Dell to buy cloud software firm Enstratius

Dell yesterday struck a deal to buy cloud software firm Enstratius, as part of its plan to diversify from its core business of making PCs.

Dell, the world's second-largest PC maker, which itself is in the midst of being acquired by a consortium led by company founder Michael Dell, did not disclose the financial terms of the proposed acquisition of Enstratius.

Founded in 2008 and based in Minneapolis, Enstratius helps organisations manage applications across private, public and hybrid clouds, including automated application provisioning and scaling, application configuration management, usage governance, and cloud utilization monitoring.

It has more than 20 public and private cloud platforms, including OpenStack, VMware, Rackspace, Amazon Web Services and Windows Azure.

Dell, based in Texas, said in a statement that the acquisition of Enstratius "further enhances Dell's end-to-end solutions strategy, bringing key capabilities to deliver cloud-management solutions to our customers."

"As enterprises increase their use of public, private and hybrid clouds, the need for controls, security, governance and automation becomes more critical," said Tom Kendra, vice president and general manager for systems management at Dell Software.

"Dell, together with Enstratius, is uniquely positioned to deliver differentiated, complete cloud-management solutions to enterprise customers, large and small, empowering them with the efficiency and flexibility in the allocation and use of resources," he added.

David Bagley, CEO, Enstratius, said, ''Together, Enstratius and Dell create new opportunities for organizations to accelerate application and IT service delivery across on-premises data centers and private clouds, combined with off-premises public cloud solutions. This capability is enhanced with powerful software for systems management, security, business intelligence and application management for customers, worldwide.''