5 Companies That Came To Win This Week

For the week ending Dec. 11, CRN takes a look at the companies that brought their ‘A’ game to the channel.

The Week Ending Dec. 11

Topping this week’s Came to Win list is Nutanix, which scored a hiring coup when it hired a top executive from rival VMware to fill its CEO post.

Also making the list are Hewlett Packard Enterprise for its new high-performance computing GreenLake service; a cybersecurity startup for exiting stealth armed with $100 million in financing; Juniper Networks for a strategic acquisition; and Google Cloud for establishing partnerships with ISVs building 5G applications that can work with the Anthos platform.

Nutanix Hires Former VMware COO Rajiv Ramaswami To Become New CEO

Nutanix scored a hiring coup over longtime rival VMware this week when the hyperconverged infrastructure technology developer hired VMware COO Rajiv Ramaswami to become Nutanix’s new president and CEO.

Ramaswami is replacing Nutanix founder and now former CEO Dheeraj Pandey, who is retiring.

Ramaswami has led VMware’s cloud products and services development for the past four years. Before that he was executive vice president and general manager for infrastructure and networking at Broadcom. In total, he has 30 years of IT industry experience, including stints at Cisco Systems, Nortel and IBM.

Nutanix channel partners praised the move to hire Ramaswami—one calling it a “huge, massive win” for the company—saying Ramaswami will lead Nutanix in competing with VMware in particular and in the cloud technology market in general.

HPE Launches GreenLake HPC Supercomputing As A Servic

Hewlett Packard Enterprise made a big move in cloud services this week when it debuted GreenLake HPC, a high-performance computing cloud service that the company said brings affordable supercomputing power to midsize and even small businesses.

The new offering, which an HPE executive described as “supercomputing for the masses,” makes the company’s HPC systems available through GreenLake on a pay-per-use basis, providing users with an agile, elastic cloud experience.

GreenLake HPC, which is available in small, medium and large options, allows customers and partners to order HPC as a service through a self-service portal with delivery—from configuration to rollout—in as little as 14 days.

HPE said the new service will cut by 40 percent the capital expenditure price for HPC systems—which can cost hundreds of thousands and even millions of dollars—and accelerate HPC deployments by 75 percent.

Cloud Security Startup Wiz Exits Stealth With $100M In Funding

Cloud security startup Wiz got everyone’s attention this week when it exited stealth with an impressive $100 million in funding.

Wiz, based in Tel Aviv, Israel, was founded in January by former Microsoft cloud security executive and Wiz CEO Assaf Rappaport.

The startup has developed cloud security tools that provide complete risk insight and visibility and are simple to deploy at scale. The company’s technology facilitates scanning of an entire cloud environment, across all compute types and cloud services, for vulnerabilities and configuration, network and identity issues.

Rappaport and his team previously founded cloud access security broker Adallom, then sold it to Microsoft where they stayed more than four years to lead Microsoft’s Cloud Security Group before leaving to start Wiz.

Wiz wasn’t the only young company making funding announcements this week. Next-generation database developer SingleStore raised $80 million in Series E financing to fuel its expansion while rising cloud security star Orca Security closed a $55 million Series B funding round. And Kubernetes cloud management startup Weaveworks raised $36.6 million in a Series C round.

Juniper Networks To Buy Intent-Based Networking Leader Apstra

Juniper Networks struck a deal this week to acquire intent-based networking startup Apstra in a move that will allow Juniper to advance its strategy of injecting AI throughout the network for greater automation.

The addition of Apstra’s technology to Juniper’s data center networking automation portfolio will advance Juniper’s vision of transforming data center operations, providing infrastructure and fabric management systems with integrated design, deployment and root cause identification and remedy capabilities.

As a bonus, Apstra co-founder and CEO David Cheriton will be joining Juniper as chief data center scientist.

Google Expands Anthos 5G Ecosystem With New ISV Partners

Google Cloud wins kudos this week for expanding the 5G ecosystem around its Anthos multi-cloud application development platform by partnering with more than 30 ISVs who are building 200-plus 5G-enabled edge applications.

Google Anthos is used to deploy applications and workloads across multi-cloud environments. With 5G on the horizon, the new ISV partnerships will enable the deployment and delivery of new applications and services that leverage Anthos and other components of the Google Cloud.

The ISVs Google is now working with include companies developing 5G applications in IoT and manufacturing, media and entertainment, and retail, as well as a number of ISVs developing horizontal applications that span multiple industries.