Five Companies That Came To Win This Week

Citrix Steps Up Cloud Game Core Mobile Investment

Citrix Systems continued its bold march into the cloud this week by investing in Core Mobile Networks, a company that boasts its ability to "mobilize the cloud."

Core Mobile Networks correlates information from enterprise IT systems with content in the cloud and delivers that data to mobile devices, focusing specifically on the sizeable target of Apple iPhone and Android mobile device users.

Core Mobile is the third company in which Citrix has invested as part of its Startup Accelerator program, an initiative launched last December to scout out promising new cloud and virtualization technologies.

Oracle Expands Content Management Lineup With FatWire Buy

Oracle has been quiet on the acquisition front this year, but this week the company's M&A engine crackled to life with the acquisition of FatWire Software, a developer of Web content management applications, for an undisclosed sum.

Oracle says FatWire's technology will complement its CRM and ATG Web Commerce software, as well as its enterprise content management, business intelligence and portal systems. The deal will pit Oracle in more head-to-head competition with Adobe, EMC, IBM and other vendors in the Web content management space.

Kaspersky Inks Global Distribution Deal With Ingram Micro

Kaspersky Lab added some distribution muscle this week by teaming up with Ingram Micro on a global agreement that will bolster the security vendor's partnership and channel reach. Kaspersky already has distribution deals with Tech Data, D&H, as well as Computerlinks and Synnex in Canada, but with Ingram's reach, Kaspersky is looking to continue its rise in the security market and put more pressure on Symantec and McAfee.

IBM Ramps Channel Recruitment For Netezza

IBM this week said it wants the channel to account for half of the data warehouse appliance sales from its Netezza operation within four years. That's an ambitious jump considering that Netezza was almost entirely reliant on direct sales before IBM acquired it last November.

Appliances are to the channel what seals are to Great White Sharks, and IBM believes that its Netezza data warehouse appliances will be a major component of business intelligence product channel sales. All it needs to do now is show partners how selling Netezza will translate into higher margins.

Mozilla Exploring Simpler Way Of Handling PDF Files

PDF files have always been kind of clunky to work with, and they're also rife with security issues. Mozilla is apparently fed up with PDFs, and this week, the organization unveiled a new project that will render PDFs natively within the Firefox browser using HTML5 and Javascript.

"Our most immediate goal is to implement the most commonly used PDF features so we can render a large majority of the PDFs found on the web. We believe we can reach that point in less than 3 months (the entire code so far is less than one month old, and it already renders a large set of PDF features)," said Mozilla researcher Andreas Gal in a recent blog post.

Mozilla will initially offer a Firefox extension to interested users that enables inline PDF rendering using pdf.js, but its ultimate goal is to embed this capability into Firefox. This will result in a substantial usability but also security improvement for our users," Gal wrote.