There is a lot of momentum behind the belief that the future of IT is based on tightly integrating the key components of IT such as networking, servers and storage. In our last newsletter we discussed Oracle’s rumored acquisition of EMC. We are going to use the next three newsletters to continue the discussion of Oracle’s possible acquisition of EMC and look at what some of the other industry giants are doing.
There is a lot of momentum behind the belief that the future of IT is based on tightly integrating the key components of IT such as networking, servers and storage. In our last newsletter we discussed Oracle’s rumored acquisition of EMC. We are going to use the next three newsletters to continue the discussion of Oracle’s possible acquisition of EMC and look at what some of the other industry giants are doing.
Tech industry’s M&As in 2010
Oracle has obvious strengths with applications and databases. Its acquisition of Sun gave it an industrial strength compute platform. If it acquires EMC it has a lot of the pieces of a complete IT solution under its control. It would clearly be missing the networking piece. They don’t really need to control the branch office LAN or the WAN router to be successful. They may, however, need to control the data center LAN. There are some obvious companies they could acquire for a whole lot less than the $50 billion or so dollars they will have to pay to acquire EMC. Candidates include industry veterans such as Extreme Networks and Force10. They could also go after Arista, a start-up company that is getting a lot of attention. All three of these companies would be relatively easy to assimilate. Another option is to acquire Brocade. As we will explain in a future newsletter, assimilating Brocade would not be terribly easy.
Whatever they do, Oracle has to be looked at similar to Cisco. By that we mean that both Cisco and Oracle want to be at the center of what they believe to be the integrated approach to how enterprise IT is provided in the future.
In the next newsletter we will look at HP. In the mean time, we would like your input. Do you believe that the future of IT is based on tightly integrating networking, servers, storage and possibly applications? If so, when do you think that future will be mainstream?
