5 Companies That Came To Win This Week

The Week Ending April 8

Topping this week's roundup of companies that came to win is Brocade for its blockbuster deal to acquire Ruckus Wireless.

Also making the list were Aerohive Networks for a new product lineup that better competes against Cisco Systems and Brocade, Dimension Data's acquisition of a public cloud service provider, a key promotion at Amazon Web Services that reflects its explosive growth, and this year's winner of CRN's annual Channel Madness Tournament of Chiefs.

Not everyone in the IT industry was making smart moves this week, of course. For a rundown of companies that were unfortunate, unsuccessful or just didn't make good decisions, check out this week's Five Companies That Had A Rough Week roundup.

Brocade To Challenge Cisco With $1.2 Billion Ruckus Wireless Acquisition

Brocade Communications made a bold move to beef up its networking technology portfolio this week with a deal to acquire wireless networking vendor Ruckus Wireless for an estimated $1.2 billion.

Brocade said the acquisition would make it the No. 1 vendor in storage-area networking and the top Wi-Fi service provider, the No. 2 player in data center networking, and the No. 3 vendor for enterprise wireless LAN and enterprise edge networking in the U.S. and EMEA regions.

Partners cheered the move, saying the acquisition will create a much more formidable competitor against networking giant Cisco Systems.

Aerohive Networks Beefs Up Product Portfolio To Compete With Cisco, Brocade

Speaking of competition in the consolidating wireless networking industry, Aerohive Networks took steps to strengthen its own competitive position this week by unveiling significant upgrades to its portfolio of access point and switching products.

The vendor launched new 802.11ac Wave 2 access points, along with four new cloud-managed enterprise switches.

Partners said the new hardware helps close a technology gap Aerohive had with Brocade and Cisco Systems and will drive more sales wins against those rivals.

Dimension Data Expands Public Cloud Lineup With Acquisition

Solution provider Dimension Data significantly strengthened its Microsoft public cloud service offerings this week with the acquisition of Ceryx, a 65-employee cloud services firm.

Dimension Data said the acquisition of Toronto-based Ceryx would also make it easier to serve businesses in which some employees need to use on-premise or private cloud systems while others can use more cost-effective public cloud services.

Until now, Dimension Data was only able to offer its private cloud offering, known as Cloud Services for Microsoft. The acquisition means the solution provider can provision, manage and optimize cloud workloads around Office 365, Exchange, Sharepoint and Skype for Business.

Jassy Promoted To CEO Of Fast-Growing AWS

It was a good week for Amazon Web Services' top executive Andy Jassy (pictured), reflecting what's expected to be a very good year for the giant cloud service provider.

This week Jassy, senior vice president of AWS since its 2006 launch, was promoted to CEO of the industry's top public cloud infrastructure business.

Jassy's promotion followed a letter to shareholders from Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos in which he said AWS is on track to reach $10 billion in sales this fiscal year, up from $7.9 billion in fiscal 2015.

Ruckus Wireless' Channel Chief Wins Channel Madness

Sandra Glaser Cheek (pictured), vice president of worldwide partner sales at Ruckus Wireless, is the winner of this year's 2016 CRN Channel Madness Tournament of Chiefs.

Cheek beat out AT&T's Brooks McCorcle in this year's final round of voting.

The second-annual tournament began March 17, pitting 32 of the IT industry's most influential channel executives against each other with CRN readers voting to determine the victors. All together, more than 350,000 votes were cast.