5 Companies That Came To Win This Week

For the week ending July 31, CRN takes a look at the companies that brought their ‘A’ game to the channel.

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The Week Ending July 31

Topping this week’s 5 Companies That Came To Win list is IT services giant Cognizant for making a strategic acquisition that will greatly expand its presence in the Microsoft cloud services arena.

Also making the list are Mimecast, which made its own savvy acquisition in email security; Google for turning to the deep sea to improve the reliability of its cloud services; and Juniper Networks for debuting new network troubleshooting technology. And startup KloudGin makes the list for its Series A funding round that will help it accelerate development of its field service applications.

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Cognizant To Acquire New Signature

IT services giant Cognizant is making a strategic acquisition, striking a deal to buy New Signature, a Washington D.C.-based solution provider and MSP, in a move that will strengthen its hand in the Microsoft services arena.

The acquisition will be the base for Cognizant’s recently formed Microsoft Business Group, which is centered on Microsoft cloud solutions and helping businesses and organizations build native cloud environments around Microsoft Azure.

The acquisition also will expand Cognizant’s hyperscale cloud advisory services.

New Signature is a cloud-first, full-service Microsoft services provider that regularly wins numerous Microsoft partner awards. New Signature boasts more than 500 technical certifications from Microsoft and more than 15 Gold-level certifications and is one of 70 certified Azure Expert Managed Service Providers worldwide.

Mimecast Acquires Email Security Startup MessageControl

Speaking of savvy acquisitions, email security vendor Mimecast said this week that it has acquired startup MessageControl in a move that will allow Mimecast to offer customers stronger protection against advanced phishing and impersonation attacks.

MessageControl also helps prevent the inadvertent loss of sensitive and confidential data and will serve as an additional sensor for Mimecast’s threat intelligence system.

MessageControl is designed to protect customers that use productivity applications such as Microsoft 365. The company’s graph technology inspects email attributes and content and applies machine learning to build a library of known and unknown patterns for individual users.

Google Laying Second Transatlantic Cable To Boost Cloud Reliability

Installing a communications cable under the sea might sound like an odd way to boost cloud computing. But that’s just what Google is doing.

This week the internet services giant said it has begun laying a new fiber optic transatlantic cable that will speed the flow of data between the U.S. and Europe and make the company’s cloud network more reliable by allowing traffic to be rerouted more effectively during outages.

The cable, named after computer sciences pioneer Grace Hopper, implements a cutting-edge fiber switching architecture. It will start in New York and cross under the Atlantic before splitting in the waters off Northern Europe to connect to Bude, U.K., and Bilbao, Spain. The cable installation is expected to be completed by 2022.

The cable will power several Google Cloud services including Google Cloud Platform, Gmail and Meet. The company already operates undersea cables that connect the U.S. to Central and South America, the U.S. to France, and Portugal to two landing sites in Africa.

Juniper Introduces WAN Assurance Service And Virtual Network Assistant

With so many employees working from home, corporate networks have suddenly evolved into wide-area networks with many “mini branch offices.” This week Juniper Networks took steps to make it easier to manage those networks.

With the help of its Mist Systems business, Juniper introduced a new WAN Assurance Service and a virtual network assistant (VNA) conversational interface powered by Marvis, Mist’s VNA technology. The announcements are part of Juniper’s AI-Driven Enterprise strategy for automating and optimizing IT management and end-user satisfaction.

The cloud-based Juniper Mist WAN Assurance Service brings in telemetry data from Juniper SRX devices to the Mist AI engine so that businesses and MSPs can customize WAN services levels. The service works with Marvis to correlate events across the LAN, WLAN and WAN to quickly identify and remedy issues across all domains.

Juniper partners applauded the technology enhancements, saying they provide ways for solution providers to go beyond commodity networks and offer customers differentiated solutions in next-generation networking.

KloudGin Closes $8.2 Million Round To Scale Its ‘Blue-Collar Cloud’

Startup KloudGin has raised $8.2 million in Series A financing to accelerate development of its applications designed for field service and manufacturing floor workers.

KloudGin, founded by a number of former Oracle employees, offers cloud-based and mobile service and asset management applications in such vertical industries as energy, utilities, telecommunications and manufacturing.

The bulk of KloudGin’s sales are through regional VARs focused on midmarket companies. But more recently KloudGin has also begun working with global systems integrators that focus on specific vertical industries.