For the week ending May 8, CRN takes a look at the companies that brought their ‘A’ game to the channel including Meter, Cisco Systems, Innovative Solutions, SAP and IBM.
The Week Ending May 8
Topping this week’s 5Companies that Came to Win list is Network-as-a-Service tech innovator Meter for its bold launch of a $100 million partner fund to increase the margins earned by the company’s channel partners.
Also making the list this week are Cisco Systems and SAP for making strategic acquisitions. Cisco’s acquisition is focused on technology for securing AI agents while SAP’s acquisition strengthens its technology portfolio around data preparation and integration.
Solution provider superstar Innovative Solutions is here for scoring a coveted Strategic Collaborative Agreement with AWS.
And IBM wins kudos for outlining its “AI Operating Model” vision for developing and governing agentic AI and providing the new products and technology to make that happen.
Meter Launches $100M Partner Fund To Lift Partner Margins On NaaS Platform
Network-as-a-Service upstart Meter tops this week’s Came to Win list with its debut of a new $100 million partner fund that boosts partner margins on the company’s NaaS platform by 50 percent to 75 percent.
The additional margin comes on top of the average margin increase of three to four times over the margins provided by legacy networking providers, said Adam Ulfers, Meter vice president of sales, in an interview with CRN.
“This adds additional margin potential for partners across hardware as well as services,” Ulfers said. “We are looking to boost and complement partner businesses to ensure that from a hardware standpoint they retain and increase great margins and from a services standpoint that they can utilize Meter to do more with their teams and increase margins there as well.”
The increased margins will come in the form of customer credits, rebates and presale MDF funds, said Ulfers.
Ulfers said Meter is hoping the $100 million partner fund will result in a wave of new partners working with the company, as well as expanding the success of existing partners.
Meter’s new $100 million partner fund, which comes in the midst of the memory shortage and the legacy networking supply chain crisis, amounts to a perfect storm that is set to spark big growth of the disruptive Meter NaaS platform, partners told CRN.
Cisco To Acquire Astrix To Boost Identity Security For AI Agents
Cisco Systems makes this week’s list for its deal to acquire identity protection startup Astrix Security in a bid to bolster the tech giant’s offerings for securing AI agents.
In a post announcing the deal, Peter Bailey, general manager of Cisco’s security business, wrote that Astrix is a top specialist in securing identities and credentials used by modern systems such as API keys, OAuth tokens and service accounts. These are “the very credentials that AI agents are now using (and abusing) to gain access and execute work at scale,” Bailey wrote.
The Astrix acquisition will provide Cisco with “deep capability to discover and secure every AI agent and non-human identity (NHI), including excessive privileges and real-time threats, enabling organizations to adopt AI securely and at scale,” Bailey wrote.
Key capabilities include AI agent discovery and governance, agentic access management and threat detection and response for agents, according to the post.
The Astrix technology will be folded into the Cisco Identity Intelligence platform and builds on the launch of Cisco’s Zero Trust Access for AI in March. Astrix capabilities will also be extended to the Cisco Secure Access and Duo Identity and Access Management offerings, according to Bailey.
Solution Provider Innovative Strikes Strategic Collaboration Agreement With AWS
Innovative, a leading solution provider in the Amazon Web Services arena, has scored a two-year Strategic Collaboration Agreement with AWS around Innovative’s agentic AI service delivery prowess.
Innovative has developed its Agentic Delivery solution, powered by its proprietary AI platform DarcyIQ in combination with AWS AI technology, which enables AI agents to execute work alongside data architects and engineers across the full process life cycle.
Innovative is one of the fastest-growing AWS Premier Tier Services partners in North America. With its ground-breaking solutions, the company brought more than 400 new customers to AWS last year and has a 99.7 percent customer retention rate.
All this has caught the attention of AWS, which would like to see Innovative accelerate those efforts as it looks to boost AI adoption across the AI ecosystem.
“The SCA is built on helping more customers in an efficient way using Agentic AI to do service delivery, but also to bring Agentic AI to the customers so that they can ultimately benefit from this automation,” Innovative Solutions CEO Justin Copie (pictured) told CRN.
SAP To Buy Dremio And Prior Labs To ‘Lead’ Agentic And AI Models
SAP is elevating its AI strategy with acquisition deals for data lakehouse platform provider Dremio and AI foundational model specialist Prior Labs, along with a $1.1 billion investment commitment to scale Prior Labs.
With the planned purchase of Dremio, SAP Business Data Cloud will become an Apache Iceberg-native enterprise lakehouse that unifies SAP and non-SAP data to power agentic AI at enterprise scale, according to the company.
“Enterprise AI doesn’t stall because the models aren’t good enough; it stalls because the data isn’t ready for AI agents,” said Philipp Herzig, CTO of SAP, in a statement. “Dremio eliminates that bottleneck. Combined with SAP Business Data Cloud, we can now take customers from raw, fragmented data to governed, AI-ready intelligence on a single open platform.”
By acquiring Dremio, SAP will boost its Business Data Cloud and SAP HANA Cloud offerings to ensure seamless data integration across SAP and non-SAP data with high performance and low cost to accelerate AI-ready context and time-to-value for AI.
With Prior Labs, a pioneer in Tabular Foundation Models, SAP looks to boost its presence in AI foundation models. SAP said Prior Labs will remain an independent company, with SAP pledging more than $1.1 billion over the next four years to scale the startup into a global frontier AI lab focused on enterprise structured data.
IBM Launches Agent Development, Governance Platforms At Think 2026
IBM used its Think 2026 conference in Boston this week to lay out its vision for how customers and partners will build and manage AI agents on an enterprise scale.
IBM introduced its “AI Operating Model,” a new strategic framework to help customers move on from limited, experimental AI projects to enterprisewide adoption of AI for business transformation.
To support that vision, IBM also introduced a wave of new products including the IBM Bob agentic development platform, Watsonx Orchestrate for deploying and managing agents, and IBM Sovereign Core for embedding agent governance policies into workflows.
“Our goal is to produce the technologies, to [enact] the strategies, where we see lots of demand and then work with you to get it out there,” IBM Chairman, President and CEO Arvind Krishna said addressing partners during the Partner Day keynote at Think 2026.
