Nine Dell Acquisitions: From EqualLogic to Quest, Compellent to Boomi
, July 03, 2012 In recent days, Dell representatives made no bones about promoting the company’s own products over products it resells. While the approach makes sense, it’s a departure for Dell, which has historically been quite adamant about maintaining its reseller relationships even on products that directly compete with its own. But Dell’s own product portfolio is now much richer than it once was. Here are nine important Dell acquisitions leading to today.
2. EqualLogic: The purchase of EqualLogic in 2008 is probably the most important Dell acquisition. Not only did it signal that Dell was serious about iSCSI storage with a $1.4 billion acquisition, but it also formed the foundation for its enterprise strategy. Dell could now sell servers and Ethernet-based storage to its SMB/SME customers, but in some cases, nip away at storage partner EMC in the data center.
Dell not only retained the majority of EqualLogic employees, but also aggressively expanded the team to meet demand and integrate EqualLogic with its existing products and with other storage acquisitions like deduplication vendor Ocarina and NAS vendor Exanet.
Dell understands the SMB/SME space. Those companies often have the same demands as larger enterprises but don't have the expertise to make efficient use of complex enterprise systems. One of Dell's overriding philosophies is to make the deployment and management of storage easy.
