Five Companies That Came To Win This Week
For the week ending Jan. 31, CRN takes a look at the companies that brought their ‘A’ game to the channel including Asana, Tenable, SuperOps, Dell Technologies, CrowdStrike and Inky.
The Week Ending Jan. 31
Topping this week’s Came to Win list is work platform developer Asana for launching a new partner program aimed at spurring growth for partners and helping Asana become a $1 billion company.
Also making the list are Tenable for a strategic acquisition in the exposure management space, SuperOps for a successful funding round, and Inky for its innovative use of generative AI for email security.
And Dell Technologies and CrowdStrike make the list for their development partnership that brings advanced managed detection and response capabilities to Dell’s PowerProtect backup storage systems.
Asana’s Path To $1B Includes New Partner Program
Enterprise work management platform vendor Asana makes this week’s Came to Win list for launching a new partner program aimed at growth for new and existing partners, with the first quarter set as the time for launching a new partner portal, new partner tiers and a new partner handbook, among other resources.
The San Francisco-based company, which has more than 150,000 customers, sees service partners as part of the path to greatly increasing revenue and better helping customers transform business practices in a world that’s embraced remote work and artificial intelligence.
“We want to be a $1 billion company, and we all believe at the management level that we can get to $1 billion faster with a really strong partner ecosystem,” Eron Sunando, Asana’s channel chief, told CRN. “The momentum is here from a partner perspective. It’s a great time to be a partner with Asana because we are in a growth phase. We are in a building phase. And we’re taking a lot of input from partners. Our partners are part of this build process.”
The new Asana Partner Program includes co-marketing and co-selling support and lead sharing with partners, according to the vendor. Improved resources and training for VARs, MSPs and other partner business models are also part of the new program’s design.
The vendor is also launching a high-margin tier structure that rewards partner engagement and customer retention. Courses, playbooks and guides are options through the Partner Academy. And the company is offering an enhanced tool stack for deal registration and opportunity closure, plus a refreshed partner directory.
In the second half of the year, Asana expects to provide a marketplace where partners can sell Asana-based applications and custom integrations, Sunando said.
Tenable To Acquire Vulcan Cyber For $150M, Boosting Exposure Management Offering
Tenable this week struck a $150 million deal to acquire exposure risk management startup Vulcan Cyber.
Vulcan is a venture-backed player in the exposure risk management space, offering capabilities around management of vulnerabilities, cloud exposures such as misconfigurations and other cyber risks.
Tenable said that Vulcan Cyber’s technology will augment its exposure management platform, enabling customers to “consolidate exposures across their security stack” while better prioritizing risks and simplifying remediation.
Tenable is among the biggest names in the exposure management segment and has already been busy expanding its platform through mergers and acquisitionz in recent years.
Other acquisitions by Tenable in recent years included the acquisition in 2024 of Eureka Security, a data security posture management startup, and Tenable’s $265 million acquisition of cloud identity security startup Ermetic in 2023.
SuperOps’ New $25M Funding Round Aimed At AI, Global Market Growth
SuperOps wins kudos for securing $25 million in Series C funding this week, financing the IT platform developer will use to expand its AI research and development efforts, scale its solutions for mid-market and enterprise MSPs, and further extend its global footprint.
The funding round was led by March Capital, with participation from existing investors Addition and Z47, bringing the company’s total funding to $54.4 million.
“AI-driven solutions are scalable, and we’re building them with a global audience in mind,” Arvind Parthiban, SuperOps co-founder and CEO, told CRN. “As we expand, we’ll continue to innovate, ensuring our products meet the needs of each market.”
Last year, the Clayton, Del.- based company reported 250 percent growth and is on track to see more than 100 percent growth in 2025, according to Parthiban.
Dell, CrowdStrike Co-Engineer MDR For PowerProtect Storage
Dell Technologies and cybersecurity superstar CrowdStrike win applause for teaming up to develop new managed detection and response (MDR) security capabilities for Dell’s PowerProtect backup storage systems.
The new managed service, unveiled this week, provides 64 indicators and around-the-clock monitoring for threats inside PowerProtect devices. The capabilities are based on CrowdStrike’s next-generation SIEM technology, which allows Dell to export proprietary logs from the data protection systems and into the SIEM, which can reveal up to 64 indicators of compromise based on the MITRE attack framework.
“Secondary storage is what attackers are after. Because if you target the secondary storage, the backup storage portfolio, then it becomes hard for customers to recover, right? You can’t recover from your attack, for instance, if that becomes corrupted,” Mihir Maniar, Dell vice president of infrastructure, edge and security services portfolio, told CRN.
The development teams used intelligence gathered by Dell’s security operations team through interactions with more than 20,000 customers to understand what is happening inside the systems when attacks are carried out and where attackers are likely to strike.
The managed offering is available through Dell and CrowdStrike channel partners exclusively for Dell’s PowerProtect portfolio. The two companies are talking about expanding it to other Dell storage devices in the near future.
Inky Unveils GenAI Security Scanning For ‘Every Single Email’
Email security vendor Inky makes this week’s Came to Win list for rolling out innovative new capabilities that utilize generative AI to analyze every email intended for a customer’s inbox, rather than just a portion of emails.
Using large language models to scan all emails is cost- and resource-prohibitive for most security vendors, but Inky has developed a way to use GenAI efficiently and affordably enough to do so, Inky co-founder and CEO Dave Baggett told CRN.
The enhancement took more than a year to develop, as a result of needing to address the multiple challenges of using infrastructure-intensive LLMs to assess the massive volumes of email — a large portion of which is spam or phishing — that customers receive today.
The capability on Inky’s MSP-focused behavioral email security platform is available now for users of its pro and advanced bundles without any additional charge, the company said.