Looking Back 2010: Key Cloud Acquisitions

This is the final post in the Looking Back 2010 Series and, also, for the year 2010. After looking at the three key cloud events in this year (thanks to James Urquhart for kicking up the discussion on Twitter), I want to do a post talking about some of the key acquisitions in the cloud computing space this year. Well, this is not an exhaustive list on this year’s acquisitions but about the key ones from my point of view. I will also briefly explain the rationale for my selection.

The following are the key cloud acquisitions from my point of view (not in any particular order):

Salesforce’s Heroku Acquisition: As I pointed out in my post three days back, this acquisition is important not just from Salesforce.com point of view but for PaaS itself. This acquisition makes Salesforce more palatable for developer community and, if executed right, this will completely democratize the PaaS segment
Redhat’s Acquisition Of Makara: After showing no interest for a long time, Redhat had trouble getting a firm footing in the cloud computing landscape. Their attempts to get into cloud didn’t inspire many. But, by acquiring a hot company in the PaaS space, Redhat is clearly positioning themselves to get a strong foothold in the platform services space. Makara offering is unique in that it allows users to port their applications to cloud without any re-writes. Redhat being a strong player in the enterprise market will find such a service very handy to lure enterprises and gain traction in the enterprise cloud market. This acquisition along with their recent partnership with Eucalyptus makes Redhat a company to watch in the 2011 cloud space. On a side note, am I the only one who thinks Redhat will acquire Eucalyptus in 2011?
CA’s acquisition of 3Tera and Nimsoft: 2010 saw the first steps in CA’s transformation into the cloud based world. Their almost 1 Billion shopping spree gives them enormous foothold in the cloud computing market. Their Nimsoft acquisition puts CA at a higher plane because Nimsoft is a strong player both in enterprise as well as service provider market. CA could put Nimsoft to use in offering a solid management and monitoring solutions for cloud and enterprise IT services. Their 3Tera acquisition not only helps them offer a solid private cloud platform, it could also help transition CA’s traditional software into a service model
IBM and Dell get key integration pieces: As IBM and Dell continue building their stack for the cloud world (even though both differ in their approaches), they have clearly understood the need to have a clear cut integration strategy. IBM’s acquisition of Cast Iron Systems and Dell’s acquisition of Boomi clearly aims to fill this gap in their cloud strategies. It will be interesting to see how they put these acquisitions to use in the coming years
Rackspace’s acquisition of Cloudkick: Rackspace’s acquisition of CloudKick is not as significant as the other acquisitions listed above but, as I mentioned in this post, it gives an insight into where Rackspace may be heading. From this perspective, this news joins other key acquisition news from 2010

2010 has seen the beginning of maturation of cloud computing after a few years of major hype. Some of the acquisitions of this year clearly point out to this development. If 2010 is any indication, 2011 is going to be even more exciting for cloud computing. I am trying to put together a research report which will, hopefully, go live on monday and I will talk about some of the trends which we can expect in 2011 and beyond. Let me take this opportunity to wish CloudAve readers a very happy new year and thank you for your continued support through these exciting years.