5 Companies That Came To Win This Week
For the week ending Sept. 11, CRN takes a look at the companies that brought their ‘A’ game to the channel.
The Week Ending Sept. 11
Topping this week’s Came to Win list is Progress Software for a savvy acquisition that will greatly expand the company’s portfolio of application development and management technology.
Also making the list are Computacenter for its own acquisition that will significantly expand its North American footprint, Nutanix for debuting a new channel program that changes the way it interacts with and incentivizes partners, T-Mobile for launching its own new partner program following its mega-merger with Sprint, and Commvault for expanding its product lineup with a new disaster recovery offering.
Progress Software To Acquire DevOps Pioneer Chef In $220 Million Deal
Progress Software made a bold acquisition move this week that will significantly expand the company’s technology for developing, deploying and managing applications.
Progress will acquire Chef Software, a DevOps technology pioneer, for $220 million. Chef, based in Seattle, has expanded into such areas as DevSecOps, security and compliance, infrastructure configuration management and application life-cycle management.
Chef has more than $70 million in annual recurring revenue. It also brings to Progress a vibrant developer community, an impressive blue-chip customer base, and highly skilled and engaged employees, Progress said in announcing the acquisition deal.
Progress, a provider of application development and digital experience software, said the acquisition will expand the company’s technology portfolio and allow it to offer “complete infrastructure automation to build, deploy, manage and secure applications” in modern multi-cloud, hybrid and on-premises environments.
Given Progresss presence in OEM channels, the acquisition also could expand Chef’s reach through OEM relationships.
Computacenter To Acquire Pivot For Big U.S. Expansion
Staying with the topic of significant acquisitions, U.K.-based IT solution provider giant Computacenter is looking to expand its North American business in a big way with a deal this week to acquire Toronto-based Pivot Technology Solutions for more than U.S.$80 million.
Pivot, with 2019 revenue of U.S.$1.22 billion, has about 600 U.S. employees and 100 in Canada and gets about 85 percent of its revenue from U.S. customers.
Computacenter CEO Mike Norris said the Pivot acquisition represents an opportunity for his company to increase its scale, geographic footprint and capabilities in the U.S. And Pivot’s Canadian business expands Computacenter’s total market opportunity and helps it meet the needs of international customers.
The Pivot acquisition follows Computacenter’s first real push into North America when it bought San Francisco-based FusionStorm in late 2018. That acquisition increased Computacenter’s U.S. head count by 50 percent and gave it a full range of services to offer U.S. customers.
Nutanix Launches New Global Partner Program
Nutanix wins a high-five this week for launching its new Elevate Partner Program through which the hyperconverged system company is changing the way it interacts with and incentivizes channel partners and brings its entire partner ecosystem under one global program.
The initiative includes the new Performance+ Deal Registration program that’s designed to increase incentive potential and provide opportunity protection. Also new is the Americas Partner Support Center with dedicated channel sales, systems engineers and marketing resources.
The new program offers enhanced incentives such as higher rebates for winning new business, a refreshed partner portal, automated claims payments, and new partner specializations in such areas as DevOps and multi-cloud.
The Elevate Partner Program eliminates traditional tiers, rewarding partners instead according to their competency levels and specializations. The program also brings all of Nutanix’s partners under one umbrella including resellers, systems integrators, MSPs, service providers, public cloud providers, distributors, telecommunications companies, and independent software, hardware and platform vendors.
T-Mobile Relaunches Partner Program In Wake Of Sprint Merger
T-Mobile is working through the complex task of integrating its operations with Sprint following its $26.5 billion mega-merger with its former carrier competitor earlier this year.
So T-Mobile wins kudos this week for introducing its new channel partner program that T-Mobile said combines the best elements of the two companies’ pre-merger partner programs.
The new T-Mobile for Business Partner Program combines the two carriers’ legacy channel programs for both mobility and wireline partners. T-Mobile said it’s boosting channel investment by doubling sales and engineering teams dedicated to partners, including dedicated wireline implementation customer support, and increasing marketing resources for VARs, MSPs and agent partners.
Commvault Launches Disaster Recovery For VMware Cloud Environments
Commvault expanded its product lineup this week with the news that its Commvault Disaster Recovery is now generally available with the first iteration of the software offered for VMware environments.
Commvault Disaster Recovery is the first stand-alone disaster recovery offering from the provider of data protection and data management systems. The new product is aimed at both current and prospective customers.
Unveiled at this week’s Commvault Virtual Connections customer event, Commvault Disaster Recovery offers a comprehensive system for business continuity and verifiable recoverability of data by replicating it across on-premises and cloud systems. It ensures data availability by automating data recovery operations and validates that data can be recovered before disaster strikes.
The software supports VMware environments for customers on Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform and Oracle Cloud. The initial release focuses on VMware because of its prevalence. Commvault plans to expand the number of supported systems in the future.