5 Companies That Came To Win This Week

The Week Ending Oct. 11

This week's roundup of companies that came to win include two startups helping furloughed government employees find work, AMD earning a contract with Verizon Terremark and HP releasing two new Chromebooks. Also, Amazon claims victory over IBM in court and Tintri releases its latest batch of products aimed at VMware environments.

Two Startups Help Furloughed Employees Find Work

The government shutdown continued this week and hundreds of thousands of government workers still are not receiving a paycheck. As the partisan bickering continues in Washington, D.C., two software startups have teamed together to offer those furloughed workers a chance to get back to work. Blen Corp. and 1776 have collaborated to create unfurlough.us, a job site that allows tech companies to post available freelance work and workers to offer their skills.

The idea was hatched by developers at 1776. Blen heard about the idea and reached out. Within five hours, a website was launched. The morning after, the site crashed after a traffic rush.

"I think that's the beauty of these kinds of communities, where startups can get together and collaborate, because they can quickly get an idea into a solution," said Donna Harris, co-founder of 1776. "It's startups doing what startups do best: being scrappy and turning a problem into an opportunity."

AMD Microservers To Power Verizon Terremark Cloud Offering

AMD announced Monday that its SeaMicro servers will power Verizon Terremark's new Infrastructure-as-a-Service cloud offering, with an undisclosed amount of servers already deployed to Verizon. The two companies worked together to develop hardware and software technology on the SM15000 server.

It's a big win for microservers, which are an alternative to traditional servers, using a fraction of the power and space. Last week, Verizon unveiled its public cloud infrastructure offerings, the company's first effort to compete with cloud heavyweights like Amazon, Google and Microsoft.

"The technology we developed turns the cloud paradigm upside down," said Andrew Feldman, AMD's corporate vice president and general manager, server, in a prepared statement.

HP Releases Business, Education Chromebooks

HP and Google extended their partnership this week with the launch of two new low-priced Chromebook laptops targeted at the business and education market. The HP Chromebook 14, which will be available in commercial channels, has an entry-level price of $299 and is targeted at business users looking for "simple, secure, mobile productivity," according to HP.

"What's exciting about the HP Chromebook is they are still building a device that is unique to them," said Paul Shiff, vice president of Hub Technical Services. "They are putting their own stamp on it."

The second Chromebook is ARM processor-based priced starting at $279.99, with an 11.6-inch diagonal screen and battery life of up to six hours.

Amazon Claims Victory In $600M CIA Contract Court Case

Amazon earned a temporary piece of good news Monday when a U.S. court said the company's $600 million contract with the CIA can move forward after a protest from IBM was denied. IBM filed a complaint against the contract in June, claiming the CIA didn't properly evaluate prices between the two companies. The Government Accountability Office agreed with IBM. Amazon countered with its own complaint in July.

"We are pleased with the Court's decision and look forward to resuming our work on this important contract with our customer," an Amazon spokesperson told CRN.

Judge Thomas Wheeler of the U.S. Court of Federal Claims has not released a written opinion on the case. IBM said it disagreed with the ruling and told CRN that it plans to appeal the court's decision.

Tintri Intros New VMstore Appliances

Storage startup Tintri, a developer of hybrid flash and disk appliances aimed at VMware environments, unveiled new versions of those appliances for enterprise and entry-level workloads on Tuesday. The company will start shipping its new VMstore T600 series in the fourth quarter, said Geoff Stedman, vice president of marketing for the Mountain View, Calif.-based company. The company also introduced the Tintri Global Center, a single-pane-of-glass management software for managing multiple virtual machines as one.

Tintri currently supports more than 200 customers who have over 80,000 virtual machines running on the company's hardware, according to Stedman.

"We provide storage products with zero management," he said. "We eliminate the tuning, LUNs, and so on. We let customers manage their virtual machines, and not their storage."