5 Companies That Came To Win This Week

For the week ending Dec. 4, CRN takes a look at the companies that brought their ‘A’ game to the channel.

The Week Ending Dec. 4

Topping this week’s Came to Win list is Salesforce for its blockbuster acquisition of Slack, a move that could remake the Software-as-a-Service arena.

Also making the list are Sirius Computer Solutions for its own savvy acquisition, AWS for expanding options for its ISV and consulting partners, cybersecurity vendor CrowdStrike for a big customer win, and Microsoft for expanding the data management capabilities of the Azure cloud platform.

Salesforce To Buy Collaboration App Developer Slack For $27.7 Billion

Salesforce made a big acquisition move this week when the CRM application giant struck a deal to buy Slack, the developer of popular collaboration and chat applications, for $27.7 billion. It was the biggest acquisition of Salesforce’s history.

Salesforce will integrate Slack’s software to make it the front end “engagement layer” of its entire portfolio of Salesforce Customer 360 cloud applications – including the company’s flagship CRM application – and bring Salesforce workflows to users.

The acquisition will put Salesforce into head-to-head competition in the red-hot collaboration software arena with Microsoft and its Teams application.

Sirius Acquires Champion Solutions Group

Speaking of savvy acquisitions, Sirius Computer Solutions bought Champion Solutions Group this week in a move that will bring the latter’s surging MessageOps practice to one of the country’s largest channel companies.

The acquisition will allow San Antonio-based Sirius, No. 21 on the CRN Solution Provider 500, to double the size of its Microsoft solutions practice and grow its recurring revenue. The acquisition of Champion Solutions Group, based in Boca Raton, Fla., also expands Sirius’ presence in Florida and the Southeast.

Chris Pyle (pictured), CEO of Champion Solutions Group (No. 188 on the Solution Provider 500) will now serve as president of the MessageOps business and its Inscape flagship product. The Inscape cloud monitoring and management tool, which Champion developed for Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Azure customers, now boasts more than 1 million users.

AWS To Launch New ISV Partner Path, Offer Third-Party Services Through Its Marketplace

Amazon Web Services wins kudos this week for launching the ISV Partner Path program, a move the cloud giant said will make it easier for independent software vendors to build, market and sell their solutions on the AWS cloud.

The new program, announced at this week’s AWS re:Invent conference, will also support AWS Consulting Partners in the AWS Partner Network.

AWS is moving away from badging ISVs as Select or Advanced Technology Partners based on meeting tier requirements, focusing instead on ISVs’ service-level recognition and validation. AWS also will badge ISVs’ individual solutions. AWS believes that approach will better align with how ISVs go to market and how customers buy solutions form ISVs.

AWS also unveiled SaaS Boost, a new open-source tool to help ISV partners more quickly modernize their applications for Software-as-a-Service delivery on the AWS cloud.

AWS is also now providing a way for consulting, ISV and MSP partners to offer professional services through the AWS Marketplace, including offering quoting and billing capabilities.

Target Taps CrowdStrike For Fast Deployment, Drops Symantec

Cybersecurity tech developer CrowdStrike has scored a big customer win, disclosing this week that retail giant Target deployed CrowdStrike’s Falcon endpoint protection system across its entire 368,000-employee environment in less than 10 days.

Minneapolis-based Target made the move because it was dissatisfied with how Symantec was treating the retailer and because November marked the end-of-life for some versions of the Symantec Endpoint Protection product.

Microsoft Adds Data Governance Capabilities To Azure

Microsoft gave Azure’s big data management capabilities a significant boost this week when it unveiled a new unified data governance service for the cloud platform.

The new Azure Purview automates data discovery and cataloging across all of an organization’s on-premises and multi-cloud environments. Currently in public preview, the service will initially be targeted for discovering data, gaining insights faster and managing compliance with data protection and privacy regulations.

Microsoft also announced the general availability of its Azure Synapse cloud data warehousing and data analytics service.