Five Companies That Came To Win This Week

For the week ending May 23, CRN takes a look at the companies that brought their ‘A’ game to the channel including Dell Technologies, Google Cloud, Nvidia, DataCore and Alation.

The Week Ending May 23

Topping this week’s Five Companies that Came to Win list is Dell Technologies for unleashing a wave of new PCs, servers and storage systems at its Dell Technologies World Conference this week. The unveilings included an AI PC with advanced inference technology thanks to NPU technology from Qualcomm.

Also making this week’s list is Google Cloud for revamping its online marketplace with significant enhancements aimed at making partners more profitable. DataCore and Alation both make this week’s list for strategic acquisitions.

And Nvidia made a bold move this week by unveiling a new silicon offering that it hopes will keep the company “at the center” of AI infrastructure for hyperscaler customers.

Dell Debuts New AI PCs – Including First With Enterprise-Grade Discrete NPU

Dell Technologies unleashed a wave of new laptops, servers and storage systems this week at its annual Dell Technologies World Conference. Dell executives touted the capabilities of the new offerings as coming at a critical time as businesses and organizations move long-gestating AI projects into production, boosting the need for high-performance IT systems.

What really got everyone’s attention was the new Dell Pro Max Plus laptop that uses a Qualcomm AI 100 PC Inference Card. That makes it the world’s first workstation with an enterprise-grade discrete NPU (neural processing unit).

The NPU product consists of two of Qualcomm’s Cloud AI 100 data center processors housed on a circuit board, providing a total of 32 AI cores. That, according to Qualcomm, allows the Dell Pro Max Plus to “offer fast and secure on-device inferencing at the edge for large AI models typically run in the cloud,” including models with up to 109 billion parameters, the company added.

Development of such an NPU product is a surprising move by Qualcomm and it could give Dell an edge in what’s expected to be a highly competitive market for AI PCs.

Also making its debut at the Dell event was the Dell AI Data Platform for discovering, ingesting and processing data from the edge to the data center or the cloud. On the server front Dell impressed with its new PowerEdge XE9785 and XE9785L servers with AMD Instinct MI350 Series processors, and PowerEdge servers with Nvidia HGX B300 processors.

Google Cloud Revamps Marketplace To Boost Partner Profitability

Google Cloud is revamping its online marketplace with three big enhancements including a new customer incentive and Google moving to a variable revenue share model aimed at making channel partners more profitable.

Google Cloud Marketplace enables users to find, procure, buy and sell software solutions and services from Google Cloud, Google channel partners, and independent software vendors (ISVs). The online marketplace enables channel partners and ISVs to more efficiently sell their solutions to a global audience as well as create unique joint solutions to offer to a broader customer base.

Partners can now receive more earnings by moving to Google Cloud’s new variable revenue share model, which includes a 1.5 percent to 3 percent revenue share for partners and deals. The revenue share percentage allows partners to retain a larger portion of earnings based on things like total contract value (TCV), deal size, renewals or migrations.

In another change, starting June 9, all qualifying software purchases through the Google Cloud Marketplace Channel Private Offers (MCPO) will result in 100 percent commitment drawdown tied to the final price on a private offer. The goal is to better streamline the buying process through channel partners, improve partner earnings, and enable customers to select the best solutions for their needs from across its ecosystem.

And Google Cloud has made generally available its new Marketplace Customer Credit Program (MCCP), which now offers customers up to 3 percent in Google Cloud credits for first-time ISV solution purchases. The incentive allows cost savings for customers looking to buy software solutions from Google and its partners.

Nvidia Reveals Offering To Build Semi-Custom AI Systems With Hyperscalers

As hyperscalers like Amazon and Microsoft continue to diversify their supply chains by building custom AI chips, Nvidia this week revealed a new silicon offering that it hopes will keep the company “at the center” of AI infrastructure for such customers.

At Computex 2025 in Taiwan Monday, Nvidia unveiled NVLink Fusion, a silicon offering that it said will allow the company to use its NVLink interconnect technology to build semi-custom, rack-scale AI infrastructure with hyperscalers.

“A tectonic shift is underway: For the first time in decades, data centers must be fundamentally rearchitected—AI is being fused into every computing platform,” said Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang in a statement. “NVLink Fusion opens Nvidia’s AI platform and rich ecosystem for partners to build specialized AI infrastructure.”

NVLink Fusion is the company’s standard NVLink chip-to-chip interconnect technology made available for non-NVLink processors, said Dion Harris, senior director of high-performance computing and AI factory solutions go-to-market at Nvidia, in a briefing.

“The reason why that’s really important is when you think about the large hyperscale data centers that are being built today based on a lot of our scale-up architecture, this now allows them to go and standardize across their entire compute fleet on the Nvidia platform,” Harris said.

Nvidia also said it is teaming up with a wide range of server vendors to convince enterprises to move their workloads from CPU-based systems to GPU-accelerated infrastructure with the new RTX Pro servers that are powered by its popular Blackwell architecture.

DataCore Acquires StarWind, Adding HCI Technology For Edge, Remote-Office/Back-Office Applications

Software-defined storage pioneer DataCore this week said it had acquired StarWind Software, a developer of hyperconverged infrastructure technology aimed at edge and remote-office/back-office applications.

With the acquisition, Fort Lauderdale, Fla.-based DataCore is making its first move beyond its data center focus with StarWind’s technology that combines compute, storage and networking.

StarWind’s hyperconverged infrastructure technology, like those of other companies including Nutanix and Scale Computing, competes with industry heavyweight VMware by Broadcom.

“StarWind has been very successful in getting a lot of frustrated Broadcom customers moving over into a different hypervisor,” DataCore CEO Dave Zabrowski told CRN. “Every VMware shop in the industry is frustrated, and StarWind has been taking advantage of that because it has a hypervisor-agnostic solution. For us, it completes our DataCore Next platform.”

As part of its DataCore.Next vision, DataCore wants to deliver best-in-class storage technology from the core to the edge to the cloud in whatever form best suits customers, Zabrowski said.

Alation Looks To Accelerate AI Agentic Workflow Development With Acquisition

Staying on the topic of strategic acquisitions, Data intelligence platform provider Alation this week acquired Numbers Station, a startup pioneer in building AI agents for managing data workflows.

Alation said the combination of its platform with Numbers Station’s technology will boost the ability of data and engineering teams to quickly build and deploy a new class of AI-native analytics applications featuring “agentic workflows that operate with enterprise-grade governance and context,” according to the Alation announcement.

Many businesses have sought to apply their structured corporate data, such as financial transactions and customer records, to AI. But AI agents often have difficulty understanding and acting on data due to incomplete semantics and data definitions, unclear data governance policies, missing context of data lineage and poor data quality. That leads to AI agents producing inaccurate outputs and violating data privacy and compliance requirements.

By combining Numbers Station’s agents with Alation’s metadata foundation, customers can build intelligent applications that reason over structured data, understand business context, and automate real-time decision-making—all while maintaining rigorous governance and compliance standards, according to the two companies.