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Dell CEO and founder Michael Dell is on the verge of a buyout that will take the public company private. But this hasn't changed the company's plan to transform itself from a hardware seller into an outfit that's just as concerned with software and cloud services.
On Monday, Dell announced that it will acquire the cloud management company Enstratius, formerly known as enStratus. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Enstratius aims to provide a single platform for managing the use of multiple cloud services, wherever they might be hosted. It can be used with public services -- such as those hosted by Amazon Web Services or Rackspace -- as well as so-called private clouds built in your own data center using tools like OpenStack. It can also manage "hybrid clouds" that span both public and private services.
In addition to offering tools for automation, management, security and compliance, the company provides algorithmic analysis for optimizing clouds for price and performance.
Competing with outfits like Cloudscaling and RightScale, Enstratius has some high profile talent, including DevOps Cookbook co-author John Willis and former Cisco cloud czar James Urquhart. Dell did not respond to questions about the acquisition and whether the Enstratius team will work from Dell's Round Rock headquarters or continue to operate remotely.
The acquisition comes at a critical time for Dell. Much like HP, the company is trying to move beyond the sagging desktop computer market by muscling its way into the high-margin enterprise software and services business.
In 2010, Dell and HP fought a very public bidding war for storage company 3PAR, a struggle HP eventually won. Undeterred, Dell has been on a buying spree ever since, snapping up database technology company Quest, storage company Compellent, software based networking company RNA Networks, and cloud integration company Boomi, amongst others. It also built its own open source cloud deployment tool Crowbar, and it recently launched a new cloud service called Project Fast PaaS, which is based on VMware's open source Cloud Foundry platform.
This new direction is part of what pushed Dell to go private earlier this year. Transforming the company takes time -- and public shareholders may not have the patience to see it through.
