For the week ending April 24, CRN takes a look at the companies that brought their ‘A’ game to the channel including Cyera, OpenAI, Google Cloud, Cisco Systems and Yugabyte.
The Week Ending April 24
Topping this week’s Five Companies That Came to Win list is data and AI cybersecurity tech developer Cyera for a strategic acquisition that boosts its AI agent security offerings
Also making the list is OpenAI for hiring channel veteran Colleen Kapase as the AI pioneer builds out its channel operations. And Google Cloud is here for unveiling a slew of new technology innovations and channel resources at its Google Cloud Next 2026 event this week.
Cisco Systems wins applause for thinking long-term with its debut this week of its first quantum switch product for the quantum computing age. And next-generation database developer Yugabyte scored a strategic collaboration agreement (SCA) with Amazon Web Services through which the two companies will help customers move their mission-critical applications to the cloud and migrate database workloads off legacy database systems.
Cyera Boosts Data Security For AI Agents With Ryft Acquisition
Cyera makes this week’s Came to Win list for its acquisition of Ryft, an AI-focused data lake startup, in the latest major expansion of Cyera’s data and AI security platform.
The startup will bring its data lake, which was designed for AI agents, to the Cyera platform, Cyera said. The acquisition accelerates Cyera’s roadmap for being able to offer “instantly traceable, secure data access for agentic AI at scale,” the company said.
The Ryft acquisition follows a $400 million Series F funding round announced by Cyera in January. The round came with a $9 billion valuation for the company.
Cyera previously acquired Trail Security in 2024 for $162 million, which the company said introduced an AI-powered approach for DLP (data loss prevention) to its data security platform.
OpenAI Hires Channel Superstar Colleen Kapase For A Top Channel Position
OpenAI scored big in the personnel department this week when the AI pioneer hired Colleen Kapase for a top channel post to help lead the company’s efforts to build out its channel operation.
Kapase is a channel veteran having held channel management positions at Google Cloud, Snowflake, VMware and Citrix. At OpenAI she holds the title of vice president, strategic global partnerships and ecosystems.
“The time to build your practice and technology around OpenAI is now,” Kapase said in a LinkedIn post. “We are here building an epic GTM Sales, Marketing, Operations and Partner machine tailor-made and laser-focused on AI.”
OpenAI CRO Denise Holland Dresser announced Kapase’s appointment as part of an all-out partner offensive for the OpenAI Codex AI coding platform.
Google Cloud Launches Partner Fund, AI Product Innovations
Google Cloud was making news at its Google Cloud Next 2026 event this week, including establishing a $750 million fund of new resources and incentives for channel partners, system integrators, consulting firms, software partners and other members of its 120,000-member ecosystem to help drive AI adoption.
With the fund Google Cloud seeks to accelerate solution providers’ ability to assess AI’s potential for customers, rapidly prototype, prove AI value, build agents and integrate those agents into existing software and workflows, according to the vendor. It aims to support AI value identification, agentic AI prototyping, and the building and deployment of agents.
The company also introduced a Rapid Enterprise Migration offering to accelerate customer migrations from Microsoft 365 to Google Workspace.
Google Next 2026 was also the launch pad for a number of product innovations including the new Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform for building, scaling, governing and optimizing agents. The Gemini Enterprise application has been updated with a new agent designer feature while the Agentic Data Cloud now has an AI-native architecture for unlocking data use for agentic AI.
Google Cloud also unveiled significant updates to its cybersecurity suite, including new AI-powered security agents and new Wiz capabilities for securing AI-native development. And Google debuted the eighth generation of its tensor processing unit.
Cisco Unveils ‘Foundational’ Universal Quantum Switch To Scale The Quantum Internet
Cisco Systems wins applause for introducing its first universal quantum switch and what the tech giant is calling a “foundational” piece in building a scalable quantum internet.
Cisco’s strategy involves building a quantum network to connect multiple quantum computers, aiming to accelerate the development of large-scale quantum computing.
The new universal quantum switch addresses what the tech giant says is among the main barriers to building a quantum network — information loss and the need for a large number of qubits. The switch can route quantum information between systems while preserving it at room temperature on existing telecom fiber using a Cisco-patented conversion engine that translates between all encoding and entanglement modalities at input and output, according to Cisco.
“Our focus at Cisco is to build that quantum network … we are building that quantum networking stack all the way from the ground up. This is fundamental innovation. [This is] something that has not been done before,” said Vijoy Pandey, senior vice president and general manager of Outshift, Cisco’s emerging technology and incubation group.
Pandey highlighted the significant challenges in quantum computing, such as the need for thousands to millions of qubits to solve complex societal problems, such as financial modeling and drug discovery. Current quantum computers operate with about 100 to 1,000 qubits, but advancements are expected to reach tens of thousands in the next few years.
Yugabyte Strikes SCA Alliance With AWS Targeting Cloud Migrations, Legacy Database Modernization
Next-generation database developer Yugabyte has scored a strategic collaboration agreement (SCA) with Amazon Web Services (AWS) through which the two companies will accelerate their joint go-to-market efforts and technical collaboration.
Under the SCA, Yugabyte will focus on helping customers move their mission-critical applications to the cloud and migrate database workloads off legacy database systems.
Yugabyte said the expanded collaboration will help customers more efficiently deploy and operate “ultra-resilient cloud-native applications” running on the YugabyteDB database on AWS.
Yugabyte and AWS will target customers’ database modernization and cloud migration initiatives that involve legacy database workloads running on AWS, according to the companies. And Yugabyte will support customers who are building globally distributed, mission-critical transactional applications on the AWS platform.
“Enterprises are modernizing mission-critical PostgreSQL and legacy database workloads while demanding stronger resilience, predictable performance at scale, and simpler operations in the cloud,” said Yugabyte co-founder and co-CEO Karthik Ranganathan, in a statement. “Our strategic collaboration with AWS enables organizations to accelerate modernization and AI adoption while leveraging the scalability, reliability, and operational simplicity of AWS. We’re helping customers move faster with a resilient, cloud-native database foundation.”
