Five Companies That Came To Win This Week

Brocade Boosts Customer Service

Brocade on Tuesday launched a new program, dubbed Brocade Network Subscription, enabling its customers to acquire its data center products via a monthly subscription. The new subscription program aims to give customers ways to cut costs as well as greater flexibility to scale their networking and data center resources, the company says.

Under the terms program, Brocade customers pay for their network infrastructure on a monthly basis, and can adjust the level of acquisition depending on their network capacity needs. Meanwhile, executives maintain that there’s no term limit, no risk for unused equipment and no capital lease agreement.

The subscription option will be offered through the Brocade’s Elite level partners, as well as select Federal government partners and global systems integrators, with a subscription service qualifying threshold of $500,000.

Time To Shine For Cisco Partners

This week, Cisco said it planned to put some wind into the sails of its channel strategy by finding ways to drive more business through partners while letting them take the lead with customers.

The networking giant said that putting the ’partner’ in its ’partner-led’ strategy will include implementing a partner relationship management (PRM) system as well as a slew of incentives designed to help partners streamline and receive higher margins for Cisco deals. Cisco said it would also bolster partner-led deals with marketing resources and lead generation, while working collaboratively with the solution provider's sales and marketing teams.

And that’s not all. Cisco also plans to tap into Microsoft’s Office market after it acquired Versly, a San Francisco-based firm specializing in how collaboration tools integrate via plug-in to Microsoft Office. The acquisition will make Cisco's collaboration products more alluring to Microsoft Office’s 600 million users, the company said.

More IBM Acquisitions

IBM went on a bit of a shopping spree. This week the company said that it planned to acquire Algorithmics, specializing in financial risk analysis software and services, for $387 million.

And earlier this week IBM said that it would further expand its security capabilities after it inked a deal to buy U.K.-based i2, a security firm offering threat and fraud detection applications.

Toronto-based Algorithmics develops risk analysis applications used by banking, investment and insurance companies to help assess financial risk, make business decisions and comply with regulatory requirements, while also providing risk assessment advisory services. The purchase aligns with IBM’s stated focus in business analytics while revenue from business analysis software and services grew 20 percent in the first half of 2011. The company expects those sales to reach $16 billion by 2015.

Salesforce Gets Aggressive With ISV

During the DreamForce conference in San Francisco this week, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said the company planned to put pedal to the metal with an aggressive ISV push.

Putting its money where its mouth is, Salesforce also unveiled several high-profile ISV partnerships this week. Meanwhile the company said that ISV orders are up 210 percent year-over-year and ISV revenue is up 90 percent year-over-year, while ISV partner growth experienced a 25 percent year-over-year growth.

The ISV push is part of the cloud company’s overriding strategy to head toward the social enterprise, a business model comprising social, mobile and cloud technologies, and an approach that the company hopes will retool previous models in which applications and platforms remained separate entities, executives said.

VMware Partners Get In The Cloud

During its VMWorld conference in Las Vegas this week, VMware boasted that its partners are using recently released components of its highly touted cloud infrastructure stack to deliver backup and recovery and business continuity services to customers.

Four of those partners include VeriStor, FusionStorm, iLand and Hosting.com, which are gearing up to launch cloud based disaster recovery services based on vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM).

Meanwhile, VMware also announced that Dell came on board its vCloud Data Services program, joining existing partners that include Colt, Bluelock, CSC, and Terremark/Verizon. The company also unveiled Global Connect, collaboration between vCloud partners that lets customers obtain services from different providers under a single contract.