Five Companies That Came To Win This Week

McAfee Finally Gets The Sweet Deal It Craved

Talk about a reversal of fortune: A few months back, McAfee was confronted with a major disaster when a glitch-ridden AV update took down thousands of customers PCs. McAfee circled the wagons and enlisted the aid of channel partners to help with the remediation, but the incident still cost the company millions and sent seismic waves of distrust rippling through its customer base.

Fast forward a few months, and McAfee gets acquired by Intel for a 60 percent premium. You think the champagne corks might be popping over at McAfee headquarters?

The deal is subject to regulatory approval, of course, but McAfee, which has long been the subject of acquisition rumors, couldn't have hoped for a better scenario.

NetApp Has A Blowout Quarter

NetApp continued to keep pace with rival EMC with a fiscal Q1 that saw earnings nearly triple year-over-year. NetApp reported Q1 earnings of $142 million or 38 cents per share, up 173 percent from the $52 million and 15 cents per share that the company reported in last year's Q1. Revenue was up 36 percent during the quarter to $1.14 billion.

"NetApp has begun our fiscal year with great momentum,’ said Tom Georgens, president and CEO, in statement.

Actually, make that an understatement.

Dell Goes For Storage Gusto With 3Par Acquisition

Dell this week made a $1.15 billion bid to acquire 3Par, a maker of high-end storage virtualization products. Analysts say the deal could still be challenged by competitors, but the consensus is that Dell may have pulled off a coup here by swooping in and snapping up a firm that's shown an ability to compete with big guns like EMC and Hitachi.

For Dell, picking up 3Par gives it enterprise-class technology that its customers can use to build public and private clouds and reach into the high-end enterprise storage market.

Google Apps Update Adds Multi-Tenancy

Multi-tenancy support, or the ability to run multiple instances of an application, is one of the golden rings that cloud computing vendors strive for. Microsoft is in the process of re-architecting its products for multi-tenancy, and this week Google released an update for Google Apps that adds this important capability.

"This allows you to easily serve the same app to multiple different customers, with each customer seeing their own unique copy of the app," Google said in a blog post explaining the move.

In addition to short-circuiting Microsoft's ability to say "We have multi-tenancy and Google doesn't", Google is also making life easier for solution providers, who only need to make minor changes when customers require customized offerings.

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Tech Data Beats Wall Street's Expectations

A continued focus on select customers and vendors and increased attention to more profitable business areas helped Tech Data to a solid fiscal second quarter. Tech Data earned $40.9 million, or 82 cents per share in its fiscal Q2, which beat analysts' expectation of earnings of $35.2 million and 70 cents per share.

"This strategy has served us exceptionally well for the last several quarters, significantly improving the quality of our vendor and customer portfolios, delivering select market-share gains, meaningful operating margin expansion, record earnings and industry-leading return on capital employed," said CEO Robert Dutkowsky in a statement.