5 Companies That Came To Win This Week

The Week Ending Oct. 3

This week's roundup of companies that came to win includes Lenovo's completion of its long-awaited acquisition of IBM's x86 server business, IBM's debut of new Power8 servers, a savvy channel executive hire by Verizon Enterprise Solutions, Oracle's channel move with its cloud software, and Pivotal Software's hire of a big name in the OpenStack community.

Lenovo Completes x86 Server IBM Deal, Promises Channel Offensive

Lenovo this week completed its long-awaited acquisition of IBM's x86 server business for $2.1 billion. Even before the deal officially closed, Lenovo executives vowed to move aggressively to capture market share from rivals Dell and Hewlett-Packard and set an ambitious goal of driving $5 billion in revenue within the first year.

And it's clear the channel will be a major component of that effort. The company promoted Sammy Kinlaw (pictured) as its new executive director of North America channel sales for the Enterprise Systems Group. Kinlaw vowed to grow Lenovo's x86 server business at a rate 30 percent above market growth and will court SMB solution providers through its distributors.

Verizon Ups Its Partner IQ With New Channel Chief Hire

Verizon Enterprise Solutions this week named channel management veteran Adam Famularo to be the telecom company's vice president of global channels. The appointment shows that Verizon intends to step up its already considerable channel game.

Famularo, who served in various channel management roles at CA Technologies over 16 years, is widely seen as one of the top channel executives in the country. He has been recognized numerous times by CRN as one of the industry's top channel strategists.

Oracle Begins Opening Its Cloud Offerings To The Channel

Oracle will open some of its Software-as-a-Service products to the channel, the company told partners at its annual Oracle OpenWorld conference this week. The company also launched the Oracle Cloud Connection, an online community that provides partners with resources they can use to better serve their customers.

Oracle initially is making only a handful of cloud apps: CRM, Taleo talent management, human capital management and customer service automation -- available to partners through select distributors. But Oracle executives said this is only the beginning and indicated the rest of the vendor's cloud portfolio would be available to the channel in the near future.

IBM Launches Server Blitz With New Power8 Systems

IBM may have sold off its x86 server business to Lenovo. But this week Big Blue made it clear it's still a player in the server arena when it unveiled a number of new Power8 servers targeting heavy duty big data and business analysis workloads.

IBM's Linux-based Power servers compete in the mid to high-range RISC server market against Hewlett-Packard's Integrity servers and Oracle's SPARC servers. The new systems include the Power E880, which IBM touted as the "world's most powerful computer."

Pivotal Hires OpenStack Technology Pioneer

Pivotal Software, the big data technology joint venture between EMC and VMware, executed a strategic hire this week when it named Joshua Mckenty to the post of field CTO. McKenty, one of the most influential people in the OpenStack community, was a founder and CTO of Piston Cloud, the San Francisco startup that develops technology for automating and simplifying OpenStack deployments.

McKenty, who CRN identified this year as one of the industry's Top 25 Disrupters, played a major role in building the OpenStack open-source cloud orchestration technology. McKenty told CRN that because OpenStack is widely accepted, he wants to spend more time working on Platform-as-a-Service technology such as Pivotal's Cloud Foundry that runs on OpenStack.