For the week ending May 29, CRN takes a look at the companies that brought their ‘A’ game to the channel including Anthropic, Snowflake, ClickHouse, Dell Technologies and Amazon Web Services.
The Week Ending May 29
Topping this week’s 5 Companies that Came to Win list is AI tech developer Anthropic, which raised a whopping $65 billion in venture funding this week.
Also making the list this week is AI and data cloud provider Snowflake, which struck a deal to buy Natoma and acquire technology that will make it possible to extend all-important data governance capabilities beyond the Snowflake platform.
Analytical database developer ClickHouse is here for launching its first partner program to work with the company’s growing roster of reseller, technology/ISV, service and consulting partners.
Dell Technologies, meanwhile, got everyone’s attention with its stellar fiscal 2027 second-quarter financial results—including an impressive surge in AI server sales.
And AWS makes the list for adding new AI agentic capabilities to its Partner Central hub that will help partners speed up their funding eligibility, administration efficiency and to better guide actions across co-selling opportunities.
Anthropic Raises $65 Billion As It Scales Partnerships
AI tech superstar Anthropic tops this week’s Came to Win list with news this week that it successfully raised $65 billion in Series H funding. That puts the company’s valuation at $965 billion—more than rival OpenAI and more than double Anthropic’s $380 billion valuation in February.
Anthropic, developer of the popular Claude AI assistant, also wins applause for its plans to apply some of the new financing toward scaling the company’s channel partnerships.
In addition, Anthropic said this week that its revenue run rate now exceeds $47 billion, more than triple the $14 billion disclosed in February.
Anthropic’s channel investments this year have included rolling out the Claude Partner Network, which received an initial $100 million investment and a new certification program. Systems integrators and other service partners help organizations adopt Claude and integrate the technology with their core business operations.
Snowflake Acquires Natoma In Bid To Extend Data Governance Perimeter
AI and data cloud provider Snowflake struck a deal this week to buy Natoma, acquiring technology that will make it possible to extend all-important data governance capabilities beyond the Snowflake platform to AI operations and interactions across an enterprise.
With the Natoma acquisition, Snowflake said it will gain the ability to “establish a natively integrated governance and identity layer for AI agents and MCP tool access,” a move that will make it easier for customers to securely connect and manage how AI systems interact with their enterprise applications, databases, APIs and tools, Snowflake said.
Natoma’s capabilities will be integrated into Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud, the company said, “and be available to customers soon.”
“By extending governance to AI-driven workflows, Snowflake makes it easier for companies to safely manage not just their data, but also the actions AI agents take across business workflows,” the company said.
ClickHouse Launches Inaugural Partner Program Amid Global Expansion, Changing Data Demands In An AI World
ClickHouse, a rising star in the analytical database arena, wins kudos this week for launching its first partner program to better work with the company’s growing roster of reseller, technology/ISV, service and consulting partners.
The launch of House Mates, the new ClickHouse partner community and program, comes as enterprise customers are rapidly adopting the company’s OLAP (online analytical processing) database for real-time analytics, AI, observability, data warehousing and other data-intensive workloads.
“ClickHouse has experienced massive growth over the last four years,” said Abhinav Mehla, the company’s channel chief, noting in an interview with CRN that the company has added 1,000 customers just within the last three months.
ClickHouse has increasingly worked with partners, especially during the last six months, on a more one-off basis. But as the company has grown, ClickHouse leaders realized they need a formal partner program to manage partner relationships on a more structured basis and provide partners with the capabilities, resources, processes and incentives they need to best serve their customers.
The new three-tier House Mates program includes a partner portal with deal registration and sales campaign materials, a partner directory, and a landing page and on-boarding process for new partners. House Mates provides “aggressive” incentives, the channel chief said, joint go-to-market materials, training and certification tracks, and many other resources.
Dell Raises Outlook For AI Server Sales To $60 Billion
Dell Technologies this week blew away Wall Street expectations for AI-optimized server revenue in its fiscal 2027 first-quarter results and raised its full-year outlook for that product segment by $10 billion to roughly $60 billion. That would represent a 144 percent year-over-year gain in AI server revenue.
News of the AI server sales surge came as the IT giant reported record revenue of $43.8 billion for the quarter, up 88 percent year over year. The stellar quarter also included booking $24.4 billion in AI orders and recognizing $16.1 billion of AI server revenue.
The company’s guidance for all of fiscal 2027 is now expected to fall between $165 billion and $169 billion, up 47 percent year over year (at $167 billion).
The financial results drove a 39 percent increase in the price of Dell shares in after-hours trading to nearly $440.
AWS Launches AI Agents On Partner Central To Simplify Funding, Co-Sell And Admin Time for Channel Partners
AWS partners can now leverage AI agents to speed up funding eligibility, improve administration efficiency and better guide partner actions across co-selling opportunities via new agentic AI innovation inside AWS’ revamped Partner Central hub.
“We have these agents that are trained by AWS to recommend funding opportunities, identify deals that need more attention, flag deadlines and sales opportunities, sort through the documentation and automate a bunch of other time-consuming and somewhat tedious tasks,” Julia Chen, vice president of Partner Core at AWS, told CRN.
The AWS Partner Central hub is a platform for partners that automates opportunity management, surfaces real-time funding eligibility, and eliminates administrative friction that slows deals.
The revamped AWS Partner Central hub is now powered by Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, which offers AI agents that automate administrative tasks and streamline opportunity management, which Chen said can reduce administrative time by upward of 40 percent.
One key agentic feature inside the hub identifies opportunities in a partner’s pipeline that show if the partner qualifies for benefits, surfaces real-time funding eligibility and flags gaps for funding qualifications.
AWS’ hub is now connected with MCP servers so that partners can connect into Partner Central with their existing IT tools and systems.
