Five Companies That Came To Win This Week

For the week ending April 25, CRN takes a look at the companies that brought their ‘A’ game to the channel including Datadog, ClearScale, Lenovo, Veeam and Alternative Payments.

The Week Ending April 25

Topping this week’s Five Companies that Came to Win is observability platform provider Datadog for a key acquisition that will allow the company to expand its technology offerings into the realm of data observability.

Also making this week’s list are consulting service company ClearScale for establishing a strategic alliance with AWS, Lenovo for a major update of its storage system product portfolio, Veeam for demonstrating its technology prowess with a new appliance offering, and Alternative Payments for a successful founding round.

Datadog Buys Data Startup Metaplane To ‘Build Reliable AI Systems’

Datadog accelerated its expansion into data observability this week with its acquisition of startup Metaplane, which develops an AI-powered, end-to-end data observability platform.

The acquisition will allow Datadog to provide unified observability capabilities across applications and data – an essential function as data teams manage increasingly complex, business-critical workflows. And that complexity will become even more pronounced as more businesses and organizations build and deploy AI applications.

Metaplane’s observability platform uses machine learning-powered data monitoring and column-level data lineage to detect, resolve and prevent data quality issues across an organization’s data technology stack. The technology monitors data quality using anomaly detection AI models trained primarily on historical metadata.

Datadog’s platform integrates and automates infrastructure monitoring, application performance monitoring, log management, user experience monitoring and cloud security to provide unified observability and security for businesses.

ClearScale Signs ‘Powerful’ AWS Agreement To Boost SMB Cloud Migration

Cloud consulting service provider ClearScale makes this week’s Came to Win list for signing a strategic collaboration agreement (SCA) with Amazon Web Services as part of the cloud giant’s drive to boost SMB customer cloud adoption.

ClearScale’s new SCA is part of the AWS Small Business Acceleration Initiative that’s designed to provide small and mid-size businesses with access to all the tools, technologies and AI guidance they need to take their cloud transformations to the next level.

The AWS SBAI program was launched in 2025 with AWS’ partner territory managers providing support to partners serving SMB customers while also passing leads to partners who have achieved AWS’ SMB Competency. ClearScale is an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner.

The SBAI program is a partner-led channel sales motion aimed at building and growing a partner’s SMB practice via incentives and co-sales. ClearScale’s goal with its AWS SCA is to help customers move away from licensed software toward consumption-based pricing.

Lenovo’s ‘Largest Storage Portfolio Refresh’ Targets AI Readiness, Virtualization Costs

Lenovo made a splash in the data storage system market this week by launching what a company executive called “the largest storage portfolio refresh in company history.”

New capabilities in the updated storage product line are focused on helping customers save money on virtualization deployments and help prepare them for the AI era, Stuart McRae, Lenovo executive director and general manager of data storage, told CRN.

Customers embarking on an AI path need high-performance storage to make their data actionable. That means storage that’s designed to deliver faster performance, robust security, and resiliency to power the inferencing, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and agentic AI applications that organizations are deploying, according to McRae.

The challenge at the same time is to address the burgeoning cost of their virtualization environment, he said.

Among the new offerings are the Lenovo ThinkAgile SDI V4 Series, a full-stack turnkey device that simplifies IT infrastructure and accelerated computing that enhances time to value for large language model (LLM) workloads. The company also announced Lenovo ThinkSystem Storage arrays, three times faster than previous models while using less power and offering a 99 percent density improvement when upgrading from legacy products.

The ThinkAgile V4 HX Series GPT-in-a-Box features the industry's first liquid-cooled hyperconverged infrastructure appliance that is capable of inferencing LLMs with a 25 percent energy savings over previous generations. The full-stack generative AI product is part of Lenovo’s partnership with Nutanix to deliver Nvidia NIMs and Hugging Face LLMs inside inferencing-capable hardware that can be deployed locally as a turnkey solution.

In many cases Lenovo customers are replacing storage systems that are at least five years old, McRae said, so those environments reap instant and massive gains from switching to modern flash architecture, including a 97 percent reduction in energy costs.

Veeam Launches First Software Appliance

Staying on the topic of breakthrough technology, Veeam Software this week introduced its first software appliance, targeting the data protection and replication market with a product offering that’s easy to deploy and manage.

The new Veeam Software Appliance is an additional way to consume the Veeam Data Platform end-to-end data recovery platform, said Rick Vanover, vice president of product strategy at Kirkland, Wash.-based Veeam.

“The Veeam Backup and Replication product is installed and pre-configured on Linux,” Vanover said. “Customers want a more secure and resilient experience,” he said. “Getting this Veeam Software Appliance in place will be a good opportunity for partners.”

The Veeam Software Appliance, currently in beta and scheduled for general availability in the second half of 2025, will be available for channel partners to deploy in the cloud or on their customers’ own hardware, Vanover said. It will also be available from alliance partners who will bundle it with their own hardware and sell it through their channel partners, he said.

Veeam this week also debuted its Data Resilience Maturity Model aimed at helping large businesses assess just how resilient their IT infrastructure is against cyberattacks.

Alternative Payments Raises $22M To Help ‘MSPs Automate All Money Movement’

Alternative Payments has secured $22 million in funding, fueling the company’s mission to bring cutting-edge automation and global accessibility to underserved B2B industries.

The New York-based B2B payments vendor plans to use the capital to expand its product suite beyond core payment automation and to scale its customer success and go-to-market teams. The funding was led by MissionOG and Third Prime.

“The MSP market has been massively underinvested in when it comes to payments,” CEO Baxter Lanius told CRN. “We’ve built the biggest financial services team in the space because we believe the opportunity is massive, and our clients are hungry for better tools.”

Alternative Payments has bold ambitions to modernize the B2B payments landscape. “We’re here to make online payments seamless and powerful for MSPs,” Lanius said. “Everything we build is with them in mind. We’re not just a tech company, we’re a partner to help MSPs scale faster, smarter, and more securely.”

Officially founded in 2021 but rooted in a private equity journey dating back to 2014, Alternative Payments has grown from a one-person operation to a 45-person team serving more than 500 MSPs. The company is now processing nearly $1 billion in annualized payments.