Five Companies That Came To Win This Week

Intel Steps Up To The Plate In Smartphones

Intel was late to the smartphone party, but now it has a plan for getting its Atom mobile processors into smartphones. With the unveiling of three new OEM partnerships at the Mobile World Congress this week, Intel is making clear its resolve to get back in the race. "We are not a stranger to the mobile market," Intel CEO Paul Otellini said in a keynote at MWC.

Intel’s current Atom Medfield mobile processor, Otellini said, is an industry leader in power and speed, according to benchmark tests. The new chip will also bring to devices an 8-megapixel camera that can take 10 pictures in less than one second, along with 1080-pixel videos. "It’s a lot more than just a chip," Otellini said.

Dell Takes Big Step Toward Converged Infrastructure

Dell this week unveiled server and storage technologies that could put the company in a position to take on Cisco and HP in the converged infrastructure market.

Dell introduced its 12th generation (12G) server architecture, focused on ease of deployment and management in virtualized environments, and a PCIe-based Flash cache solution for high-speed performance. The company also debuted its EqualLogic PS Series storage arrays, which feature 10-Gbit Ethernet performance, iSCSI over Data Center Bridging, and new management capabilities in Microsoft and Linux environments.

Presidio Goes For Data Center Gusto With BlueWater Acquisition

Presidio Networked Solutions acquired BlueWater Communications Group, a move that combines two of the most powerful communications and data center-focused solution providers in the U.S.

Bob Cagnazzi, BlueWater's CEO, will become CEO of Presidio following the close of the acquisition. Presidio has not had a CEO since the departure of former chief executive Joel Schleicher in 2011.

"It's going to be a lot of fun," Cagnazzi told CRN this week. "We felt we needed to be better positioned over the next few years to build managed and cloud-based services, and we needed the type of size and scope they have to fast-track those investments. It's been very well received by our employees and clients."

AMD Gets Into Low-Power Server Game With SeaMicro Acquisition

AMD is acquiring SeaMicro in a $334 million deal that will put the chipmaker in the market for low-power microservers, which are rapidly coming into vogue as companies look to cut power consumption in cloud data centers.

SeaMicro’s fabric technology will position AMD to deliver ’industry-leading server building blocks’ to handle workloads such as dynamic web content and social networking, AMD said.

"We are clearly skating to where the puck is going," AMD CEO Rory Read said in a conference call announcing the move, invoking one of the most hackneyed phrases in IT industry history.

Virtualization Vendor AppSense Branches Out Into Security

AppSense, a virtualization vendor that is riding high on the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) trend, unveiled DataLocker, an application that encrypts and decrypts local files on a PC or mobile device before synching them to cloud storage services such as Dropbox. DataLocker is the first product from AppSense Labs, the New York City-based vendor's research arm, which had previously operated behind the scenes.

This quarter and next, AppSense Labs will release "quite a stream" of apps aimed at consumers and enterprises, Pete Rawlinson, chief marketing officer at AppSense told CRN. "We have so many interesting things coming out that we felt we needed to make this official," he said.