Five Companies That Came To Win This Week

For the week ending Aug. 23, CRN takes a look at the companies that brought their ‘A’ game to the channel including AMD, ePlus, Grafana Labs, Amazon and Novva Data Centers.

The Week Ending Aug. 23

Topping this week’s Came to Win list is chipmaker AMD for a strategic acquisition that will provide a boost to its AI systems expertise and deployment capabilities.

Also making this week’s list are open-source observability software developer Grafana Labs for a very impressive funding round, solution provider ePlus for an acquisition that will greatly expand the reach and expertise of its service offerings, Amazon for a savvy acquisition focused on AI and edge computing, and Novva Data Centers for its ambitious plans for a new facility in Arizona.

AMD To Buy ZT Systems In $4.9B Deal To Boost AI Data Center Offerings

Chip designer AMD tops this week’s Came to Win list with its deal to acquire ZT Systems, a supplier of high-performance servers and cloud computing systems, in a move that aims to take AMD’s artificial intelligence portfolio to the next level.

The acquisition will provide AMD with industry-leading systems expertise to accelerate deployment of optimized rack-scale solutions that address a $400-billion data center AI opportunity by 2027, according to AMD.

The acquisition is the next major step in AMD’s AI strategy to deliver leadership AI training and inferencing solutions based on innovation across silicon, software and systems, according to the company. ZT Systems’ experience in designing and optimizing cloud computing solutions will also aid cloud and enterprise customers significantly by accelerating the deployment of AMD-powered AI infrastructure at scale.

“Combining our high-performance Instinct AI accelerator, EPYC CPU, and networking product portfolios with ZT Systems’ industry-leading data center systems expertise will enable AMD to deliver end-to-end data center AI infrastructure at scale with our ecosystem of OEM and ODM partners,” AMD CEO Lisa Su said in a statement.

ePlus Looks For Big Services Expansion With Bailiwick Acquisition

Sticking with the topic of strategic acquisitions, global IT solutions provider ePlus this week closed its acquisition of Bailiwick Services, a managed IT services provider specializing in the integration and implementation of large-scale technology initiatives.

ePlus, headquartered in Herndon, Va., is merging Chaska, Minn.-based Bailiwick into its ePlus Technology subsidiary. Bailiwick, which does business across the U.S. and Canada, provides a wide range of services around such technology areas as integrated intelligence, WLAN, loss prevention, asset lifecycle, help desk, digital signage, store openings and closing, and even electric vehicle charging.

Bailiwick says it has a nationwide network of 25,000 technicians who work with 700 industry partners and annually configures 200,000 devices and packages and ships over 2 million devices.

ePlus, No. 26 on the CRN 2024 Solution Provider 500, has acquired more than 30 companies since its IPO in 1996. In addition to Bailiwick, the company this year acquired Denver-based Peak Resources.

Grafana Labs Snags $270M In New Funding, Boosts Valuation To Over $6B

Grafana Labs, developer of a popular open-source observability platform, this week completed a $270 million funding round that puts the company’s valuation at more than $6 billion.

Fast-growing Grafana Labs, headquartered in New York, also said it had achieved $250 million in annual recurring revenue and had acquired more than 5,000 customers.

In April 2022 Grafana Labs announced a Series D funding round of $240 million. This week the company said that it had completed “a primary and secondary transaction” extension of the Series D funding for an additional amount of approximately $270 million “in proceeds to the company and certain of its stockholders.

The company said the latest funding put its valuation at over $6 billion.

Amazon To Buy AI Chipmaker Perceive To Boost LLMs At The Edge

Looking to accelerate its expansion into AI and edge computing, Amazon, parent company of Amazon Web Services, this week struck a deal to buy AI chipmaker and model specialist Perceive Corp. for $80 million – a move that’s expected to boost Amazon’s large language model (LLM) and edge computing capabilities.

Perceive develops technology for serving large AI models on edge devices.

With a focus on edge inference hardware and software technologies, Perceive enables low-power devices such as conferencing systems and wearable devices, some of which use Perceive’s own AI-powered Ergo processor. Ergo brings performance and power efficiency to edge devices with the ability to handle many tasks—from object classification and detection to audio signal processing and language.

AWS has been building its own in-house custom silicon for AI workloads and cloud optimization for years. The Perceive acquisition builds on Amazon’s investments in edge computing technologies and custom silicon, aimed at boosting its efforts in large language models and multimodal experiences.

Novva Data Centers Unveils 300-Megawatt Arizona Facility

Data center operator Novva Data Centers is thinking big. This week the company unveiled plans to open its sixth site, a 300-megawatt data center, on 160 acres of land in Mesa, Arizona, that it acquired at auction last year.

Novva Data Centers plans to spend some $3 billion on the site over the next decade as it builds out the facility. The first phase of the data center is expected to open in late 2026.

The data center market is booming as cloud computing and AI fuel demand for resources needed to build, store and operate high-powered applications and workloads.

The data center, Novva’s sixth location, will employ 200 people once it is completed. It is expected to have a footprint of 1.3 million square feet and over five data halls that are oriented east to west to minimize solar exposure, Novva said. The company plans to utilize its water-free cooling technology to save about 650 million gallons of water per year.