5 Companies That Came To Win This Week

The Week Ending June 30

Topping this week's roundup of companies that came to win is Nutanix, which took several significant steps to strengthen its position in the hybrid cloud market.

Also making the list are Microsoft for its deal to acquire cloud cost optimization software developer Cloudyn, Trend Micro for launching a $100 million venture fund to invest in startups in IoT and other emerging technologies, Tanium for a savvy addition to its C-level executives, and D&H Distributing's addition of Microsoft Azure to its cloud marketplace.

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.

Nutanix Strengthens Cloud Position With Google Alliance, New Tech Capabilities

Nutanix took some significant steps this week to move workloads running on its hyper-converged infrastructure systems beyond the data center to hybrid clouds.

Nutanix, which held its .NEXT conference this week, announced an alliance with Google aimed at making it easier for workloads running on its hyper-converged systems to easily migrate to the Google cloud. The Nutanix-Google relationship, which includes Nutanix support for Kubernetes container technology, builds a bridge between on-premise and cloud systems.

Nutanix also unveiled Nutanix Xi Cloud Services, which extend data center services to the cloud via the company's Prism centralized data center infrastructure management software. The move is expected to make it easier for partners and customers to build hybrid clouds, a difficult task with traditional on-premise infrastructure systems.

Microsoft Strikes Deal To Acquire Cloud Cost Optimization Software Vendor

Microsoft moved to strengthen its hand in the cloud computing arena this week when it signed a deal to acquire Cloudyn, a developer of software used by businesses and managed service providers to manage spending for cloud services.

As businesses shift more of their IT operations to the cloud, tracking spending for those services can be a challenge. Cloudyn develops tools that businesses and organizations use to identify, measure and analyze cloud service consumption, enable accountability, and forecast future cloud spending. That allows them to optimize their cloud services usage and costs through automated monitoring, analytics and cost allocation.

The tools work with Microsoft's Azure cloud service and, interestingly, with Amazon Web Services and the Google Cloud Platform.

Trend Micro Launches $100 Million Venture Fund For IoT, Emerging Tech Investments

Security technology vendor Trend Micro took a big step this week to get in on the ground floor of hot emerging technology areas such the Internet of Things.

Trend Micro unveiled a $100 million venture fund to invest in startups in "hyper-growth markets," according to President and COO Wael Mohamed. Unusually, the fund will focus on startups outside the IT security realm – a move designed to provide Trend Micro with insight into the challenges around the deployment of emerging technologies.

In addition to financial backing, Trend Micro will provide startups with access to resources such as global threat intelligence, strategic alliances, and access to the vendor's channel partners.

Tanium Hires Former Salesforce Exec As Chief Revenue Officer

Security technology company Tanium made a savvy hire this week, appointing former Salesforce.com executive Mark Wayland to the newly created role of chief revenue officer.

Wayland joins Tanium after 10 years at Salesforce, most recently as senior vice president of marketing for cloud. Before joining Salesforce he held posts at Gartner, Scient and Nortel.

In his new post Wayland will oversee Tanium's sales, customer support, pricing and revenue management operations. He will be responsible for helping Tanium develop its sales strategy and expansion into new markets.

Tanium has seen some significant changes in its management ranks this year, including the departure of COO and CFO Eric Brown. Recent hires, including Wayland, indicate the company is staffing up for growth.

D&H Adds Azure To Cloud Marketplace In Push To Quintuple Number Of VARs On Platform

D&H Distributing this week stepped up its efforts to provide its channel partners with additional cloud computing services, adding Microsoft's popular Azure to its cloud marketplace and vowing to increase the number of partners on its cloud platform from 300 today to 1,500 or 2,000 one year from now.

D&H plans to leverage Azure to address SMB-specific backup and disaster recovery needs and provide VARs with the kind of functionality in Microsoft's legacy small-business server. The distributor also plans to bundle Azure with hardware to provide VARs with a hybrid system that can easily move workloads to and from the cloud.

In addition, D&H is developing an agent system through which it will handle cloud service billing chores on behalf of partners.