Five Companies That Came To Win This Week

For the week ending Feb. 27, CRN takes a look at the companies that brought their ‘A’ game to the channel including Myriad360, Arctic Wolf, Red Hat, Confluent, AMD and Nutanix.

The Week Ending Feb. 27

Topping this week’s Five Companies that Came to Win list is solution provider Myriad360 for its blockbuster acquisition of Advizex, creating a new channel powerhouse in the AI infrastructure and networking arena.

Also making this week’s list is Arctic Wolf for its own strategic acquisition in a move to expand the security operations platform vendor’s capabilities around proactive cyber defense.

Open-source software giant Red Hat and real-time data platform developer Confluent both make this week’s list for taking steps to upgrade their partner programs.

And AMD and Nutanix make the list together for establishing a strategic partnership focused on enterprise agentic AI infrastructure.

Myriad360 Acquires Advizex, Creating $900M Nvidia AI Platform Powerhouse

Fast-growing Nvidia InfiniBand superstar Myriad360, one of the top AI networking providers, tops this week’s “Came to Win” list with its deal to buy AI infrastructure superstar Advizex in a deal that creates a new Nvidia global platform powerhouse with $900 million in annual run rate gross revenue.

The deal combines Myriad360’s networking prowess as one of the top HPE Juniper and Cisco AI networking partners with the AI infrastructure muscle of Advizex, a Dell Titanium partner and a leader in the as-a-service market with Dell Apex and HPE GreenLake.

The acquisition establishes the combined company as a bona fide global Nvidia AI platform powerhouse with the networking, hardware and services muscle to provide it with a big competitive advantage in the booming AI market.

“This is all about growth for us,” Myriad360 CEO Jay Miley (pictured) told CRN in an interview. “We were only serving part of the market. We were only addressing part of the technology stack. Advizex’s business really just filled out the technology stack for us in a really, really complementary way that was too compelling not figure out how to get a deal done.”

Arctic Wolf Doubles Down On Exposure Management With Sevco Aquisition

Arctic Wolf this week acquired Sevco Security, a startup focused on exposure management, in a move to expand the security operations platform vendor’s capabilities around proactive cyber defense.

Arctic Wolf said the Sevco acquisition will boost its capabilities around assessing vulnerabilities and other exposure risks, and then proactively securing against those exposures.

In a LinkedIn post, Arctic Wolf CEO Nick Schneider wrote that the acquisition underscores how the vendor is “strengthening our strategy around proactive security and helping organizations reduce risk before attacks occur.”

Sevco offers cloud-native capabilities that will help enable the Arctic Wolf Aurora Platform to unify asset intelligence with vulnerability context as well as with other security controls, in order to provide improved identification and prioritization of exposure risks, Arctic Wolf said.

Red Hat Revamped Partner Incentives Include Net-New Customer Rewards

Red Hat earns kudos this week for its efforts to better reward its solution provider partners that are landing net-new customers, cross-selling and upselling, and earning Red Hat capability skills and badging.

Kevin Kennedy, Red Hat vice president of the global ecosystem, told CRN that net-new customers are “going to be the lifeblood of our future.” And for more investment in Red Hat skilling by the company’s partners, “the greater profitability you’re going to have as a result of the program.”

As part of a slew of partner program updates, Red Hat is moving away from just reimbursement to a predictable model that emphasizes partner investment in Red Hat technologies and services. Partners will receive rewards for workshops, assessments and other presales activities, plus other actions taken throughout the customer life cycle. These incentives aim to reduce up-front investments by partners.

Red Hat is expanding rebates and deal registration to cover OEM, cloud and other indirect routes to market. The vendor also is broadening partner eligibility for incentives and working to increase partner profitability.

And the company is offering additional incentives for solution providers that are selling across the Red Hat portfolio, with cross-selling and upselling opportunities available through products such as the Ansible open-source IT automation engine

Coming later this year is a cloud program module for Red Hat Certified Cloud and Service Providers focused on annual recurring revenue for points instead of traditional bookings as consumption business models grow in popularity.

Confluent Looks To Streamline Partner Resell Efforts With New Initiative

Staying on the topic of channel program initiatives, Confluent wins applause for launching a new reseller partner program that the data streaming platform developer says will help partners streamline cloud resell deals with automated price quotes, instant approvals and co-marketing funds.

The new Sell With Confluent program is targeted toward solution providers, service providers and regional systems integrators, especially those working with small and mid-size clients, Kamal Brar, senior vice president of Confluent’s Partners and Technology Group, said in an interview with CRN.

Sell With Confluent includes “accelerated profitability and incentives,” according to the company. The partner rewards framework has been restructured to ensure that resellers “are highly compensated for sourcing and closing deals,” creating opportunities for market-competitive “double-digit discounts.”

New self-service quoting tools enable immediate price quote generation with programmatic discounts applied automatically, according to Confluent. Partners also receive deal protection to safeguard sourced opportunities. And a new Business Investment Fund offers funding for marketing activities such as workshops, regional events and customer engagement programs.

Sell With Confluent is the latest of a series of channel initiatives the company has launched over the last two years to engage with multiple types of partners including systems integrators, OEMs and ISVs.

AMD Commits $250M To Nutanix To Accelerate Enterprise Agentic AI Infrastructure

AMD and Nutanix together make this week’s list for signing a multi-year strategic partnership aimed at developing what they called an open, full-stack AI infrastructure platform specifically for agentic AI applications.

As part of that partnership, the two companies will work to optimize the Nutanix Cloud Platform and the Nutanix Kubernetes Platform on AMD EPYC CPUs and AMD Instinct GPUs. They will also integrate the AMD ROCm software ecosystem and AMD Enterprise AI platform into Nutanix AI full-stack solutions.

The two companies said that through the alliance they are developing “an open solution for agentic AI platforms using high-performance infrastructure and supported by a broad set of OEM partners,” according to a press statement from AMD.

As part of the agreement, AMD will purchase $150 million in Nutanix common stock at $36.26 per share. AMD will also fund up to $100 million for Nutanix to help with joint engineering initiatives and go-to-market collaboration.

“What we’re doing with this platform is we are providing the infrastructure software along with the hardware from AMD through server partners for companies to run their enterprise inferencing and agentic AI applications and manage all the data associated with that,” Nutanix CEO Rajiv Ramaswamy said during a press conference.