As far as acquisitions go, the recent purchase of cloud orchestration and infrastructure automation vendor Cloudify by Dell Technologies for an estimated US$100 million was devoid of any real detail, since both organizations opted to impose a virtual gag order.
In fact, news of the purchase only came to light after published reports revealed that a form known as S-8 had been filed by Dell with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that outlined shares of its Class C common stock being issued to Cloudify employees.
As of this morning, there had not been a peep from either Cloudify or its new owner. Cloudify is an Israeli-based company that explains on its web site what it specializes in by stating that “organizations scaling their cloud operations are realizing that current DevOps tooling is slowing them down significantly.
“Cloudify removes such blockers by integrating and enriching existing automation and DevOps tools while keeping the infrastructure future-proof, featuring limitless integration to API-based DevOps tools and built-in support for cloud native services.”
Confirmation of the purchase came late last week, when a Dell spokesperson confirmed the acquisition and said, “this transaction allows Dell to continue to innovate our edge offerings.”
According to an article on TechCrunch, the up to US$100 million price tag “would make it a solid exit for Cloudify.”
The story goes on to say that the startup was spun out from GigaSpaces in 2017 and that Nati Shalom, the founder and chief technology officer of Cloudify, was also a co-founder of GigaSpaces. “Since then, the start-up has raised less than US$8 million, according to PitchBook data. It has all several strategic backers on its cap table: VMware, KPN, and Intel were all investors in the company,” the story noted.
Scott Young, director of infrastructure research with Info-Tech Research Group, said in an interview that at this point, the purchase was made in order for Dell to target further edge growth on its APEX as-a-service platform.”
Cloudify, he added, has traditionally been viewed by the research firm as specifically a cloud platform and “what we are seeing out of Dell says that they’re targeting their edge growth for that. The story that we see evolving is effectively the edge – assuming that they’re talking about the APEX platform – is meant to be more cloud on-prem. Buy your hardware on-prem and pay for it in a cloud-like fashion.
“If that’s what they’re looking at doing, and targeting things like, say, manufacturing, they could deploy little clusters of effectively VxRail at different manufacturing sites and potentially a central colocation hosted Dell data centre that is APEX as well, and that would tie into the other cloud services. Cloudify could then be used to build building blocks across that whole unified platform and orchestrate everything in a clean way.
“That would be the play I would see them coming into in saying they are looking to enhance their edge platform with this, presuming again that I am right, that it is APEX they are targeting, and they are tying into the broader cloud services that we also see Cloudify traditionally playing in.”
