Five Companies That Came To Win This Week

Cisco Beats Estimates As Data Center Business Booms

Cisco, which had been expected to report less-than-stellar fiscal third quarter numbers, instead threw Wall Street a curveball by beating analysts' expectations.

Profit was up 18 percent and revenue rose 6 percent year-over-year, and CEO John Chambers (pictured) pointed to the rise of Cisco UCS in the data center as a main force driving the company's growth.

Emboldened by the strong results, Chambers didn't waste an opportunity to trot out one of his favorite talking points. "You can give us grief for a lot of things," he told analysts on Cisco's earnings call. "But we do not miss market transitions."

IBM Dangles $4 Billion Financing Carrot To Spur Channel Deals

IBM is ponying up $4 billion in financing to help its channel partners close deals involving its cloud and business analytics products and services and its PureSystems integrated servers.

IBM also unveiled a new mobile application that lets partners calculate on-the-spot price quotes and credit approvals for deals of up to $500,000.

Microsoft Steps Up After Office 365 Outages, Offers Credits To Customers

After outages last week and this week took down its Office 365 cloud services, Microsoft moved quickly to make things right by offering service credits to affected customers.

"All of us in the Office 365 team and at Microsoft appreciate the serious responsibility we have as a service provider to you, and we know that any issue with the service is a disruption to your business -- that's not acceptable," Rajesh Jha, corporate vice president of the Microsoft Office Division, said in a blog post. "I want to assure you that we are investing the time and resources required to ensure we are living up to your -- and our own -- expectations for a quality service experience every day."

Oracle Broadens PaaS Reach With Engine Yard Partnership

Oracle's budding platform-as-a-service plans received a shot in the arm this week when the vendor announced a partnership with PaaS up-and-comer Engine Yard.

Oracle says the Engine Yard tie-up will help expand the scope of its services.

"Developers building new web applications in Ruby, PHP and Node.js to meet growing demands associated with mobile and social computing need a robust web PaaS offering," Thomas Kurian, executive vice president, Oracle Development, said in a statement. "We are looking forward to integrating the Oracle Cloud with Engine Yard’s platform to further extend our PaaS capabilities for web application development."

Avaya Pumps Up Deal Reg, Urges Partners To Target Midmarket Deals

At Avaya's Americas Partner Executive Forum in Cancun, Mexico, company executives urged partners to attack midmarket opportunities with more vigor and dismissed the notion that Avaya is struggling financially.

Avaya is also beefing up its deal registration programs: Starting next year, it will offer a 17 percent "bonus category" for strategic products and open its entire data networking portfolio to deal registration.