Five Companies That Came To Win This Week

Lenovo Investing In Brand Marketing To Aid Partners

At Varnex this week, Lenovo told attendees that it's planning a marketing and advertising campaign aimed at building the Lenovo brand into a major force in the marketplace.

In the past, Lenovo left it up to partners to promote its brand and sell products. Now the company is stepping up and spending millions on a consumer-focused and business-focused marketing and advertising campaign that includes new television commercials.

"We are now selling our brand for you so you can go out and sell our products," Chris Frey, vice president and channel chief at Lenovo, told Varnex attendees.

Open Source Networking Upstart Vyatta Gets $12 Million VC Round

Virtualized networking specialist Vyatta this week scored a new $12 million venture capital funding round led by HighBar Partners, with participation from existing investors JPMorgan, Arrowpath Venture Partners and Citrix Systems.

The near term outlook looks rosy for Vyatta and potential channel partners that are looking at teaming up with the company: Sales are on track to triple this year, CEO Kelly Herrell told CRN this week. What's more, Vyatta on track to do around 70 percent of its business through the channel by next year, and 85 percent in 2013, Herrell said.

Google Gives BigData Service A Major Shot In The Arm

Google, in a bid to broaden the potential market for its BigQuery data analytics service, this week added new features that tackle the task of crunching massive amounts of data in the cloud.

Google's objective with BigQuery is to help customers identify and analyze trends within their datasets. "Rapidly crunching terabytes of big data can lead to better business decisions, but this has traditionally required tremendous IT investments," wrote Google Product Manager Ju-kay Kwek in a post on Google's enterprise blog.

Salesforce Acquires Model Metrics For Mobile, Social Services

Salesforce this week acquired Chicago-based Model Metrics, a cloud solution provider partner and purveyor of social cloud consulting services. It's a move aimed at helping companies leverage cloud, social and mobile technologies in their daily business.

Founded in 2003, Model Metrics has been an evangelist for cloud computing and currently boasts more than 500 customers and 1,000 Salesforce deployments.

NetEnrich Steps Up To Help Devastated Joplin, Mo. Region

NetEnrich, a remote IT infrastructure management provider, this week pledged to donate 5 percent of revenue generated by Ingram Micro's VentureTech Network VARs to the Habitat For Humanity in Joplin, Mo., until March 31, 2012.

Joplin was the site of a deadly tornado in June. Building a Habitat for Humanity home costs an estimated $45,000, and NetEnrich hopes to be able to raise enough money through VTN sales to build a few houses, Justin Crotty, senior vice president and general manager at NetEnrich, told CRN.