Five Companies That Came To Win This Week

For the week ending July 25, CRN takes a look at the companies that brought their ‘A’ game to the channel including Dashlane, Hailo, Commvault, Kyndryl and Inforcer.

The Week Ending July 25

Topping this week’s Five Companies that Came to Win list is credential security tech developer Dashlane for a major redesign of its partner program and for hiring its first dedicated channel chief.

AI figures prominently in this week’s list with Hailo challenging Nvidia with its new GenAI chip and IT services giant Kyndryl debuting an agentic AI framework to help people and AI agents work side by side.

Commvault is here for announcing a strategic acquisition to boost its data security offerings while MSP software developer Inforcer makes the list for a successful funding round.

Dashlane Revamps Partner Program, Hires First Channel Chief For Credential Security Push

Dashlane wins kudos this week for making some big strides to expand its channel efforts, including announcing a redesigned partner program and hiring its first-ever channel chief, as the credential security vendor looks to rely more heavily on partners for its next phase of growth.

In an exclusive interview with CRN, Dashlane CEO John Bennett said the company is seeking to accelerate its work with the channel focused on the vendor’s recently released Omnix platform — with the company ultimately seeking to expand from about half of new annual recurring revenue generated through partners currently.

“We want to get to where a minimum of 75 percent of our new ARR is coming through these relationships,” Bennett said. “And so we're making appropriate investments there — in go-to-market support, incentives, headcount, infrastructure.”

Key updates in the new channel program include a shift from a medal-based system to a points-based program that rewards partners for a variety of valuable activities in addition to sales performance.

As part of Dashlane’s new channel push, the company disclosed to CRN that it has hired cybersecurity channel veteran Tom Laffaye as its first director of channel sales.

Laffaye was previously an early channel hire at Okta, joining the identity security vendor in 2013 and staying through to the company's initial public offering in 2017. Most recently, Laffaye headed channel sales at Censys.

Nvidia Rival Hailo Launches GenAI Chip For Edge Devices

AI chip startup Hailo made news this week when it announced the general availability of its second-generation AI accelerator chip – a bold move to compete against AI semiconductor heavyweight Nvidia.

Hailo said the new product, the Hailo-10H chip, is the first of its kind to “bring real generative AI performance to the edge” while consuming very little energy. The processor is capable of 40 trillion operations per second (TOPS) of 4-bit integer performance and 20 TOPS of 8-bit integer (INT8) performance using 2.5 watts.

The Hailo-10H is designed for edge devices across consumer, enterprise and automotive markets and combines “high efficiency, cost-effectiveness and a robust software ecosystem,” the company said. Among the companies adopting the Hailo-10H is HP Inc., which is using the chip as the basis for the HP AI Accelerator M.2 Card.

Commvault Targets AI, Cyber Resilience Expansion With Planned Satori Cyber Acquisition

Cyber resilience and data protection technology developer Commvault this week said it plans to acquire data and AI security provider Satori Cyber.

Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Satori Cyber is the developer of the Satori Data Security Platform that’s aimed at helping security and engineering teams deploy data security controls on databases, data lakes and data warehouses, with an emphasis on securing data from production to AI.

Commvault’s planned acquisition of Satori Cyber comes as Commvault and its peers, including Cohesity, Rubrik, Veeam, Acronis, Asigra and others, closely integrate cybersecurity and the ability to prepare data for use with AI and large language models into their data protection and management capabilities.

The Satori Cyber platform provides such capabilities as centralized data access control, database activity monitoring, data discovery and classification, data access governance and real-time enforcement. The company said it gives security teams visibility into and control over sensitive data in fast-moving AI environments.

Satori Cyber presents an opportunity for Commvault to increase its ability to support enterprise adoption of AI by improving its enterprise compliance, risk mitigation and sensitive data access control, according to Commvault.

Kyndryl Launches Agentic AI Framework To Combine Business AI, Human Capabilities

Staying on the topic of pushing the boundaries of AI, global technology services provider Kyndryl this week introduced its Kyndryl Agentic AI Framework, which is designed to ease the deployment of agentic AI systems to work alongside human teams.

Kyndryl’s investment in agentic AI comes on the heels of the widespread adoption of GenAI, said Ismail Amla, senior vice president of Kyndryl Consult. “GenAI was great for getting content,” Amla told CRN. “Suddenly we’ve got not just content, but incredible content, reasoning, learning, and acting all in an agent and all done in a way where it’s gone from a little bit of technology to an influx of technology capability and with it lots of opportunities.”

Capitalizing on those opportunities means making use of the rapidly growing number of large language models, inference engines, frameworks and other AI tech products, Alma said.

The Kyndryl Agentic AI Framework takes advantage of thousands of infrastructure deployments and over 12 million AI-driven insights via Kyndryl Bridge, the company’s platform for integrating and orchestrating complex IT infrastructures to better meet mission-critical requirements.

Combined, the Kyndryl Agentic AI Framework and Kyndryl Bridge use advanced algorithms, self-learning, optimization, and secure-by-design AI agents to turn complex data into clear insights, Alma said.

Inforcer Accelerates Microsoft AI Enablement With $35M Funding Round

Already enjoying rapid growth, Inforcer will leverage its latest $35 million funding haul to supercharge product development, drive AI innovation and help MSPs unlock Microsoft’s AI capabilities for SMBs.

Inforcer, which specializes in developing software for managing and automating Microsoft 365 policies across multiple tenants, this week announced the funding round led by Dawn Capital with participation from existing investor Meritech Capital.

The Series B funding will supercharge Inforcer’s AI roadmap, particularly in areas like AI readiness assessments and Copilot service enablement, helping MSPs not only adopt but also sell AI effectively.

“We’re building out tools that allow MSPs to sell AI-as-a-service,” co-founder and CEO Jamie Daum said. “This means helping them assess environments, configure Microsoft’s stack securely and educate end clients on what these AI tools can do and how to use them safely.”

The funding comes less than a year after the company received $19 million in Series A funding to support its rapid growth, product development and expansion into the U.S. market.