With network security such a huge business it stuns me that Dell first bought dinosaur vendor EMC and is now selling most of its other “non-core” assets to others. Sonicwall is now owned by private equity firm Francisco Partners and hedge fund Elliott Management. It is going to be a rough time for Sonicwall now and now I have to rethink my partnership with them as I am sure Sonicwall will either get torn apart or get sold again. Dell also sold off its IT services arm(formerly Perot Systems) to the Japanese telecom giant NTT. Dell is taking on more than 60 billion in debt. There’s one bright side though…EMC owns VmWare. I bet Dell is banking on the cloud continuing to grow and is willing to make a strategic play for the entire cloud stack. With the vertical from the base server hardware to networking to now virtualization and SANs now covered Dell is making an all in cloud vendor integrated push. Unless Dell starts getting EMC into flash arrays they will flounder quickly. Let’s see how this one turns out.
