5 Companies That Came To Win This Week

The Week Ending Dec. 4

Topping this week's roundup of companies that came to win is Hewlett Packard Enterprise's launch of its groundbreaking Synergy "composable" infrastructure that's designed to leapfrog converged infrastructure systems from competitors.

Also making the list this week are AppDynamics' $158 million venture financing win, startup OpsClarity's impressive launch, Ingram Micro's acquisition of some key cloud assets, and Microsoft's shipping of a new release of its enterprise Office 365.

Not everyone in the IT industry was making smart moves this week, of course. For a rundown of companies that were unfortunate, unsuccessful or just didn't make good decisions, check out this week's Five Companies That Had A Rough Week roundup.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise Launches Synergy Infrastructure

Hewlett Packard Enterprise CEO Meg Whitman called the new "composable" Synergy architecture the company's biggest technology breakthrough in a decade.

While there may be some hyperbole there, the announcement of the new infrastructure technology, designed to leapfrog converged infrastructure offerings from the likes of Nutanix and Cisco, was clearly a milestone for HPE. The unveiling comes just weeks after the company was created from the split of the old Hewlett-Packard.

Synergy is designed to bridge traditional and cloud-native applications, creating fluid resource pools that can be deployed at "cloud speed." The technology is slated to be available in the second quarter of 2016.

AppDynamics Snags $158 Million In Venture Financing

Venture financing rounds of more than $100 million aren't as rare as they once were. But a funding announcement of $158 million is still enough to make people sit up and take notice.

AppDynamics, developer of software for monitoring, managing, analyzing and optimizing complex software environments, this week said it closed on a $158 million financing round led by General Atlantic and Altimeter Capital.

The financing puts AppDynamics' market value at $1.9 billion, according to a TechCrunch story. The company said the funding would be used to accelerate development of the AppDynamics Application Intelligence Platform and expand the company's sales and marketing operations.

Startup OpsClarity Launches Next-Gen IT Monitoring System

AppDynamics wasn't the only startup making headlines this week. OpsClarity, the high-visibility creation of a group of former Cisco, Google and Yahoo engineers, formally debuted its infrastructure and application monitoring system.

The company also announced $11 million in Series A financing and said it will launch a channel program in 2016.

OpsClarity has been developing the software since its 2013 founding. The company said the OpsClarity Intelligent Operations Platform leverages big data analytics and data science technology, including machine learning and data streaming, to help IT management monitor and troubleshoot Web-scale applications and infrastructure.

Ingram Micro To Buy 500-Person Cloud Management Vendor

Distributor Ingram Micro took a significant step this week to boost its cloud computing market position by striking a deal to acquire Odin, a cloud service provider and service automation platform developer.

Owning Odin will help Ingram Micro accelerate the functionality of its Cloud Marketplace and help bring on new vendors and cloud service providers, Ingram said. (The distributor licensed Odin in 2013 when it built the cloud marketplace, now used by about 12,000 resellers.) That should give reseller partners more cloud offerings to provision, manage and invoice.

Odin's 500-employee roster includes some 250 software engineers, a resource that will boost the distributor's cloud development capabilities.

Microsoft Delivers Long-Awaited Office 365 E5

Microsoft this week debuted the latest enterprise edition of its Office 365 cloud-based productivity suite, a long-anticipated release that's expected to create new opportunities for channel partners.

The release offers cloud-based calling and Web conferencing, an eDiscovery tool for documents, end-user and organizational analytics, and new security and compliance capabilities.

Partners said the software would create new upsell opportunities with existing customers and help them attract new customers.