5 Companies That Came To Win This Week

For the week ending Jan. 28 CRN takes a look at the companies that brought their ‘A’ game to the channel.

The Week Ending Jan. 28

Topping this week’s Came to Win list is Canadian IT service provider Calian for its deal to buy MSP Computex.

Also making this week’s list are Intel for a big win on the legal front, Nvidia whose GPUs will power an industry-leading AI supercomputer, and data lake platform startup Dremio for a win in venture capital funding. Multi-cloud networking startup Prosimo makes the list for launching its first partner program and making a key channel executive hire to oversee it.

Calian Group To Acquire Computex In Everything As A Service Move

Canadian IT service provider Calian Group is acquiring Computex, a leading managed service provider, as part of an aggressive expansion into the U.S. everything as a service market.

Computex has a comprehensive lineup of cloud and cybersecurity managed services and the company will become part of Calian Group’s fast-growing IT and Cyber Solutions Group once the $30 million acquisition is completed. In addition to bringing some 200 employees to that division, the acquisition provides Calian Group with two round-the-clock security and network operations centers manned by Computex engineers.

Computex, No. 187 on the CRN Solution Provider 500, also brings expertise and certifications in cybersecurity technology from Cisco Systems, AT&T, Okta, CloudFlare and Cylance.

Intel Wins Court Appeal Of $1.2B E.U. Antitrust Fine

Intel has won its appeal of a $1.2 billion fine levied by European Union antitrust regulators more than 12 years ago for alleged anti-competitive behavior against rival AMD.

This week the General Court, the E.U.’s second highest court, annulled the European Commission’s fine against chipmaker Intel, saying that the antitrust authority failed to prove that an OEM rebate plan by Intel was anti-competitive. The European Commission can appeal the ruling.

The European Commission levied the 1.06 billion euros fine in 2009, saying the rebates to a number of OEMs, including Acer, Dell, Lenovo and NEC, were illegal. Regulators said the rebates were offered on the condition those companies buy most of their processors from Intel, effectively blocking AMD from competing.

Nvidia GPUs To Power ‘Fastest AI Supercomputer’

Facebook parent company Meta is building what it said will be the world’s “fastest AI supercomputer” when completed later this year and the company is using Nvidia’s DGX A100 GPUs to do it.

The high-visibility project, which is expected to be fully built out by mid-2022, is the largest deployment to date of Nvidia DGX A100 systems.

Meta’s new AI Research SuperCluster, unveiled this week, will use a total of 16,000 Nvidia A100 GPUs to train gigantic AI models for a variety of applications. With 16,000 GPUs, the supercomputer will consist of 2,000 Nvidia DGX A100 systems, each of which contain eight A100 GPUs.

The AI Research Supercluster is already operational, consisting of 760 Nvidia DGX A100 systems (6,080 GPUs). Meta said the system is 20 times faster for running computer vision applications, compared to an earlier supercomputer cluster with 22,000 Nvidia V100 GPUs, and three times faster for training large natural language processing models.

Penguin Computing, a provider of high-performance computing systems, is helping to deploy the cluster, serving as Meta’s architecture and managed services partner.

Data Lake Startup Dremio Hits $2B Valuation With Latest Funding

Dremio, a startup developer of data lakehouse software, hit it big this week when it raised $160 million in a Series E round of funding that boosted the company’s valuation to $2 billion. The company has now raised a total of $421.5 million.

The latest funding comes as the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company says it has doubled its revenue every year for several years in a row, accelerated its hiring, and has “achieved breakout velocity” in its target markets.

Cloud data warehouse service provider Firebolt was also a winner in venture funding this week, raising $100 million in a round that pegged the Tel Aviv-based startup’s valuation at $1.4 billion – impressive for a company that’s competing with such cloud giants as Snowflake and Amazon Web Services.

Prosimo Launches Partner Program And Hires Competitor’s Channel Leader

Multi-cloud networking startup Prosimo wins applause this week for launching its first official partner program and for hiring Timoteo Prietto, previously the channel executive at one of the company’s biggest competitors, to lead its channel initiatives.

Prosimo introduced the Prosimo Next Partner Program this week to provide the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company’s partners with access to incentives, profit margins and resources. The three-tier program offers deal registration, sales assistance, discounted pricing and non-compete territory protection.

The program will also serve as a vehicle to educate partners about multi-cloud opportunities using Prosimo’s Application eXperience Infrastructure (AXI) platform, which integrates networking, application performance and security into one approach.

The new channel program is under Prietto’s direction. He joins Prosimo from Aviatrix Systems, a competitor in the multi-cloud networking arena, where he was channel leader for three years. Before that he was a territory account manager at VMware.