5 Companies That Came To Win This Week

The Week Ending June 27

This week's roundup of companies that came to win includes a wave of new enterprise products from Dell, a major Office 365 contract win by a leading solution provider, strategic moves by a vendor of a next-generation NoSQL database, a major acquisition by Oracle, and some savvy channel program enhancements by one of the top security software vendors.

Also, check out this week's roundup of companies that had a rough week.

Dell Steps Up Enterprise Game With Data Center Product Blitz

If there were any doubts Dell intends to expand beyond selling commodity servers to become a supplier of a broad range of data center technologies, those doubts were dispelled this week at the Dell user Forum in Hollywood, Fla. where the company launched a blitz of new enterprise-class IT products.

Most significant among the announcements was a series of integrated converged appliances, including systems built around the Oracle Database 12c and Cloudera's Hadoop big data software. The appliances included application acceleration technology from Fusion-io and converged storage technology vendor Nutanix. Partners were especially excited about the potential opportunities for the new "baby Compellent" Dell Storage SC4020 array.

En Pointe Scores Major Microsoft Office 365 Contract

In one of the biggest Microsoft Office 365 deployments in state and local government this year, solution provider En Pointe Technologies will implement more than 100,000 seats of the Microsoft cloud applications for Los Angeles County employees under a five-year contract.

En Pointe (No. 42 on CRN's 2014 Solution Provider 500 list) will implement the applications across 30 county departments at a price tag of $72 million in licensing revenue alone. En Pointe already manages a number of LA County Microsoft enterprise agreement software contracts and this latest deal expands the solution provider's presence in the county.

MongoDB Database Launches On Microsoft, Google Cloud Systems

MongoDB, the NoSQL, document-oriented database, gained some competitive traction this week when MongoDB Inc. (the software's developer) announced the database now runs on Google Compute Engine as a managed virtual machine and on Microsoft Azure as a managed service. MongoDB (the name comes from humongous) is already a popular cloud service through Amazon Web Services.

Last October MongoDB Inc.'s backers (including EMC, Red Hat and Salesforce.com) provided a whopping $150 million in Series F financing. But Couchbase Inc., which develops Couchbase, a competing NoSQL database, announced $60 million in series E financing this week.

Oracle Acquires Point-Of-Sale Technology Developer Micros Systems

Oracle this week plunked down $5.3 billion to acquire Micros Systems, a developer of point-of-sale hardware and software used in the retail, hotel and hospitality industries. The acquisition is Oracle's largest since it bought Sun Microsystems in January 2014 for $7.2 billion.

Oracle, which recently missed Wall Street expectations with its fourth-quarter earnings, is looking to jump-start its growth. Channel partners told CRN the acquisition should help Oracle and its partners expand in retail and hospitality markets.

Trend Micro Beefs Up Partner Program With New Tiers, Incentives

Trend Micro already has a mature, successful global partner program. But the security software developer understands that such programs need constant attention and frequent updates. This week the company said it is revamping its program with new partner tiers, new incentives, a new partner portal, and simplified training for sales and technical engineers.

The program changes, which will be rolled out gradually through 2015, adds a new referral partner level and helps standardize branding, naming, revenue requirements and benefits around the world, according to Trend Micro channel executives.