5 Companies That Came To Win This Week

For the week ending Dec. 19, CRN takes a look at the companies that brought their ‘A’ game to the channel including Google Cloud, Red Hat, Cyderes, CrowdStrike and Redpanda and Akamai.

The Week Ending Dec. 19

Topping this week’s 5 Companies that Came to Win list is Google Cloud for providing a look at its plans to revamp its partner program in 2026 with new partner incentives and a new partner competency framework.

Also making this week’s list are a pair of strategic acquisitions. Red Hat is boosting the artificial intelligence safety, security and guardrail capabilities in its product portfolio through its acquisition of Chatterbox Labs. Managed security services provider Cyderes, meanwhile, acquired Lucidum, a provider of advanced identity security capabilities, in a move to deepen its protection of customer IT environments and lay the groundwork for greater usage of agentic AI.

Cybersecurity giant CrowdStrike makes the list with the launch of its new Falcon AI Detection and Response offering, a pivotal expansion of its AI security capabilities that the company says delivers a massive boost to security around AI prompts and agent interactions.

And data streaming tech developer RedPanda and cloud computing giant Akamai forged an alliance this week through which Redpanda’s data streaming technology will run on the Akamai Cloud platform, offering a way to adopt high-performance data streaming services for real-time, AI-driven applications.

Google Cloud Previews New Partner Program With Revamped Tiers And Rewards

Google Cloud got the channel’s attention this week when it unveiled plans for a new partner program, scheduled to launch in 2026, that will shift how the $61 billion cloud company financially rewards and works with channel partners, including new tiering and a competency framework.

The new Google Cloud Partner Network will cover all partner types with financial incentives tied to partners providing successful customer outcomes across a client’s life cycle.

“This marks a strategic shift from measuring program work to valuing genuine customer outcomes,” said Colleen Kapase (pictured), vice president of channels and partner programs at Google Cloud, in a blog post.

“This includes rewarding successful co-sell sales efforts, high-quality service delivery and shared innovation with ISVs,” she said.

The Google Cloud Partner Network is centered on three pillars: simplicity, outcomes and automation and will have a three-tier model: Select, Premier and a new Diamond tier.

Google Cloud will roll out a new competency framework that will replace current specializations. The framework will focus on a partner’s proven ability to help customers by measuring capacity and capability. Capacity refers to knowledge and skills development via technical certifications and sales credentials, while capability refers to real-world customer use cases, measured by presales and post-sales contributions for customers.

Google Cloud said the administrative responsibility for partners to participate in the new program will be dramatically reduced through the use of AI and other tools.

Red Hat Promises AI Safety Boost Through Chatterbox Labs Acquisition

IBM open-source enterprise tools subsidiary Red Hat is boosting the artificial intelligence safety, security and guardrail capabilities in its product portfolio through its acquisition of Chatterbox Labs.

Raleigh, N.C.-based Red Hat has closed on its purchase of the London-based company, founded in 2011, and will leverage Chatterbox’s capabilities for demonstrable, trustworthy and safe deployment of AI in production instead of just experimentation, according to the vendor. The companies did not disclose the terms of the deal.

“Enterprises are moving AI from the lab to production with great speed, which elevates the urgency for trusted, secure and transparent AI deployments,” Steven Huels, Red Hat vice president of AI engineering and product strategy, said in a statement. “This acquisition will help enable truly responsible, production-grade AI at scale.”

The addition of the Chatterbox capabilities will help Red Hat users building machine learning operations practices and with AI scaling across hybrid cloud environments, also an important market for Red Hat parent IBM. Although Red Hat is part of IBM, its technology works with any cloud vendor, any model and any accelerator.

Chatterbox’s portfolio ranges from the AI Model Insights platform for delivering independent quantitative risk metrics for large language models and pinpointing and remedying prompts for bias, toxicity and other dangers before models enter production.

Cyderes Acquires Lucidum To Boost Identity, Agentic Security

Staying on the topic of strategic acquisitions, Cyderes, a leading managed security services provider (MSSP), this week said it had acquired Lucidum, a provider of advanced identity security capabilities, in a move to deepen its protection of customer IT environments and lay the groundwork for greater usage of agentic AI.

Lucidum’s technology will provide Cyderes with a “data fabric” approach to unifying identities, privileges, assets and exposures within a customer environment, Cyderes said.

The result is that Cyderes will benefit from having a centralized and continuously updated view of a customer’s IT environment, enabling managed security decisions that are faster and offer higher accuracy, according to the company.

Ultimately, Lucidum technology will serve as a “backbone” for Cyderes’ capabilities in identity and access management, exposure management and MDR (managed detection and response), Cyderes CEO Chris Schueler said in a news release.

The acquisition of Lucidum also accelerates efforts at Cyderes to utilize agentic AI for securing end customers. Lucidum’s data fabric will better enable Cyderes to “deploy agentic AI that unifies threat visibility, delivers data-driven response recommendations and supports teams throughout investigation and response,” the company said.

CrowdStrike Debuts AI Detection And Response Capabilities

Cybersecurity giant CrowdStrike got everyone’s attention this week with the launch of its new Falcon AI Detection and Response (AIDR) offering, a pivotal expansion of its AI security capabilities.

Falcon AIDR delivers a massive boost to security around AI prompts and agent interactions, CrowdStrike President Mike Sentonas told CRN, providing the industry’s most comprehensive approach so far to protecting organizations against some of the key risks caused by surging AI adoption.

The cybersecurity giant is ultimately seeking to replicate its track record in its core segment of endpoint detection and response (EDR) within the rapidly growing AI attack surface, he said.

“I believe we pioneered modern endpoint security with EDR, and we’re looking to do the same thing in the AI world with AIDR,” Sentonas said. “We want to protect the interaction layer where AI systems reason and they decide and they take action.”

CrowdStrike’s Falcon AIDR launch brings the Falcon platform to a total of 32 products, known on the platform as modules. The new AIDR module is based on the company’s acquisition of AI security startup Pangea in September.

Sentonas said the debut of Falcon AIDR provides new functionality and service opportunities for CrowdStrike’s large base of channel partners, particularly for MSSPs that are tasked with keeping up with the security risks posed by widespread deployments of AI tools.

Redpanda-Akamai Alliance To Offer High-Performance Data Streaming For AI

Data streaming tech developer RedPanda and cloud computing giant Akamai win kudos this week for forging an alliance through which Redpanda’s data streaming technology will run on the Akamai Cloud platform, providing enterprises and solution providers with a way to adopt high-performance data streaming services for real-time, AI-driven applications.

Redpanda has joined the Akamai Qualified Compute Partner Program as an ISV, extending an existing relationship between the two companies under which Akamai has used Redpanda’s data streaming platform as part of the underlying technologies within Akamai’s application security services.

The newly expanded partnership is designed to broaden access to high-performance data processing for customers building edge, agentic and data-intensive applications, particularly in regions where buyers prefer the Akamai platform, executives for the two companies told CRN in interviews.

“Data streaming is a core part of agentic AI,” said Alex Gallego (pictured), Redpanda founder and CEO. “We want to mediate access for all private data. The next frontier for AI is private data. You can imagine that all [industry large language] models have already indexed all public data. In the age of AI, we help the global 2000s unlock private data for agentic access.”

Akamai, meanwhile, has been steadily expanding its cloud service offerings after it bought cloud computing provider Linode in February 2022, noted Zak Putnam, Akamai senior director of business development, also in an interview with CRN. For Akamai, offering the Redpanda platform will drive data consumption and, in turn, increase demand for Akamai’s portfolio of cloud services.