For the week ending Feb. 16, CRN takes a look at the companies that brought their 'A' game to the channel.

According to an exclusive CRN survey, many channel players are being forced to absorb the costs of the Spectre and Meltdown fallout.

Google is ramping up its Internet of Things capabilities for Google Cloud with a move to acquire LogMeIn's Xively IoT platform.

CRN breaks down five recent investment and acquisition deals involving companies operating in the cloud that partners need to know.

With customers including Bank of America, GE and NASA, XebiaLabs plans to invest heavily in its partner program and channel outreach.

Amazon surpassed Microsoft in market value for the first time on Wednesday evening after markets closed. The two market leaders directly compete in the cloud, and Amazon has attributed 10 percent of its recent growth to Amazon Web Services.

The Super-NetOps program combines product training with programming tools and techniques designed to give customers' operations teams the tools they need.

Zenedge's web application firewall and DDoS mitigation products help customers secure their applications, networks, databases and APIs from malicious internet traffic.

Intel is launching a new bug bounty program focused on side channel vulnerabilities similar to Spectre, and is offering an award of up to $200,000.

The data center giant will increase the number of owned assets by four and boost Equinix recurring revenues by more than 45 percent.

Many smartphones and tablets containing business data do not have the latest patches, or may not even be patchable, mobility specialists told CRN.

"As we have all seen over the last several months, operating with integrity isn't always the norm," said Dell Technologies CEO Michael Dell.

We asked the honorees of the Channel Chiefs 2018 list to tell us how they personally helped solve a problem for a solution provider partner in the last year. Here's what they had to say.

Extreme Networks channel chief Gordon Mackintosh said his company is using recent acquisitions and a new, combined partner program to gain ground on Cisco and HPE Aruba.

Channel M&A: CTG said the $16.5 million cash purchase of Soft Company will open up "significant" cross-selling opportunities in France's $40 billion IT services sector.

The move will allow IT departments to simplify management of devices by bringing both HP and Apple devices onto one platform.

Samples of the malware deployed during the Winter Olympics' Opening Ceremony carry indications that hackers were inside Atos systems since at least December, according to CyberScoop.

Cisco Chairman and CEO Chuck Robbins said the bringing the cash home from overseas would have little impact on the San Jose, Calif., company's mergers and acquisitions strategy.

The newly-combined CenturyLink/Level 3 reported mixed financial results during Q4 2017, but CenturyLink's president and COO Jeff Storey said that the company will be relying heavily on partners to move its strategic IT and managed services going forward.

Carbonite said that Mozy's huge customer base benefited from that company's endpoint data protection capabilities, but is ripe for Carbonite's channel partners to bring a wider portfolio of business-oriented disaster recovery, availability, and other services.