For the week ending April 26, CRN takes a look at the companies that brought their ‘A’ game to the channel including IBM, Nvidia, ThreatLocker, HPE Aruba and FlexAI.

The Week Ending April 26

Topping this week’s Came to Win is IBM for its blockbuster deal to acquire cloud infrastructure management tool developer HashiCorp.

Also making this week’s list is Nvidia for its own strategic acquisition of AI infrastructure management startup Run:ai. MSP cybersecurity provider ThreatLocker makes the list for its impressive $115 million Series D funding round while HPE Aruba demonstrated its technology chops with the launch of new Wi-Fi 7 access point products that will help power next-generation AI and IoT services.

And startup FlexAI gained attention this week when it exited stealth with its plans to build a universal AI compute infrastructure to meet the needs of AI developers.

IBM To Acquire HashiCorp For $6.4B

IBM tops this week’s Came to Win list with its deal to buy HashiCorp, developer of the Terraform cloud infrastructure management toolset, for $6.4 billion. The parties expect to complete the acquisition by the end of 2024, pending approval of HashiCorp shareholders and regulatory approvals.

IBM said acquiring HashiCorp will provide a boost to IBM’s focus on hybrid cloud and AI and enhance the company’s ability to capture a greater share of the $1.1 trillion total cloud addressable market.

HashiCorp’s automation capabilities for infrastructure and security life-cycle management, and its status as system of record for hybrid and multi-cloud critical workflows, made the vendor stand out, according to IBM.

“Combining IBM’s portfolio and expertise with HashiCorp’s capabilities and talent will create a comprehensive hybrid cloud platform designed for the AI era,” IBM Chairman and CEO Arvind Krishna said.

HashiCorp’s technology will also complement products from IBM subsidiary Red Hat. Users, for example, can combine Red Hat’s Ansible Automation Platform configuration management and Terraform’s automation to simplify application provisioning and configuration across hybrid cloud environments, according to IBM.

Nvidia Buys Run:ai For $700M

Staying on the subject of blockbuster acquisitions, AI chip developer Nvidia doubled down on its efforts to become the dominant force in the artificial intelligence hardware space by acquiring AI infrastructure management startup Run:ai for $700 million.

Run:ai, which made CRN’s 2024 AI 100 list, is a Kubernetes-based workload management and orchestration software provider, which Nvidia plans to leverage to drive its DGX Cloud business.

Nvidia also plans to leverage Run:ai’s customer base that includes some of the world’s largest enterprises across multiple industries, which use its platform to manage data-center-scale GPU clusters.

With the acquisition, Nvidia DGX and DGX Cloud customers will gain access to Run:ai’s capabilities for their AI workloads, particularly for large language model deployments.

The two companies are already technology collaborators and Run:ai’s offerings are already integrated with Nvidia DGX, Nvidia DGX SuperPod, Nvidia Base Command, NGC containers and Nvidia AI Enterprise software, among other products.

Run:ai’s AI-cluster management platform helps customers speed up development, scale AI infrastructure and lower compute costs, while its AI Workflow management offering helps data teams work with the tools of their choice and quickly spin up a working environment.

Also making savvy acquisitions this week were KnowBe4, which struck a deal to buy AI-powered email security firm Egress, and Veeam, which bought cybersecurity incident response tech developer Coveware.

ThreatLocker Will Drive R&D, Marketing And Support With $115M In New Funding

MSP cybersecurity provider ThreatLocker plans to use the $115 million in Series D funding the MSP security powerhouse raised this week to drive new product development, support and marketing initiatives with plans to double its workforce over the next three years, co-founder and CEO Danny Jenkins told CRN.

The new funding round was led by its primary investor, General Atlantic, with secondary investments by StepStone Group and D.E. Shaw Group.

ThreatLocker has doubled its revenue over the last year. So it’s not surprising that planned investments include a doubling of the company’s support team over the next year, continuing what Jenkins called the “best support in the industry” with an average response time of 23 seconds.

ThreatLocker also continues to add to its threat intelligence capabilities and is building out a Special Ops Security team made up of the best and brightest security technologists to drive breakthroughs in product development, said Jenkins.

ThreatLocker also continues to funnel a huge amount of cash into marketing with the aim of helping MSPs and customers understand the importance of zero trust, said Jenkins.

HPE Aruba: Wi-Fi 7 Launch Lays Foundation To Power Advanced AI, IoT Services

HPE Aruba Networking demonstrated its Wi-Fi technology prowess this week, unveiling its first line of Wi-Fi 7-capable access points. But the new products are differentiated in the wireless market for several reasons, none of which are related to the Wi-Fi 7 standard, according to the vendor.

The latest HPE Aruba Networking 730 Series Campus access points (APs), in addition to their competitive connectivity strength for enterprise and large-venue use cases, also boast integrated network security and location-based services to meet the increasing demands of AI and IoT requirements. The company is calling it “Wi-Fi 7 plus,” said Larry Lunetta, vice president of product and community marketing for HPE Aruba.

The new Wi-Fi 7 AP product family offers up to 30 percent more capacity for wireless traffic than rival access points because of HPE Aruba’s patented ultra tri-band hardware technology, which helps its APs make full use of both the 5GHz and 6GHz bands at the same time, without interfering with each other and without the customer having to sacrifice part of either spectrum to avoid interference, Lunetta said.

Perhaps most timely is the AP product line’s tie-in to HPE’s larger AI strategy. The APs can connect IoT devices organizations are deploying all over—and at the edge—of the network, including sensors. The next step is for businesses to efficiently collect, secure and use that data not only to serve up real-time business insight, but to train and activate their own AI models, Lunetta said.

Ex-Nvidia Engineers Launch AI Startup FlexAI With $30M Backing

Artificial intelligence startup FlexAI caught everyone’s attention this week when it exited stealth with the goal of building a universal AI compute infrastructure to meet the needs of AI developers.

The AI startup has raised $30 million in seed funding from Alpha Intelligence Capital, Elaia Partners and Heartcore Capital for its goal of re-architecting compute infrastructure to accelerate artificial intelligence breakthroughs.

FlexAI is working with hardware and cloud providers across the AI ecosystem, including AMD, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Intel and Nvidia, as well as with companies developing AI models and products.

Later this year, the startup plans to unveil its first commercial product: an on-demand cloud service that connects developers to virtual heterogeneous compute resources, enabling them to run their workloads on a variety of architectures to build and deploy AI models more efficiently.

The company was co-founded by CEO Brijesh Tripathi and CTO Dali Kilani, both of whom previously worked at Nvidia as engineers.