Five Companies That Came To Win This Week

For the week ending Dec. 6, CRN takes a look at the companies that brought their ‘A’ game to the channel including Amazon Web Services, CDW, Ness, OpenText and Couchbase.

The Week Ending Dec. 6

Topping this week’s Came to Win list is Amazon Web Services, which used this week’s re:Invent extravaganza to announce a number of partner-focused initiatives including removing a financial cap in the vendor’s MAP program.

Also making this week’s list are solution provider giant CDW and digital transformation services provider Ness for announcing strategic acquisitions this week.

OpenText makes the list for a significant upcoming expansion of its cybersecurity portfolio while cloud database provider Couchbase is here for making it easier for developers to build agentic AI applications.

AWS Removes Financial Cap For Partners In Map Program

Amazon Web Services was making a lot of news at its re:Invent 2024 event this week. For partners, topping the list was the announcement that AWS is eliminating the financial cap on how much money partners can make inside the company’s popular Migration Acceleration Program (MAP).

Until now there was a cap on how much partners could earn on migration projects – no matter how big the deal. With the elimination of the cap, partners are incented to pursue larger, broader-scale migration and transformation projects – and make more money for their work.

The company is making sure MAP provides funding to partners is tied to key performance milestones as well as customer transformation and modernization success. It’s also providing more MAP funding for “greenfield” customer deals.

AWS also debuted a slew of new partner incentives and offers at re:Invent. Topping that list is the availability of the Grow with SAP set of cloud-based ERP applications for SMBs on the AWS platform and in the AWS Marketplace.

The company also unveiled several new partner competencies in AI security, security incident response and digital sovereignty.

And AWS is keeping the AI product development pipeline moving, this week debuting the Nova family of foundational models and a new latency-optimized inference capability in Bedrock that will boost AI application response times.

AWS partners say they have enjoyed massive sales growth this year thanks to the cloud giant’s ever-expanding portfolio of generative AI products.

CDW Acquires Mission Cloud Services In Bid To Expand AWS Relationship

Speaking of Amazon Web Services, IT solution provider heavyweight CDW makes this week’s ‘Five Companies That Came To Win’ list for its acquisition of Mission Cloud Services.

The acquisition will expand CDW’s partnership with AWS and increase its presence in the AWS universe. The combination of Mission Cloud Services and CDW’s existing expertise will become CDW’s dedicated AWS practice.

Mission Cloud Services provides small and midmarket AWS customers with custom solutions and guidance for professional services, end-to-end cloud services, and security. The company is an AWS-certified GenAI partner, helping clients transform customer data with AI and machine learning and comprehensive security for AWS environments.

Mission Cloud Services will also complement the CDW Digital Velocity cloud, data, AI and software platform engineering organization. That business provides services around automated infrastructure, practical DevOps, modern cloud, software and enterprise architecture, agile team integration, and rapid resourcing of necessary talent.

Ness Acquires Raja Software Labs In Digital Transformation Play

Staying on the topic of strategic acquisitions, digital services transformation solution provider Ness Digital Engineering this week acquired Raja Software Labs in a move to strengthen its capabilities in the technology, media, and telecom area.

Ness is one of the IT industry’s original product engineering firms, having been founded in Israel about 25 years ago, said Ranjit Tinaikar (pictured), CEO of the New York-based company.

“We're basically continuing to build on that core competence around product engineering with the acquisition of RSL,” Tinaikar told CRN. “Our core vertical in which we had always had a very strong capability was tech and ISVs, helping software companies build software.

“Product engineering is different from traditional IT services in the sense that traditional IT services is about implementing other people's software. Product engineering is building other people's software. That's been our core DNA,” he said.

OpenText To Add Strategic Component To Its Cybersecurity Platform With Upcoming MDR Debut

On a forward-looking note, software giant OpenText makes this week’s “Came to Win” list for its plans to debut its new managed detection and response (MDR) offering next week in what one MSP partner called a crucial piece for rounding out the vendor’s broad cybersecurity platform.

The general availability launch of OpenText MDR within the vendor’s Secure Cloud platform is planned for Monday, the company told CRN. The offering will provide partners with a 24/7 Security Operations Center service featuring more than 400 integrations to other security tools, including third-party products, executives said.

While OpenText has amassed a comprehensive array of security tools on its platform in recent years, MDR “was a component that was missing from the OpenText stack,” said Caesar Avila, founder and CIO of AVLA, a longtime OpenText partner in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. “I think that’s going to be a great addition.”

OpenText MDR is based upon OpenText’s acquisition of the Pillr platform from solution and service provider Novacoast in May.

The OpenText Secure Cloud portfolio offers a wide array of security capabilities leveraging a series of acquisitions in recent years. The platform includes security and threat intelligence from Webroot as well as data protection from Carbonite and capabilities from email encryption provider Zix and security software vendor AppRiver.

With the addition to Secure Cloud, partners will now be able to purchase and manage MDR alongside other OpenText tools.

Couchbase Accelerates AI Agentic Application Development With New Database Services

Couchbase wins kudos this week for adding artificial intelligence capabilities to its Capella cloud database that the company says will streamline the development of agentic AI applications – a major task for many businesses and organizations right now.

The new Capella AI Services provide developers with simplified data integration workflows and more control over data throughout the development lifecycle including putting agentic applications into production, according to Couchbase.

The AI services also help developers mitigate data security and privacy risks by keeping data and large language models – including LLMs running outside of an organization – close together.

With the new Capella AI Services, Couchbase, based in Santa Clara, Calif., is looking to provide data management capabilities needed for the growing wave of AI and generative AI applications development.

“This release is all about our offering, really targeted at developers building AI and agentic or multi agentic applications,” Matt McDonough, Couchbase senior vice president of product and partners, told CRN. “There's a lot of enthusiasm around AI agents, but the industry as a whole lacks well-defined best practices for building and deploying these agentic applications.”