Five Companies That Came To Win This Week

For the week ending Jan. 10, CRN takes a look at the companies that brought their ‘A’ game to the channel including ACP CreativIT, HP Inc., Dell Technologies, AMD, Nvidia, Intel, WatchGuard and Amazon Web Services.

The Week Ending Jan. 10

Topping this week’s Came to Win list is solution provider ACP CreativIT for a savvy acquisition that will expand its capacity and expertise to provide managed services to mid-market customers.

This week’s massive CES (Consumer Electronics Show) factors heavily in this week’s list with significant PC announcements from HP Inc. and Dell Technologies and major product launches from semiconductor rivals AMD, Nvidia and Intel.

Cybersecurity provider WatchGuard is here for its strategic acquisition of ActZero. And Amazon Web Services makes this week’s list for continuing to expand its global data center footprint with its plans to invest $11 billion in data center infrastructure in Georgia.

ACP CreativIT Acquires Midmarket Managed Services Superstar Mindsight

ACP CreativIT dramatically boosted its midmarket managed services capabilities this week with the acquisition of Mindsight, a Downers Grove, Ill.-based MSP that has developed a stellar reputation for its elite enterprise engineering talent.

ACP CreativIT CEO Matt Zafirovski (pictured) said the deal, the first acquisition by his company in nearly two-and-a-half years, will be a springboard for Chicago-based ACP CreativIT to capture a bigger slice of the highly coveted midmarket managed services pie. Mindset is also a top Cisco partner.

“Having Mindsight as part of our team is going to accelerate our journey to serve more midmarket and upper midmarket customers in a deeper and more holistic way as technology consultants and advisors,” he said. “They have done a really nice job of building out an enterprise-driven engineering culture with strong managed services for the midmarket, growing in cloud and cybersecurity. It’s a services intensive business with strong recurring revenues. Most importantly they put their customers and their employees first.”

The owners of Mindsight, led by President and CEO Ed Kapelinski, built the 21-year-old company with about 50 employees from the ground up by recruiting the best technical talent with the highest salaries to deliver enterprise class solutions to midmarket customers.

HP, Dell Launch New PC Lineups At CES 2025

HP Inc. and Dell Technologies brought their A-game to the Consumer Electronics Show this week, each unveiling the latest additions to their PC product lineups.

HP debuted the HP EliteBook X and the HP EliteBook Ultra, new high-end commercial AI laptops that are designed to meet the high-performance demands of today’s AI software such as HP’s built-in AI Companion artificial intelligence assistant.

HP also took home three innovation awards including one for AI Companion and one for the company’s 2-in-1 Omnibook Ultra Flip.

Dell, meanwhile, debuted an overhauled PC product lineup with three tracks: Dell, Dell Pro and Dell Pro Max, each with a Base, Plus and Premium configuration. Dell said the revamped product lines will make it easier for customers to find what they are looking for.

AMD, Intel And Nvidia Unveil New High-Performance Chips At CES

Staying on the topic of CES 2025 launches, the three major semiconductor companies win kudos this week for showing off their latest PC processor offerings at the mammoth electronics show.

Nvidia revealed its much-anticipated GeForce RTX 50 GPUs for desktops and laptops, relying on the same Blackwell architecture at the center of its new AI data center chips to bring forth PC advancements in graphics, content creation and productivity.

Nvidia called the GeForce RTX 50 series the “most powerful” consumer GPUs “ever created,” positioning them as a significant upgrade for gamers that will offer up two times faster graphics performance than the previous generation. The AI computing giant is also hoping to lure AI developers and content creators with a bevy of new hardware and software capabilities.

AMD, meanwhile, said it’s taking AI PC capabilities to the next level with its new Ryzen AI Max chip lineup, calling it the “most advanced mobile x86 processor ever created” and promising to beat top chips from Intel, Apple and Nvidia in key performance areas.

Revealed at CES this week, the Ryzen AI Max series is meant to act as the “halo” product line in AMD’s family of processors for Microsoft’s Copilot+ PCs and is set to provide significant enhancements over the top Ryzen AI 300 chips from last year, ranging from increased core counts to a new unified, coherent memory architecture.

AMD also scored a big win with its first deal to supply Ryzen AI Pro chips to commercial PCs made by Dell Technologies, opening another channel for the chip designer to compete with Intel.

Intel isn’t standing still, however. At CES Intel said that its Core Ultra 200V processors will become available in commercial laptops starting this month, promising to beat competing chips from AMD and Qualcomm in multiple areas, including battery life and a variety of AI workloads.

At CES the semiconductor giant announced that the Core Ultra 200V series, previously code-named Lunar Lake, will go into more than 30 commercial thin-and-light laptop designs from over 10 OEMS, including Lenovo, HP Inc. and Dell Technologies.

WatchGuard To Scale Up MDR Service With ActZero Acquisition

WatchGuard Technologies is doubling down on its managed detection and response (MDR) service with the acquisition of ActZero, bringing major enhancements for MSPs including reduced alert fatigue and greater support for third-party security tools.

The acquisition will represent a massive expansion of capabilities for WatchGuard’s existing MDR offering, which has already seen strong growth since its debut in October 2023 following the company’s acquisition of CyGlass

Now, the integration of ActZero’s technology will enable WatchGuard to provide MSPs with improvements including a “dramatic reduction” in false-positive alerts as well as a move to “more of an open architecture than what we were able to provide for the MDR service before,” he said.

Specifically, ActZero already brings support for endpoint security tools including CrowdStrike Falcon and Microsoft Defender — which will significantly expand the usefulness of WatchGuard’s MDR for MSPs that work with multiple vendors, WatchGuard CEO Prakash Panjwani told CRN.

AWS Invests $11B In Georgia Data Centers To ‘Support The Future Of AI’

Amazon Web Services continues to invest huge sums of money to expand its data center footprint. This week AWS said it will invest $11 billion in new data center infrastructure in Georgia to boost its support for cloud and AI computing tasks.

AWS said generative AI is driving increased demand for advanced cloud infrastructure and compute power, and “AWS’ investments will support the future of AI from data centers in Georgia.

“This deployment of cutting-edge AI infrastructure will strengthen Georgia’s position as an innovation hub,” AWS said. The cloud giant said its $11 billion investment will create at least 550 jobs, including direct AWS employment in technical roles like data center engineers, network specialists, engineering operations managers and security specialists.

Just last month, AWS unveiled plans to invest $10 billion in new data centers in Ohio.