Five Companies That Came To Win This Week

NetSuite Reports 50 Percent Year-Over-Year Channel Growth

Forget the sluggish channel sales numbers reported by old-school enterprise software makers. Cloud computing ERP stalwart NetSuite is on a channel tear. This week NetSuite said sales through its North America channel are up 50 percent year-over-year.

In May the company recruited Blytheco, one of Sage's top VARs, to launch a cloud computing practice based on NetSuite's ERP suite. NetSuite also enlisted the accounting firm Grant Thornton LLP to become a NetSuite systems integrator.

"They're making that change," said NetSuite CEO Zach Nelson of the channel's cloud computing adoption rate. "It's hard not to be excited about what we're seeing in the indirect model right now."

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Apple's Mountain Lion OS: Macs Now Work Better With iPad, iPhone

Apple released the ninth iteration of its OS X Mountain Lion operating system for Macs with significantly improved integration with its popular iPad tablet and iPhone smartphone.

The new OS, which is selling in the Mac App Store for $19.99, delivers more than 200 new features, including tighter integration with Apple's homegrown cloud service, iCloud.

With iCloud support now included natively, users can synchronize apps across the Mac, iPad and iPhone, including email, reminders, calendar and contacts, eliminating the need for manual file sharing or updates.

The new OS release puts the heat on Microsoft, which is poised to launch Windows 8 with its new Metro interface at the end of October.

Samsung Takes Q2 Smartphone Sales Crown From Apple

Think Apple is invincible? Think again. Samsung was the undisputed king of smartphone sales in the second quarter, selling twice as many smartphones as Apple, according to a report released this week from mobile research firm Juniper Research.

Samsung, which grew its Android-based line of Galaxy smartphones in May with the launch of the new Galaxy S III, sold 52.1 million smartphones during the second quarter, compared to Apple's 26 million iPhones, according to Juniper Research.

Juniper Research attributed much of Samsung's lead to the fact that nearly 10 million units of the new Galaxy S III shipped in June alone. The Samsung gains came with Apple acknowledging that rumors about the forthcoming fifth-generation iPhone may have impacted iPhone sales during the most recent quarter.

Google Sets Up Partner Program For Cloud Services

Google this week upped its partner game with a new Cloud Platform Partner Program that includes tools, training and resources to provide cloud services through Google's infrastructure.

Google will make available to partners technology resources such as Compute Engine to configure and manage applications running on Google's infrastructure; Google BigQuery to import and analyze data; and Google Cloud Storage for archiving, backup and recovery, and primary storage solutions.

The platform provides partners with consulting service, integration and support opportunities on Google Cloud products such as Google App Engine, Mobile Apps and Social Apps.

VMware Plunks Down $1.2 Billion To Acquire SDN Startup Nicira

Talk about a game-changer. VMware this week burst into the software- defined networking market with its $1.2 billion acquisition of Nicira.

VMware will pay $1.05 billion in cash and $210 million of assumed unvested equity awards for Nicira, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based startup that has has lured awary high-profile talent from Juniper and Cisco.

Bogomil Balkansky, VMware's senior vice president of cloud infrastructure products, told CRN the deal gives VMware and its partners the ability to extend virtual networking across any cloud platform. That includes using Nicira technology to extend VMware's reach into clouds built on the OpenStack open-source software platform -- the leading alternative to VMware's vSphere platform.