5 Companies That Came To Win This Week

For the week ending June 7, CRN takes a look at the companies that brought their 'A' game to the channel.

The Week Ending June 7

Topping this week's roundup of companies that came to win is Google for its savvy $2.6-billion deal to acquire Looker in a significant move to expand its cloud business analytics offerings.

Also making the list were Dell Technologies for increasing its share of the global server market in the first quarter, SentinelOne for raising $120 million in financing to step up its end-point security battle with competitors CrowdStrike and Cylance, and Cisco for its deal to buy IoT device security developer Sentryo. And Hewlett-Packard Enterprise and NetApp both made strategic pricing moves this week.

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 Five Companies That Had A Rough Week roundup.

Google To Acquire Looker In $2.6B Blockbuster Business Analytics Deal

Google made a major move this week to expand the business analytics offerings of its Google Cloud Platform when it announced a deal to buy Looker Data Sciences, a fast-rising developer of a business intelligence platform and analytical applications.

Google Cloud already offers a number of big data management and business analytics services, including its Big Query cloud data warehouse. The addition of Looker will allow Google to provide a more comprehensive portfolio of analytical services.

Google Cloud is in a tough fight with cloud platform rivals Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, as well as upstarts like Snowflake Computing. This week Google Cloud took a major step to boost its competitive standing in business analytics.

Dell Increases Server Market-Share Lead Over Rivals HPE, Lenovo And Cisco

Dell Technologies remained the leader of the worldwide server market in the first quarter of 2019, according to numbers released by IDC this week.

Dell generated $3.99 billion in server revenue during the quarter, up 8.9 percent from $3.67 billion in the first quarter of 2018. Those sales gave Dell a 20.2 percent share of the $19.80 billion global server market – nearly a full-point gain from the 19.3 percent market share Dell held one year earlier.

While the dollar value of Dell's Q1 server sales were up, however, the 517,000 server units the company shipped in the quarter marked a 7.0 percent decline from one year earlier.

But Dell's showing was good enough to stay ahead of the server vendor pack. Rival Hewlett Packard Enterprise closed the quarter with $3.52 billion in worldwide server revenue for a 17.8 percent market share, a decline from the 18.5 percent share HPE held one year earlier.

Other server vendors including Lenovo, Cisco and Inspur Power Systems held single-digit market shares.

HPE And NetApp Go Low – Price, That Is

Hewlett Packard Enterprise and NetApp both made strategic pricing moves this week to improve their competitive positioning.

HPE made good on its promise to be more aggressive in the intensely competitive SMB/midmarket server arena by slashing ProLiant Gen 10 prices this week by an average of 9 percent. The company is also offering trade-in rebates to customers that can lower the price of the enterprise-class ProLiant Gen 10 servers to well under $1,000.

NetApp, meanwhile, continued its hard push into the commercial storage market this week when it unveiled the AFF C190 all-flash FAS storage array with a starting price below $20,000. Despite the low price tag NetApp said the new AFF C190 has many of the same enterprise-class capabilities of higher priced NetApp systems.

SentinelOne Raises $120 Million To Battle CrowdStrike, Cylance

Endpoint protection technology developer SentinelOne this week raised an impressive $120 million in a Series D round of financing, building up the company's war chest to support its competition against rivals CrowdStrike and Cylance.

SentinelOne plans to use the proceeds from the funding round to establish a leadership position around securing Internet of Things devices and network endpoints. With the funding the company intends to gain market share from CrowdStrike and Cylance by further differentiating its product and go-to-market strategies.

Cisco To Scoop Up Sentryo To Boost Industrial IoT Security

Internet of Things and operational technology devices generally weren't designed with security in mind – and that's a growing problem as more businesses expand their IoT networks.

Cisco Systems wins kudos this week for its plans to acquire Sentryo, a French company that specializes in device visibility and security for industrial control system networks. The technology is targeted toward companies in the manufacturing, transportation, and oil and gas sectors.

The small but strategic acquisition will let Cisco offer more device visibility for operational technology endpoints on a network and protect them against cybersecurity attacks.