Five Companies That Came To Win This Week

For the week ending Dec. 13, CRN takes a look at the companies that brought their ‘A’ game to the channel, including Cohesity, Comcast Business, Qualcomm and Ayar Labs.

The Week Ending Dec. 13

Topping this week’s Came to Win list is Cohesity for completing its blockbuster $3 billion acquisition of Veritas’ enterprise data protection business this week.

Comcast Business makes the list for its own acquisition that will bolster its networking and cybersecurity capabilities. Qualcomm is here for ramping up its hiring for key channel sales positions across as the chip designer readies a competitive offensive in the global PC market. And startup Ayar Labs scored a win with financial backing from Nvidia, AMD and Intel.

And congratulations to the women, the companies and the gentleman who were honored this week at the second annual Women of the Year Awards, which recognize some of the channel’s most remarkable women and shines a spotlight on their most noteworthy achievements as they shape the IT channel.

It’s Official: Cohesity Closes Veritas Acquisition, Claims No. 1 Data Protection Software Market Position

Data protection and cyber resilience software vendor Cohesity this week closed its long-gestating $3-billion acquisition of Veritas’ enterprise data protection business, centered around Veritas NetBackup, and proclaimed itself the market- share leader.

With the acquisition, Cohesity now has a customer base of over 12,000 businesses, including almost 70 percent of the world’s 500 largest enterprises, and more than 3,000 channel and technology partners, including strategic partnerships with the leading cloud and on-premises IT infrastructure providers.

Last month Cohesity CEO Sanjay Poonen told CRN that the new Cohesity would be a profitable, pro-forma $1.7-billion revenue company with a goal of quickly growing to $2 billion and beyond in annual revenue. (Veeam, Cohesity’s top rival in the data protection arena, says it remains No. 1 in this space.)

Comcast Business To Acquire Nitel For Network-As-A-Service, Security Push

Speaking of strategic acquisitions, Comcast Business wins kudos this week for its deal to acquire Nitel, a provider of Network-as-a-Service technology, in a move to bolster its networking and cybersecurity capabilities.

Comcast Business, in a news release, said its planned acquisition of Nitel will help enable the company’s expansion in the areas of “high-performance” networking, security and cloud services.

In an interview with CRN in January, Nitel CEO Margi Shaw (pictured) said the company had been doubling down on Network as a Service, SD-WAN and security with its evolution from a telecom service provider to a networking technology provider.

Nitel has moved into offering “privatized network functionality and application performance monitoring through global SD-WAN infrastructure, as well as global SASE infrastructure,” Shaw said at the time, referring to secure access service edge (SASE) capabilities that combine networking and security for enabling secure access to the workforce.

Nitel has 6,600 customers and focuses on serving midsize enterprises.

Qualcomm Ramps Up Global Channel Hiring To Fight Intel And AMD In The PC Market

Qualcomm makes this week’s Companies That Came To Win list for ramping up its hiring for key channel sales positions across the world as the chip designer readies a competitive push against Intel and AMD into the PC market.

The company has listed these positions, including North America PC channel distribution manager and multiple commercial channel sales manager roles for various regions in the West, on its public job board over the past several weeks.

The chip designer is making the hiring push after launching a partner program for its Arm-based Snapdragon X processors earlier this year. The chips debuted in June as the first to power the Copilot+ PCs that debuted from Microsoft and other OEMs, bringing a new wave of competition against Intel and AMD while also giving the Windows PC ecosystem new ammunition against Apple’s Mac computers with their custom M-series chips.

Qualcomm has listed at least 22 positions related to channel sales and marketing or distribution covering North America and several European countries, including the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy and Spain. There are also jobs posted for channel-facing roles in Japan, India and China.

In North America, Qualcomm’s listed positions include commercial channel managers for Western, Midwestern and Eastern regions as well as commercial channel go-to-market managers for the two latter areas. It’s also looking for a consumer channel account manager to cover North America and a commercial channel manager to cover Canada.

Optical Interconnect Startup Ayar Labs Wins Backing From Nvidia, Intel And AMD

Ayar Labs, a startup developer of optical interconnect technology that could revolutionize AI system design, was a big winner this week when it won financial backing from Nvidia, Intel and AMD.

The San Jose, Calif.-based company raised $155 million from Nvidia and the venture arms of AMD and Intel, along with several other investors including U.S. contract chip manufacturer GlobalFoundries and VentureTech Alliance (which has a strategic partnership with Taiwanese foundry giant TSMC).

The funding boosted Ayar Labs’ valuation to more than $1 billion.

The startup seeks to address what it views as a pressing problem and a substantial opportunity in the AI infrastructure space: bottlenecks in data movement between chips and systems that can hold back AI training and inference workloads from running faster.

One major culprit for this is traditional electrical interconnects, which Ayar Labs hopes to replace with its optical interconnect technology. The company said its technology provides major advantages over electrical interconnects by allowing customers to “maximize the compute efficiency and performance of their AI infrastructure, while reducing costs and power consumption, to dramatically improve profitability metrics for AI applications.”

(IBM earns a shoutout here for its progress in this same space, developing co-packaged optics—new chip assembly and packaging advancements—to replace electrical signal communication with faster light-transmitted data capabilities.)

CRN Women Of The Year 2024: The Winners

Congratulations to the women, the companies and the gentleman who were honored at the second annual Women of the Year Awards at an event in New York City this week.

At a ceremony, held at the iconic Gotham Hall in the heart of Manhattan, CRN and parent The Channel Company recognized some of the channel’s most remarkable women, shining a spotlight on their most noteworthy achievements as they shape the IT channel.

Over the course of the evening, CRN handed out trophies in 18 categories to women, allies and companies, part of a monthslong process that included two rounds of judging and culminated with the 2024 Women of the Year Awards Gala event.

Award winners included Megan Amdahl, Insight senior vice president of client experience and North America COO, as Woman of the Year–Solution Provider; and Julie Sanford, Microsoft vice president of go-to-market programs and operations, as Woman of the Year–Vendor/Distributor. Jen Anaya, Ingram Micro senior vice president of global marketing, received the 2024 CRN Women of the Year Lifetime Achievement Award.