For the week ending March 14, CRN takes a look at the companies that brought their ‘A’ game to the channel including ServiceNow, Fivetran, Accenture, CrowdStrike, Amazon Web Services, and F5.
The Week Ending March 14
Topping this week’s Five Companies that Came to Win is ServiceNow for a savvy acquisition in the increasingly important AI agent technology space.
Also making this week’s list is data movement platform company Fivetran for a significant channel program upgrade intended to better serve reseller partners.
CrowdStrike and Accenture are here for forming an alliance around next-generation SIEM technology while F5 makes the list for playing competitive hardball in the application delivery platform arena.
And cloud giant Amazon Web Services caught everyone’s attention by unveiling new multi-agent collaboration technology on Amazon Bedrock.
ServiceNow To Buy Moveworks In Bet On Enterprise Agentic AI
Digital transformation and workplace automation technology developer ServiceNow this week struck a deal to acquire Moveworks, a developer of front-end AI assistant and enterprise search technology.
Once the acquisition is complete, ServiceNow plans to combine Moveworks’ technology with its own AI capabilities to drive agentic AI adoption across enterprise business clients.
Moveworks is being acquired for a combination of cash and stock totaling $2.85 billion. The acquisition is slated to close in the second half of 2025.
Agentic AI can autonomously make decisions without continual human interaction. It does so by combining machine learning, natural language processing, and automation to make those decisions.
ServiceNow has been making AI the focus of its Now platform since it’s the Now Platform Vancouver release in the fall of 2023 and has since pushed to make AI agents ubiquitous across the ServiceNow platform and throughout its customers, including pre-built, ready-to-deploy AI agents for every workflow.
This includes its release earlier this year of ServiceNow AI Agent Studio, a new low-code/no-code tool for businesses looking to build their own AI agents.
Fivetran Looks To Deepen Its Relationship With Resellers With Expanded Partner Program
Fivetran wins applause this week for extending its partner program in a bid to increase the number of VARs it works with. With the revamped program the company is offering new reseller discounts, additional go-to-market collaboration opportunities and expanded technical enablement.
Fivetran, a leading provider of data movement and transformation technology, is also increasing the “finder’s fees” it pays partners who reference-sell the company’s big data software and bring deals to the Oakland, Calif-based company.
The additions come as Fivetran reports growing demand for its automated data movement platform as the wave of AI application and model development is boosting the demand for tools that can move, integrate and prepare high volumes of data.
Fivetran has traditionally worked with regional and global systems integrator partners, including Accenture, Cognizant and Capgemini, who leverage the company’s platform as part of broader data projects to support digital transformation initiatives, operational systems, and analytical and AI applications.
The new program for resellers introduces four partner tiers offering structured benefits based on engagement level, with partners at the top tier eligible to earn programmatic discounts of up to 30 percent. Top-tier partners can also earn rebates on contract values to ensure customers are successfully onboarded and getting the most out of the Fivetran platform. Partners who source and influence customer deals, but don’t resell, can earn rebates up to 15 percent of a contract’s value.
“The new partner program is aligned to incentivize a partner throughout the journey of a customer adopting Fivetran, from learning about Fivetran, to working with Fivetran on getting Fivetran selected as a vendor, and then ultimately turning [the Fivetran platform] on and syncing data,” said Logan Welley, Fivetran vice president of strategic alliances, in an interview with CRN.
CrowdStrike And Accenture Launch ‘Major’ Siem Modernization Partnership
CrowdStrike and Accenture announced an expanded partnership this week that will see the two industry giants accelerate their efforts around enabling modernization of the SIEM tools relied upon by security operations teams.
In particular, the companies will be working together to facilitate migrations from “legacy” providers to CrowdStrike’s cloud- and AI-native Falcon Next-Gen SIEM offering, the executives said.
The two companies are “going all-in” on each other, making this a “major moment for both parties to transform the SOC of the future,” said Daniel Bernard, chief business officer at CrowdStrike.
While its origins go back several decades, SIEM (security information and event management) continues to provide the logging, analytics and search capabilities that many security teams depend upon for responding to and mitigating cyberattacks.
Accenture sees a huge opportunity in migrating legacy SIEM systems to CrowdStrike’s Falcon Next-Gen SIEM and Charlotte AI technology given that Accenture originally implemented many of those older systems.
AWS Launches New Agentic AI For Bedrock, ‘The Next Frontier In Computing’
Returning to the topic of agentic AI, AWS doubled down on agentic AI innovation this week by unveiling new multi-agent collaboration technology on Amazon Bedrock as the $115 billion cloud titan turns its R&D engine toward AI agents.
The news comes after the Seattle-based company formed a new business group this month, led by AWS’ AI guru Swami Sivasubramanian, which is focused on building various AI agents to help users automate daily tasks without needing prompts for the AI to take action.
AWS debuted new multi-agent collaboration capabilities on Amazon Bedrock that enable developers to build, deploy and manage networks of AI agents that work together seamlessly to efficiently execute complex workflows.
Multi-agent collaboration lets customers create networks of specialized agents that communicate and coordinate under the guidance of a supervisor agent. Each agent contributes its expertise to the larger workflow by focusing on a specific task.
AWS is betting that Agentic AI will be the next big wave in the artificial intelligence era. IT research firm Gartner predicts that by 2028 at least 15 percent of day-to-day work decisions will be made autonomously through agentic AI, up from virtually zero percent in 2024.
F5 CEO: We’ve Flipped ‘Several Hundred’ Citrix Netscaler Customers
F5 makes this week’s Came to Win list for playing competitive hardball, actively going after Citrix customers and flipping those businesses to F5 in the wake of Citrix’s channel changes, F5 CEO Francois Locoh-Donou told CRN in an exclusive interview.
F5 CEO Francois Locoh-Donou said the company has moved “several hundred” customers off rival Citrix’s Netscaler load-balancing and application delivery platform over the last couple of years and the pace of customer defections is not slowing down.
“We continue to have a lot of success removing Citrix from many customers’ environments. They’re basically in the business at the moment of pushing customers toward F5, and we absolutely must take advantage of that at this point in time,” Locoh-Donou told CRN.
F5’s success comes with a number of Citrix customers complaining to CRN about higher prices for renewals with longer terms. Citrix partners, meanwhile, are angry about the company’s move to reduce partner margins as part of a focus on top customers that has resulted in the company taking some deals direct.
Citrix also recently announced that it was cutting a number of distributors, including Ingram Micro and TD Synnex, with Arrow becoming the sole Citrix distributor in North America and Europe as of June 2.
A Citrix spokesperson told CRN that its recent go-to-market changes and expanded relationship with Arrow, “will open up new markets, customers and investments for our partners and customers alike.”
