5 Companies That Came To Win This Week

For the week ending Oct. 1, CRN takes a look at the companies that brought their ‘A’ game to the channel.

The Week Ending Oct. 1

Topping this week’s Came to Win list is private equity firm Symphony Technology Group and its plan to combine McAfee Enterprise, which it owns, and FireEye Products, which it is buying, into a new, as-yet-unnamed cybersecurity powerhouse.

Also making the list this week are chipmaker AMD for a key executive hire, startup Speedata for debuting its big data analytics acceleration technology, Jungle Disk for an acquisition move that greatly expands its data protection and disaster recovery offerings, and startup Catalog for winning new funding to continue its development of DNA-based storage and compute technology.

McAfee Enterprise And FireEye Products To Merge Into $2B Cybersecurity Titan

McAfee Enterprise and FireEye Products are being combined into a nearly $2 billion cybersecurity giant, according to plans detailed this week by the private equity firm that owns the former and is buying the latter.

The new company, which doesn’t yet have a name, will offer a comprehensive, integrated security portfolio that protects customers across endpoints, infrastructure, applications and the cloud. The company will have more than 40,000 customers and 5,000 employees.

Symphony Technology Group acquired McAfee’s $1.35 billion enterprise security business in late July for $4 billion. STG announced in June a deal to buy FireEye’s product business for $1.2 billion and expects to complete that acquisition by the end of 2021.

The new company will be led by former BlackBerry President and Cisco SVP Bryan Palma. Ian Halifax, CFO at Riverbed Technology since December 2019, will take the CFO post at the new company.

AMD Hires Intel Data Center Executive To Grow EPYC’s Cloud Business

AMD confirmed this week that it has hired Lynn Comp, a 22-year Intel veteran, to lead the cloud business for AMD’s EPYC processors as it looks to take server market share away from rival Intel.

AMD hired Comp as corporate vice president of the company’s Cloud Business Group. She reports to Dan McNamara, another former Intel executive who has led AMD’s Server Business Unit since early 2020.

Comp’s recruitment is seen as a win for AMD given her experience in data center and IT infrastructure strategy and product planning. In her new job Comp is overseeing all go-to-market activities for cloud and “mega data center” customers and is driving the company’s customer engineering, optimization and benchmarking functions.

Comp was most recently a vice president within Intel’s Data Platforms Group and general manager of the Visual Infrastructure Unit. There she oversaw development of the first discrete GPU for data centers based on Intel’s Xe architecture.

Startup Speedata Debuts New Processor Targeting Big Data Analytics And Database Tasks

Israeli startup Speedata exited stealth this week, providing details about its new Analytics Processing Unit (APU) chip technology for accelerating database and data analytics workloads. The company is promising a 2X magnitude or more performance boost over mainstream processors for big data analysis tasks.

Speedata CEO and co-founder Jonathan Friedman said the performance of general-purpose CPUs have not kept pace with the demands of today’s big data analytical workloads.

He said the company’s APU technology, now in the prototype stage and slated for general availability within several quarters, is the first dedicated accelerator processor for optimizing data center- and cloud-based database and analytics workloads.

The company has also raised $70 million in financing, including $55 million in a new Series A round of funding and a previously undisclosed $15 million seed round.

Jungle Disk Expands Data Protection Business With Three Acquisitions

Jungle Disk, a developer of cloud-based data protection and cybersecurity technologies, this week said it has acquired three of its peers in a move to provide a broad range of data protection and disaster recovery products and services.

Jungle Disk acquired KeepItSafe, Live Vault and OffsiteDataSync assets from J2 Global. Combining those with Jungle Disk creates one of the largest stand-alone backup and disaster recovery organizations in the industry, particularly in backup-as-a-service, Jungle Disk President and CEO Bret Piatt.

The four companies bring a variety of products, customer bases and go-to-market approaches to the table. And they can implement data protection for the smallest customers to large enterprises, according to Piatt.

Startup Catalog Raises $35 Million To Develop DNA-Based Compute Technology

Catalog, a startup that is pioneering the development of DNA-based digital data storage, closed a $35-million round of funding this week – financing the company will use to develop a compute platform based on its groundbreaking technology.

The new funding brings Catalog’s total financing to $60 million. Korea-based Hanwha Impact Partners is the lead investor.

Catalog is developing synthetic DNA-based storage and computing technology that is expected to offer a number of advantages over traditional electronic computing technology. DNA-based storage, for example, will provide data storage density that is a million or more times more dense than electronic media.