Cloud Scoreboard

There have been some meaningful acquisitions in the cloud and data center space recently, not the least of which was Dell’s offer to buy enterprise storage maker Compellent Technologies for nearly $1 billion earlier this week. Dell hopes this will help them close the gap in the storage arena with HP, who recently won the Dell-HP bidding war for 3Par. Other notable acquisitions include Juniper’s $95 million acquisition of Altor Networks, which provides virtualization security for data centers, and Cisco’s purchase of LineSider Technologies, a privately held provider of network management software that makes it easier for businesses to create their cloud computing infrastructures. The latter two acquisitions emphasize the importance of management software and security in cloud computing.

Some of the key Data Center vendors like: Cisco, Intel, VMware, Oracle, Dell, HP and IBM are purchasing other companies in order to provide vertical data center solution stacks to their customers, but none of them have the “best of breed” in all the verticals such as network, storage, server and enterprise applications. Its back to the future in terms of proprietary vertical stacks.