5 Companies That Came To Win This Week

For the week ending Feb. 19, CRN takes a look at the companies that brought their ‘A’ game to the channel.

The Week Ending Feb. 19

Topping this week’s Came to Win list is security tech developer CrowdStrike, which struck a strategic acquisition deal in a move that will boost the data analysis and observability capabilities of its security platform.

Also making the list are Palo Alto Networks for its own savvy acquisition in the cloud security space, big data software developer Matillion for an impressive funding round, security operations firm Red Canary for its own successful round of financing, and Verizon and Cisco Systems for expanding their alliance to bring SD-WAN solutions to enterprise customers.

CrowdStrike To Acquire Log Management Startup Humio For $400 Million

Cybersecurity tech developer CrowdStrike struck a big acquisition deal this week when it agreed to buy log data management startup Humio for $400 million.

The addition of Humio’s technology will help the developers, security analysts and IT professionals that use the CrowdStrike platform gain complete observability into threats and vulnerabilities and obtain actionable insight from computer-generated data in real time.

The addition of Humio’s native ability to ingest, correlate and analyze unstructured and semi-structured data from logs, applications and data feeds will enhance how CrowdStrike’s platform addresses DevOps and DevSecOps issues and will provide deep, contextual index-free eXtended Detection and Response (XDR) with speed and scale.

Palo Alto Networks To Boost Cloud Security With Bridgecrew Acquisition

Speaking of savvy acquisitions, Palo Alto Networks announced a deal to buy cloud security startup Bridgecrew for $156 million in a move that will allow Palo Alto Networks to deliver cloud security across the full application lifecycle.

Bridgecrew helps bridge the gap between developers and cloud security. The company makes use of “shift left” security techniques in which infrastructure configuration is codified during development.

The addition of Bridgecrew’s technology to the Palo Alto Security system will provide developers and DevOps teams with a systematic way to enforce infrastructure security standards throughout the development lifecycle.

Big Data Software Developer Matillion Raises $100M In Series D Round

Data integration and transformation software developer Matillion scored big in investor backing this week, raising $100 million in a Series D round of funding.

Founded in 2011, Matillion has now raised a total of $160.6 million in financing, including $35 million the company raised in a Series C round in June 2019. The latest financing round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with participation from Battery Ventures, Sapphire Ventures and Scale Venture Partners, along with financing from Silicon Valley Bank U.K. Branch.

Matillion’s software is one of a new generation of data ETL (extract, transform and load) tools used to prepare and move data from operational systems and applications to cloud-based platforms, such as Snowflake, Databricks, Amazon Redshift, Azure Synapse and Google Big Query, for business analytics, data visualization, machine learning and other tasks.

Capturing and analyzing increasingly huge volumes of big data to develop competitive insights is one of the most complex data management challenges businesses and organizations face today.

Security Operations Firm Red Canary Raises $81M To Grow R&D

Also having a good week in the financing department was security operations company Red Canary, which raised $81 million in a Series C round led by Summit partners.

Red Canary plans to use the new funding to accelerate its research and development efforts and expand its sales and marketing teams – both to meet rapidly growing customer demand.

The company has now raised a total of $125 million in outside funding.

Verizon, Cisco Expand Alliance To Offer Managed SD-WAN

Networking giant Cisco Systems and carrier Verizon this week announced an expansion of their relationship with Verizon adding three Cisco SD-WAN solutions to the Verizon Business portfolio for enterprise customers.

Verizon and Cisco have been working together since last year to provide businesses and organizations with needed technology for building out agile networking infrastructure – especially in light of new IT demands due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In June, for example, Verizon added Cisco’s Enterprise Network Compute System to its Virtualized Network Services portfolio.

The latest joint offerings are in response to increased demand for SD-WAN solutions, the two companies said.

Verizon will now offer a co-managed solution with Cisco SD-WAN powered by Viptela, managed SD-WAN powered by Viptela for the Cisco ISR1100 Series platform, and managed services tiers for the Cisco SD-WAN offering powered by Meraki.