Five Companies That Came To Win This Week

Salesforce Launches Fusillade Of Social Networking Programs

Salesforce this week unveiled five social networking programs aimed at helping businesses improve their sales, marketing, communications, data collection and analysis capabilities.

The new programs are part of Salesforce's strategy of using social networking for business needs, Scott Holden, senior director for solutions marketing at Salesforce, told CRN at the Dreamforce 2012 conference in San Francisco.

"What we're talking about now is business as social," Holden said.

Motorola Mobility Launches First Smartphone Running Intel Chip

Motorola Mobility launched its first smartphone, the RAZR i, the first device to run on an Intel Atom processor and the first smartphone to come out of Motorola Mobility since becoming part of Google. With a 4.3-inch display, 8-megapixel camera, long battery life and speeds up to 2.0GHz, the RAZR i pushes the smartphone hardware envelope even further.

"Together with Intel, we're redefining what people can expect from a mobile device. A camera that launches in an instant, Web pages that load blazingly fast and a device that's the perfect balance of screen size and fit in hand," Jim Wicks, senior vice president of Consumer Experience Design at Motorola Mobility, said in a statement.

Cisco Ups Its Switching Game With Low-Latency Nexus 3548

Cisco launched its Nexus 3548, a low-latency Ethernet switching system it claims is 60 percent faster than competitors' counterparts. Cisco's Nexus 3548 features a technology called Algorithm Boost, or Algo Boost, which gives users a detailed view of how the switch is performing during production.

Earlier this week, David Yen (pictured), senior vice president and general manager of Cisco's Data Center Group, told The Wall Street Journal Cisco is planning to "give Arista a very, very significant challenge."

"Today, Cisco has leapfrogged our competitors in delivering a full-featured switch that offers the lowest latency Ethernet in the networking industry," Yen said in a prepared statement.

Amid Rapid Growth, Axcient Keeps Focus On Channel

Axcient has increased its number of employees by 50 percent this year, has added more than 200 new features to its platform for cloud recovery of business data and apps, and is quickly becoming a go-to shop for solution providers and managed service providers.

According to CEO Justin Moore (pictured), Axcient's success has in large part been due to its work with the channel.

"There's a lot of hype around MSPs and the VAR will go out of business. That's proven to be untrue," Moore told CRN this week. "VARs want to augment with services and provide better business value to customers. When you provide meaningful, tangible value to customers, you will be successful."

ViewSonic Gets Out Of Consumer Tablets, Will Pursue Verticals

ViewSonic's move to dump consumer tablets and focus instead on tablets for vertical markets will help partners, Michael Holstein, ViewSonic's vice president of business development, told CRN this week.

"The tablet market is becoming more and more competitive and also somewhat chaotic," Holstein said. "The reason I say that is, you know, you start to see suppliers or your technology partners starting to compete in the marketplace, and you got some very interesting and aggressive business models in the marketplace, as well."