EMC Will Be Latest and Greatest of Dell’s Many Acquisitions

Dell’s acquisitions have helped transform the company and extend its reach into such areas as networking, storage, software, cloud, big data and security.

The EMC deal will give Dell more capabilities in such areas as data storage, virtualization and the cloud, and greater traction in large enterprises. It also promises to make Dell a more significant competitor with the likes of HP and IBM, though a merger of this size brings challenges in such areas as product and culture integration and greater debt. Analysts say it could be two years before Dell can say for sure how the deal worked out.

Dell took a significant step into the storage business when it bought iSCSI system maker EqualLogic for $1.4 billion in 2007, at the time the largest acquisition in the company’s history. Three years later, Dell spent $940 million for storage vendor Compellent and bought deduplication software vendor Ocarina Networks. As Dell grew its storage capabilities, its decade-long partnership with EMC drew to an end.

Dell already had networking in hand with its PowerConnect products and was partnering with Juniper Networks and Brocade when it bought Force10 Networks in 2011, a move that brought greater enterprise capabilities.

Security has been a focus of Dell’s acquisitions plans, and the company filled out a lot of its portfolio with three purchases in just over a year. Dell bought SecureWorks in 2011 for $612 million for managed security services, SonicWall the following year for network security, and Credant Technologies later in 2012, bringing with it data protection software for securing information sent from endpoints to servers, storage or cloud systems.

Dell also has spent billions to build out its software capabilities. Quest became the foundation of the software business when Dell bought it in 2012 for $2.4 billion, outbidding a venture capitalist firm. Also that year, the company bought Gale Technologies for $341 million for its infrastructure automation software.

Dell wants to make it easier for enterprises to manage their IT infrastructure. In 2007, the company bought Everdream for software-as-a-service (SaaS) remote server management, and in 2010, acquired application virtualization software maker Kace and automation software maker Scalent Systems.

Dell officials have been clear about wanting to help customers avoid any significant disruption in their data centers when migrating to more open, cloud-based environments. The company has invested in application modernization software and services through such acquisitions as Clerity Solutions and Make Technologies within days of each other in 2012.

The cloud has gotten its share of attention from Dell over the past several years. The company in 2010 bought Boomi, a SaaS vendor that brought with it technology that allows for easy transfer of data between cloud-based and on-premises applications. About three years later, Dell bought Enstratius, which offered cloud management software and services.

Dell in 2014 bought StatSoft, whose offerings provided data mining, predictive analytics and data visualization to enterprises looking to make fast and accurate business decisions based on the increasing amounts of data they’re collecting.

AppAssure, which Dell bought in 2012, brought with it application recovery products to help enterprises in the case of such problems as a power outage, environmental issue or human error.

Dell in 2012 bought thin-client vendor Wyse Technology, which was in the process of transitioning from hardware to software. Not only did Dell acquire Wyse’s thin clients, but it expanded its desktop virtualization and cloud-based client capabilities.

Dell significantly grew its services around technology, infrastructure, business processes and consulting when it bought Perot Systems in 2009 for $3.9 billion, a move designed to enable the company to better compete with vendors like HP and IBM.