5 Companies That Came To Win This Week

GE Gets In On Cloud, Big Data Action With Pivotal Investment

General Electric has invested $105 million in the Pivotal Initiative, the ambitious EMC-VMware joint venture that aims to marry cloud platform-as-a-service with big data and other services.

GE's investment gives it a 10 percent stake in Pivotal and values the newly formed company at around $1 billion. GE and Pivotal also inked a commercial and R&D agreement "aimed at accelerating GE's ability to create new analytic services and solutions for its customers," the companies said in a statement.

IBM Adds To Software Arsenal With UrbanCode Acquisition

IBM hopped onto the DevOps party bus by acquiring UrbanCode, a provider of software deployment automation and software life-cycle management technology. This probably wasn't an expensive deal for IBM, but it does give the company a taste of DevOps, one of the IT industry's hottest trends and a technology that is becoming table stakes for cloud players.

Dell Goes On x86 Offensive With Server Price Cuts, Financing

Dell launched a new pricing program to help its partners displace the competition in the x86 server market.

In a letter to partners, Greg Davis, Dell's vice president and general manager of global commercial channels, said Dell plans to devote more "energy and funds into PartnerDirect programs and channel leadership to work with you, our partners, and deliver long-term, end-to-end solutions that will power our customers' businesses."

Partners will receive global list price discounts, zero-percent financing and programs to assist with buybacks, POCs and seed systems for customers considering Dell's server solutions, according to Davis.

Vidyo Scores $17.1 Million In Latest VC Funding Round

Videoconferencing startup Vidyo landed $17.1 million in its latest round of capital funding led by Triangle Peak Partners. Vidyo, which has now raised more than $116 million since its launch in 2005, last week partnered with technology consortium Internet2, which will use Vidyo's videoconferencing software in thousands of public K-12 schools across the U.S.

Box Brings In Security Execs To Help Shore Up Image

Cloud storage vendor Box has hired two experienced security executives to shore up its corporate image and (it hopes) lure more enterprise customers.

Justin Somaini, former chief information security officer at Yahoo, is now Box's chief trust officer, and Niall Wall, former vice president and general manager at Symantec, is Box's senior vice president of business development.

Somaini, who has also worked at Symantec in the past and is credited with starting Yahoo's security program from scratch, says he'll focus on ensuring Box is responsive to any outages that occur. "There's no question about it that Box is already concerned about availability; it's one of the top priorities if not the top priority within the company," Somaini told CRN.