Five Companies That Came To Win This Week

MarkLogic Snags $25 Million In Venture Funding

There's been a lot of venture capital flowing into big data companies lately. But MarkLogic, which develops a "NoSQL" database, attracted a lot of attention this week when it closed on $25 million in venture financing, bringing its total financing to date to more than $71 million.

MarkLogic, now led by ex-Oracle and Veritas Software executive Gary Bloom, wants to replace the relational database software from Oracle, Microsoft and other vendors that's found in almost every business today. That's a lofty goal, but the $25 million is proof the company's vision has its believers.

IBM Invests $1 Billion In Flash Storage Initiative

IBM unveiled a plan this week to invest $1 billion through 2015 to develop high-performance flash storage technology to meet today's data-heavy workloads, including handling the increasing volumes of big data generated by social media and mobile systems. The initiative is centered on technology IBM acquired when it bought Texas Memory Systems last year for an undisclosed sum.

The comprehensive effort goes beyond the processors and hardware aspects of flash storage to include development of database and analytics software that can best take advantage of flash technology. And IBM made it clear the channel would play a major role in selling the products that come out of the project.

Ingram Micro Offers Professional And Cloud Services For The Channel

Solution providers hear it all the time: They must expand into cloud and professional services to be successful today. Distributor Ingram Micro, at its annual Cloud Summit this week, offered partners some assistance in making the transition to a recurring revenue business model.

Ingram Micro rolled out a new professional services network the distributor said would help its 30,000 North American partners identify professional services opportunities in application development, data migration, remote service delivery, and installation and integration. Ingram Micro also unveiled new cloud telecom services it's adding to its set of 170 services it offers partners through its cloud marketplace.

Synnex Offers Partners A Route Into Mobile Computing

Ingram Micro wasn't the only distributor lending a hand this week to its channel partners to move into new business areas. Synnex, which recently created a business unit focused on mobility products and services, launched an initiative to help solution providers expand into the fast-growing mobility space.

This week Synnex launched an initiative through the new global mobility solutions business unit to provide partners with a single source for bundling different mobile products and services. The MobilitySolv effort includes mobile devices and carrier services solution providers can use to assemble mobile solutions for their customers.

HP Fires Off Its Moonshot Server Line

Hewlett-Packard has had a tough ride in recent years, with its turmoil in the CEO office and all. But this week the company demonstrated it still has its engineering chops when it debuted its long-awaited HP Moonshot servers that HP resellers called "a paradigm shift" in how servers are architected.

HP has promoted Moonshot as a new way to build energy-efficient data centers. HP said the first Moonshot server, based on the Intel Atom S1200 Centerton processor and a "shared everything" design, uses up to 89 percent less energy than traditional servers and takes up to 80 percent less space.