Dell Expands Enterprise Solutions Biz With Reorg, Gale Technologies Buy

Dell on Friday beefed up its enterprise solutions capabilities with an acquisition of infrastructure automation software developer Gale Technologies and the setting up of a new organization focusing on converged and enterprise workloads.

The acquisition and move come at a time when Dell is continuing a transition from its focus on selling consumer and low-value products to providing enterprise products and solutions including servers, storage, networking and related software and services.

That transition is reflected in Dell's third fiscal quarter 2013 financials in which the company on Thursday reported a steep drop in consumer-focused sales and a strong rise in enterprise-related revenue.

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Dell's acquisition of Santa Clara, Calif.-based Gale Technologies brings it technology that helps customers turn discrete server, storage and networking components into integrated solutions for high-end applications, virtualized environments and private cloud environments, said Matt Baker, executive director of strategy for Dell's Enterprise Solutions Group.

As such, its technology will fit well with Dell's Active Infrastructure converged infrastructure solutions.

Active Infrastructure, which was introduced last month, comes in two flavors. One of them is pre-integrated systems, which will be fully engineered, assembled and tested by Dell and implemented using Dell's enterprise deployment services, similar to the fully-configured Vblock solutions from VCE, the joint venture company owned by Dell rivals EMC and Cisco.

The other is a reference architecture for building converged infrastructure similar to the FlexPod architecture from NetApp and Cisco or EMC's VSPEX architecture.

"Gale Technologies will help us further accelerate our Active Infrastructure family," Baker said. "Its technology helps turn components into integrated solutions, including in virtualized and cloud environments. This will accelerate our plans in this integrated solutions space."

Gale Technologies was founded in 2008 and has been shipping its technology for over two years, primarily through indirect sales channels, Baker said.

Along with the acquisition, Dell on Friday unveiled a new division, the Enterprise Systems & Solutions organization, which focuses on converged and enterprise workload solutions including Active Infrastructure, Dell's vStart virtualization platform and high-end application workloads such as ERP, database, decision support and other similar applications, Baker said.

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The new Enterprise Systems & Solutions organization is a part of the Dell Enterprise Solutions Group.

Dario Zamarian, who had been serving as vice president and general manager of Dell's networking business, is taking the reins at the new Enterprise Systems & Solutions organization.

Dell also said it hired Tom Burns as its new vice president and general manager for Dell Networking, where he will take over for Zamarian. Burns comes to Dell from Alcatel-Lucent where he was most recently the president of the Enterprise and Strategic Industries Business Group.

Both Zamarian and Burns now report to Marius Haas, president of Dell's Enterprise Solutions Group.

Dell declined to provide financial details related to its Gale Technologies acquisition.

PUBLISHED NOV. 16, 2012