Five Companies That Came To Win This Week

Kaspersky Hot On Heels Of Security #3 Trend Micro

Kaspersky Lab gained 7.5 percent of endpoint security market share in 2010, and the company expects to relegate long time security industry #3 Trend Micro to the #4 spot this year. After racking up the largest yearly market share gain in its history, Kaspersky is brimming with confidence about the future.

"We are winners. We like to win. We like the challenge. We like to compete," Eugene Buyakin, Kaspersky's COO said this week at Kaspersky's partner conference in Riviera Maya, Mexico. "We continue to gain market share from our competitors."

Brand awareness has been a key growth driver for Kaspersky: In 2010, Kaspersky's global brand awareness grew to 58 percent in the consumer space and to 61 percent in the corporate space. "We do want to become clearly the No. 3 player in this industry [in 2011]," Buyakin said.

Time Warner Nabs Cloud Service Provider Navisite For $230 Million

A week after Verizon acquired Terremark for $1.4 billion, Time Warner responded with a major cloud computing acquisition of its own, plunking down $230 million for Andover, Mass.-based NaviSite. Time Warner said acquiring NaviSite will help build its commercial services customer base while adding a new suite of managed services and cloud solutions to its product portfolio. The acquisition gives Time Warner Cable Business Class, the cable provider's commercial services arm, access to NaviSite's more than 1,200 managed services customers.

Amazon's Storage Cloud Reaches Monstrous Proportions

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), the cloud storage component of Amazon Web Services, now stores about 262 billion objects, a 100-fold jump from four years ago. Amazon claims the peak request rate for S3 is now more than 200,000 requests per second.

These are telling stats that underscore the massive scale Amazon's cloud has attained in a relatively short period. Its scalability and durability has also caught the attention of storage vendors that use S3 as part of the services they sell through solution providers.

Cisco Goes After HP-3Com With SMB Financing Program

Cisco Systems this week launched a new three-year, zero percent interest financing program to help SMB partners close voice and unified communications deals, a bid to capitalize on turmoil in the Avaya-Nortel and HP-3Com channels.

The program covers deals ranging from a minimum of $5,000 to a maximum of $75,000 that include at least one of Cisco's SMB-geared UC systems, either Cisco UC450 or Cisco UC560. Cisco will also pay $1,250 to customers that replace a competing UC system with one of Cisco's UC systems.

Google Android Passes Symbian, Stands Atop Smartphone Heap

Google's Android is now the world's top smartphone in terms of units shipped, eclipsing Nokia's Symbian platform for the first time, according to research released this week by Canalys. In Q4, Android shipments accounted for 32.9 percent of the global market, compared to 30.6 percent for Symbian, which has long held the top spot in terms of mobile devices but whose relevance has been fading with the rise of smartphones.

Android shipments grew an astonishing 615.1 percent year over year, a figure that's no doubt causing headaches over at Microsoft, whose share dropped from 8 percent in last year's Q4 to 5 percent this year, according to Canalys.