After a lot of second guessing by people, Dell have finally made that purchase and announced today they intend to acquire Perot Systems, which will become the services arm for the company.
There’s no doubt that Dell needed to do something to match the technology and services play offered by IBM and HP/EDS. I suspect many people thought the acquisition could have been GlassHouse but to my mind that would have too narrow a focus on only the storage consulting part of the business. After all, competing with IBM/HP is about the entire stack from infrastructure to application.
So, the question now is, how does this affect the storage market? Does this re-ignite discussions about an EMC/Cisco merger? Possibly not, as EMC’s position hasn’t really changed. I think GlassHouse are the most likely losers in this scenario as Dell now have all the service resources they need. It will be interesting to see how things pan out.
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laurencedavenport
