Who's Next on the Acquisition Block? Bloggers Chime in
Oracle buys Sun. HP buys 3Com. SAP buys Sybase. Just when it seemed like consolidation among the big data-center vendors had played itself out, we're off again at full tilt. Multiple trends are driving the latest acquisitions wave: The economy is recovering, customers are demanding systems that are easier to implement and vendors seem intent on collapsing the divide between servers, network and storage.
Tue, June 15, 2010
IDG News Service — Oracle (ORCL) buys Sun. HP (HPQ) buys 3Com (COMS). SAP buys Sybase (SY). Just when it seemed like consolidation among the big data-center vendors had played itself out, we're off again at full tilt. Multiple trends are driving the latest acquisitions wave: The economy is recovering, customers are demanding systems that are easier to implement and vendors seem intent on collapsing the divide between servers, network and storage.
Tech Industry's Biggest M&A Deals of 2009
So who's next on the block? We asked some of IDG's expert bloggers to pull out their crystal balls and make some bold merger predictions for the near future. Some are obvious, some controversial, but any one of them would give corporate CIOs a lot to think about if they woke up tomorrow morning to find out it had happened.
IBM (IBM) buys Amazon Web Services
By Alan Shimel, author of Network World's Open Source Fact and Fiction blog
The company that coined the phrase "on-demand computing" has been rather timid about the cloud. While Microsoft (MSFT) has Azure and Google (GOOG) its App Engine, IBM is not going to sit out the biggest computing migration in a generation. Jeff Bezos, on the other hand, is a Renaissance man. From his humble bookstore beginnings, he built Amazon.com (AMZN) into the biggest retailer on the Internet. He is bankrolling a project to put tourists in space. And unbeknown to many outside of the technology world, he has made AWS the dominant provider of public cloud services.
While cloud computing may turn out to be the biggest story in enterprise IT, Bezos' investors want Amazon to maximize their returns. The Amazon Empire is too far-flung. At the end of the day, space is far above the clouds and much sexier to Bezos. He will sell the cloud service to pursue the stars. The money AWS generates from a sale could fund a lot of rocket ships.
Who has the money, the desire and deserves to be hosting a good chunk of the public cloud? Big Blue, that's who. Who better to combine private and public clouds for true on-demand enterprise computing? IBM will make the hybrid cloud a reality. It has the software and services to offer both infrastructure as a service and platform as a service. IBM more than anyone has the resources, experience and business model to take AWS and fulfill the cloud destiny.
Who knows. When IBM reaches the cloud, it may find Jeff Bezos hovering above it in space.
