5 Companies That Came To Win This Week

For the week ending Aug. 8 CRN takes a look at the companies that brought their ‘A’ game to the channel including SentinelOne, Cloudera, CrowdStrike, Amazon Web Services, Keyfactor and Onix.

The Week Ending Aug. 8

Topping this week’s 5 Companies that Came to Win list is SentinelOne for its deal to acquire Prompt Security, a startup focused on securing AI and agentic technologies.

Acquisitions were big this week: Cloudera makes this week’s list for its move to buy Taikun, a developer of technology for managing native Kubernetes and cloud infrastructure across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Onix, a star Google Cloud partner, likewise makes the list for acquiring the services business of AI-powered contact center innovator UJET.

CrowdStrike and Amazon Web Services are here for the latest moves in their growing alliance. And identity security provider Keyfactor wins applause for a key hire for its channel executive ranks.

SentinelOne To Acquire AI Protection Startup Prompt Security

SentinelOne tops this week’s Came to Win list with its announced deal to acquire Prompt Security, a startup focused on securing AI and agentic technologies, in the company’s latest move to enable AI adoption.

Prompt Security—named one of CRN’s cybersecurity startups to watch in 2025—is a “pioneer in securing AI in runtime, preventing AI-related data leakage and protecting intelligent agents,” SentinelOne said in a news release.

The planned acquisition aims to boost SentinelOne’s Singularity Platform with capabilities that will provide real-time visibility into access of AI tools and the data that’s being shared as well as automated enforcement for preventing attacks and misuse, the vendor said.

Founded in 2023, Prompt Security offers protection against AI-related threats through providing enhanced visibility and governance for GenAI tools. In November 2024, Prompt Security announced an $18 million Series A funding round led by Jump Capital with participation from Hetz Ventures, Ridge Ventures, Okta and F5.

In the news release, SentinelOne co-founder and CEO Tomer Weingarten said the goal of the planned acquisition is “making it possible for every company to fully embrace GenAI and agentic AI without compromising safety and security.”

Cloudera Expands Data And AI Services Deployment, Delivery Capabilities With Taikun Acquisition

Speaking of savvy acquisitions, data and AI cloud platform provider Cloudera this week acquired Taikun, a developer of technology for managing native Kubernetes and cloud infrastructure across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

With the acquired Taikun technology, Cloudera said it can accelerate the deployment and delivery of the complete Cloudera platform, including data services and AI, across public clouds and on-premises data centers, as well as to sovereign and air-gapped environments—all through a unified control plane.

Cloudera said the acquisition is a response to increasingly complex and distributed enterprise IT estates, as well as the growing need for reliable and scalable data infrastructure to support both core operations and the demands of AI workloads.

The acquisition is Cloudera’s third in just over a year, including the company’s purchase of Verta and its operational AI platform in May 2024 and the acquisition of data lineage and catalog technology developer Octopai in November.

Keyfactor Hires Trend Micro Veteran Louise McEvoy As New Channel Chief

Keyfactor made a strategic personnel move this week when it hired Louise McEvoy, a former longtime channel sales executive at Trend Micro, as its new channel chief to lead an effort to double down on partners.

The identity security tech vendor said in a news release that it appointed McEvoy to serve as senior vice president of global channel sales.

McEvoy (pictured above) joins Keyfactor after spending nearly a decade as vice president of U.S. channel sales at cybersecurity giant Trend Micro.

From her time as channel chief at Trend Micro, McEvoy brings deep experience in developing modern partnering strategies to the role at Keyfactor, the company said.

In the press release, McEvoy is quoted as saying she expects to pursue a “channel-first” approach at Keyfactor, which she noted is well-positioned for major growth amid massive emerging threats related to quantum computing and accelerating adoption of AI.

Industry Giants CrowdStrike And AWS Double Down On Their Alliance

CrowdStrike and Amazon Web Services are doubling down on key cybersecurity initiatives such as AI security and incident response as part of a deepening collaboration between the two industry giants, executives told CRN this week.

The expanding CrowdStrike-AWS partnership signals where the companies are looking to go next with both customers and the channel, with partners able to capture major security opportunities through teaming with the two companies, the executives said.

With CrowdStrike generating more than $1 billion in AWS Marketplace sales in 2024 alone—the first cloud-native security ISV to achieve the feat in a single year—there’s no question that “this relationship works” and is strongly resonating with partners and customers, said Hart Rossman, vice president for global services security at AWS.

Some of the latest collaborative moves by the two industry heavyweights include CrowdStrike’s new Falcon for AWS Security Incident Response offering, CrowdStrike making its MCP server and AI Red Team Services available on the AWS Marketplace, a joint alliance between the two companies and cyber insurance provider Resilience, and an AWS-CrowdStrike Startup Accelerator to support next-generation security innovators.

Google Cloud Partner Onix Buys UJET Services To Boost AI CCaaS, Customer Service

Completing a trifecta of acquisition items in this week’s 5 Companies That Came to Win roundup, Onix, a star Google Cloud partner, makes the list for acquiring the services business of AI-powered contact center innovator UJET.

The acquisition boosts Onix’s AI chops within Google’s customer engagement and contact center markets. With the purchase, the 16-time Google Cloud Partner of the Year award-winning company has the goal of becoming the world’s top partner for Google’s Customer Engagement AI Suite (CES).

UJET’s platform is built entirely on Google Cloud and integrated with Google’s CES to help enterprises transform customer experiences using generative AI. Onix is integrating UJET's Contact-Center-as-a-Service (CCaaS) capabilities with its agentic AI solutions and Google Cloud Agentspace across more than 10 industries.

With UJET's professional services team now under Onix, CEO Sanjay Singh (pictured above) said his company gains massive expertise in deploying Google CES solutions globally, positioning itself to scale rapidly and drive transformative outcomes for some of the world’s most complex and high-volume contact centers.