Five Companies That Came To Win This Week

Coraid Scores Big With $50M Venture Funding Round

Ethernet SAN technology developer Coraid on Thursday proved there is still a lot of venture capital out there looking for good investment opportunities when it unveiled a new $50-million investment in the company that included hard drive vendor Seagate as a strategic investor.

Not that Coraid really needs the cash, to hear CEO Kevin Brown talk. The company is still sitting on cash from last year's $25 million funding round. However, it is nice to keep around for things like making acquisitions.

"There are lots of little startups here (in the Silicon Valley area)," he said. "Many are suited to being acquired by larger companies."

Data Centers Get ARMed For Energy-Efficient Future

ARM, the U.K.-based processor vendor, had a couple of big wins this week that helped it take some high ground against Intel in the race to be the nucleus of energy-efficient data centres, erh, centers.

ARM was the star Tuesday when Hewlett Packard unveiled Project Moonshot, a new program for sharing IT resources across an energy-efficient data center. The centerpiece was a new server, Redstone, built by ARM partner Calxeda, that stuffs over 2,800 individual ARM-based servers in a rack.

ARM, which last week saw partner AppliedMicro introduce the first 64-bit ARM-based architecture, on Monday also unveiled the acquisition of IC design software developer Prolific.

From Two VARs To One: Presidio Unveils Plan To Acquire INX

Presidio Network Solutions on Tuesday said it reached an $85 million deal to acquire INX in a merger of two VAR500 companies.

The deal, once it closes early next year, will instantly push Presidio into the national spotlight. Presidio has 31 regional offices, most of them in the East and South, along with one office in Southern California and three in Texas. But 16 of INX's 20 offices are located west of the Mississippi, from Texas to California.

F5 Shows Security Strategy With High-Profile Poaching Of Cisco Exec

When networking vendor F5 Networks decided to show it is serious about security, it skipped the marching bands and fancy press releases in favor of a dramatic poaching of a high-profile Cisco executive.

F5 Networks on Monday said it hired away one of Cisco's best-known senior vice presidents to be the new head of its security and strategy teams.

Manny Rivelo, a 19-year Cisco veteran and most recently Cisco's senior vice president, engineering operations and systems, will have the title of senior vice president, security and strategic solutions at F5, reporting to John McAdam, F5's president and CEO.

Lenovo Reports Record Financial Quarter

What could be more fun than stealing bragging rights as the world's second largest PC maker from Dell? Why, making a lot of money doing so.

Lenovo Wednesday reported record quarterly revenue of $7.8 billion for its second fiscal quarter on the back of 35.8-percent growth in PC shipments during the quarter thanks to a strong growth in the channel.

That was the tenth consecutive quarter that Lenovo has grown faster than the industry as a whole, the company said.

Lenovo also reported a 59.8-percent year-over-year growth in gross profit for the quarter to $948 million.