Dimension Data’s acquisition of OpSource marks the end of an era and illustrates how the Cloud Computing competitive landscape is expanding to encompass every type of tech vendor and service provider.

Although it is only a fraction of the size and has only a fraction of the brand equity of Salesforce.com, OpSource has had a disproportionate impact on the growth of the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) market and broader Cloud movement.

The company’s CEO, Treb Ryan, has been a tireless evangelist for the business value of SaaS and now the Cloud. He and his staff have invested heavily in educating and facilitating the industry’s growth through an endless stream of webcasts and whitepapers, and founding the industry’s most important annual gathering, the SaaS Summit, now known as “All About the Cloud” and managed by the SIIA.

Rather than simply offer a set of hosting services, OpSource put together … Read More »

OpSource and the Virtual Computer Environment (VCE) Company announced an alliance today which will offer joint solutions aimed at helping service providers (xSPs) launch public cloud services more quickly. This joint initiative is the latest effort by various vendors to enable  xSPs to fulfill their promise as potent ‘cloud brokers’.

VCE is a joint venture formed by Cisco and EMC, with additional investments from VMware and Intel, to create a new generation of networking, storage, virtualization and management technologies to improve xSP infrastructure operations. VCE’s primary product is the Vblock™ Infrastructure Platform for virtualization, data processing, networking and storage capabilities in cloud computing environments.

In this new alliance, OpSource is adding its cloud orchestration software capabilities to VCE’s Vblock Platform to enable xSPs to handle the user sign-up, provisioning, metering, billing, and reporting requirements associated with cloud services. Together, OpSource and VCE’s combined solution promises to eliminate needless development costs, accelerate the service providers’ time … Read More »

Years ago, I considered the week leading into Labor Day as the final hurrah of the Summer and tried to preserve it for an end of season vacation to cap off the warm weather months in New England. Then my kids became school age and schools started kicking off before the holiday weekend. (Don’t get me started on this silly practice.)

Now, the tech industry is also making a habit of getting back into stride for the new Fall season before the dog days of August are behind us. One of the important annual venues for kicking off the new season of activity is VMworld.

This year’s event is generating plenty of news, especially regarding cloud-oriented acquisitions and alliances. Here’s a quick sampling:

VMware Acquires Integrien and TriCipher 
Verizon and VMware to Launch Enterprise-Class Hybrid Cloud Solution 
BlueLock Introduces VMware vCloud Datacenter Service with CloudConnector 
EMC Transforms … Read More »

The first week of 2010 was marked with three quick mergers and acquisitions in the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) market.

They each were in different sectors of the industry and involved differing types of transactions, but still clearly illustrated that there are a variety of companies seeking to capitalize on the escalating demand for SaaS solutions and position themselves as strategic sources of these on-demand services.

The first was an acquisition by EMC of Archer Technologies, a privately-held governance, risk and compliance (GRC) software vendor who offers both on-premise and SaaS solutions. Archer claims to have more than six million licensed users, including 25 of the Fortune 100.

EMC plans to combine Archer’s information risk management capabilities with the information security solutions provided by EMC’s RSA Security Division to enable customers to automate and gain visibility and policy enforcement capabilities across both physical and virtualized IT environments.

The second transaction was the $100 … Read More »