5 Companies That Came To Win This Week June 30

For the week ending June 30, CRN takes a look at the companies that brought their ‘A’ game to the channel including IBM, Databricks, Amazon Web Services, Snowflake and Salesforce.

The Week Ending June 30

Topping this week’s Came to Win list is IBM for a multibillion-dollar acquisition deal that’s expected to boost Big Blue’s technology business management capabilities and provide customers with information about their application spending.

Also making this week’s list are Databricks for its own savvy acquisition in the generative AI space, Amazon Web Services for its plans to greatly expand its data center capabilities in the U.S. Midwest, data cloud giant Snowflake for a series of development and AI technology unveilings at its Summit 2023 event, and Salesforce for its plans to invest billions of dollars in its U.K. operations.

IBM Buying Apptio For $4.6B To Boost Watson, Red Hat, Hybrid Cloud Capabilities

IBM is spending a whopping $4.6 billion to acquire hybrid cloud and FinOps software developer Apptio in a move to expand the functionality of its Watson and Red Hat offerings and provide a boost to IBM’s automation services.

Apptio’s FinOps [financial and operational IT management and optimization] software integrates and simplifies visibility into technology spending across hybrid and multi-cloud environments, labor and resources.

The Bellevue, Wash.-based company will bring to IBM $450 billion of anonymized IT spending data that will unlock new insights for clients and partners. The Apptio software-as-a-service applications are used by more than 1,500 customers.

IBM said the acquisition of Apptio is expected to drive “significant synergies” across several key areas for IBM including automation, its Red Hat subsidiary, the IBM AI portfolio and IBM Consulting, as well as strengthen partnerships with systems integrators like Accenture, KPMG and Deloitte.

CEO Arvind Krishna said IBM also plans to combine Apptio software with its Watsonx AI platform and automation software.

Databricks To Acquire Generative AI Startup MosaicML In $1.3 Billion Deal

Staying on the topic of big-ticket acquisitions, data lakehouse giant Databricks struck a deal this week to acquire generative AI platform vendor MosaicML for approximately $1.3 billion, Databricks said Monday.

With the acquisition Databricks will provide customers with the ability to “build, own and secure generative AI models with their own data,” according to the company.

MosaicML, founded in 2021, is known for its MPT (multitask prompt tuning) large language models that organizations use to quickly build and train state-of-the-art models while cost-effectively using their own data. MosaicML says that automatic optimization of model training provides 2x to 7x faster training compared to standard approaches.

Databricks said MosaicML’s platform will be “supported, scaled, and integrated over time to offer customers a seamless unified platform” they can use to build, own and secure their generative AI models.

Databricks said also the entire MosaicML team, including its machine learning and neural networks specialists, is expected to join Databricks once the acquisition closes.

AWS Confirms $7.8 Billion Data Center, Cloud Regions Expansion In Ohio

Amazon Web Services is expanding its data center and cloud services footprint in America by unveiling plans for a whopping $7.8 billion investment in its Ohio facilities.

The cloud services giant has poured billions of dollars this year into building new data centers that power its AWS Regions and AWS Local Zones both in the United States and abroad. AWS’ data centers are filled with thousands of servers, storage and networking hardware along with other IT infrastructure used to power its public cloud computing services.

Since 2015 AWS has invested more than $6 billion in Ohio and has several data center campuses in the central region of the state. Although no specific locations in Ohio have been confirmed yet for its new facilities, the final selections for the new data center sites will be decided in the near future.

AWS is arguably expanding its cloud computing footprint faster and wider than any company in the world by building and equipping new data centers. Amazon has already spent billions in 2023 on building and expanding data center campuses both in the U.S. and overseas.

Inside the U.S. AWS has announced plans to invest a massive $35 billion in building data centers across Virginia over the next several years. The cloud company is also set to build five new data centers in Oregon after local officials in May approved tax breaks worth an estimated $1 billion.

Snowflake Launches Generative AI, AppDev, Data Monetization Initiatives At Summit 2023

Data cloud giant expanded its service offerings on multiple fronts this week at the company’s Summit 2023 event where it debuted a range of new technologies and capabilities with an emphasis on artificial intelligence and application development.

The company unveiled new container services as part of its Snowpark development environment that the company said expands the Snowflake compute infrastructure to run a variety of workloads including full-stack applications, the hosting of Large Language Models and model training jobs.

Also new was the Snowflake Native App Framework to help developers more quickly build, more easily deploy and more effectively manage applications on the Snowflake Data Cloud.

Also on the Summit 2023 agenda was a new Snowflake-Nvidia alliance to provide customers with the ability to build generative AI applications using proprietary data within the Snowflake Data Cloud using Nvidia’s NeMo platform.

Salesforce Will Invest $4B In U.K. Business Over Five Years

Cloud application giant Salesforce is doubling down on its business in the U.K., saying it plans to invest $4 billion there over the next five years. The latest round of capital injection builds on the $2.3 billion five-year investment Salesforce announced in 2018.

The CRM application vendor says it is seeing rapid growth in the U.K. with business investments in digital transformation and innovation around artificial intelligence among the sales drivers. CEO Marc Benioff hailed the U.K. as a home for “incredible” innovation.

Einstein GPT, Salesforce’s generative AI software for CRM, is the company’s lead product in the AI space.

Salesforce announced its U.K. plans as the company kicked off its World Tour London: AI Day event, which the company described as its largest-ever U.K. event.