Five Companies That Came To Win This Week

Intel Goes 3D With New Tri-Gate Transistors

Intel needs a horse in the mobile race, and this week the chipmaker took a bold step in that direction with the unveiling of its three-dimensional (3-D) Tri-Gate transistor technology.

Intel demonstrated its newest achievement in a 22-nm microprocessor, code-named Ivy Bridge, which is already being used in prototype laptops, servers and desktop systems.

It marks the first time since the invention of silicon transistors more than 50 years ago that a 3-D silicon structure will be put into high-volume manufacturing. Intel said Ivy Bridge is "slated for high-volume production readiness" by the end of the year. Ivy Bridge 3-D will likely cement Intel's microprocessor technology dominance for years to come and open the door to a new class of smaller, faster and more energy efficient devices.

User Virtualization Vendor AppSense Lands Key Citrix Exec

User virtualization upstart, Appsense, has lured away a top Citrix executive who's not afraid to mix it up with industry rivals in the court of public debate. AppSense this week named Harry Labana, former CTO of Citrix desktop virtualization, as its new VP and CTO.

Labana, who joined Citrix in 2009, is still bullish on desktop virtualization but sees AppSense poised on the brink of something just as big. "User virtualization represents the next generation of evolution of desktop virtualization because it enables many different desktop models to be considered simultaneously, such as VDI, hosted shared desktop, server based computing," Labana told CRN this week.

CA Says It's Changing Channel Culture

CA this week said it's aware of its past channel missteps but is committed to making things better. At CA's Channel Summit this week, David Bradley, senior vice president of global channel sales, told CRN that CA has spent a lot of time in the past 18 months remaking its executive ranks and learning from channel partners how it can be a better and more responsible vendor. Bradley's message for CA partners who remember its years of channel fickleness is: give us another chance, and we'll make it work, for real this time.

OK, so we've heard this many times before from CA, but the company's tone at the Channel Summit -- its first in several years -- had a ring of humility

Red Hat Rolls Out New PaaS, IaaS Offerings

Red Hat continues to expand its cloud computing middleware line, unveiling its CloudForms Infrastructure-as-a-Service and its OpenShift Platform-as-a-Service this week at the company's Summit conference in Boston. "This is one more building block to bring our Red Hat cloud offerings to the next level," said Paul Cormier, executive vice president and president of products and technologies, at the event.

Cormier called CloudForms "the most comprehensive resource management [product] across bare metal, virtualized servers and public clouds that enables the application on the cloud for complete application life-cycle management."

Of OpenShift, Cormier spoke in similarly glowing terms. "This, we feel, is the best Platform-as-a-Service that's designed for people who are open-source developers. But more importantly, designed by people who are open-source developers."

IBM Shows It Grasps The Whole 'Consumerization Of IT' Concept

IBM Global Financing this week added tablet PCs to its roster of products and services available to be financed in the enterprise.

It's a sign that IBM recognizes that tablets such as the iPad and Motorola Xoom are making their way steadily into the business world, particularly within key vertical markets such as health care. It also shows that IBM wants solution providers want to include these mobile devices in financing deals with their customers.

"[Tablets] are coming, whether you like it or not. [VARs] need get to hold of it and manage the program and manage the costs," an IBM spokesperson told CRN this week.