5 Companies That Came To Win This Week

For the week ending July 28, CRN takes a look at the companies that brought their ‘A’ game to the channel including ServiceNow, Nvidia, MSPbots, Teradata, Dynatrace and Tecton.

The Week Ending July 28

Topping this week’s Came to Win list are ServiceNow and Nvidia for an expanded alliance that could help partners and customers as they look to leverage the promise of generative AI technology.

Also making this week’s Five Came to Win roundup are Teradata for a key acquisition in the AI and ML space, startup MSPbots for a successful seed funding round, observability platform company Dynatrace for enhancing its AI engine that will help MSPs improve their productivity, and machine learning startup Tecton for striking a key partnership with Google Cloud.

ServiceNow Teams With Nvidia To ‘Fast-Track’ Enterprise Generative AI

Workflow automation giant ServiceNow and AI hardware/software developer Nvidia make this week’s Came to Win list with an expanded partnership aimed at driving breakthrough ServiceNow AI enterprise workflows through the implementation of generative AI large language models.

The two companies are teaming up as part of an AI Lighthouse program to accelerate the development and adoption of large language model generative AI solutions across the enterprise.

The AI Lighthouse program is a watershed moment for partners to bring the power of AI solutions to enterprise customers directly through the ServiceNow platform, said Erica Volini (pictured), ServiceNow senior vice president of global partnerships, in an interview with CRN.

“This is about making generative AI real. Customers don’t need to worry about that. We are developing the large language models and we are embedding them into our workflows. All our customers need to tell us is how do they want to use them and what are they trying to do with their digital transformation,” Volini said.

The first partner in the Lighthouse program is $61 billion systems integrator powerhouse Accenture.

Teradata Buys Data Startup Stemma To Accelerate AI, ML Analytics

Teradata made a savvy strategic acquisition this week, buying Stemma Technologies, a startup developer of automated data catalog software that uses AI and machine learning to help users discover, trust and use data and metadata more effectively.

Stemma describes its mission as making data within organizations more accessible by bridging the gap between data producers and data consumers.

Teradata, a leading cloud database and analytics software developer, said the acquisition of Stemma and its AI-enhanced data search and exploration technology would “broaden Teradata’s capacity to provide transformative analytics value from discovery through delivery.”

Financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed.

MSPbots Raises $5 Million In Seed Funding

AI technology platform MSPbots has secured $5 million in seed funding from venture capital firm Mercury Fund, financing the Chicago-based startup will use to further develop its products and expand its sales and marketing teams with a goal of capturing more of the MSP market.

The company develops its platform to help MSPs leverage AI to better automate tasks and optimize team management.

The company’s first funding round comes at a time when venture capital for startups isn’t flowing as freely as it was just a year ago.

On the technology side MSPbots will apply some of the new funding to AI development, including large language models and RLHF (reinforcement learning human feedback). Some of the company’s new AI capabilities are expected to be ready in the next two to three months.

Dynatrace Expands AI Platform To Help MSPs Reduce Costs

Speaking of giving MSPs a boost, unified observability and security platform developer Dynatrace wins applause this week for expanding the capabilities of its artificial intelligence engine, Davis AI, to help managed service providers improve the productivity of their development, operations, security and business teams.

An updated version of Davis AI brings together causal, predictive and generative AI capabilities that can simplify and accelerate such tasks as creating automations and dashboards.

With the new capabilities within Davis AI, predictive AI recommends future actions based on data from the past, casual AI delivers fact-based and precise answers based on analyzing large sets of observability and security data, and generative AI recommends how to solve specific tasks.

All of which can add up to improved productivity for MSPs.

Tecton-Google Cloud Alliance Offers Solution Providers A Machine Learning Boost

Machine learning startup Tecton wins kudos for striking a strategic partnership with Google Cloud this week under which the Tectonic feature platform, used to supply machine learning models with high-quality data, is available for Google Cloud partners and users.

Through the partnership the Tecton Feature Platform can be used in conjunction with Google Cloud’s AI and data services to speed up the development of machine learning models while controlling costs.

The Tecton platform works with Google Cloud’s Vertex AI system, used to train and deploy machine learning models and customize large language models for use in AI-powered applications and Google Cloud’s data processing infrastructure services including DataProc and BigQuery.

Solution providers and strategic service providers who perform AI and machine learning development work for customers can use the Tecton-Google Cloud combination to do that work more efficiently, CEO Mike Del Balso told CRN.