Five Companies That Came To Win This Week

Adtran Goes For WLAN Market Gusto With Bluesocket Acquisition

Adtran this week acquired virtual wireless LAN vendor Bluesocket, taking a bold and decisive step into the wireless networking space. Bluesocket touts itself as an emerging player among wireless LAN vendors moving away from a more traditional hardware-based controller architecture for wireless.

Adtran channel partners reacted to the news like baseball fans whose team has just landed a prized free agent.

"Personally, I'm very excited about it," Jeronimo Romero, managing partner and CTO of EUS Networks, a New York-based solution provider, told CRN this week. "I get to see the Adtran stamp on a company that makes very good products. I say 'yeah' because Adtran's [wireless products] are OK, but Bluesocket is at a different level."

Citrix Adds To Its VDI Arsenal With RingCube Acquisition

This week, Citrix Systems acquired RingCube Technologies, a Mountain View, Calif.-based desktop virtualization vendor whose technology tackles challenges in large-scale virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) deployments.

RingCube combines the advantage of two main VDI models -- dedicated and pooled -- and stores users' preferences, data and applications into a separate container that can be easily moved between physical to virtual environments, speeding migrations.

Citrix, which acquired VDI vendor Kaviza in May, has been aggressively adding new pieces to its desktop virtualization portfolio to maintain its leadership position in the market and fend off advances from competitors.

Avnet Surges In Face Of Macroeconomic Headwinds

Despite Wall Street's roller coaster ride, Avnet's Q4 results came in ahead of analysts' expectations and provided a rare bright spot in a week of gloom and doom.

Avnet shares soared more than five percent in the wake of the news.

Avnet earned $238.8 million or $1.54 per diluted share on $6.91 billion in sales for the fourth fiscal quarter ended July 2. The results compare to diluted earnings per share of 92 cents on $5.21 billion in sales in the year-ago quarter. Analysts were projecting earnings of $1.15 per share on sales of $6.95 billion for the quarter.

Looking forward, Avnet projects sales between $6.25 billion and $6.85 billion for the current quarter with earnings per share between 90 cents and 98 cents. A consensus of analysts' opinion expects earnings of $1.03 per share on revenue of $6.74 billion for the current quarter.

Google Adds Enterprise-Ready Features To Chrome OS

Google this week released an update to Chrome OS that adds support for VPN, secure Wi-Fi (802.1x) and access to virtualized applications through Citrix (NSDQ:CTXS) Receiver, all of which could cause enterprises to look more seriously at Chromebooks.

Rajen Sheth, group product manager for Chrome For Business, said the technology preview release of Citrix Receiver for Chrome OS will allow Chromebook customers to access their non Web-enabled applications through the use of virtualization.

"While most new applications will be built for the Web, we recognize that some users need to access desktop applications," Sheth said in a blog post.

HP Makes $100 TouchPad Discount Permanent, Gives TouchPads To XChange Attendees

HP knows it needs to build WebOS market share, and this week's institution of a permanent $100 discount on the HP TouchPad should help boost sales. At $399 for the 16 GB model and $499 for the 32 GB model, the HP TouchPad is now priced well below the iPad, and in a competitive range with competing tablets from Acer and Asus.

At XChange Americas, being held this week in Denver, Colo., Frank Rauch, vice president of channel sales for HP's Enterprise Storage Server Networking (ESSN) division, wowed tablet-crazed attendees by giving everyone a free HP TouchPad. Talk about getting aggressive about building market share. If this doesn't get HP VARs excited about the possibilities of WebOS, nothing will.