the ecosystem,” McDermott said. “Together, we will harness the power of AI, workflow automation and cross-enterprise experiences to unlock unparalleled value for our mutual clients.”

The acquisition deal comes just five months after Insight paid $410 million to acquire Google Cloud partner superstar Sada.

D&H Launches Multimillion-Dollar AI PC Blitz, Expects To Train 5,000 Partners

D&H Distributing is launching a multimillion-dollar AI PC sales blitz that includes outfitting its 800-person sales and support team with AI PCs and a roadshow that aims to get 5,000 partners selling the new systems.

D&H already has AI PCs in stock or on the way to the distributor from HP, Dell, Lenovo, Microsoft Surface and MSI.

“D&H is making a multimillion-dollar investment to continue our history of investing ahead of the curve and looking around the corner to ensure our partners are prepared, trained and armed for the next wave of opportunity,” D&H Co-President Dan Schwab said in an interview with CRN. “It’s the future. Clearly our recommendation is if you are looking to upgrade your system you need to future proof your investments. That is what we are telling our partners.”

The first step in the AI PC sales charge is outfitting the distributor’s 800-strong sales and support team with new AI systems and over the next month providing them with training on the full fleet of AI PC vendors and suppliers including PC makers and chipmakers AMD, Intel and Qualcomm.

Once D&H has its own team trained, the distributor is setting its sights on a summer road show that will focus on how partners can drive big business productivity gains for customers with the new systems. “We expect to train and educate 5,000 partners by the Fall,” said Schwab.

D&H is also looking at rolling out an AI demo program for partners, he said. “One of the things we want to do is have our resellers, where appropriate, utilize AI in their businesses,” he said. “Just like D&H’s sales reps need to be fluent to be able to talk about AI PCs, so do our partners need to be fluent to talk to their end users.”

D&H sees the AI PC as a key component of a major upgrade cycle for businesses over the next three years, creating opportunities for partners and manufacturers around the natural upgrade cycle, purchases of AI PCs, and upgrades to Windows 11 and the forthcoming Windows 12 sometime in the next year.

MongoDB Launches ‘One-Stop-Shop’ Program For Building Advanced GenAI Applications

MongoDB made headlines this week with its launch of a program that provides a complete technology stack, services and other resources to help businesses develop and deploy at scale applications with advanced generative AI capabilities.

The new MongoDB AI Applications Program (MAAP), with the MongoDB Atlas cloud database and development platform at its core, includes reference architectures and technology from a who’s who in the AI space including all three cloud platform giants, LLM (large language model) tech developers Cohere and Anthropic, and a number of AI development tool companies.

The new program also includes strategic advisory and professional services from MongoDB and a number of the company’s systems integrator and consulting partners.

“So many of these enterprise customers are struggling. They're trying to figure out how to best get an ROI with AI,” said Alan Chhabra, MongoDB executive vice president of worldwide partners, in an interview with CRN.

Greg Maxson, MongoDB senior director and global lead, AI go-to-market and strategic partnerships, described MAAP as “a one-stop shop of the essential tools and expertise addressing [GenAI application] development challenges” and that “brings together each part of the stack that an enterprise would need in order to build a complete GenAI application.”

MAAP launch partners include cloud hyperscalers AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure; foundation model developers Anthropic, Cohere and Nomic; and AI framework and model hosting companies Anyscale, Fireworks.ai, and Together AI. Also participating are LLM data framework provider LlamaIndex, development platform company LangChain, and AI development and security tool company Credal.ai.

Also participating in MAAP are a number of “boutique systems integrators” that MongoDB has previously invested in including PeerIslands, Pureinsights and Gravity 9.

Intel: 500 AI Models have Been Optimized For Core Ultra Processors

Intel this week said the chip maker has optimized more than 500 AI models for its Core Ultra processors, calling the move a “significant milestone” in its effort to position itself as the prime chip supplier for AI PCs.

The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company said the AI models span “more than 20 categories of AI, including large language, diffusion, super resolution, object detection and computer vision.” These models are accessible through industry sources such as Hugging Face, ONNX Model Zoo, OpenVINO Model Zoo and PyTorch.

The models include Microsoft’s Phi-2 small language model, Meta’s Llama large language model, OpenAI’s Whisper speech recognition model, Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion 1.5 text-to-image generation model, Google’s Bert natural language understanding model and the Mistral language model.

The semiconductor giant is in an arms race with rivals AMD and Qualcomm to not only provide the best processors for AI PCs but also to enable compelling software experiences with the goal of creating greater demand for their respective products.

Intel said its optimization work is important because “models form the backbone of AI-enhanced software features like object removal, image super resolution or text summarization.” The models can be used across the Core Ultra’s CPU, GPU and neural processing unit (NPU), the company said.

AI Superstar Sterling Is Setting Up AI PC Demo Center

Sterling, a fast-growing solution provider powerhouse that has invested heavily in AI solutions, wins kudos for setting up an AI PC Demo Center to assist customers in evaluating the new systems.

“We are building an entire AI PC demonstration area where customers can actually sit down and learn about these new AI PCs and get a feel for what each one of them does,” said Sterling Chief Technology Officer Chris Cyr.

The new AI demonstration center, located within Sterling’s new facility in Sterling, Va., will include Dell Technologies, HP, and Lenovo systems outfitted with AI software. Sterling is working closely with D&H Distributing and Intel and expects the AI Demo Center to open soon.

The new demo center will place AI PCs side by side with the current crop of systems that are not outfitted with NPUs so customers can see the advantages offered by the new AI PCs.

The AI PC demo center is aimed at helping customers build out their AI strategy working hand in hand with Sterling.

“This is a huge opportunity. We feel like we’re well positioned to help our customers operationalize their AI PC strategy and contract and procure these systems efficiently,” said Sterling Senior Vice President of Partner Alliances Steve Van Ginkel.