The news is filled with Cloud and mergers. Will it Rain?
Rain is revenue. Will all these acquisitions turn into revenue? We'll wait and see, but most big mergers do not see the synergies that were predicted.
The big merger is The Planet and SoftLayer, both owned by the same VC firm, GO Partners, who put them together. "The merger creates the largest private hosting and cloud services provider in the world. Its 24,000 customers in 110 countries will be served by 13 facilities across the United States and Europe that house 76,000 servers under management. The newly combined company will operate under the SoftLayer brand and offer a complete range of solutions, including dedicated and managed hosting, cloud services (including hybrid environments), and colocation." [infotech] SoftLayer will have $260 million in revenue for 2010. GI Partners "has made several related investments, most notably Digital Realty Trust in 2002, The Telx Group in 2006, and ViaWest in 2010."
Interesting article on The WHIR that talks about the value of the SoftLayer deal at $528M.
Meanwhile, Jon Arnold is on CircleID talking about "Will the Cloud Kill Telecom Vendors?" As with almost any sector experiencing change today, you either adjust or dig your feet in. When you dig your feet in, you send in the lawyers and lobbyists to try to hold on to the status quo for as long as you can. Meanwhile, change happens anyway in your sector all around you and you lose value anyway. As Tom Peters says RE-IMAGINE. Innovate or Die.
In other news, North Carolina is becoming the Data Center Capital of the US. Research Triangle Park has long been the home for data centers for IBM, NetApp, Ralph Lauren, Peak 10, Hosted Solutions and DataChambers. Now, Google, Facebook, Wipro and Apple have spent about $2.1 billion on data centers in western NC.
The forecast is for Cloudy, I just hope it brings rain.
