EMC acquired Syncplicity today for an undisclosed amount.

The news comes in the midst of EMC World, where speculation about the company’s next acquisition has been the talk of the event.

It’s the second acquisition for EMC in the past two weeks.  On May 10, EMC announced its acquisition of XtremIO, a pure flash storage provider.

Syncplicity, a cloud-based file management solution, does something else for EMC.  It gives the masive storage company the capability to reach out to the Fortune 500 with a potential credible strategy for developing an infrastructure that can sync cloud environments.

That’s a huge missing piece for most companies. Most enterprise cloud environments are spread across multiple departments.  From the Syncplicity blog:

For all the hype in our space, we’ve yet to see the Fortune 500 standardize on early cloud file sync, share and collaboration solutions across their firms as the new way of doing business.  There is vast interest and demand, with a lot of experimentation, but real enterprise-wide adoption is still in its earliest stages because having a secure, enterprise grade solution matters.  And it matters to everyone, from the largest enterprises to SMBs and individuals.

EMC Chairman and CEO Joe Tucci certainly alluded to the company’s strategy in his keynote today at EMC World. He said the debate about the public and private cloud is silly. He said 78% of companies have solid plans for public clouds and 77% for private clouds.  It’s not an either, or situation “it’s a world of both”.

Certainly true.  But I do think Tucci is throwing a bit of curve ball. The question becomes more about what you believe about the meaning of cloud computing. If you can see it, it’s not a cloud. That’s certainly what most of my colleagues will tell you. If it means consolidating your data center than that is something different. True, the public v. private cloud debate is silly but to obfuscate the reality that data centers represent clouds has its own fallacies, too.

Syncplicity will be a wholly owned subsidiary of EMC. It will integrate its offering with EMC’s Information Intelligence Group.

Smart acquisition but  I am left curious about one thing. What about Oxygen Cloud, the EMC partner that provides a capability to access documents over the network through its syncing service? The service certainly has overlap with Syncplicity.  And then there is VMware’s Project Octopus. Doesn’t it overlap, too?

Questions to ponder as data blurs any preconception of what we think we think we know about infrastructure and how data breathes and flows across data centers and their differing architectures.