For the week ending June 21, CRN takes a look at the companies that brought their ‘A’ game to the channel including Nvidia, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Huntress, Digital Ocean and Riverbed.

The Week Ending June 21

Topping this week’s Came to Win is Nvidia which – for a short time, at least – became the world’s most valuable company with a $3.34 trillion market cap.

Also making this week’s list are Hewlett Packard Enterprise for some big moves in the AI and virtualization technology side at its HPE Discover event, cybersecurity service provider Huntress for a very impressive funding round, cloud service and IaaS provider DigitalOcean for a savvy top-executive hire, and WAN optimization and observability provider Riverbed for a major revamp of its partner program.

Nvidia Becomes World’s Most Valuable Company With $3.34 Trillion Market Cap

Nvidia became the most highly valued company in the world this week when the chip designer’s stock price hit a high of $136.33 per share Tuesday, sending the company’s total market valuation to $3.34 trillion, surpassing previous “most valuable” companies Apple and Microsoft.

At the close of trading on Thursday Nvidia’s stock had dropped to $130.78 per share, putting its market cap at $3.217 trillion. That allowed Microsoft to regain the “most valuable” company crown with a market cap of $3.313 trillion at day’s end. Apple’s market cap stood at $3.215 trillion – just a hair below Nvidia – at the close of trading.

The impressive market cap is the latest benchmark of what has been a remarkable rise for Nvidia. While achieving early success with its GPUs, the company’s more recent success is the result of its evolution into a “full-stack” computing company developing breakthrough technology for the major cloud service providers, server vendors, data center infrastructure software developers and ISVs.

Nvidia’s rise also has much to do with its role of providing the accelerated compute performance needed to make generative AI advancements possible.

HPE Launches New Virtualization, AI Solutions Portfolio

Hewlett Packard Enterprise made some bold technology moves this week at its HPE Discover event, launching new virtualization offering and a comprehensive generative AI solutions portfolio co-developed and co-branded by Nvidia.

The new ‘Nvidia AI Computing By HPE’ portfolio provides a complete co-developed generative AI compute, storage and networking portfolio to accelerate AI adoption that also extends into the channel with joint enablement and training program with combined business market development funds for partners.

The biggest game changer is an HPE Private Cloud AI solution developed with Nvidia that is designed to be up and running with just three clicks. The service is built on top of HPE’s Greenlake cloud service.

HPE also previewed a new KVM-based hypervisor virtualization capability at HPE Discover, slated to be available as a beta program later this summer and generally available later this year as part of HPE Private Cloud Business Edition later this year.

Huntress Raises $150M, Plans To ‘Democratize’ SIEM And Data Protection For SMBs

Managed cybersecurity provider Huntress makes this week’s Five Came to Win list for raising $150 million in a Series D funding round that boosts the company’s market value to more than $1.5 billion.

The additional funding will be used to accelerate expansion into new product segments – part of a drive to spur growth for partners and better secure their SMB customers, Huntress co-founder and CEO Kyle Hanslovan told CRN.

The funding, which brings Huntress’ total financing to $268 million, more than doubles Huntress’ market cap and officially puts it into “unicorn” status. Investors in the round included Kleiner Perkins, Meritech Capital and Sapphire Ventures.

DigitalOcean Hires AWS AI Leader As New CTO

Cloud computing and Infrastructure-as-a-Service provider DigitalOcean has scored big on the personnel front by hiring Bratin Saha as the company’s new chief product and technology officer.

Saha comes to DigitalOcean from Amazon Web Services where he served for six years as vice president and general manager of AI and machine learning and data infrastructure.

At AWS, Saha led the creation of one of the fastest-growing AWS businesses and helped to build the multibillion-dollar generative AI business for AWS through products like Amazon SageMaker, Amazon Q, Amazon Bedrock, Vision and Language AI, and applied AI services like HealthAI, Industrial AI and others.

Before AWS Saha held executive positions at Nvidia and Intel.

Riverbed Simplifies, Shakes Up Its Channel Program

Riverbed, a leading developer of WAN optimization and observability technology, this week launched Riverbed One, a total revamp of its channel program that focuses on simplicity both in terms of how the program works and the number of partners the company works with.

Riverbed has been transitioning from having a primary focus on WAN acceleration and optimization, which is still a significant business for the company, to a larger focus on observability, said Alex Thurber, Riverbed’s senior vice president of global partners and alliances. At the same time, Thurber has been engaged in revamping Riverbed’s go-to-market strategy.

Riverbed’s old multi-tiered partner program, Riverbed Rise, was primarily built around a hardware and perpetual software model and had become incredibly complicated as the company kept adding elements to it over the years.

The new Riverbed One is vastly simplified with a single program level while offering partner support through deal registration, deal protection and other resources. Participation is on an invitation-only basis and Riverbed is cutting some 90 percent of its partner ranks, largely partners that conducted one-off sales transactions through the years.