5 Companies That Came To Win This Week

For the week ending Dec. 1, CRN takes a look at the companies that brought their ‘A’ game to the channel including Insight Enterprises, AWS, Hewlett Packard Enterprises, BlueVoyant and SentinelOne.

The Week Ending Dec. 1

Topping this week’s Came to Win list is Insight Enterprises for its acquisition of Google Cloud partner SADA in a move that positions Insight as a major solution provider in both the Microsoft and Google Cloud worlds.

Also making the list are Amazon Web Services for its new AI security offering and other tech innovations launched at this week’s re:Invent conference, BlueVoyant for a strategic acquisition that reshapes the Microsoft security landscape, Hewlett Packard Enterprise for launching a complete “AI stack” system through its alliance with Nvidia, and SentinelOne for its expanded relationship with Pax8 that will bring its cybersecurity technology to more MSPs.

Insight Enterprises Buys Google Cloud Superstar SADA

Insight Enterprises, No. 16 on the CRN Solution Provider 500, tops this week’s Came to Win list with its blockbuster acquisition of SADA, a leading solutions provider in the Google Cloud space.

Insight is already a leading global solutions provider in the Microsoft arena, boasting a multibillion-dollar relationship with the software giant. The acquisition of SADA, a Google Cloud Partner of the Year winner and No. 108 on the CRN Solution Provider 500, makes Insight a major solutions and services provider in both the Microsoft and Google cloud realms.

SADA is a Google Cloud Premier partner with some 850 professionals focused on Google Cloud and 10 Google Cloud specializations covering security, infrastructure, cloud migration, data analytics, application development, location intelligence and machine learning.

Insight also said the deal extends its AI capabilities across two leading generative AI platforms.

AWS’ New AI Security ‘A Huge Confidence Boost’ For GenAI Customer Adoption

With some businesses hesitant to deploy generative AI due to security concerns, AWS’ launch of Guardrails for Amazon Bedrock this week will give customers the confidence needed to dive deeper into GenAI.

At the AWS re:Invent 2023 in Las Vegas AWS unveiled Guardrails for Amazon Bedrock in a move to implement safeguards customized to a business’s application requirements. Amazon Bedrock is AWS’ generative AI platform for building GenAI applications using various foundation models from AWS and third parties such as Anthropic and Cohere.

The new Guardrails AI cloud security offering evaluates user inputs and foundational models (FM) responses based on use case-specific policies and provides an additional layer of safeguards regardless of the underlying FM. Customers can create multiple guardrails, each configured with a different combination of controls, and use these guardrails across different applications and use cases.

Guardrails for Amazon was just one of a wave of new offerings making their debut at re:Invent this week. Other new product launches included Graviton4 processors, Amazon Workspaces Thin Client, the high-performance Amazon S3 Express One Zone storage class, and a new generation of machine learning Trainium chips.

Of particular interest for partners is AWS’s plan to provide partners with the same diagnostic tools that AWS support engineers use internally – a move that will empower partners to better support their customers. Partners can now access a customer’s EC2 Capacity Reservations, Lambda Functions list, GuardDuty findings and Load Balancer responses.

BlueVoyant Acquires Conquest Cyber In Deal That Reshapes Microsoft Security Landscape

Managed detection and response security provider BlueVoyant scored a strategic acquisition this week with its purchase of Conquest Cyber, a Microsoft government cloud security superstar.

The deal effectively reshapes the Microsoft security market by combining BlueVoyant’s commercial security expertise – the company has been Microsoft’s U.S. Security partner of the Year for two year’s running – with Conquest Cyber, named the Microsoft U.S. Defense and Intelligence Partner of the Year in 2022

Each company operates its own security operations center: BlueVoyant’s focused on commercial customers and Conquest Cyber’s on Microsoft government cloud customers.

The acquisition sets BlueVoyant apart as one of the few Microsoft security focused providers that’s capable of securing both commercial and government environments, said BlueVoyant CEO Jim Rosenthal (pictured left). Furthermore, he said the deal opens the door to the defense industrial base for BlueVoyant.

Together the two companies- which both grew at an 80 percent clip over the last year- provide a single “powerful combination” that will appeal to customers that need to secure Microsoft environments in both the commercial and government sectors, Rosenthal said.

HPE Expands Nvidia Partnership To Help Businesses Adopt GenAI Faster

Hewlett Packard Enterprise this week doubled down on its partnership with Nvidia to create an “enterprise-class, full-stack” system intended to help businesses more easily adopt generative AI applications.

HPE said the new generative AI enterprise computing offering has been co-engineered with Nvidia and pre-configured to allow businesses of any size to use private data to quickly customize so-called foundation AI models.

Businesses can use the custom models as the foundation for GenAI applications that can run anywhere from edge servers to cloud infrastructure. HPE executives also said the new AI systems present a tremendous opportunity for HPE’s channel partners to help businesses figure out how to take advantage of GenAI.

The jointly developed system starts with a rack-scale architecture consisting of 16 HPE ProLiant Compute DL380a servers, each of which have been pre-configured with Nvidia L40S GPUs, Nvidia BlueField-3 DPUs, and the Nvidia Spectrum-X Ethernet networking platform.

On the software side, the system features the HPE Machine Learning Development Environment software, which includes new GenAI capabilities for rapid model prototyping and tests, and the HPE Ezmeral software, which comes with new GPU-aware capabilities to aid with data preparation. The system also includes Nvidia AI Enterprise, the GPU designer’s suite of software that provides critical building blocks for bringing AI applications into production.

The new offering is part of HPE’s bigger push, outlined at the company’s HPE Discover Barcelona 2023 event this week, to develop what it calls “AI-native” infrastructure, software and service offerings that meet the unique and computationally intense requirements of a wide range of AI workloads, from computer vision to generative AI.

“We think the next decade is going to require full-stack thinking from hardware all the way up through software layers as organizations lean into the deployment of AI applications,” said Evan Sparks, vice president and general manager of AI solutions and supercomputing cloud at HPE.

SentinelOne Expands Alliance With Pax8

SentinelOne expanded its partnership with cloud-focused distributor Pax8 this week in a major deal that will create significant opportunities for MSPs, the cybersecurity vendor exclusively told CRN.

The two-year agreement will see more of SentinelOne’s tools beyond its core endpoint security offering coming to the Pax8 marketplace. Under the deal more tools from SentinelOne’s Singularity platform will be available through Pax8, for example.

The alliance will also see the distributor putting more of its attention behind bringing SentinelOne products to its large base of MSPs. Greenwood Village, Colo.-based Pax8 serves more than 29,000 partners and has offered products from Mountain View, Calif.-based SentinelOne since 2019.

SentinelOne said the deal is indicative of how the company is committing to a harder push to bring its cybersecurity offerings to MSPs and their SMB customers.

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