Five Companies That Came To Win This Week
For the week ending Feb. 21 CRN takes a look at the companies that brought their ‘A’ game to the channel including HP Inc., ThreatLocker, Lambda, Zoom and Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
The Week Ending Feb. 21
Topping this week’s Five Companies that Came to Win is HP Inc. for a strategic acquisition of AI software – including the Cosmos AI operating system – and other AI technology and assets from Humane.
Also making this week’s list is cybersecurity company ThreatLocker for unveiling a massive expansion of its product portfolio. AI service provider Lambda makes the list for a very impressive funding round while videoconferencing giant Zoom is here for unveiling a significant expansion of its channel program.
And Hewlett Packard Enterprise got noticed this week for its announcement of VM Essentials standalone as a global offering with a “channel only” go-to-market model.
HP Strikes Humane Deal To Acquire Cosmos OS, Other AI Assets
HP Inc. tops this week’s Came to Win list for its intriguing move to buy AI software and intellectual property assets from artificial intelligence consumer electronics company Humane for $116 million in a deal set to close at the end of this month.
The Palo Alto, Calif.-based maker of PCs, printers and other accessories is buying Humane’s AI-powered Cosmos platform and more than 300 of the company’s patents and patent applications under a definitive agreement announced this week.
The acquisition “advances HP’s transformation into a more experience-led company,” according to an HP statement.
As part of the deal, a group of “highly skilled” Humane engineers, architects and product workers will join the HP Technology and Innovation organization and form HP IQ, an AI innovation lab focused on HP’s products and services for the future of work, according to HP.
"This investment will rapidly accelerate our ability to develop a new generation of devices that seamlessly orchestrate AI requests both locally and in the cloud," said Tuan Tran, HP president of technology and innovation, in the HP statement. “Humane’s AI platform Cosmos, backed by an incredible group of engineers, will help us create an intelligent ecosystem across all HP devices from AI PCs to smart printers and connected conference rooms. This will unlock new levels of functionality for our customers and deliver on the promises of AI."
ThreatLocker Unveils Massive Product Expansion: Patch Management, Web Filtering, User Store
ThreatLocker got everyone’s attention this week when it debuted an array of new offerings that represents a major expansion into several key security and IT categories, with an emphasis on providing increased simplification and reduced friction for MSPs.The announcements included new products and capabilities in patch management, web filtering and cloud control. The vendor also unveiled its User Store — where employees can access pre-approved applications and browser extensions — as well as its new ThreatLocker Insights data analytics offering.The product launches came during ThreatLocker’s Zero Trust World 2025 in Orlando and were applauded by solution and service provider partners who spoke with CRN.
ThreatLocker co-founder and CEO Danny Jenkins (pictured above) said the company is both giving MSPs an opportunity to get more capabilities from ThreatLocker while also making existing products better with predictive capabilities from Insights.
Solution and service provider partners told CRN that ThreatLocker is delivering massive new opportunities to MSP partners while driving more broadly into the enterprise segment with its increasingly crucial “deny-by-default” approach to cybersecurity.
AI system and cloud standout Lambda this week raised $480 million in a Series D funding round, with investments from Nvidia and private equity firms, with the goal of fueling innovation around Lambda’s Cloud Platform and Lambda Chat, which hosts DeepSeek’s R-1 AI model.
Lambda CEO and co-founder Stephen Balaban (pictured above) said in a blog post that the additional $480 million investment will help Lambda scale both infrastructure and software—including Lambda’s Cloud Platform—as well as enable AI developers to train, fine-tune, and deploy models faster and easier than ever before.
“We’ll build more software tools that delight AI developers and deploy more GPUs to meet the massive customer demand,” Balaban said of his plans for the additional funding. “The AI revolution is in full swing, and Lambda is here to power it.”
The Series D investment round was co-led by Andra Capital and SGW with participation from new investors Nvidia, Andrej Karpathy, ARK Invest, Fincadia Advisors, G Squared, In-Q-Tel (IQT), KHK & Partners and others. The latest funding comes just a year after the company raised $320 million in a Series C funding round.
Zoom Up Partner Program Evolves As Videoconferencing Giant Undergoes Channel-First Transformation
Zoom Video Communications wins kudos for evolving its partner program with ambitious plans to transform into a partner-first company.
Nick Tidd (pictured above), who joined Zoom in September as head of global channel go-to-market for Zoom, aims to boost enterprise revenue generated by the channel from its current 30 percent to 50 percent by the end of Zoom's fiscal 2026, which began February 1.
Tidd has been building out his prescriptive plan for revenue growth through the channel and with that comes a programmatic approach to partner enablement. The longtime channel leader is now ready to launch the next evolution of the Zoom Up Partner Program: The Zoom Up Services Program.
The latest iteration of Zoom Up will reward partners based on their investment and skill sets and arm partners with specialized enablement and training via three partner service models: Reseller or Referral, Certified Services, and Partner-Delivered Programs, the videoconferencing giant said.
Via the Reseller or Referral model, any Zoom Up Partner can continue to resell or refer Zoom-branded services. The next level, Certified Services, lets partners deliver their branded services to customers, endorsed by Zoom. This model is available to all qualifying partners that complete the necessary accreditations and training. Finally, Partner-Delivered Programs will let partners deliver differentiated and advanced post-sales services to customers in partnership with Zoom. The latter model is available to Certified Partners who meet partner proficiency standards and capability, resource, scale and performance commitments.
"Our goal as a company is to have services filled through the channel, globally," Tidd said. While more modules will be rolled out throughout the year, the program will start with Zoom's customer experience offerings, Workplace offerings, and Zoom Phone.
HPE Unleashes VM Essentials Globally With A ‘Channel Only’ Model
Hewlett Packard Enterprise this week announced its VM Essentials standalone as a global offering with a “channel only” go-to-market model backed up by a 10.5 percent rebate.
The channel-only HPE sales model is in contrast to the channel strategy taken by Broadcom in the wake of its acquisition of VMware in 2023. After the acquisition VMware took the top 2,000 accounts direct, terminated partner agreements and invited select partners to rejoin the channel program, reduced the product portfolio and initiated a new per-core processor pricing model that resulted in price increases for many customers.
HPE has responded to partner and customer calls for an alternative with the new HPE VM Essentials standalone offering that are supported on HPE’s ProLiant Gen11 and Gen12 servers.
VM Essentials is not preinstalled on those servers but is available for partners to quote and to be installed on those systems. The software was available to be downloaded in the U.S. in December but is now available worldwide as a term-based software license for one-year, three-year and five-year terms.
“We wanted to demonstrate our commitment to partners and therefore we made a decision that HPE VM Essentials standalone will be channel-only,” said HPE Worldwide Channel and Partner Ecosystem Leader Simon Ewington (pictured above) in an interview with CRN. “The message that we want our partners to understand is that we are all-in with partners on HPE VM Essentials…That is pretty unique in the industry. Most of the virtualization solutions in the market have a split route to market between direct and partners.”