System Center Guide

This just in:

Dell announced today it has signed an agreement to acquire Kace, a leading systems-management appliance company with solutions tailored to the requirements of midsized businesses and public (government, education and healthcare) institutions.

Kace provides comprehensive and affordable solutions through the award-winning KBOX systems-management and deployment appliances which carry a wide range of capabilities including:

• Device discovery, PC and server inventory, and asset management;
• Configuration management, including operating system deployment, software distribution, application virtualization and scripting;
• End-point security via patch management, security-policy enforcement and vulnerability scanning; and,
• Service management through integrated service desk, user portal and alerting.
Dell channel partners will be able to resell Dell / Kace products, but the channel integration plan is not yet final. In the interim, we welcome our Channel Partners to go directly to the Kace Team to set-up a reselling agreement at http://www.kace.com/partners/application.php. Learn more at http://www.kace.com/partners/channel-partners.php

KACE has been successful in selling to midsized customers in every industry vertical, but has been particularly successful in K-12 and higher education, as well as state and local government. For a sampling of KACE customers by vertical and size see the KACE customer pages at http://www.Kace.com/customer

If you have additional questions on our recent acquisition, please read the Press Release located at http://content.dell.com/us/en/corp/d/secure/2010-2-11-Kace-Acquisition.aspx or contact your Dell Account Team.

Learn more about Kace products at http://www.Kace.com/products

It would appear that my prediction is holding true: 2008 is certainly becoming the year of virtualisation acquisitions. Yesterday Novell decided to have a seat at the buyer’s table by announcing their plans to complete an acquisition of PlateSpin, a leading provider of virtual machine and server consolidation software solutions.

The $205 million cash deal will be completed in Q2 of 2008.

Read more about the acquisition from the following links:

http://www.platespin.com/novell/

Novell Press Release

As the acquisitions continue, Dell has just annouced its $1.4B buyout of EqualLogic (remember my prediction?). The press release to partners stated that their “combination significantly advances Dell’s focus on helping customers and partners grow their business through IT simplification and virtualization“