Five Companies That Came To Win This Week

For the week ending Nov. 14, CRN takes a look at the companies that brought their ‘A’ game to the channel including AMD, Cisco Systems, TD Synnex, Commvault and Cognizant.

The Week Ending Nov. 14

Topping this week’s Five Companies that Came to Win list is chip designer AMD for a strategic acquisition in the AI technology space that will strengthen its competitive stance against rival Nvidia.

Cisco Systems likewise makes this week’s list for its own AI-related acquisition that will help businesses and organizations use proprietary data for generative AI applications. IT services giant Cognizant, meanwhile, is making an acquisition that extends its services around Microsoft Azure.

Distributor TD Synnex is here for the launch of a new AI-based agentic sales assistant that works with its Digital Bridge platform with the goal of powering partner sales growth. And Commvault makes the list for debuting its Commvault Cloud Unity platform that combines data security, cyber resilience, and identity resilience capabilities within a single system.

AMD Buys AI Startup Led By Neuralink Veterans In Ongoing Acquisition Spree

AMD tops this week’s Came to Win list after buying an AI software startup founded by two veterans of Elon Musk’s Neuralink firm, part of an ongoing acquisition spree to build out its AI capabilities in its competition against Nvidia.

Anush Elangovan, AMD’s corporate vice president of software development, said in a blog that the chip designer completed its acquisition of MK1, a Mountain View, Calif.-based provider of inference and enterprise AI software, to “advance AI performance and efficiency across the stack.”

The MK1 team will join AMD’s Artificial Intelligence Group, “where their technology and expertise will play a key role in advancing our high-speed inference and enterprise AI stack.”

MK1 has been focused on “high-speed inference and reasoning-based AI technologies optimized for large-scale deployments” running on AMD hardware, currently serving more than 1 trillion tokens a day, Elangovan wrote.

“Together, we’ll accelerate the next generation of enterprise AI, enabling customers to automate complex business processes and unlock new opportunities in high-value applications,” he wrote.

Cisco To Acquire AI Startup NeuralFabric For GenAI Push

AMD wasn’t the only company making a strategic acquisition in the AI space this week. Cisco Systems struck a deal to buy startup AI platform company NeuralFabric Corp. as the tech giant boosts its generative AI prowess.

Seattle-based NeuralFabric, founded in 2023 by former Microsoft engineers, has “cracked” the code on data sovereignty as a challenge to AI adoption, said DJ Sampath, vice president of product, AI software and platform for Cisco, in a blog post about the acquisition.

NeuralFabric’s generative AI platform lets organizations develop domain-specific small language models (SLMs) using their own proprietary data that’s deployable across SaaS and on-premises environments, Sampath said.

NeuralFabric’s technology will work with Cisco’s AI Canvas, a tool with agentic AI capabilities for customers and partners that was introduced at Cisco Live in June.

“NeuralFabric’s capabilities will help develop and strengthen the foundation of AI Canvas by introducing advanced tools for modular SLM development, streamlined model training, and flexible deployment options,” Sampath explained.

TD Synnex Launches Agentic AI-Based Digital Bridge Sales Tool To Power Partner Sales Growth

TD Synnex wins kudos this week for launching an agentic AI-based addition to its Digital Bridge platform aimed at powering partner sales growth.

The new functionality—which is built into Microsoft Teams and Outlook—provides partners out of the gate with access to what TD Synnex calls an AI assistant with deep solutions enablement insight.

The new AI assistant—now available for download—is designed to improve partner “win rates” in high-growth technology areas like security, infrastructure, cloud, AI, data analytics and IoT.

The plan is to build on the initial release, leading to the delivery in the first half of next year what amounts to the equivalent of a full- blown, agentic AI-powered superstar consultant of sorts providing recommendations and insight in response to specific customer pain points.

“We are taking partnership with our customers to the next level, and indeed, we are going to leverage technology to improve the quality of the support and the solutions we deliver to our partners,” said TD Synnex CEO Patrick Zammit in an interview with CRN. “It’s a new way of working. It’s the next level of partnership with our customers to create more impact for them.”

The Digital Bridge offering opens the door for partner sales reps to tie into the $58.45 billion distribution behemoth’s intellectual property on business outcomes and solutions directly at the point they are communicating with customers in Microsoft Teams or Outlook to win business.

Commvault Takes Data Resiliency Head-On With New Cloud Unity Platform

Commvault demonstrated its prowess in the data protection and resiliency technology space this week by unveiling the Commvault Cloud Unity platform, a move the company said will unify data security, cyber resilience, and identity resilience across cloud, SaaS, on-premises, and hybrid environments.

The new system was introduced at the Commvault Shift conference in New York where Commvault CEO Sanjay Mirchandani, in his opening keynote, called Commvault Cloud Unity the most significant release in the company’s history.

The Commvault Cloud Unity platform brings together three separate disciplines, three categories of tools, or three separate operational processes that Commvault thinks should be brought together, said Tim Zonca, Commvault’s vice president of portfolio marketing, solutions, and product marketing.

The first is data security, Zonca said. “This is understanding what data is out there,” he said. “How sensitive is it? Am I governing it correctly? Who’s accessing it? What are these access patterns? And is that OK?”

The second is identity resilience, which looks to ensure the access patterns for data and the systems that govern those patterns are resilient, Zonca said. The third is cyber recovery, which ensures that in the case of malicious activity on the data, customers can get the data back.

At the Commvault Shift event the Tinton Falls, N.J.-based company also unveiled new technologies that expand end-to-end identity resilience, cloud-native data protection, and synthetic recovery by using AI to automatically determine threats in backed-up data to remove them during a recovery process.

Cognizant Plans To Buy Fellow Microsoft ‘Partner Of The Year’ 3Cloud

Completing a trifecta of strategic acquisitions on this week’s Came to Win list, Cognizant struck a deal to buy 3Cloud, a repeat Microsoft partner of the year winner, in a move to strengthen its position in the Microsoft Azure arena.

Cognizant will add 3Cloud’s 1,000-plus Azure experts and engineers and 1,500-plus Microsoft certifications to its capabilities, according to a statement. The companies did not disclose financial terms for the deal. 3Cloud is also an Elite Databricks partner.

Cognizant today has almost 20,000 Azure-certified associates globally, the company said.

“This acquisition marks a pivotal step in Cognizant’s strategy to empower our clients for the future of enterprise AI,” Cognizant CEO Ravi Kumar S said in a statement. “3Cloud’s deep Azure expertise, industry-aligned approach and longstanding Microsoft partnership will enable us to deliver even greater value to our clients as they accelerate their AI journeys. Together, we are poised to set a new standard for innovation and impact in the Azure ecosystem.”

News of the acquisition deal came just a day after 3Cloud won Microsoft’s 2025 Americas Channel U.S. Partner of the Year award. The awards were announced just as Microsoft heads into its annual Ignite conference aimed at its 500,000-member ecosystem.