January 28, 2011 — Michael Dell is at The World Economic Forum this week talking about Dell having acquisition plans in “software, data centers, cloud computing, storage and virtualization,” which has speculators venturing guesses as to what’s on its shopping list. Timothy Prickett Morgan gave his thoughts in The Register, dropping companies from Brocade to Cray to Rackspace as possibilities, but I don’t think Dell will make a system-centric play this time around. There are two trends right now – cloud computing and big data – that are dependent on software and services, and I think Dell gets this, if only because the company knows it doesn’t want to go blow-to-blow with IBM, HP and Cisco on high-end systems. It has already shown as much with its recent purchases of Scalent and Boomi… Read more
