Five Companies That Came To Win This Week

For the week ending March 21 CRN takes a look at the companies that brought their ‘A’ game to the channel including Google, Nerdio, Nvidia, HP Inc. and Blue Mantis.

The Week Ending March 21

Topping this week’s Five Companies that Came to Win is Google for its stunning $32 billion deal to acquire cloud security superstar Wiz.

Also making this week’s list are Nerdio for a very impressive funding round, Nvidia for a number of new product introductions and strategic alliance announcements coming out of its 2025 GTC developer event, and HP Inc. for its own series of partner incentive news from its Amplify event.

And strategic service provider Blue Mantis makes the list for a trifecta of acquisitions of Vermont-based MSPs that expand the company’s tech capabilities and geographic reach.

Google To Buy Cybersecurity Startup Wiz For $32B, Google Cloud Has Bold Plans

Google tops this week’s Five Companies That Came To Win list for its blockbuster deal to acquire cloud security superstar Wiz for a whopping $32 billion. The move, which shakes up the cloud and security sectors, will provide a major boost to Google Cloud’s bold AI ambitions.

Google said the $32 billion all-cash deal will address two significant trends in the AI era that Google Cloud is driving: The growth of multi-cloud IT networks and the need for improved cloud security.

Google was reported as far back as July 2024 to be in talks to acquire Wiz, so the announcement of the deal wasn’t totally unexpected. But the acquisition’s price tag still got everyone’s attention.

“We expect this change to enable us to execute and innovate even faster,” Wiz co-founder and CEO Assaf Rappaport wrote in a post Tuesday. “Becoming part of Google Cloud is effectively strapping a rocket to our backs: It will accelerate our rate of innovation faster than what we could achieve as a stand-alone company.”

Google’s stunning deal to acquire Wiz makes it clear to the market that the tech giant has every intention of becoming a “strategic” cybersecurity vendor and is more than ready to do battle on Microsoft’s turf, Gartner analyst Neil MacDonald told CRN. The acquisition gives Google Cloud an immediate leadership position in the cloud and AI security markets where Wiz has been a trailblazer.

Nerdio Sets Itself Up For Global DaaS Success With $500M Funding Round

Speaking of big-money deals, Nerdio got everyone’s attention this week when it secured $500 million in a Series C funding round—money the company will use to accelerate product development and expand geographically.

The investment puts Nerdio’s valuation at more than $1 billion, quadrupling the valuation of two years ago, according to the vendor. The funding round was led by General Atlantic with participation from Lead Edge Capital and Stepstone.

Nerdio develops an automated end-user computing platform that solution providers use for Microsoft cloud deployments and management. The company and its MSP partners are seeing demand from customers looking to leave on-premises virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) systems from Citrix and Omnissa (the spin-out of VMware’s EUC business) and migrate to Microsoft’s Desktop-as-a-Service offerings.

Nvidia Launches New Blackwell GPUs, Unveils Strategic Alliances

Chip designer Nvidia, which held its GTC 2025 developer event this week, made news on multiple fronts including unveiling new additions to its GPU lineup and striking strategic alliances with a number of leading IT companies.

Nvidia, for example, paired up with Cisco Systems to introduce an “AI factory” joint architecture for building and securing data centers to develop and run AI workloads. Nvidia and Hewlett Packard Enterprise also showed off the fruits of their collaboration including an HPE unified data layer that works in conjunction with the Nvidia AI Data Platform.

Nvidia, meanwhile, debuted a number of new GPU products including the Blackwell Ultra accelerated computing platform, designed for massive-scale AI reasoning inference tasks. Other product launches included the RTX PRO Blackwell series of workstation and server GPUs and the RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition universal data center GPU. The company also unveiled the DGX Spark and DGX Station “desktop supercomputers” targeting developers, researchers and data scientists and their AI tasks.

The GPU chipmaker was also reported this week to have acquired synthetic data AI startup Gretel for $320 million in a move that builds on Nvidia’s portfolio of generative AI services for developers.

Applause is also due to the 14 recipients of Nvidia’s 2025 Americas Nvidia Partner network Awards including Mark III Systems and World Wide Technology.

HP Rolls Out Big Partner Incentives, Debuts New AI PCs

Nvidia wasn’t the only IT vendor with a major event this week. HP Inc. held its Amplify 2025 annual partner conference in Nashville, Tenn., and HP partners had a lot to cheer about.

Topping the list were plans for new incentives for its channel partners aimed at giving them bigger accelerators on deals when they win with more of the company’s portfolio. HP is also offering resellers training through master classes in AI and persona-based selling techniques.

The goal is to build a sales force that has an unrivaled expertise in the business uses of the technology that is driving sales, Kobi Elbaz (pictured), HP senior vice president and general manager of global revenue operations, told CRN.

The new Amplify SuperPower Booster is an upgraded compensation structure that gives partners better incentives if they sell products across the HP portfolio. This springs from a program HP started last year called More for More and has now grown to include all the items that HP sells, with the exception of 3-D printers.

“If you sell more across our entire portfolio, it means that you are bringing a better value for the customer, and if you bring a better value for the customer, we want to reward you,” Elbaz told CRN.

HP also announced new AI PCs that the company said give users and businesses dozens of reasons to upgrade their devices, with improvements in power and efficiency as well as the ability to run large language models locally for increased security. The new models included the HP EliteDesk 8 Series, the newest generation of the OmniBook Series, the HP Z2 Tower G1i, the HP ZBook Fury G1i and the HP EliteBook 8 G1 Series.

Blue Mantis Acquires Three Vermont MSPs, Adds Telecom, Network Muscle In Northeast Expansion

Fast-growing strategic service provider Blue Mantis this week added more managed services capabilities to its arsenal and expanded its Northeast footprint with the acquisition of three Vermont MSPs that had already formed tight go-to-market sales relationships with each other.

The three Vermont-based service providers: TELigence Partners, a 19-year-old Shelburne, Vt., telecom and carrier services advisory MSP; Calkins Networks, a 12-year-old networking MSP, also based in Shelburne; and Brevin Systems, a Ferrisburgh, Vt., networking and managed IT services company collectively pack a big services punch with about 70 percent of their sales coming from recurring revenue services.

Terms of the three acquisitions, which add about 200 new customers to Blue Mantis, were not disclosed.

Blue Mantis CEO Josh Dinneen (pictured) told CRN that the three “tightly integrated” companies provide Blue Mantis with additional carrier services, networking, cybersecurity and managed services talent. In fact, he said, 90 percent of the employees from the three companies are customer-facing tech talent.

“This was a great opportunity for geographic expansion in an underserved market and to deepen our bench in key categories,” he said. “These three companies complement each other nicely, so they were able to go to customers together and deliver a full business outcome-based services approach, modernizing IT environments and then managing those environments as needed. … We don’t have folks in the region so this is a tremendous opportunity to get a great team that can deliver and expand our core services into that market.”