5 Companies That Came To Win This Week

For the week ending June 25, CRN takes a look at the companies that brought their ‘A’ game to the channel.

The Week Ending June 25

Topping this week’s Came to Win list is Microsoft for its Windows 11 debut and for hitting a new market cap milestone.

Also making the list this week are Hewlett Packard Enterprise for unleashing a wave of innovative products at its annual Discover conference, Lenovo for its plans to deliver a significant channel program upgrade, security tech vendors Ping Identity and LookingGlass for making strategic acquisitions, and Confluent for its successful IPO.

Microsoft Debuts Windows 11, Reaches $2 Trillion Market Cap

Software giant Microsoft hit it big twice this week, launching a major new release of its flagship Windows operating system and scoring a $2 trillion market valuation as its stock hit $265.51 per share.

The new Windows 11, successor to the Windows 10 operating system that’s been out since 2015, includes direct integration with the Teams collaboration app, a refreshed user interface and a revamped Microsoft Store. The software also offers improved voice recognition and zero-trust-ready security.

Windows 11, which Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella called “the first version of a new era of windows,” is expected to be generally available by the holiday season as a free update for Windows 10 PCs. Microsoft partners said the new Windows edition marks an important update in its security and collaboration advances.

Microsoft, meanwhile, hit the $2 trillion market valuation threshold on Tuesday as its stock price grew about 1.1 percent to more than $265 per share. (The stock’s $265.27 close on Thursday maintained the market cap at $2.009 trillion.) Microsoft joins Apple, which became a $2 trillion market-valued company in August 2020 and currently has a market cap of $2.226 trillion.

HPE Unleashes Innovations AT HPE Discover 2021

Hewlett Packard Enterprise held its HPE Virtual Discover 2021 technology conference for customers and partners this week where it unveiled a blizzard of new products and business strategies.

HPE made a number of announcements around its GreenLake on-premises cloud services including the new Project Aurora zero trust security architecture for GreenLake, a new Silicon On Demand capability, the GreenLake Lighthouse platform for instantly deploying multiple workload-optimized cloud services across any platform, the new HPE Compute Cloud Console, and the new 5G Core for Telco GreenLake service.

The company is promising partners more lead generation and co-selling assistance around GreenLake. The company also is piloting a program with its Pointnext services organization that will provide MSP partners with more GreenLake managed services opportunities

As HPE Virtual Discover 2021 was about to kick off, HPE said it had acquired artificial intelligence tech developer Determined AI.

And an extra cheer to solution provider Advizex, which was named the Hewlett Packard Enterprise U.S. As-A-Service Partner of the Year.

Lenovo Debuts Lenovo 360 Partner Program To Unite PC And Data Center Businesses

Lenovo wins kudos this week for unveiling a new global partner program that’s designed to bring together the company’s intelligent devices and data center infrastructure businesses in a more cohesive and profitable way for partners.

The new Lenovo 360 program, slated to launch in early 2022, signals how the PC and data center system company’s sales framework will evolve in keeping with its “One Lenovo” strategy.

Lenovo reorganized in April into three business units: the Intelligent Devices Group, a rebranded Infrastructure Solutions Group (previously the Data Center Group) and a new Solutions and Service Group.

Lenovo is seeking to unite those businesses from a solutions creation and go-to-market perspective and drive greater product synergies and partner opportunities. The company recently established a global channel organization which, along with the new Lenovo 360 program, will bring the company and its channel partners closer to that “One Lenovo” goal.

Ping Identity, LookingGlass Make Strategic Security Acquisitions

Security technology developers Ping Identity and LookingGlass both made news this week when they unveiled significant acquisitions that will bolster their product portfolios.

Ping Identity acquired bot detection and mitigation startup SecuredTouch, whose technology provides identity, risk and fraud teams with early visibility into potential malicious activity. The acquisition will allow Ping to offer more extensive intelligence and protection capabilities around customer identity.

LookingGlass Cyber Solutions, meanwhile, bought attack surface management startup AlphaWave, a move that will give customers deeper attack surface visibility into cloud and container environments, helping them better understand and reduce their cyber risk with proactive detection and mitigation.

Confluent Launches Successful IPO That Raises More Than $800M, Sets Market Cap at $11B

Confluent, the startup developer of real-time “data-in-motion” processing software, went public this week in one of the most highly anticipated tech IPOs of the year.

Confluent began trading on the Nasdaq exchange Thursday at far above its $36-per-share target price, closing the day at $45.02 and giving the company a market cap of $11.39 billion.

The company raised $828 million through the IPO.