5 Companies That Came To Win

RIM Receives 15,000 New Apps For Blackberry

Research In Motion has received 15,000 new apps for its upcoming BlackBerry 10 platform in only three days, suggesting its efforts to woo developers to the new mobile OS may just be paying off.

The rush of new apps resulted from RIM's "Port-a-Thon" events, which encouraged developers to take any applications not already compatible with BlackBerry 10 and "port" them over to the new platform. The events, which started Friday, Jan. 11, and lasted just over 37 hours, were open to developers porting either legacy BlackBerry apps or apps built for Google's Android OS.

"When we decided to hold a series of Port-A-Thons to help our developer community port their apps over to BlackBerry 10 we had no idea how wildly successful they would be," the company wrote in its developer blog. "This past weekend's Port-A-Thons brought in more than 15,000 apps! It has been truly inspiring to see so much excitement and support for BlackBerry 10."

CenturyLink Makes A Big Cloud Bet With The Channel

Telecom giant CenturyLink pledged to grow its percentage of channel revenue from 15 percent to 30 percent within the next five years.

Now that the company has digested major acquisitions like Qwest and Savvis, it will focus on channel priorities like ease of doing business and growing market share with the help of partners.

"There's no question in CenturyLink's mind that we cannot get at these markets without strong channels," said Jim Ousley, Savvis' CEO and president of CenturyLink's Enterprise Markets Group at the company's annual Alliance Expo Conference In Denver. "We need you, and we need you to be a bigger part of our business."

Cloud Sherpas Snaps Up Two More Companies

Cloud Sherpas, a cloud solution provider specializing in Salesforce.com and Google Apps implementations, has purchased Innoveer Solutions, a CRM integration firm, and Navigis, an IT service management provider.

The acquisitions are the latest in Cloud Sherpas' aggressive worldwide growth strategy as a cloud software broker. Innoveer Solutions, a CRM consultancy, is based in Boston, with offices in the U.K. and an outsourcing business in Mumbai, India. Navigis helps customers implement IT service management with ServiceNow, which offers cloud-based services to automate enterprise IT operations.

"This is in line with our strategy to build a cloud services brokerage worldwide, with a Salesforce business that's appropriate in size to be among the largest Salesforce partners in the world," said Cloud Sherpas CEO David Northington.

Verdasys Adds Data Loss Prevention Support To Citrix ShareFile

Verdasys is adding support for Citrix ShareFile to its Digital Guardian Enterprise Information Protection Platform, extending data loss prevention capabilities to organizations that support virtual desktops.

Citrix ShareFile allows users to sync and share data from any device in a secure location. The new functionality gives Verdasys customers the ability to block data being sent to unapproved personal cloud storage locations or storage devices and redirect it to Citrix ShareFile.

"Enterprise customers are asking us for more advanced use cases where they want to track data in a public or private cloud and control what happens to data when it comes out of that environment," said Marcus Brown, vice president of business development at Verdasys. "We monitor the data going in and as it goes out, and we're applying some of the same capabilities we apply at the endpoint."

Juniper Adds New Services, Cloud, MDF Channel Resources

Juniper has beefed up its Partner Advantage program with new incentives specific to cloud.

Juniper Advantage Cloud will offer partners training, marketing, financing and various incentives to sell cloud capabilities specific to Juniper and its strategic partners. In addition, there will soon be a Juniper Cloud Innovation Fund partners will be able to tap for help building cloud infrastructure solutions.

Juniper CEO Kevin Johnson (pictured) said the company is making available to partners the largest Market Development Fund (MDF) allocation in the company's history.

Solution providers will also now have access to quarterly product road maps from Juniper, as well as a program called Junos Jump Start to help them with solution design using Juniper's Junos platforms.