Five Companies That Came To Win This Week

For the week ending Aug. 29, CRN takes a look at the companies that brought their ‘A’ game to the channel including AMD, Okta, CrowdStrike, TD Synnex, AWS and Gruve.ai.

The Week Ending Aug. 29

Topping this week’s Five Companies that Came to Win list is chip designer AMD for its plans to significantly boost channel funding, expand its channel staff and increase its partner coverage.

Also making this week’s list are cybersecurity companies Okta and CrowdStrike for making strategic acquisitions this week. Distributor TD Synnex and cloud giant Amazon Web Services make the list for a strategic collaboration deal to help solution providers expand their AI and cloud practices.

And startup Gruve.ai is here for becoming only the second company worldwide to achieve the designation of Global Cisco Managed XDR (MXDR) Partner.

AMD Makes Big Channel Funding Boost As It Builds ‘True’ Partner Program

CRN reported this week that AMD has boosted partner funding by more than 40 percent this year as it works to nearly double its channel staff and grow its global partner coverage by roughly 20 percent in its move to build a “true channel program” that is competitive on many fronts.

Santa Clara, Calif.-based AMD is amping up its channel resources as the semiconductor industry gets increasingly competitive, with Qualcomm doubling its channel funding and quadrupling its commercial channel team this year to grow its small slice of CPU market share. And Intel has vowed to deliver “more value” and “more benefits” to partners as part of a simplified partner program it plans to launch this October.

“This is a gigantic movement for the entire company,” said Jason Mooneyham, who became AMD’s global commercial channel chief in January after previously serving as head of Americas sales for several years. “We have to turn this channel on in a major way, in a much more improved way. It couldn’t just be status quo,” he said.

The 40 percent-plus increase to AMD’s overall 2025 channel investment budget includes funding for sales incentives, new strategic programs and marketing funds. The boost in channel spending is part of the increased investment AMD announced for go-to-market initiatives in early May, according to Mooneyham.

New AMD sales incentives for partners include special rebates for things like AI PCs and Windows 11 refresh that can be stacked on top of AMD’s volume incentive rebate.

As part of these increased channel investments, AMD has improved the way it enables partners to market and sell AMD-based solutions to a variety of commercial customers, including those in the midmarket and SMB segments.

AMD has also improved its training program for partners by working closely with the company’s business units to ensure there is greater quality and consistency.

AMD is expected to grow its global partner coverage by roughly 20 percent by the end of the year. There were more than 500 value-added resellers, distributors, service providers and systems integrators on its roster in the first quarter, according to the company.

Okta To Acquire Axiom For Privileged Access Management Expansion

Okta is seeking to expand its privileged access management capabilities with its announcement this week that it plans to acquire startup Axiom Security.

Founded in 2021, Israel-based Axiom Security offers privileged access management built to meet the needs of cloud environments as well as SaaS and databases, Okta CTO Abhi Sawant wrote in a post announcing the deal.

The identity security vendor plans to integrate Axiom’s technology into its Okta Privileged Access offering, which will serve to extend access controls to additional sensitive resources, Sawant wrote.

Key capabilities offered by Axiom include just-in-time access as well as automated workflows for requests and approvals, Okta said.

The planned acquisition of Axiom Security “elevates” Okta’s current privileged access management offering to address additional use cases while increasing security controls and connectors for infrastructure such as Kubernetes environments and databases, Sawant wrote.

CrowdStrike To Acquire Onum For Next-Gen SIEM Expansion

Speaking of savvy acquisitions in the cybersecurity space, CrowdStrike announced this week that it had reached a deal to acquire Onum, a startup that provides data pipeline management, to boost its Falcon Next-Gen SIEM offering.

For CrowdStrike, the planned addition of Onum will bring capabilities for both data pipeline management as well as data filtering, the company said.

The combination of Onum’s technology with CrowdStrike’s Falcon Next-Gen SIEM platform will enable the vendor to “stream high-quality, filtered data directly into the platform to drive autonomous cybersecurity at scale,” said CrowdStrike co-founder and CEO George Kurtz in a statement.

The acquisition comes during a year when Next-Gen SIEM has been a key focus area for expansion at CrowdStrike.

TD Synnex, AWS Sign Agreement To Advance Cloud, AI Adoption

Distributor TD Synnex and cloud platform giant Amazon Web Services make this week’s Came to Win list for their newly unveiled strategic collaboration initiative to help channel partners throughout the Americas accelerate AI adoption, cloud migration and modernization, and marketplace growth.

Under the agreement, the two companies are investing in resources to connect small and midsize channel partners with an enhanced range of AWS services via the distributor while making it easier for them to gain access to AWS Marketplace programs for ISVs, said Jan Michael de Kok, vice president of global AWS lead and FinOps go to market for TD Synnex.

The partnership, de Kok said, is “focused on the long-term impact of driving behavior and building a practice within SMBs, particularly AI practices. It’s building a practice of not only how to implement AI, but also how to use it and how to sell it.”

The new strategic collaboration agreement also simplifies access to the AWS cloud marketplace for solution providers—especially smaller ones, de Kok said.

TD Synnex currently has about 3,900 channel partners working with AWS.

Gruve.ai Achieves Coveted Global Cisco Managed XDR Partner Status

Gruve.ai, a one-year-old startup, has become only the second company worldwide to achieve the designation of Global Cisco Managed XDR (MXDR) Partner, Gruve told CRN exclusively this week.

The designation positions Gruve as a top-tier managed security provider, especially at a time in which the XDR market has become saturated, Jay Kulkarni, senior vice president of strategic accounts at Gruve, told CRN.

The designation builds on the relationship the two companies established in the spring following Gruve’s $37.5 million Series A funding round, which included investment from Cisco. Cisco at the time called Redwood City, Calif.-based Gruve an emerging “visionary” in helping enterprises harness outcome-based AI solutions.

Gruve supports enterprises in regulated and resource-constrained sectors such as health care, government and financial services with strategy, data readiness, infrastructure integration, model tuning and ongoing compliance management.

Kulkarni said Cisco is already introducing Gruve to large service provider partners to help scale XDR delivery. Gruve, for its part, will help Cisco build on that momentum by working with the tech giant’s engineering and go-to-market teams to “fill in the gaps” to give enterprises the secure AI infrastructure they need, he said.