Cloud Review: Bad Manners and Acquisitions
Last week IBM showed its competitors that it plays hardball. The firm announced a multi-billion deal that will extend its cloud business into Amazon’s turf, and later thwarted a lucrative contract that the CIA had awarded to the company. The news from IBM hit the wire shortly after Salesforce announced its multi-billion acquisition, and on the same day an OpenStack startup called Mirantis closed a $10 million round of funding.
On Wednesday IBM shelled out $2 billion for SoftLayer, a cloud provider that maintains 13 data centers across the US, Holland and Singapore. According to SiliconAngle contributing editor John Casaretto, the company’s infrastructure will provide IBM with a “platform through which they can continue to support and build off of OpenStack without encroaching or dominating it.”
Two days after the acquisition was made public, Bloomberg revealed that Big Blue denied Amazon a $600 million contract with the CIA. The company achieved this via a complaint to the U.S. Government Accountability Office, which determined that the spy agency did not uphold Amazon to the same standards as rivaling bidders.
Salesforce didn’t knock the bottom out of a major competitor, but it did buy a digital marketing called ExactTarget for $2.5 billion, roughly 52 percent more than what it was worth the day before the deal was announced. The Indianapolis-based firm is not profitable, but it lists thousands of deep-pocketed corporations as clients. Mirantis, an OpenStack integration specialist, is not worth billions just yet. But they got a step closer to that target on Friday, when we reported that they secured $10 million in funding from Ericsson, Red Hat, SAP Ventures and existing backer WestSummit Capital. The round brought the company’s total funding to $20 million.
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