Five Companies That Came To Win

For the week ending Sept. 27, CRN takes a look at the companies that brought their ‘A’ game to the channel including HP Inc., Torq, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, SafeBreach and Salesforce.

The Week Ending Sept. 27

Topping this week’s Came to Win list is HP Inc. for a savvy acquisition that will provide customers with insights and recommendations to improve the employee experience when using unified communications and collaboration products.

Also making the list is security operation automation startup Torq for an impressive funding round while Hewlett Packard Enterprise is here for its plan to combine the Aruba channel networking team into the HPE global sales organization to pave the way for a global networking sales offensive.

Breach and attack simulation vendor SafeBreach is a winner for launching a revamped channel program as the company moves into a new growth phase that’s expected to include a greater emphasis on partners. And cloud application giant Salesforce makes the list for an acquisition that’s expected to provide more data for its Agentforce and AI agents.

HP Buys Vyopta To Boost ‘AI-Driven’ Insights And Workspace Platform

HP this week acquired collaboration management standout Vyopta in a move to boost HP’s Workforce Experience Platform and to provide its customers with more AI-driven insights.

Founded in 2007, Austin, Texas-based Vyopta develops collaboration management solutions that provide analytics and monitoring for unified communications and collaboration networks. Its Technology Insights and Space Insights applications have helped identify and address over 9 million issues.

“Vyopta has revolutionized the way organizations deliver collaboration experiences by providing contextual intelligence, unified visibility, and actionable alerts across a wide range of business collaboration applications, devices, and infrastructure,” said Faisal Masud, president of HP digital services, in a statement.

HP’s purchase of Vyopta is expected to expand the company’s capabilities around space and applications management including enhanced fleet management with Vyopta providing multi-vendor monitoring, analytics, space utilization and occupancy tracking.

By buying Vyopta, HP also plans to boost end-to-end insights based on telemetry captured from on-premises and cloud collaboration technologies to deliver visibility across devices, applications, infrastructure, and networks as well as proactive troubleshooting, recommendations, and data-driven workplace decisions.

Torq Raises $70M In Funding, Its Second Successful Round This Year

Security “hyperautomation” startup Torq raised $70 million this week in a successful Series C funding round led by Evolution Equity Partners. The new funding comes on top of the $42 million the company raised in January.

Altogether the company has raised $192 million in funding to date. The startup also disclosed Tuesday that it’s on track to reach $100 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) by the end of 2026.

Co-founder and CEO Ofer Smadari told CRN that a major focus for the new capital will be on expanding the startup’s push with solution and service provider partners. Many of the largest security-focused solution providers have already become Torq partners, he said.

Torq offers a no-code method for automating security operations activities, which boosts security analyst productivity by completing numerous SecOps tasks faster and more easily, according to the company.

HPE Aruba Readies Edge-To-Cloud Networking Global Sales Offensive

Hewlett Packard Enterprise this week said it is combining the Aruba channel networking team into the HPE global sales organization, effective Nov. 1, in a move that paves the way for an all-out, edge-to-cloud global networking sales offensive.

Simon Ewington, HPE senior vice president of Worldwide Channel and Partner Ecosystem, told CRN that the move will create a “massive opportunity” to simplify and deliver a better partner experience.

Under the new go-to-market model, partners will no longer be forced to go to two separate organizations for networking price quotes or channel issues. Ewington said the new structure provides a single partner business manager that “will own” the partner relationship with a unified go-to-market model with the full HPE portfolio.

The integration of the HPE Aruba channel networking team into the HPE global sales organization will maintain the global sales specialization model that exists with HPE compute and HPE storage specialists in the field helping partners close deals, said Ewington.

The go-to-market change also paves the way for the big additions to the HPE product portfolio that will come with the expected completion of HPE’s $14 billion acquisition of Juniper Networks later this year or in early 2025.

HPE partners told CRN that they expect dramatic go-to- market sales advantages from the reorganization and new sales offensive. The move is going to have a “stupendous” impact that will help partners move the networking “sales needle,” said Pat O’Dell, general manager and managing partner at Clinton, N.J.-based CPP Associates, one of HPE’s top enterprise partners.

SafeBreach Debuts Revamped Partner Program To Help ‘Maximize’ Cybersecurity Investments

Breach and attack simulation (BAS) vendor SafeBreach debuted its revamped channel program Wednesday as it seeks to expand sales of its platform that helps organizations validate endpoint security and other tools.

SafeBreach has worked with the channel for a number of years and already had a strong program and set of partnerships, said Joe Wilkinson, director of channel sales at the company. But the new Elevate program will “take that to the next level,” Wilkinson said, as the company moves into its next phase of growth that is expected to include an even greater emphasis on partners.

The new program will switch from a flat-tiered system to a program with four tiers, which will reward partners at the higher level with greater margin and other incentives, according to Wilkinson. With the launch of the new program, “top tier partners will absolutely be getting more margin,” he said.

Across all types of partners, the opportunity for the channel with SafeBreach is to help customers to “maximize those investments” that customers have already made into existing cybersecurity tooling, he said.

SafeBreach has been particularly popular with customers looking to compare endpoint detection and response (EDR) tools with each other, according to SafeBreach co-founder and CEO Guy Bejerano.

The company’s software provides security validation in a continuous, automated fashion through offensive testing that replicates an adversary’s activities in attempting to thwart security controls.

Salesforce Eyes Zoomin Purchase To Bring AI Agents More Data

Recognizing the importance of data for effective artificial intelligence systems, Salesforce makes this week’s Came to Win list for its deal to buy unstructured data management provider Zoomin in a move to help power its AI agent offerings and AI agent builder Agentforce.

The Zoomin acquisition deal comes on the heels of Salesforce’s announcement earlier this month that it was buying data protection and management vendor Own Co. for about $1.9 billion in cash. Both acquisitions are expected to close in Salesforce’s fiscal 2025 fourth quarter (ending Jan. 31, 2025),

The Zoomin and Own Co. acquisitions will expand the capabilities of Salesforce’s Data Cloud offerings. Zoomin’s ability to work with unstructured data is expected to complement the structured data that resides within the Salesforce CRM system.

“Proprietary unstructured data is powerful fuel our customers can use for AI agents and customer experiences, and Zoomin’s proven expertise and technology will accelerate Data Cloud’s innovation and enable our customers to get better value from Agentforce,” Rahul Auradkar, Salesforce executive vice president and general manager of unified data services and Einstein, said in a statement.