Five Companies That Came To Win This Week

McAfee Pumps Up Volume On SIEM With NitroSecurity Acquisition

McAfee this week said it's planning to acquire NitroSecurity, a security information and event management (SIEM) vendor, for an undisclosed sum.

For McAfee, now an Intel subsidiary, the deal will bring in Security Information and Event Management technology that gives organizations better visibility into what's happening on their networks.

Portsmouth, N.H.-based NitroSecurity's solution can identify, correlate and remedy security threats in minutes instead of hours, and McAfee plans to weave the SIEM assets gained into its Security Connected Framework.

Huawei Beefing Up U.S. Enterprise Channel To Take On Cisco

Huawei this week launched a channel program for U.S.-based partners, a move calculated to help its enterprise networking unit take on the biggest fish in the networking space. The program is available for U.S.-based solution providers, and will eventually be expanded to Canadian VARs as well. Huawei's goal is to someday do all its U.S. business through the channel.

"We have a long-term commitment to the U.S. market," said Kevin Lu, director of channel management, in an interview with CRN. "Sales training, pre-sales and post-sales training, all of it is in line to work with our partners to be able to sell our products quickly."

Fortinet Sets Sights On Larger Network Security Foes

Fortinet is aiming to become a billion-dollar company within the next three years, and it's ready to take the fight to network security rivals such as Cisco and Juniper.

"We believe we can grow 30 percent year-over-year," Greg Fitzgerald, vice president of global marketing, told CRN this week. "And we're trying to take out the Junipers and Ciscos. They've taken their eye off the security ball, mostly for organizational reasons, and we just want customers to put our stuff side by side with their equipment and put it to the test."

HP Readying Channel Program For Networking Partners

Hewlett Packard is gearing up to launch a new channel program for networking partners, newly appointed HP Networking chief Bethany Mayer told CRN this week. The program, which HP plans to roll out roughly four months from now, includes training and channel incentives tailored for solution providers that sell HP Networking.

"We have some things coming that are going to be very positive for our channel partners," said Mayer, senior vice president and general manager of HP Networking, in an interview at Interop New York. "We've carved out a segment of [HP channel program] PartnerONE just for HP Networking partners."

Red Hat Plunks Down $136 Million For Storage Startup Gluster

Red Hat this week announced its $136 million acquisition of Gluster, a provider of open-source scale-out storage software that assists organizations in their migrations to virtualized and cloud environments.

Milpitas, Calif.-based Gluster, which won Best of Show at Citrix Synergy in May, boosts the performance and capacity of network-attached storage using a clustered or grid storage system. Gluster's GlusterFS scale-out NAS file system uses standard server nodes, each with its own processing power, storage capacity, and I/O bandwidth so that as capacity is added, the processing power and bandwidth increase at the same time.