Five Companies That Came To Win This Week

Dell's Cloudy Certs

Dell was a winner with a new program it hopes will help its channel partners become winners via a new set of cloud services and solutions certifications.

Dell hopes the new certifications, which include Cloud Builder, Cloud Provider and Cloud Service Enabler, will help partners efficiently create cloud solutions for customers.

Drobo Goes Big With Small Biz Storage

Folks who think small business is small forgot to tell Drobo.

Drobo CEO Tom Buiocchi this week said in a blog post that his company for the first time sold a petabyte of storage to a single, unnamed customer. Not bad for a company whose largest storage appliance has space for a maximum total of 12 drives.

"This is just a natural (albeit unexpectedly large) step in our growth into the business segment. Our most recent largest deal was a quarter of a petabyte, just a few months ago. But this is ONE PETABYTE," Buiocchi wrote.

Intel Is The Top Chip Maker

Intel has been coming to win for the last several years in the semiconductor field, and this week it paid off with new bragging rights thanks to a new IHS iSuppli survey.

IHS iSuppli said Intel last year increased its worldwide semiconductor market share to 15.6 percent, the highest the chip maker has seen since 2001, when its share of the market reached 14.9 percent.

Intel attributed the jump in market share to huge sales gains in the PC and data center hardware markets, which helped contribute to a 20.6 percent increase in revenue from 2010 to 2011.

Microsoft Uses Botnet Against The Bad Guys

Microsoft, which late last week seized the command and control servers for a botnet that allegedly stole more than $100 million from financial institutions, said this week that, instead of the usual shutting down of the operation, it actually kept the botnet running in order to gather evidence for law enforcement and to try to trick the masterminds into identifying themselves.

The botnet consisted of 13 million computers infected with the Zeus family of malware, including 3 million computers in the U.S.

Big Jump In Synnex Profit

Synnex didn't let a little thing like a tiny drop in revenue stop it from being a winner this week when it announced a huge jump in profits.

Thanks to a mix of higher-value products and services, the distributor earned $38.2 million, or $1.02 per share, on $2.46 billion in sales for the quarter ended Feb. 29, compared to a profit of $29.7 million, or 80 cents per share, on $2.50 billion in sales in the year-ago quarter. Analysts had projected earnings of 92 cents per share on $2.55 billion in revenue.

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