5 Companies That Came To Win This Week

For the week ending Sept. 26, CRN takes a look at the companies that brought their ‘A’ game to the channel including ServiceNow, Microsoft, AMD, Exabeam and Blue Mantis.

The Week Ending Sept. 26

Topping this week’s 5 Companies that Came to Win list is ServiceNow for undertaking a significant revamp of its partner program, including launching a strategic investment fund for partner AI projects.

Also making this week’s list is Microsoft for launching a new marketplace that provides channel partners with a new route to market for their agentic AI products. AMD is here for scoring a strategic win for its Instinct GPUs, while security tech developer Exabeam is introducing a bold, new commercial model for working with its MSSP partners.

And solution provider Blue Mantis got noticed this week for the latest in a string of acquisitions that expands the company’s geographical reach and technical expertise.

ServiceNow AI Co-Investment Fund Part Of Partner Program Updates

ServiceNow wins applause this week for unveiling a host of updates to its partner program, including a strategic investment fund offering $100,000 for artificial intelligence projects, program credit for subcontracting work and a way to identify customers with undeployed products.

The business workflow automation vendor aims to simplify and improve how solution providers work with customers as the company looks to grow beyond its reputation as an IT-focused platform and seize share in the AI market, executives told CRN in a series of interviews at the company’s Santa Clara, Calif., headquarters.

“When I think about the channel ecosystem, I don’t think there’s any ecosystem that’s ever going to be asked to move as fast as we’re going to have to move to be ready for the opportunity,” Michael Park, ServiceNow’s channel chief and senior vice president of global partnerships and channels, told CRN in an interview. “There’s all kinds of new ways to stitch technology layers, stacks and departments and systems together in a much faster way for a higher value-add. What we really want to do for the next couple of years here is set a clear operating model.”

ServiceNow executives detailed a number of changes being made to the company’s partner program during the vendor’s Global Partner Ecosystem Summit event held this week.

Jen Odess, ServiceNow vice president of partner experience, said the $100,000 co-investments, available as part of the strategic investment fund, fills a gap ServiceNow recognized it had when compared with other vendors. Elite and global elite consulting and implementation partners are among the ones that can qualify for the fund if they have validated practices. Work that qualifies for the investments includes proofs of concept, proofs of value and AI architecting.

“If we’re expecting the partners to be at the tip of the spear on AI innovation, co-creation, on developing agents, all these things, we have to support them better,” Odess said.

Going live in the fourth quarter is partner program credit recognition for solution provider implementation subcontracting work, Odess said.

In other updates, the company’s partner portal is adding product readiness pages to help with enablement to add to AI and CRM enablement navigators already released for the portal. Partner deal registration is getting an AI-first redesign for speed and efficiency that is rolling out in phases, Odess said. A virtual agent for deal registration is now live. And automated email-to-deal registration and automated voice-to-deal registration will go live “in the near future,” she said.

New Microsoft Marketplace Promises Simpler AI Agent Purchasing

Microsoft has released in the U.S. a new online marketplace that aims to simplify artificial intelligence application and agent discovery, purchase and deployment while also unifying its Azure Marketplace and AppSource marketplaces.

Nicole Dezen, Microsoft’s chief partner officer and corporate vice president of global channel partner sales, told CRN in an interview that for channel partners, the marketplace will enable further customer reach and faster time-to-value delivery. Just three months into the fiscal year, Microsoft has seen customer purchases of AI products through the marketplace double.

“Channel partners are building agents, and this is a fantastic place for them to showcase those skills,” Dezen said.

Making AI apps and agents available through the marketplace should cut down on configuration time and lower operating costs, according to Microsoft. Distributors that are integrating the Microsoft Marketplace catalog into their own marketplaces include Arrow, Crayon, Ingram Micro, Pax8 and TD Synnex.

Microsoft Marketplace launch partners include CRN 2025 Solution Provider 500 members Infosys, Avanade, Kyndryl, Cognizant and Capgemini.

Also, a new resale-enabled offers capability for the Microsoft Marketplace, currently in private preview, allows software companies to authorize channel partners to sell private offers on the vendor’s behalf. Resale-enabled offers allow other vendors to expand their reach through authorizing channel partners to resell products by geography.

AMD Lands Deal For AI Provider Cohere To Expand Use Of Its Instinct GPUs

AMD scored a big win this week in the fierce battle among semiconductor designers for leadership in the AI-fueled GPU arena. AMD said that enterprise AI startup Cohere will expand its use of the company’s Instinct GPUs as part of a new agreement.

Cohere—a Canadian startup that raised $500 million in a funding round from AMD, Nvidia and other investors in August—plans to make its full suite of large language models and other AI software available on infrastructure running on Instinct GPUs, according to AMD.

These products include Cohere’s North platform, which is designed to help businesses build and run private AI agents in a secure fashion, as well as the startup’s Command family of generative AI models. As part of the deal, AMD said it plans to use Cohere’s North platform as an “integral part” of internal AI workloads, including for engineering functions.

AMD positioned Cohere’s expanded use of Instinct-based infrastructure as a way for enterprise and government customers to “meet performance and TCO [total cost of ownership] goals that make their AI plans real.”

The deal was announced as part of AMD’s move to challenge Nvidia’s dominance of the AI computing space with its Instinct GPUs and related offerings, including the ROCm software stack that boosted AMD GPU performance in its seventh major update last week.

Exabeam ‘Reinventing’ MSSP Model In SIEM Partner Push: Channel Chief

Exabeam is seeking to accelerate its work with the channel around the massive SIEM opportunity, including a new commercial model for MSSPs and enhanced incentives for VARs launching in January, Global Channel Chief Craig Patterson (pictured above) told CRN.

The moves come in connection with Exabeam’s recent debut of its new Apex Partner Program, which unifies the programs from Exabeam and LogRhythm following the merger of the two major SIEM (security information and event management) vendors in 2024.

Key components that have already rolled out to partners include a unified partner portal and refreshed training, but a number of updates are forthcoming as of Jan. 1, Patterson (pictured) said in an interview. Those include a new commercial model for MSSPs that addresses a main point of friction with the prior model.

In the past, there hasn’t been a clear way for an MSSP to consume a single license and then allocate its license across its customer base, which often will vary in size by organization, Patterson said.

“We’re reinventing that right now,” he said. “As we launch Jan. 1, we'll be rolling out a new commercial model that will be solving that particular gap that the MSSPs presented to us.”

Among Exabeam’s global base of about 3,000 partners, roughly a quarter are MSSPs, Patterson noted.

For the company’s VAR partners, meanwhile, Exabeam has overhauled numerous aspects of its channel effort with the new Apex program launch. That includes a brand-new incentive package featuring revamped rebates, aimed at enabling both the initial sale as well as the retention of the end customer, in addition to new spiffs.

Exabeam is also launching new goals for partners and “including those in a strategic plan, so we can make sure we’re incentivizing [partners] across that entire life cycle,” Patterson said.

Blue Mantis Expands Canadian Business, ServiceNow Capabilities With Coreio Acquisition

IT service provider Blue Mantis wins kudos this week for its acquisition of fellow services provider Coreio, a move that will expand the company’s go-to-market reach into Canada and boost its capabilities around the ServiceNow platform.

Josh Dinneen (pictured above), CEO of Portsmouth, N.H.-based Blue Mantis, (No. 136 on CRN’s 2025 Solution Provider 500) told CRN that the addition of Coreio provides an extended reach into the Canadian market that Blue Mantis did not previously have—despite having a presence in Toronto that delivers services to the U.S.

“There’s a lot of synergies on how they [Coreio] deliver to their customers with everything from desktop to the data center, networking and SOC [Security Operations Center] services that make it a very easy integration,” Dinneen said.

“In that context, their philosophical approach to solving those IT challenges with managed services is very much aligned with us, and certainly them being a ServiceNow shop provides some great synergies as well,” he said.

Dinneen said to expect Blue Mantis to make more acquisitions at some point, but not until it is done digesting the six solution providers it has acquired in the last 12 months.