5 Companies That Came To Win This Week
For the week ending Feb. 21, CRN takes a look at the companies that brought their 'A' game to the channel.
The Week Ending Feb. 21
Topping this week’s list of companies that came to win is HP for going on the defensive with a new shareholder rights plan in battling Xerox’s unsolicited takeover bid.
Also making the "Came to Win" list are Google Cloud for a savvy acquisition in mainframe application migration technology, CenturyLink for offering new security services for its customers and channel partners, SentinelOne for an eye-popping round of financing, and security startup Snyk for launching its first channel partner program.
Not everyone in the IT industry was making smart moves this week, of course. For a rundown of companies that were unfortunate, unsuccessful or just didn't make good decisions, check out this week's 5 Companies That Had A Rough Week roundup.
HP To Battle Xerox Takeover With Shareholder Rights Plan
Facing a hostile takeover bid from rival Xerox, HP Inc. made a major defensive move this week by adopting a shareholder rights plan that the company said could prevent an unsolicited acquisition or at least strengthen HP’s negotiating position.
The shareholder rights plan includes a number of measures to help fend off a takeover and are triggered if an outside entity acquires 20 percent or more of HP shares. The plan will expire in one year on Feb. 20, 2021.
The defensive move comes after Xerox said it plans to ask all HP shareholders to sell their shares through a tender offer starting “on or around” March 2. Xerox recently raised its takeover offer to $24 a share from its initial offer of $22 a share.
HP’s board of directors has repeatedly rejected the takeover deal since it was first proposed by Xerox in November.
Google Cloud Continues Enterprise Push With Cornerstone Technology Buy
Google Cloud acquired Netherlands-based Cornerstone Technology this week in a move that provides the company with technology its customers use to migrate mainframe workloads to its cloud platform.
The savvy acquisition will help customers modernize their infrastructure and applications on Google Cloud. The company will offer the Cornerstone capabilities through its professional services organization and its channel partner network.
Cornerstone’s technology includes migration road-map development, conversion flexibility for programming languages and databases to prepare applications for modernization, and automated mainframe data migration capabilities. The automated application modernization processes, for example, break down COBOL, PL/1 and Assembler programs into services and makes them cloud-native, such as within a managed, containerized environment.
CenturyLink Steps Up Security With Rapid Threat Defense Offering For Partners, Enterprises
Security is clearly the top priority for many solution providers and their customers today. So CenturyLink wins applause for its introduction this week of its new Rapid Threat Defense threat detection and response capability that helps enterprises automate their responses to security events.
The new capabilities are indicative of how CenturyLink is prioritizing network-based security for its enterprise customers—and for the CenturyLink channel partners that support them.
Rapid Threat Defense is now available through CenturyLink's Adaptive Threat Intelligence and Adaptive Network Security, the telecommunications company’s cloud-based firewall platform. The offering will be integrated with CenturyLink's Managed Premises Firewalls and Secure SD-WAN offerings later this year.
Security Vendor SentinelOne Raises $200 Million, Eyes IPO
SentinelOne caught everyone’s attention this week when the endpoint protection technology developer raised $200 million in a Series E round of funding. The new financing brought the company’s market valuation to more than $1.1 billion.
The fast-growing security company said it would use the funding to fuel its hypergrowth, including adding sales, marketing and channel staff and expanding its geographic footprint in Europe and Asia.
The new funding comes just eight months after SentinelOne closed a $120 million Series D round. But the company is growing so quickly that it quickly pursued another round. The financing also positions the company for a possible IPO in one to two years.
Security Startup Snyk Debuts Partner Program To Win Larger Customers
Snyk, a fast-growing provider of technology that helps developers use open-source code, wins kudos this week for launching its first partner program, a move to recruit solution providers who support enterprise-class companies with large numbers of developers.
Snyk plans to provide more resources and discounts to channel partners who focus on speeding up application development life cycles in a secure manner for their clients.
London-based Snyk is already in the process of recruiting 35 channel partners in North America, according to CEO Peter McKay, with plans to partner closely with Optiv, GuidePoint and Trace3 due to their expertise in security and digital transformation.
While Snyk has traditionally landed developers as customers through word-of-mouth, the massive increase in the number of developers using the company’s tools to build applications means that Snyk needs to take a different approach and rely on more partners to support developers at large enterprise and midmarket customers.
Snyk, founded in 2015, has raised $252 million in five rounds of outside funding, including a $150 million Series C round just last month.