Acquisitions can be a bit like buses…you wait around for an hour and then, suddenly, three show up at once. That’s what happened today at EMC. We announced a three-acquisition convoy to accelerate our customers’ adoption of hybrid cloud.
Unless you’ve been buried in datacenter sans-Internet for the last few years, you know of the excitement surrounding the emergence of OpenStack, an open source project that enables users to build infrastructure clouds by virtualizing and controlling pools of compute, storage and network resources. The first EMC acquisition announced today is San Francisco-based Cloudscaling, a leading provider of OpenStack-powered Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) for private and hybrid cloud solutions. In case you didn’t know, Cloudscaling CEO Randy Bias and team also happen to be founding members of the OpenStack Foundation.
Cloudscaling’s Open Cloud System (OCS) provides an operating system to manage compute, storage and networking in the cloud, and supports a new generation of cloud-based applications that provides the agility, performance and economic benefits of leading public cloud services, but it is deployed in customer data centers and, therefore, remains under the control of IT. The addition of Cloudscaling will provide EMC customers with multiple options for running private and hybrid clouds and will heElp EMC accelerate its OpenStack-powered infrastructure offerings. We have some pretty exciting things planned over the next year, so stay tuned for more updates on EMC’s OpenStack strategy. The Cloudscaling team will join CJ Desai’s Emerging Technologies Division.
One of the biggest revelations within the research is that organizations recognizing maximum business value from hybrid cloud also have a deep understanding of the workload requirements of their applications. Through the research, we see six particular requirements rise to the top for consideration: performance, security, compliance, storage, data protection and automation. The other EMC acquisitions announced today target one of these requirements in particular: data protection.
The first is Mountain View, California-based Maginatics, whose technology enables organizations to leverage public and private clouds as a backup “device.” The addition of Maginatics extends EMC’s cloud data protection strategy by enabling unified data protection and management across disparate private, public and hybrid clouds. Maginatics technology also enables efficient data mobility across multiple clouds with data deduplication, WAN optimization, handling of large objects and multi-threading. We plan to integrate Maginatics technology with existing EMC data protection software, storage and services as part of our Core Technologies Division, led by Guy Churchward.
Last, but by no means least (we’re going alphabetically here, so someone has to go third!), is the acquisition of Austin-based Spanning. Spanning provides subscription-based backup and recovery for born-in-the-cloud applications and data. Spanning solutions prevent business interruption due to data loss in Google Apps and Salesforce.com (with support for Microsoft Office 365 in the first half of 2015). The combination of EMC’s data protection portfolio and Spanning’s capabilities will accelerate our ability to help users confidently deploy data protection solutions across all applications and workloads, regardless of where the data is created or where the applications reside.
It goes without saying that we’re excited to be bringing such phenomenal technology into the EMC portfolio. However, as EMC Information Infrastructure CEO David Goulden always says: “We’re a people company, focused on technology.” Hence, it gives me great pleasure to personally welcome Randy Bias and the Cloudscaling team, Amarjit Gil and the Maginatics team, and Jeff Erramouspe and the Spanning team to the EMC family.
So, with our three buses having arrived … next stop … EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud.
