5 Companies That Came To Win This Week

For the week ending Jan. 24, CRN takes a look at the companies that brought their 'A' game to the channel.

The Week Ending Jan. 24

Topping this week’s list of companies that came to win is VMware for a savvy strategic acquisition that will boost the capabilities of the company’s SD-WAN offerings.

Also making the "Came to Win" list are ServiceNow for its own strategic acquisition in the AIOps space, CenturyLink for some big contract wins in the federal government arena, Stack Infrastructure for its ambitious plans to build a massive data center campus in Virginia, and security AppDev startup Snyk for snagging $150M in venture funding.

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.

VMware Acquiring Nyansa To Boost SD-WAN Through AI

Virtualization giant VMware is acquiring network analyst specialist Nyansa in a strategic move to boost its flagship SD-WAN by VeloCloud platform through new artificial intelligence and machine-learning capabilities.

The Nyansa acquisition will accelerate VMware’s delivery of end-to-end monitoring and troubleshooting capabilities for LAN/WAN deployments within VMware’s SD-WAN system, according to the company.

The addition of Nyansa’s technology to VMware’s SD-WAN lineup will better enable VMware to provide end-to-end network visibility, monitoring and remediation that can proactively predict problems, optimize application and network performance, and ensure that IoT devices are working correctly.

ServiceNow Makes AIOPs Play With Loom Systems Acquisition

Sticking with the topic of AI-related acquisitions, IT services and operations management giant ServiceNow struck a deal this week to acquire Loom Systems in a move to expand its AIOps – artificial intelligence for IT operations capabilities.

ServiceNow already incorporates AIOps within its IT service and IT operations management offerings, using it to address customer problems, identify deficiencies, correct issues, and take corrective actions before problems become apparent.

Adding Loom Systems’ advanced AIOps log data analytics technology to its platform will allow ServiceNow to enhance and expand those problem detection and resolution capabilities.

CenturyLink Lands Defense Department Learning Network Contract

CenturyLink this week scored a major contract to power the U.S. Department of Defense Education Activity (DoDEA) learning network with secure connectivity.

The contract starts with a one-year term, with 12 additional option periods and a contract ceiling value of $75 million, CenturyLink said. The telecommunications company will power the DoDEA learning network with virtual private networking, internet, and voice and video services to more than 85 global locations, the telecommunications carrier said.

The win comes just a week after CenturyLink was awarded a $1.6 billion task order to modernize the U.S. Department of Interior enterprise network with secure network services. CenturyLink competed against eight other vendors for that contract.

Data Center Service Provider Stack Infrastructure Plans Massive Campus

Armed with more than $1 billion in capital raised since its formation last year, wholesale data center colocation provider Stack Infrastructure disclosed this week that it is building a massive 125-acre, 4-million-square-foot campus in northern Virginia.

The new facility in Manassas will eventually offer more than 250 megawatts of critical capacity with flexible build-to-suit facilities to serve large data center customers.

Stack is following the model of hyperscale data center operators like Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google and Microsoft, which are investing billions in building, buying and equipping large hyperscale data centers.

Stack plans to have 700,000 square feet of data center space serving up 72 megawatts of critical capacity running on the campus by the end of this year.

Security AppDev Startup Snyk Raises $150 Million

Security application development startup Snyk has raised $150 million in a new round of funding, money the fast-growing company will use to fuel its global expansion and accelerate product development.

The company, founded by former Veeam co-CEO Peter McKay, is now valued at more than $1 billion. The funding comes on the heels of the company’s 400 percent revenue growth in 2019.

Snyk looks to change the way application security is approached and delivered to software-driven enterprises using what the company calls “developer-first” application security. The company’s tool set is targeted toward developers rather than IT security personnel and is already being used by 400,000 developers.

Snyk’s technology is designed to help businesses secure applications by fixing security issues in source code and in Kubernetes and container applications. The company’s tools help developers find vulnerabilities in code from BitBucket, GitHub or GitLab or in CI/CD (continuous integration/continuous delivery) tools.