EMC CEO Joe Tucci

Just when you thought EMC Corp. couldn’t be any busier, it’s gone and acquired no less than three cloud startups in one fell swoop – The Cloudscaling Group Inc., Maginatics Inc., and Spanning Cloud Apps Inc.

Apparently these weren’t impulsive buys. Each company has been carefully chosen to fulfil a key part of EMC’s hybrid cloud vision across cloud infrastructure, storage and data protection. The acquisitions allow EMC to broaden its cloud capabilities in three areas – OpenStack-powered hybrid solutions, data mobility across multiple clouds and new data back up and recovery services for cloud-based apps.

Here’s a quick rundown of what EMC’s getting its hands on:

Cloudscaling offers an OpenStack-powered Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) for private and hybrid cloud solutions. A founding member of the OpenStack Foundation, its main product is the Open Cloud System (OCS), which facilitates the management of compute, storage and networking in OpenStack clouds. The OCS offers agility, performance and cost benefits that are equivalent to public cloud services, only the software is deployed on-premises, which means IT teams can retain full control.

Maginatics‘ main strength lies in storage. It describes its main cloud product as “a new breed of storage technology that has been natively designed for software-defined data centers and the cloud, providing enterprises with an unparalleled solution to manage their growing unstructured data while enabling agile IT and business growth.” Basically, it helps to manage and protect data that’s strewn across disparate private, public and hybrid clouds by offering a consistent global namespace that can be accessed from any device.

As for Spanning, its cloudy backup and recovery systems are designed to prevent data loss in essential enterprise apps like Google Apps, Salesforce.com and Microsoft Office 365. EMC says it’s planning to combine its own data protection tools with Spanning’s technology to come up with a new data protection solution for all applications and workloads, regardless of where the data resides.

Tuesday’s deals come a day after EMC said it is reorganizing its core businesses into two divisions, called the Emerging Technologies Division and the other called the Core Technologies Division.

It’s no secret EMC is a latecomer to the cloud market, but it’s taking some big strides to try and catch up. In a second announcement yesterday, it unveiled a new EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud Solution it claims can deliver a hybrid cloud in 28 days or less using EMC Professional Services. The solution is currently only compatible with the MC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud Federation Software-Defined Data Center Edition, though it plans to add Microsoft Cloud Platform and OpenStack versions later. It also offers a connection to VMware vCloud Air, Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services’ public clouds.

With so many developments in such a short space of time it might seem like EMC is in a bit of a rush, but it really doesn’t have much choice. EMC has to react to market shift, the only problem is it’s doing so at a time of great uncertainty as it faces enormous pressure from investors to restructure its federation.

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