Dell has purchased Enstratius, a company that allows customers to manage cloud resources across multiple providers from a single management console for an undisclosed sum this week.
Enstratius is one of the leading companies in the growing marketplace of cloud management tools, providing customers the ability to deploy and manage applications across public and private clouds, and across multiple providers. In addition to providing a common management layer across those multiple clouds, the company also provides security services related to authentication and encryption across those providers.
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In the systems administration space, cloud is huge, says Kamesh Pemmaraju, a technical product marketer for Dell, who spoke about the acquisition at this weeks Interop conference in Las Vegas.
Pemmaraju says Dell will integrate Enstratius technology into its broader cloud offerings, including its OpenStack product line. Dell has certified its server hardware to run on OpenStack, the open source cloud computing platform. As part of that, Dell has embraced OpenStack distributions from Ubuntu. Enstratius could help Dell customers using OpenStack to launch resources to a variety of public clouds while having OpenStack running on Dell equipment in their own premises.
David Linthicum, a consultant at Cloud Technology partners who tracks the market closely, says hes not surprised by the move. CA recently purchased management company Layer 7, while BMC was recently taken private. Linthicum expects more M&A activity in the cloud management market. In addition to buying the Enstratius technology, Dell also acquired some well-known names in cloud circles, including Bernard Golden, James Urquhart, and George Reese.
Network World senior writer Brandon Butler covers cloud computing and social collaboration. He can be reached at BButler@nww.com and found on Twitter at @BButlerNWW.
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