Five Companies That Came To Win This Week

For the week ending Sept. 19, CRN takes a look at the companies that brought their ‘A’ game to the channel including Intel, Nvidia, CrowdStrike, Check Point, Indicium and Dell Technologies.

The Week Ending Sept. 19

Topping this week’s Five Companies that Came to Win list are Intel and Nvidia for striking a bold alliance to develop a new generation of IT systems that integrate Nvidia’s AI and accelerated computing stack with Intel’s CPUs and the vast x86 ecosystem.

Also making this week’s list are cybersecurity companies CrowdStrike and Check Point for making savvy strategic acquisitions that will boost their capabilities around AI security.

AI and data consulting company Indicium secured its position as a leading services partner with Databricks this week when the data platform giant made an equity investment of undisclosed size in the firm.

Rounding out the list is Dell Technologies for laying claim to debuting the first server that incorporates Intel’s Gaudi 3 PCIe AI accelerators.

Intel And Nvidia Announce ‘Historic Collaboration’ In Mega Design Deal That Includes A $5B Nvidia Investment In The Chipmaker

Semiconductor industry heavyweights Nvidia and Intel surprised the industry Thursday when they announced a groundbreaking collaboration deal to jointly develop “multiple generations” of products that Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said “tightly couple Nvidia’s AI and accelerated computing stack with Intel’s CPUs and the vast x86 ecosystem—a fusion of two world-class platforms.”

While both companies stand to gain from the blockbuster alliance Intel, which has been struggling in recent years, is perhaps the more immediate winner thanks to Nvidia’s plans to invest $5 billion in Intel common stock. That news sent Intel’s stock soaring more than 29 percent in pre-market trading early Thursday morning. (Intel stock closed Thursday up $5.67 or nearly 23 percent from its Wednesday close.)

Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan said his company’s computing platforms, combined with its process technology, manufacturing and advanced packaging capabilities, “will complement Nvidia’s AI and accelerated computing leadership to enable new breakthroughs for the industry.”

The joint development efforts will center around using Nvidia’s NVLink interconnect technology to “seamlessly” connect Intel’s and Nvidia’s respective chip architectures, according to the two companies. That will make it possible to integrate Intel CPUs into Nvidia’s rack-scale AI platforms for data centers.

Huang said Nvidia’s deal with Intel also will allow the two firms to create a “new class of integrated graphics laptops,” representing what he called an “underserved” market that is “largely unaddressed by Nvidia today.”

CrowdStrike To Expand AI Security Portfolio With Deal To Acquire Pangea

CrowdStrike makes this week’s Came to Win list for its deal to buy Pangea, a startup whose technology provides guardrails for GenAI-powered applications.

CrowdStrike co-founder and CEO George Kurtz spoke about the deal this week during the vendor’s Fal.Con 2025 conference in Las Vegas, saying the planned acquisition aims to enable CrowdStrike to offer “AI detection and response” capabilities.

Pangea is “a leader in the space of protecting AI agents from the browser, application, gateway, cloud [and] in the development pipeline, as well as in production,” Kurtz said during his keynote.

The deal for Pangea comes after CrowdStrike announced plans in August to acquire Onum, a startup that provides data pipeline management, in a move to boost the vendor’s AI-powered Falcon Next-Gen SIEM offering.

Check Point To Buy AI Cybersecurity Startup Lakera To Boost Agentic AI Security

Staying on the topic of savvy acquisitions around AI security, Check Point this week announced a deal to acquire acquire AI cybersecurity startup Lakera, the developer of AI-native security platforms for agentic AI applications.

Lakera is set to be the foundation of Check Point’s Global Center of Excellence for AI Security. Check Point CEO Nadav Zafrir said with the Lakera acquisition, the company can deliver a full end-to-end AI security stack designed to protect enterprises as they adopt artificial intelligence.

“AI is transforming every business process, but it also introduces new attack surfaces,” Zafrir said in a statement. “We chose Lakera because it brings AI-native security, superior precision and speed at scale. Together we are setting the benchmark for how enterprises adopt and trust AI.”

Founded in 2021, Lakera’s flagship offerings—Lakera Red and Lakera Guard—provide pre-deployment posture assessments and real-time runtime enforcement to protect large language models, AI agents and multimodal workflows.

Services Partner Indicium Wins Equity Investment From Databricks

Data and AI platform giant Databricks has generated headlines recently by raising huge amounts of venture capital. This week Indicium, an AI and data consulting services provider that works closely with Databricks, was a winner when Databricks Ventures made an equity investment of undisclosed size in the company.

The two companies said the investment “strengthens the bonds between the industry leaders” as clients work to modernize their data systems and adopt AI.

“This is a huge confirmation from Databricks of the great work that we have been doing for the past eight years, the great partner that we are for them…and we’re quite excited to get closer and closer with them,” said Indicium CEO Matheus Dellagnelo in an interview with CRN.

Indicium is a global data and AI services company that helps clients—especially in the financial services space— migrate and optimize data systems, develop scalable data products, and leverage data resources for operational AI.

While Indicium has worked with the Databricks platform since the service company’s 2017 founding, the firm has been developing an ever-tighter relationship with the big data giant, achieving Databricks Elite partner status last year.

Dell Technologies Says It’s First To Bring Intel’s Gaudi 3 PCIe To Market

Dell Technologies showed off its technical chops this week when it debuted a new server that can house up to eight Intel Gaudi 3 PCIe AI accelerators—saying it’s the first IT company to do so.

Dell said the Gaudi allows for fast inferencing, silicon diversity, and better capital expense management for enterprises leveraging AI workloads. The company touted the Gaudi as costing less and drawing about half as much power as other GPUs.

Round Rock, Texas-based Dell said the Gaudi 3 can come installed on the Dell PowerEdge XE7740 rack server, a 4U device that is capable of fine-tuning AI models for specific workflows and running high-performance inferencing. The XE7740 can accommodate up to eight Gaudi 3 PCIe accelerators in either a double-wide or a four-way bridged configuration.

Dell is the worldwide market leader in selling servers and during its most recent quarter, it delivered record server and networking revenue of $12.9 billion, up 69 percent, year over year.