Five Companies That Came To Win This Week

Dell Buying Wyse, Clerity

On Monday Dell agreed to acquire Wyse Technology for an undisclosed sum, adding desktop virtualization technology (a hot market) to its cloud client computing capabilities and enterprise solution portfolio. One day later it acquired Clerity Solutions, a provider of technology and services that help customers migrate from legacy systems to more modern technology.

The moves continue Dell's aggressive acquisition spree, which just two weeks ago included Internet security system vendor SonicWall, and are transforming the once-hardware-centric company into a broad-based enterprise IT provider.

The Wyse acquisition, expected to close in Dell's second quarter, also brings Wyse Technology's 3,000 channel partners into the expanding Dell universe.

Heads Up: Google Shows Off Project Glass

This week Google showed off a work-in-progress called Google Project Glass, a system that combines a Web-connected smartphone with high-tech glasses that essentially turn the world into a giant heads-up display.

With the device, for example, a glance out the window will bring up a display with the day's weather forecast. Alerts (a warning about a closed subway station, as demonstrated in a Google video) appear before your eyes. And users can reply to messages from friends using a talk-to-texting system.

Useful technology? Or a first step toward turning us all into a Borg-like collective? Too soon to say, but it's certainly intriguing and demonstrates Google's technological prowess.

Violin Memory Scores $50 Million From Investors

Violin Memory, a developer of flash memory-based storage arrays, received $50 million in Series D funding this week with software giant SAP joining Toshiba and Jupiter Networks as investors. That brings the total invested in the company to $155 million.

Demands are growing for ever-faster applications to process ever-bigger volumes of data, and this week's big investment in the young company confirms that Violin's storage arrays are, well, in tune with those market needs.

Citrix Shakes Up Cloud With Split From OpenStack

Citrix roiled the cloud computing market this week when it abandoned its Olympus distribution of the OpenStack Infrastructure-as-a-Service cloud software, focusing instead on its CloudStack IaaS software. Citrix also said it contributed CloudStack to the Apache Software Foundation as an open-source project.

Some industry watchers viewed Citrix's moves as a blow to Rackspace, an OpenStack co-founder, and strengthening the market position of Rackspace rival Amazon (because CloudStack APIs support Amazon). While Amazon could become the dominant player in the cloud scene, some think the industry will benefit from having two open-source cloud platforms.

Either way, Citrix got to flex its muscles and play an influential role in the cloud arena this week.

U.S. Army Awards HP A $249 Million Private Cloud Contract

Forward march for HP this week, with the news that HP won a $249 million contract to provide private cloud services to the U.S. Army.

Under the contract HP will provide the Army with its mobile, containerized data centers (which HP calls Performance-Optimized Data Centers, or PODs), which the Army will use as it consolidates distributed data centers and develops a secure, cost-effective private cloud system.

The Army plans to use the private cloud capacity in commercial and government-owned buildings, as well as deploying PODs for contingency operations or wherever temporary cloud computing systems are needed.

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