For the week ending July 18, CRN takes a look at the companies that brought their ‘A’ game to the channel including Microsoft, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, NetBox, Lansweeper and CoreWeave.
The Week Ending July 18
Topping this week’s Five Companies that Came to Win list is Microsoft for its plan to step up partner incentives around Copilot and Azure.
Also making this week’s list is Hewlett Packard Enterprise for concluding a “cooperation” pact with activist investor Elliott Investment Management that will allow HPE—which just completed its $14 billion acquisition of Juniper Networks—to focus on its business with one less distraction.
Startup NetBox is here for an impressive Series B funding round. Lansweeper, developer of a popular IT asset management and network discovery platform, makes this week’s list for a strategic acquisition. And hyperscaler CoreWeave got noticed this week with its ambitious plans to build a $6 billion, 300-megawatt data center in Pennsylvania.
Microsoft ‘Significantly’ Boosts Partner Funding For Copilot, Azure Incentives
Microsoft tops this week’s Came to Win list after the company announced that it is “significantly increasing” partner funding and incentives across several key areas, including Copilot, Azure and Microsoft 365, for its new fiscal year.
Announced this week at the company’s MCAPS Start for Partners event, the tech giant is boosting enterprise customer investment funds by roughly 20 percent to enable partners to “deliver more AI design wins, migrations and Copilot deployments” for its 2026 fiscal year, which began this month, according to a blog post by Chief Partner Officer Nicole Dezen.
Dezen said the funding increases and other changes represent a “record year of investment” in the Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program, which encompasses all resources the company’s 500,000-plus partners need to sell and support its wide range of products and services.
Microsoft is boosting investments elsewhere in the program, increasing funding for Copilot offerings under the new AI Business Solutions banner by 50 percent. AI Business Solutions, which also includes Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Dynamics 365 products, is one of the three solution areas Microsoft has organized its products around for the new fiscal year.
A second solution area, Security, is getting a 15 percent funding boost, which Dezen called “an increase from a significant investment base,” designed “to empower partner-led engagements” for the company’s various offerings under this category.
NetBox Labs Raises $35M For AI Data Center Buildouts, Network Infrastructure Modernization
NetBox Labs, the startup commercial steward of the NetBox open-source network and infrastructure management stack, this week announced a successful $35 million funding round aimed at helping enterprises build and manage complex network infrastructure at a time in which AI is placing new burdens on existing infrastructure.
The company said the new funding will go towards furthering its pace of innovation, help the company scale to meet global market demand, and hire across customer success, engineering, marketing, product, partnerships and sales.
NetBox’s technology is helping enterprises build, manage and automate modern infrastructure to unlock AI use cases and guarantee adherence to critical performance and security standards, the company said.
The Series B funding round was led by NGP Capital, with participation from Sorenson Capital and Headline. Existing investors also participated in the round, including Flybridge Capital, Notable Capital, Mango Capital, Salesforce Ventures, Two Sigma Ventures, and IBM, according to NetBox.
HPE Inks ‘Cooperation Pact’ With Elliott Management
Hewlett Packard Enterprise this week concluded a “cooperation” pact with activist investor Elliott Investment Management that partners are calling a “huge victory” for the company to stay the course on President and CEO Antonio Neri’s AI networking strategy.
Partners told CRN that the cooperation pact clears the way for HPE and partners to aggressively move forward to capture networking market share.
The agreement closely follows HPE’s settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice that cleared the way for its acquisition of Juniper Networks.
Under the terms of the pact, HPE agreed to appoint Robert (Bob) Calderoni, who stepped in as Elliott Management’s choice for interim CEO and president of Citrix in 2021, as a member of the HPE board of directors and the chairman of a new Strategy Committee.
In addition, Calderoni will become a member of HPE’s Integration Committee, which was formed by the HPE board following the successful completion two weeks ago of the $13.4 billion HPE acquisition of Juniper Networks.
HPE said the agreement also includes an “information-sharing agreement that will allow for an ongoing dialogue” between Elliott Management and HPE.
Lansweeper Boosts Technology Asset Intelligence Offering With Redjack Acquisition
Lansweeper, developer of a popular IT asset management and network discovery platform, makes this week’s Came to Win list for its acquisition of Redjack, which develops technology used to collect data about IT asset connections and dependencies.
The melding of the two companies’ technologies will create a platform that provides IT management and cybersecurity teams with complete visibility into every asset that touches an organization’s network—known or unknown, managed or unmanaged— across enterprise, cloud and edge IT environments, executives from both companies told CRN.
Lansweeper, headquartered in Merelbeke, Belgium, develops technology that provides complete visibility across an IT estate, including IT, IoT, software and operational technology assets. Redjack, based in Silver Springs, Md., develops an IT asset discovery and inventory system that provides IT managers with AI-powered information about communications and dependencies between IT assets.
“With Redjack on our side, we can now promise total visibility for our customers—the most crucial step in any cybersecurity strategy. After all, you can’t secure what you don’t see.” said Dave Goossens, CEO of Lansweeper, in a statement. “Together, we will pair Redjack’s unparalleled network-level discovery and application dependency mapping with Lansweeper’s rich asset intelligence to help organizations to be more secure and productive.”
CoreWeave Invests $6B In 300-Megawatt Data Center In Pennsylvania
Hyperscaler CoreWeave this week announced plans for a $6 billion, 300-megawatt data center in Pennsylvania to answer what CEO Michael Intrator called “relentless” demand for AI compute capacity.
The initial build-out of the data center will bring 100 megawatts of capacity online in the middle of Lancaster, Pa. — famous for scenic farmland and home to a significant Amish population— and in doing so create one of the largest data centers in the region, the company said.
The Livingston, N.J.-based firm plans to scale capacity to 300 megawatts and create 600 skilled jobs during the build-out phase of the project.
Once it is completed, the site is expected to employe 175 full-time facility workers, the company stated in a press release.
