HP has been in the news this week due to its acquisition struggle against rival Dell to gain storage vendor 3PAR for reasons that many assume are cloudy in nature. Although the news was lost in the din of the bidding war, the company quietly took hold of Statavia, a cloud service automation company that works to aid companies as they shift to the cloud and attempt to manage their hosts of cloud-based applications.
Although there were about ten other companies that might have seemed better positioned as an acquisition on the part of HP to bolster its cloud service automation product offerings, IDG analyst Mikael Ricknas suggested that Statavia was a solid purchase, claiming that “key advantages of Stratavia’s tools are that they automate tasks and can be used in so-called hybrid environments, which host applications in a mixture of on-premise, off-premise, physical and cloud-based environments.”
HP and Dell, both companies that have indicated strong interest in building their cloud offerings, are certainly seeing clear value in making sure their cloud management and services portfolios are robust, which indicates that are fewer and fewer questions about the movement of the cloud as concept to mainstream business practice. While there are, quite unquestionably, some trust and maturation issues, by making acquisitions of 3PAR, Stratavia, and whatever comes next, both tech giants are counting on clouds to be at the heart of their business strategies.