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For the week ending September 29, CRN will highlight companies that are bringing their “A” game to the channel, including Amazon, Ingram Micro, SHI’s Stratascale cybersecurity business, ServiceNow, and Dell Technologies.
Week ending September 29th
Topping this week’s Came to Win list is Amazon, which made the bold move of investing heavily in GenAI startup Anthropic.
Also, distributor Ingram Micro has a new Staff Assist program to help partners with high-demand workforce talent, SHI Stratascale has an acquisition to expand its cybersecurity portfolio, ServiceNow has a savvy acquisition of its own, and Dell Technologies has a new service. The Development business unit is focused on driving the company’s AI strategy.
Amazon to invest up to $4 billion in Anthropic as GenAI competition intensifies
Amazon is putting money into its own AI, revealing plans this week to invest up to $4 billion in Anthropic, ChapGPT developer OpenAI’s biggest competitor.
The acquisition of a minority stake in Anthropic is part of a broader strategic partnership between Amazon and the two-year-old San Francisco startup founded by former OpenAI executives Dario Amodei and Daniela Amodei. be.
The investment agreement also includes Anthropic’s commitment to use AWS’ Trainium training chips and Inferentia AL accelerator chips to build, train, and deploy AI foundational models. The two companies will work together to further develop the Trainium and Inferentia technologies.
Anthropic also has a long-term commitment to providing AWS customers with access to future generations of AI foundations through AWS Bedrock fully managed AI services. And AWS will be Anthropic’s primary cloud provider for its mission-critical workloads.
Amazon and Anthropic’s partnership comes nine months after Microsoft invested $10 billion in OpenAI as part of an all-out generative AI offensive that included the launch of Microsoft 365 Copilot last week.
Ingram Micro launches staff assistance program to support offshore talent partners
Ingram Micro announced its new Staff Assist program this week to rave reviews. Through this program, the distributor will help her MSPs and IT service providers address the ongoing challenge of finding and retaining talent by pairing them with offshore talent at a fraction of the cost of hiring in the United States. To do.
Under the Staff Assist program, IT service partners can hire Ingram Micro employees at offshore locations around the world to become part of their MSP team. Offshore talent will be located in India, the Philippines and Latin America, and Ingram plans to expand into other accessible regions soon.
Ingram can supply talent for cloud, network operating center, server management, network administration, and cybersecurity tasks.
Service providers can hire as many people as they need and can scale up to meet the demands of enterprise customers or scale down to serve the small and medium-sized business market. Ingram said the hiring cycle typically takes 30 to 60 days.
Ingram said partner companies will conservatively pay 30 to 50 percent less than the cost of hiring IT talent in the United States.
SHI’s Stratascale aims to expand security services with first acquisition
Stratascale is looking to strengthen its portfolio of cybersecurity services this week with the acquisition of attack surface management provider Vector0.
The deal marks Stratascale’s first acquisition since its founding in late 2020 as a subsidiary of SHI International, No. 14 on CRN’s Solution Provider 500.
Founded in 2021, Vector0 provides customers with continuous internet scanning to identify potentially vulnerable assets through its DarkWave attack surface management platform.
Stratascale senior vice president David Olzak said in a statement that Vector0 offers “scalability” that allows Stratascale’s managed services to be integrated with “the threat and vulnerability management capabilities of some of our most strategic cybersecurity partners.” Said to bring.
Thai Lee, president and CEO of SHI International, said the move is the latest effort to establish SHI, and Stratascale in particular, as “a leader in the cybersecurity consulting and implementation market.”
ServiceNow acquires Occupational Safety and Health Practice Assets
Staying on the topic of savvy acquisitions, digital workflow technology developer ServiceNow further strengthened its industry expertise this week with the acquisition of ToolBox OH&S digital assets from an Australian service provider.
ToolBox OH&S, an occupational health and safety management asset built on the ServiceNow platform, was developed by Enable Professional Services, an Australia-based ServiceNow Elite partner acquired by Fujitsu in July 2022.
ServiceNow adds ToolBox OH&S to ServiceNow’s practice focused on workplace delivery systems.
“ToolBox OH&S just gives us a way to accelerate our roadmap,” Eric Schroeder, vice president of products for ServiceNow’s NowX internal incubator division, told CRN. “This gives us the deeper functionality that our customers are looking for. They have extensive experience in this area, which will help accelerate our health and safety practices.”
Australian customers can continue to use ToolBox OH&S while ServiceNow integrates it more tightly with its own systems. Eventually, it will be available to all his ServiceNow partners and customers.
Dell creates AI business unit and names Jeff Boudreau as chief AI officer
Dell Technologies signaled its full commitment to the hotly contested generative AI space this week with the creation of a new AI business unit to lead Dell’s AI strategy across the company.
Dell also named Jeff Boudreau, who has led the company’s Infrastructure Solutions Group since 2019, as its first chief AI officer, reporting to Dell’s chief operating officer Jeff Clark. . Boudreau will be responsible for Dell’s strategy to use its technology as the foundation for generative AI efforts within the enterprise.
Clark said Boudreau and his team will work across the company to understand domain-specific use cases for AI, build, define and standardize architectures, and integrate AI across Dell’s product portfolio. It is said that This business unit will also lead the AI Innovation Center, which builds relevant AI partnerships and sets policy, and helps educate others within the company.
Clarke previously said Dell is looking at how AI could revolutionize PC sales. Dell expects PC users to adopt applications such as Microsoft’s Copilot and other similar AI-based assistants and run multiple applications in parallel to improve productivity. Masu.
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