For the week ending Oct. 4, CRN takes a look at the companies that brought their ‘A’ game to the channel including Accenture, Nvidia, CACI, Salesforce and Qualcomm.

The Week Ending Oct. 4

Topping this week’s Came to Win list is global services provider Accenture for its bold plan to build a new business group around Nvidia’s AI technology and train 30,000 staffers on Nvidia’s full AI stack.

Also making the list is Nvidia for a savvy hire which hints at the company’s ambitions in the AI-enabled networking space. IT professional services provider CACI makes the list for a strategic acquisition that expands its cloud computing expertise – especially around AWS.

Salesforce is here for its plans to create a Tableau Einstein Alliance partner community. And chipmaker Qualcomm made a significant move to boost its IoT tech portfolio this week by completing a key technology acquisition

Accenture To Train 30,000 Staff On Nvidia AI Tech In Blockbuster Deal

Global services giant Accenture will train 30,000 employees on Nvidia’s full stack of AI technologies and start a new business group dedicated to the AI computing tech developer as part of a blockbuster deal between the two companies.

Accenture, No. 1 on CRN’s 2024 Solution Provider 500 list, announced the expanded partnership this week and said its newly formed Nvidia Business Group will focus on driving enterprise adoption of what it called “agentic AI systems” by taking advantage of key Nvidia software platforms that fuel consumption of GPU-accelerated data centers.

“The power of these announcements cannot be overstated,” Accenture Chief AI Officer Lan Guan said in a briefing with journalists and analysts.

Most of the work done by Accenture’s new business group will happen through its AI Refinery platform, which takes advantage of three key Nvidia software platforms: Nvidia AI Foundry, Nvidia AI Enterprise and Nvidia Omniverse.

In tandem with the launch of the Nvidia business group and massive training effort, Accenture said it will open a network of AI engineering hubs in Singapore, Tokyo, Malaga and London that will aid its push to drive adoption of “agentic AI systems.” These hubs become part of Accenture’s Center for Advanced AI and complement existing locations in Mountain View, Calif., and Bangalore, India.

Nvidia Hires Top Cisco Inventor Amid Big Networking Sales Push

Nvidia, meanwhile, makes this week’s Came to Win list for making an interesting personnel move by hiring JP Vasseur, a 25-year Cisco Systems engineering veteran who will lead Nvidia’s AI and networking architecture development.

Vasseur, a recently departed Cisco fellow, was once credited by Cisco as the networking giant’s most prolific inventor. He last served as vice president of engineering of machine learning and AI for networking at the company.

Vasseur announced in a LinkedIn post on Wednesday that he had joined Nvidia as a senior distinguished engineer and chief architect of AI and networking. “With over 32 years of experience in networking, including the past 13 years focused on AI and networking products, I am invigorated by the immense opportunities ahead to drive innovation in these areas,” he wrote in the post.

Nvidia’s decision to hire a Cisco engineering veteran with experience at the intersection of AI and networking should serves as another sign that the AI computing giant is making networking a major priority.

Nvidia started making a big push into networking when it acquired high-speed interconnect vendor Mellanox Technologies for $7 billion in 2019. Last month, during Nvidia’s fiscal 2025 second quarter earnings call, Nvidia CFO Colette Kress said that the company’s Spectrum-X line of Ethernet networking products for data centers is “well on track to become a multibillion-dollar product line within a year.”

CACI Buys AWS Partner Applied Insight In Cloud Push

CACI International makes this week’s list for its acquisition of fellow solution provider Applied Insight in an all-cash deal that should boost CACI’s capabilities in Amazon Web Services, cloud migration, cybersecurity and productivity for government agency customers.

CACI, No. 19 on CRN’s 2024 Solution Provider 500, bought Applied Insight from Acacia Group, a Fulton, Md.-based specialist investment firm. CACI and Applied Insight are both headquartered in Reston, Va. Applied Insight is No. 174 on the Solution Provider 500 list.

In July, Applied Insight achieved Amazon Web Services Premier Tier Services Partner status, logging more than 200 completed AWS cloud migrations across 16 public sector and enterprise organizations,

During an earnings call in August CACI CEO John Mengucci said his company was on the lookout for potential acquisitions, especially for service providers with expertise in cloud, artificial intelligence, and what the U.S. Department of Defense calls C4ISR – command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance.

The Applied Insight deal comes on the heels of another acquisition recently announced by CACI: $1.3 billion in cash for Azure Summit Technology, an engineering firm whose offerings include radio frequency (RF) hardware and software technologies. CACI expects the Azure Summit acquisition to close in its fiscal 2025 second quarter.

Salesforce To Launch New Tableau Partner Community

Salesforce plans to roll out a Tableau Einstein Alliance partner community in February with the goal of furthering artificial intelligence and AI agent creation and delivery by providing partners with access to experts, marketing materials and product road map information.

The new community already has 25 initial members including such channel heavyweights as Capgemini, IBM Consulting and Slalom Consulting.

“So much of Tableau’s success is thanks to our partners’ investment in our customers,” Tableau CEO Ryan Aytay said in a statement this week. “Now, we’re investing in the Tableau Einstein Alliance to grow an ecosystem of visionary and innovative partners that will help our customers integrate Agentforce into every aspect of analytics. The future of data and analytics is now, and our partners are a critical part of the journey.”

Products and services made by alliance members will become generally available on Salesforce AppExchange and an upcoming Tableau Marketplace.

Qualcomm Strengthens Its Competitive Hand In IoT With Sequans Tech Purchase

Chipmaker Qualcomm this week wrapped up its acquisition of Sequans Communications 4G IoT technology, a $200-million deal that significantly enhances Qualcomm’s semiconductor portfolio around the Internet of Things.

With Sequans’ Monarch chips Qualcomm looks to bring new value to Qualcomm’s product lineup as the Monarch series offers improved performance, lower power consumption and smaller size semiconductors compared to Qualcomm’s chips, according to the company.

Qualcomm has been striving to grow its IoT business for several years now in an effort to diversify.

The addition of Sequans’ 4G IoT technology to Qualcomm’s product portfolio adds to “our robust, low-power solutions for dependable and optimized cellular connectivity for industrial IoT applications,” said Nakul Duggal, Qualcomm group general manager for automotive, industrial and embedded IoT, and cloud computing, in a statement.

“This acquisition supports our commitment to delivering cutting-edge IoT solutions and strengthens our position as a leader in intelligence at the edge,” Duggal said.

Qualcomm expects to integrate the 4G IoT technologies into its portfolio of purpose-build connectivity solutions for IoT.