5 Companies That Came To Win This Week

For the week ending Dec. 13, CRN takes a look at the companies that brought their 'A' game to the channel.

The Week Ending Dec. 13

Topping this week's roundup of companies that came to win is Cisco for making a bold shift in its hardware strategy with the debut of its Cisco Silicon One ASIC networking chip.

Also making the Came to Win list this week is Fortinet for an acquisition that will expand its incident response technology offerings, Hewlett Packard Enterprise for a key hire for its GreenLake business, and Intel for its own important hire in the realm of chip design. And congratulations are due for the winners of CRN’s Products of the Year.

Not everyone in the IT industry was making smart moves this week, of course. For a rundown of companies that were unfortunate, unsuccessful or just didn't make good decisions, check out this week's Five Companies That Had A Rough Week roundup.

Cisco Intros Cisco Silicon One: New ASIC Play Beyond The Network Into The Cloud

Cisco signaled a major shift in its approach to networking hardware this week when the company unveiled Cisco Silicon One, a Cisco-designed ASIC for high-performance networking. The chip is Cisco’s first foray into making its silicon available to third-party companies, including cloud providers.

The bold move is intended to help Cisco become a key part of cloud infrastructures, even where Cisco’s own networking hardware systems aren’t installed. The company said it already has a couple of major service providers as customers for the ASIC.

Cisco said the ASIC will deliver performance up to 25 terabits per second. But speeds and feeds aside, the real significance of Cisco Silicon One is that it represents the company’s latest move away from its hardware system manufacturer roots and recognition that the real value in IT today is in software – making programmable silicon so important.

Fortinet Buys SOAR Vendor CyberSponse To Boost Incident Response

Fortinet has acquired security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR) technology developer CyberSponse in a move to expand the automation and incident response capabilities of its own security platform.

Fortinet will integrate CyberSponse’s SOAR system into the Fortinet Security Fabric for businesses and organizations that need to consolidate and triage alerts from multiple security products, automate analysis and other repetitive tasks to conserve resources, and leverage playbooks to better enable real-time incident response.

With the acquisition Fortinet will specifically extend the automation and incident response prowess of its FortiAnalyzer, FortiSIEM and FortiGate systems.

HPE Snags Microsoft Cloud Veteran To Lead GreenLake Unit

Hewlett Packard Enterprise made a savvy hire this week when it recruited Keith White, a 20-year Microsoft veteran, as senior vice president and general manager of the HPE GreenLake business unit.

White, one of Microsoft’s top cloud executives, played a crucial role in driving Microsoft Azure sales growth, most recently as vice president of the Intelligent cloud, worldwide commercial business.

GreenLake is HPE’s hybrid cloud platform and consumption-based, pay-per-use service, a critical part of its strategy to compete with cloud service providers like Amazon Web Services. The company recently reported that GreenLake channel sales were up 326 percent in the fiscal 2019 fourth quarter and the GreenLake sales pipeline surpassing the $850 million mark.

Intel Makes Key Chip Design Hire In Move To Revamp Manufacturing Process

Speaking of key hires, Intel this week said it had hired former GlobalFoundries CTO Gary Patton, a semiconductor industry veteran with experience leading design enablement and the development of process and packaging technologies for computer chips.

The hiring of Patton, whose title will be corporate vice president and general manager of design enablement, is significant because it comes as Intel plans to return to a two to two-and-a-half year cadence for its manufacturing process. That, after dealing with a multi-year delay for its 10nm processors, which are only now beginning to ship in volume in laptops for this holiday season.

CEO Bob Swan has said Intel is applying the lessons it learned from the 10nm delay to improve the process for 7nm products, which are slated to debut in 2021. The company is also working on new ways to develop chips, such as its Foveros 3D chip packaging technology. Patton, in his new role, will likely play a key role in these initiatives.

Winners Of CRN’s 2019 Products Of The Year

Congratulations to the winners of this year’s CRN Products of the Year awards, the best new products and major updates that made it onto our radar during the past year.

Product finalists were selected by CRN editors in 22 technology categories for the IT channel, with the winners chosen by solution providers based on how the products rated on technology, revenue and profit opportunities, and customer demand. The survey received more than 5,000 product ratings from solution providers with the product receiving the highest overall score in each category named the winner.

Winners included Microsoft Teams in collaboration, HPE Infosight in enterprise software, HPE Proliant 325 with Infosight for general purpose servers, Google Cloud Anthos for hybrid cloud, Cisco Hyperflex for hyper-converged infrastructure, HPE Edgeline OT Link in IoT and edge, and the Ruckus ICX 7850 for networking.

Also winning were the Microsoft Surface Studio 2 in desktop PCs, the HP Elitebook X360 1040 G6 for laptop PCs, the Eaton 5P Lithium-Ion UPS in power management software and tools, the Brother MFC-J5945DW in printers/MFPs, the Nvidia Titan RTX in processors, and Microsoft Azure in public cloud.

Wrapping up this year’s roster of winners are Palo Alto Networks Prisma in cloud security, Sophos Intercept X in endpoint security, Palo Alto Networks Next-Generation Firewall in network security, Proofpoint Email Protection for web and email security, the Samsung Galaxy Note 10 Plus in smartphones, Cisco SD-WAN in software-defined networking, VMware vSAN in software-defined storage, the NetApp AFF A800 in enterprise storage and the Netapp AFF A320 in midrange storage.