Five Companies That Came To Win This Week

For the week ending April 11 CRN takes a look at the companies that brought their ‘A’ game to the channel, including Cloudflare, IBM, Ping Identity, Google Cloud, Meter and World Wide Technology.

The Week Ending April 11

Topping this week’s Five Companies that Came to Win is Cloudflare for a strategic acquisition that will extend the capabilities of developers using the Cloudflare platform—especially around AI applications and agents.

IBM makes the list for its own acquisition in the data transformation services space while cybersecurity provider Ping Identity is here for debuting a major upgrade of its partner program.

Google Cloud wowed the crowd at its Google Cloud Next 2025 event with a wave of new product innovations. And Network-as-a-Service provider Meter and solution provider giant World Wide Technology win applause for teaming up to bring comprehensive NaaS services to WWT customers.

Cloudflare Looks To Boost AI, Agent Development With Outerbase Acquisition

Cloudflare is enhancing the application development capabilities of its connectivity cloud service platform with the acquisition of developer database company Outerbase.

The Outerbase acquisition will “dramatically enhance” Cloudflare’s developer service offerings—especially to meet the surging demand for capabilities to build AI and generative AI applications and AI agents, according to the company.

The Outerbase technology will boost the ability of developers working with the Cloudflare platform to build and deploy database-backed, full-stack, AI-enabled applications on Cloudflare’s global network.

“Businesses are racing to build AI-powered applications to be as productive, innovative and competitive as possible. Our goal is to make it easy and accessible for any developer, regardless of expertise, to build database-backed applications that can scale,” said Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare, in a statement. "Outerbase’s technology and design expertise are an important factor in accelerating this improved developer experience.”

IBM Buys Snowflake-Focused Data And AI Consultancy Hakkoda

Staying on the topic of savvy acquisitions, IBM makes this week’s list for its acquisition of Hakkoda, a global data, artificial intelligence and Snowflake consulting service startup, in a move that’s expected to boost the data transformation services portfolio of the tech giant’s IBM Consulting division.

Hakkoda brings to IBM its generative AI-powered assets for data modernization projects with a focus on such industries as financial services, the public sector and health care and elsewhere, according to an IBM statement. IBM will add Hakkoda’s consulting capabilities to its IBM Consulting Advantage platform.

“IBM is at the leading edge of the consulting industry with how we’re supercharging our consultants with AI,” Mohamad Ali, IBM Consulting’s senior vice president and head, said in the statement. “With Hakkoda’s data expertise, deep technology partnerships and asset-centric delivery model, IBM will be even better positioned to deliver value faster to clients as they transform with AI.”

Hakkoda was founded in 2021 and raised $5.6 million in funding that year to boost its offerings focused on the Snowflake platform. The company sought to stand out from other consultancies with a subscription model providing on-demand access to data engineers, architects and other professionals.

Ping Identity Goes ‘All In With Partners’ With Channel Program Revamp

Ping Identity is making a “complete commitment to partners” with the debut this week of its redesigned Nexus Partner Program, founder and CEO Andre Durand (pictured above) told CRN.

Durand said the identity security and access management vendor has done a “top to bottom” revamp of its channel program to enable its next phase of growth with the help of solution and service provider partners.

The new Nexus program is geared toward providing newly defined “pathways” to partners including a path for those focused on the resale of licenses and a path for systems integrator and service provider partners.

The program overhaul also includes new support and enablement offerings, a redesigned partner portal and the introduction of a Partner Advisory Board.

“As much as we have a lot of Global 5000 customers, there are still a lot of customers that we don’t have a relationship with—and partners are a big part of what will change that,” Durand said. Ultimately, “we continue to move all in with partners.”

Meter Teams Up With WWT To ‘Supercharge’ NaaS Practice

Network-as-a-Service specialist Meter and solution provider giant World Wide Technology make this week’s list for joining forces to put Meter’s unified, subscription-based wired, wireless and cellular networking offerings into the hands of more enterprises.

The collaboration will bring together Meter’s full-stack hardware, software and network support with WWT’s global reach, deployment capabilities and value-added services, Adam Ulfers, Meter’s vice president of sales, told CRN.

“We think that we can supercharge [WWT’s] Network as a Service [NaaS] division with our full-stack approach that is one of a kind in the industry. … With this partnership, we can take all the benefits that we’re providing and pair that with the scale and capability that WWT brings nationwide and worldwide for customers that have hundreds and thousands of locations,” Ulfers said of the newly forged partnership.

WWT plans to “wrap NaaS offers like Meter in a WWT turnkey solution where the resulting offer is a superset of what Meter provides, delivering a comprehensive product and services solution for our clients,” said Neil Anderson, vice president of cloud, infrastructure and AI solutions at WWT.

Google Cloud Shows Off New AI Agent Development Kit, Workspace Innovation At Annual Event

Google Cloud debuted a number of new technologies and product innovation this week at Google Cloud Next 2025 with a particular focus on AI and AI agents—where the company is making its biggest investment this year.

Topping the list was a new AI Agent Development Kit that will help customers move toward a multi-agent ecosystem. The ADK is an open-source framework that simplifies the process of building sophisticated multi-agent systems while maintaining precise control over agent behavior. Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said that with the toolset developers can build an AI agent in under 100 lines of intuitive code.

One of the biggest announcements at Google Next 2025 was Ironwood, Google’s 7th-generation TPU (tensor processing unit). The Ironwood AI accelerator, specifically designed to improve AI inferencing performance and scalability, will enable Google and its cloud customers to develop and deploy more sophisticated inferential AI models at scale.

Google has turned its massive global network infrastructure into the Google Cloud Wide Area Network, making the company’s global private network available to all Google Cloud customers as a fully managed, reliable and secure enterprise backbone to transform enterprisewide area network architectures.

Google also unveiled a slew of new AI innovation for its Workspace applications.