Five Companies That Came To Win This Week

For the week ending Feb. 28, CRN takes a look at the companies that brought their ‘A’ game to the channel including IBM, HashiCorp, DataStax, MongoDB, EDB, Intel and Alibaba.

The Week Ending Feb. 28

Topping this week’s Five Companies that Came to Win is IBM for completing its $6.4 billion acquisition of HashiCorp., a leading developer of hybrid IT infrastructure management and provisioning tools, and for striking a deal to buy database development platform company DataStax.

Also making this week’s list is cloud database provider MongoDB for its own strategic acquisition in the AI modeling technology space. EDB is here for a major revamp of its channel program as it looks to partners to help expand sales of its EDB Postgres AI database. Intel makes the list for expanding its Xeon 6 line of processors for mid-range data center systems. And cloud giant Alibaba got noticed for its vow to invest $53 billion in AI infrastructure.

IBM Closes $6.4B HashiCorp Acquisition, Strikes Deal To Buy DataStax

IBM tops this week’s Five Companies That Came to Win list for two strategic acquisitions.

On Thursday, IBM said it completed its $6.4 billion purchase of HashiCorp, a leading provider of tools for managing and provisioning cloud and hybrid IT infrastructure and building, securing and running cloud applications.

IBM will leverage HashiCorp’s software, including its Terraform infrastructure-as-code platform, to boost its offerings in infrastructure and security life-cycle management automation, infrastructure provisioning, multi-cloud management, and consulting and artificial intelligence, among other areas.

The deal’s consummation was delayed while overseas regulators, including in the U.K., scrutinized the acquisition.

Earlier in the week, IBM announced an agreement to acquire DataStax and its cloud database development platform in a move to expand the capabilities of the IBM Watsonx AI portfolio.

IBM said adding DataStax to Watsonx will accelerate the use of generative AI at scale among its customers and help “unlock value” from huge volumes of unstructured data.

“The strategic acquisition of DataStax brings cutting-edge capabilities in managing unstructured and semi-structured data to Watsonx, building on open-source Cassandra investments for enterprise applications and enabling clients to modernize and develop next-generation AI applications,” said Ritika Gunnar, IBM general manager, data and AI, in a blog post.

In addition to its flagship database offering, DataStax’s product portfolio includes Astra Streaming for building real-time data pipelines, the DataStax AI Platform for building and deploying AI applications, and an enterprise AI platform that incorporates Nvidia AI technology. Another key attraction for IBM is DataStax’s Langflow open-source, low-code tools for developing AI applications that use retrieval augmented generation (RAG).

MongoDB Looks To Improve AI Application Accuracy With Voyage AI Acquisition

Sticking with the topic of savvy acquisitions, MongoDB makes this week’s list for acquiring Voyage AI, a developer of “embedding and rerank” AI models that improve the accuracy and efficiency of RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) data search and retrieval operations.

MongoDB plans to add the Voyage AI technology to its platform to help businesses and organizations build more trustworthy AI and Generative AI applications that deliver more accurate results with fewer hallucinations.

“AI has the promise to transform every business, but adoption is held back by the risk of hallucinations,” said Dev Ittycheria, MongoDB CEO, in a statement announcing the acquisition.

MongoDB’s developer data platform, based on its Atlas cloud database, has become a popular system for building AI-powered applications. Last May the company launched its MongoDB AI Applications Program (MAAP), which provides a complete technology stack, services and other resources to help partners and customers develop and deploy at scale applications with advanced generative AI capabilities.

“By bringing the power of advanced AI-powered search and retrieval to our highly flexible database, the combination of MongoDB and Voyage AI enables enterprises to easily build trustworthy AI-powered applications that drive meaningful business impact. With this acquisition, MongoDB is redefining what’s required of the database for the AI era,” Ittycheria said.

EDB Boosts Channel Program Offerings As It Expands Data Platform Sales For AI, Analytical Tasks

EDB wins applause for expanding its channel program, including increasing investments to raise partners’ expertise and go-to-market capabilities, as the company looks to boost adoption of its Postgres-based database platform for more data analytics and AI applications.

The company also launched a new partner portal and “industry success hub” repository of vertical industry customer case studies that partners can draw on.

The upgraded EDB Partner Program is the company’s latest move as it looks to grow beyond its roots of providing a transaction-oriented, Oracle-compatible database to developing a comprehensive data and AI platform.

EDB is a long-time player in the database arena with its software based on the open-source PostgreSQL database. But EDB has been shooting higher for the last 18 months following the appointment of former Wind River CEO Kevin Dallas as the database company’s new CEO in August 2023.

The expanded channel program offerings tie in with last year’s launch of EDB Postgres AI, a major update of the company’s flagship database that can handle transactional, analytical and AI workloads.

Intel Debuts Midrange Xeon 6 CPUs To Fight AMD In Enterprise Data Centers

Intel showed off its technology prowess this week when it launched its new midrange Xeon 6 processors to help customers consolidate data centers for a broad range of enterprise applications.

Intel said the new processors provide superior performance and lower total cost of ownership than AMD’s latest server CPUs.

Using the same performance cores of the high-end Xeon 6900P Series, the new Xeon 6700P series scales to 86 cores on 350 watts while the new Xeon 6500P series reaches up to 32 cores on 225 watts, expanding the Xeon 6 family for a broader swath of the data center market. Intel said its Xeon 6 processors “have already seen broad adoption across the data center ecosystem, with more than 500 designs available now or in progress” from major vendors such as Dell Technologies, Nvidia, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Lenovo, Microsoft, VMware, Supermicro, Oracle, Red Hat and Nutanix, “among many others.

Intel also debuted the Xeon 6 system-on-chips for network and edge applications and two new Ethernet product lines.

Alibaba Plans To Invest $53B In AI Infrastructure

Cloud computing giant Alibaba Group got everyone’s attention this week when it unveiled plans to invest $53 billion in its AI infrastructure and data centers over the next three years.

Alibaba looks to become a global powerhouse in providing AI infrastructure and AI models with CEO Eddie Wu declaring that AI is now the company’s primary focus.

Alibaba builds its own open-source AI large language models (LLMs), dubbed Qwen, while owning billions worth of cloud infrastructure inside its data centers. The Chinese company recently introduced the Alibaba Cloud GenAI Empowerment Program, a dedicated support program for global developers and startups leveraging its Qwen models to build generative AI applications.

Alibaba said its new $53 billion AI investment exceeds the company’s spending in AI and cloud computing over the past decade.