5 Companies That Came To Win This Week

For the week ending April 28, CRN takes a look at the companies that brought their ‘A’ game to the channel including Aruba (an HPE company), Optiv, Eaton, SentinelOne and Accenture.

The Week Ending April 28

Topping this week’s Came to Win list is Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Company, for launching its new ‘partner-centric’ Agile Network-as-a-Service.

Also making this week’s list are cybersecurity solution provider Optiv for launching a program to work with its vendor partners, Eaton for a savvy acquisition that boosts its position in renewable energy, services giant Accenture for debuting a new XDR managed service in conjunction with Google, and cybersecurity provider SentinelOne for its new threat hunting offering that incorporates generative AI.

Aruba Agile NaaS Offers A ‘Partner-Centric’ Approach

Aruba this week unveiled new Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) capabilities for customers and channel partners to acquire, deploy and manage on the popular HPE GreenLake platform.

Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, debuted its Agile NaaS and a new Service Pack enhancement at the Aruba Atmosphere 2023 conference. Agile NaaS, according to Aruba, is a framework to help customers understand their business priorities and implement new consumption choices for networking services via HPE GreenLake.

Agile NaaS is not a product, but rather a “strategic approach” for Aruba and its channel partners to work with customers to understand their priorities related to network deployment and operating the network, given their business initiatives, Larry Lunetta, Aruba VP of WLAN and security solutions marketing, told CRN.

Partners told CRN that the new NaaS and Service Pack on HPE GreenLake for Aruba networking were “partner-centric” in that they give partners a greater role in helping customers understand their networking needs based on their business objectives.

At the conference Aruba also launched the next generation of its popular network management platform, HPE Aruba Networking Central, to help solution providers help their customers get the most out of their networks.

Aruba Head of Worldwide Sales Alain Carpentier this week reaffirmed the company’s commitment to helping partners optimize and grow their businesses after disclosing that Worldwide Channel Chief Donna Grothjan, who has championed partner programs and policies that have powered solution provider growth for more than three decades, is retiring at the end of May.

Optiv Launches ‘Data-Driven’ Program ForCybersecurity Partnerships

The “5 That Came To Win” list often spotlights IT vendors’ efforts to launch new channel programs or enhance and expand existing programs. In an unusual twist Optiv, a cybersecurity solutions and service provider powerhouse,wins kudos this week for launching its own partner program to improve how it works with other companies – primarily cybersecurity vendors.

The goal of the program is to provide a clear roadmap for working with Optiv to best serve Optiv’s end customers. The Denver-based Optiv currently works with more than 450 partners including CrowdStrike, Palo Alto Networks and Proofpoint.

Optiv said the program brings a “data-driven approach” to assessing its vendor partnerships and providesvalue back to vendor partners which, in turn, will drive better customer outcomes. That includes such criteria as the amount of revenue growth each partnership is producing and the type of growth – such as from new business or renewals—being delivered.

Along with enabling Optiv to better differentiate between its partners, the company is also able to provide its vendor partners with improved transparency about their joint business, Optiv executives told CRN.

Eaton Buys Stake In Power Company To Boost Renewable Energy, Asia-Pacific Reach

Looking to double-down on sustainability, data center power management company Eaton this week said it has acquired a 49-percent stake in Chinese manufacturer Jiangsu Ryan Electrical in a move that boosts both its renewable energy portfolio and its market reach in the Asia-Pacific region.

Jiangsu generated $100 million in revenue last year with products used by customers for data center infrastructure, renewable energy and industrial markets.

Eaton is an intelligent power management and data center infrastructure company with a slew of products including UPSes [Uninterruptible Power Systems] and PDUes [Power Distribution Units] hardware as well as power management and monitoring software. The Dublin, Ireland-based company has been doubling down on sustainability and renewable energy in recent years.

In 2022 Eaton acquiredRoyal Power Solutions for $600 million to boost its energy and power management capabilities. Eaton made one of its largest acquisitions in its history in 2021 with the $1.65 billion blockbuster purchase of fellow power and data center infrastructure Tripp Lite.

Accenture Doubles Down On Google Cloud Security With New Managed Service

Accenture and Google Cloud announced a major expansion of their cybersecurity partnership Monday, with the debut of a new managed service from the IT consulting giant powered by security operations tools and brand-new generative AI technology from Google, as well as Google’s Mandiant threat intelligence.

The Accenture Managed XDR (Extended Detection and Response) service provides customers with enhanced cyber defense through correlation of data sources across an organization’s environments and productivity enhancements using generative AI, ultimately helping to thwart even sophisticated attacks more quickly, Accenture said.

Accenture and Google Cloud announced the expanded partnership in connection with RSA Conference 2023, the major cybersecurity industry summit that kicked off Monday in San Francisco.

The partnership with Google Cloud will include providing newly unveiled generative AI technology to help power the Accenture service, which “will be groundbreaking,” Paolo Dal Cin, global head of Accenture Security, told CRN.

SentinelOne Unveils Generative AI-Powered Threat Hunting Tool

Staying on the topic of ground-breaking security news out of RSA, SentinelOne this week unveiled a new threat hunting tool that utilizes generative AI in an effort to dramatically improve productivity for security analysts.

The new offering makes SentinelOne among the first security vendors to leverage generative AI technology to boost the capabilities of its product portfolio.

SentinelOne is calling the new offering for its Singularity platform the “first-of-its-kind” in cybersecurity and a major advancement for cyber defense. Looking ahead, it will become even more critical to bring generative AI functionality to security teams due to the fact that adversaries, too, are upping their game with the help of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and other chatbots, according to SentinelOne.

As an example of the new tool’s capabilities, analysts can use the new interface in the Singularity Skylight platform to ask questions about threats in a customer’s environment — such as, “is a certain threat actor present in this environment?” or “are there threat actors affiliated with China in my environment?”

The ability to use natural language to query a system will offer massive time-savings to analysts and will allow security teams to respond to more alerts and catch more attacks, according to company executives. This is particularly important at a time when cybersecurity talent is in short supply and threats continue to evolve and intensify.