Five Companies That Came To Win This Week

EMC Bolsters Americas Channel With Iventosch

Storage giant EMC pumped ups its channel business this week with the addition of Leonard Iventosch, former channel chief at Isilon Systems, as newly-appointed vice president of Americas channel sales.

Iventosch, who previously served as channel chief at NetApp, came to EMC when the storage leader acquired Isilon earlier this year. He will now report to Gregg Ambulous, who was formerly managing both worldwide and Americas channel sales for EMC but will soon become vice president of global channel sales for the company. As a result, EMC partners in the Americas will have a dedicated channel chief who will focus entirely on the region, which should benefit solution providers.

Dimension Data Joins Cloud Forces With OpSource

Dimension Data boosted its cloud computing solutions business with the acquisition of OpSource, a Santa Clara, Calif.-based cloud infrastructure vendor and managed hosting provider. Already one of the largest solution providers in the business, Dimension Data now has the ability to offer a cloud computing ecosystem with OpSource, which will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Dimension Data. Jere Brown, CEO of Dimension Data, said that OpSource" accelerates our cloud services journey" and will help his company compete against other cloud providers.

AMD's Fusion Desktop APU Arrives

AMD has bet its future on its new Fusion APU (accelerated processing unit), which integrates CPU technology with GPU capabilities on a single chip. And the all-important A-Series desktop chip, codenamed "Llano," was released this week and showed that AMD made a smart bet. The A-Series chip, which is designed to compete with Intel's Sandy Bridge Core i3 and i5 processors, is competitively priced and offers plenty of graphics horsepower for consumers and business users, eliminating the need for costly discrete graphics cards. And with up to four x86 cores, Llano comes with plenty of processing power, too. Throw in the fact that the new chips consume very low power and run cooler than many other desktop processors and AMD gets an "A" for Llano.

Microsoft Gets In the Cloud Game With Office 365

Microsoft launched its long-awaited and much-anticipated Office 365 cloud application service, which puts Microsoft's mighty Office applications in the cloud.

Microsoft now has a competing product that can go head-to-head with Google Apps. Microsoft and archrival Google have been locked in a bitter battle for cloud supremacy, and while Google has been ahead of Microsoft for some time with Google Apps, Office 365 could quickly level the playing field (read the CRN Test Center's review of Office 365's beta). Microsoft could also get a leg up on Google by integrating Office 365 with Skype, which Microsoft recently agreed to acquire.

HP Introduces TouchPad Tablet To Eager Partners

After a long wait and a rocky road (remember the HP Slate 500?), HP finally launched a viable tablet offering this week with the TouchPad tablet.

While the new tablet, which is based on Palm's WebOS, has received some mixed reviews, HP partners are jazzed for the TouchPad and hope the product will become a strong business-class tablet for enterprise and SMB customers. Furthermore, distributors such as Synnex expect strong demand in the channel for the TouchPad. While the TouchPad won't overtake the iPad any time soon, solution providers see big opportunities to sell HP's tablet to vertical markets such as health care with customized applications.