5 Companies That Came To Win This Week

For the week ending Nov. 6, CRN takes a look at the companies that brought their ‘A’ game to the channel.

The Week Ending Nov. 6

Topping this week’s Came to Win list is Intel for the company’s return to the discrete graphics processor market.

Also making the list are Aruba for its technology integration plans for its recent Silver Peak SD-WAN acquisition, HP for launching its new partner program, WANdisco for its plans to go 100-percent channel and launching its new partner program, and AWS for a savvy executive hire away from rival Oracle.

Intel Returns To The Discrete GPU Arena With Iris XE Max

After three years of teasing its return to the discrete graphics market, Intel this week debuted its first product in the category, the Intel Iris Xe Max graphics processor, which will pair with the chipmaker’s new Tiger Lake processors for ultra-thin laptops to focus on content creation.

As part of the launch, Intel announced a new software framework called Deep Link that aggregates a CPU and GPUs to accelerate performance by sharing power and enabling faster AI-based content creation and encoding.

The first laptops to use the Iris Xe Max chip from Acer, Asus and Dell Technologies are already hitting the market.

Intel also reiterated plans to release later this year a discrete GPU for servers based on the same XE-LP microarchitecture as the Iris Xe Max. The company also plans to bring low-power, XE-LP discrete GPUs to value desktops in the first half of 2021.

Aruba Raises Stakes In Edge Battle With Cisco, Palo Alto Networks By Integrating ClearPass Into Silver Peak

Aruba is stepping its competition with Cisco Systems and Palo Alto Networks in the secure intelligent edge technology arena. This week the company said it is tightly integrating its recently acquired Silver Peak SD-WAN offering with its AI-based ClearPass Device Insight security platform.

That integration, with a targeted delivery date within the next six months, is in response to customers who need better ways to secure the edge of corporate networks including Internet of Things endpoints, users and their connected devices, medical devices, barcode scanners and more.

Aruba also intends to integrate Silver Peak with the Aruba Central network management platform with a delivery timetable of one year.

Aruba closed its $925 million acquisition of SD-WAN superstar Silver Peak in September.

HP’s New Amplify Partner Program Goes Live

Printer and PC giant HP wins kudos this week for going live with its new Amplify partner program, offering a new compensation structure and a greater focus on services and data sharing with partners.

HP first unveiled details about Amplify back in July, giving partners time to become familiar with the program, and the program officially went live Monday. The company said 99 percent of its commercial partners are registered.

Amplify’s revamped compensation structure puts greater emphasis on rewarding partners who offer services (such as Device-as-a-Service and print management), collaborate with HP around customer data and bring a strong digital presence to the table.

While sales volumes remain one metric by which partners are measured, the company is putting increased emphasis on other performance indicators including service delivery capability and pre-sales support utilization.

Even sales-related metrics are going beyond simple sales volumes to include such performance indicators as deal registration volume, sales conversation rates and average revenue per account, as well as post-sales metrics such as time to delivery, customer satisfaction and account retention.

Sticking with the topic of new partner programs, distributed computing and data replication technology developer WANdisco wins kudos this week for its plans to shift to an all-channel sales model and for launching its first partner program, the LiveData Partner Network.

Data Migration Vendor WANdisco Adopts All-Channel Strategy, Launches First Partner Program

The moves come as WANdisco and its solution provider partners see significant opportunities to market the company’s software for migrating massive data stores based on Hadoop and other legacy technology to the cloud – a potential addressable market that WANdisco puts at more than $1.7 billion.

On Thursday WANdisco, which has dual headquarters in Sheffield, U.K., and San Ramon, Calif., launched the LiveData Partner Network, a three-tiered program that offers a range of sales, marketing, training, certification and support resources – all accessible through a new partner portal.

Until recently about 90 percent of WANdisco’s sales were direct with the balance through OEMs like IBM. The company has been recruiting partners in recent months, especially systems integrators and strategic service providers, and ramping up sales through ISVs, VARs, solution providers, global and regional systems integrators, consulting companies and cloud service providers. The company expects to eventually have a partner roster numbering in the dozens.

AWS Hires Away Oracle’s Americas Sales Leader

Amazon Web Services scored a personnel coup this week when it hired Oracle senior sales executive Rich Geraffo to take the post of vice president of Americas sales for AWS.

Geraffo, a seven-year Oracle veteran, had served as senior vice president of Oracle’s North America Technology Division for most of his time at the company, according to his LinkedIn page. He also served as executive vice president of North America cloud technology from June 2019 until his departure.

Geraffo also has earlier experience running Americas sales operations at Hewlett Packard and VMware.

Channel partners told CRN that hiring Geraffo provides AWS with more sales muscle as the company looks to convince major customers – especially Fortune 500 global accounts – to switch from Oracle to AWS.