Dell to Make Old Apps New Again, and Cloudier Too, with Make Technologies Buy
The ink was hardly dry on the Clerity deal before Dell whipped out its checkbook again, this time to acquire Make Technologies. Terms of the deal remain undisclosed.
Like Clerity, Vancouver-based Make develops software and services that allow organizations to pry legacy applications from aging IT infrastructures and migrate them onto modern commodity servers. Make's flagship offering is the TLM Enterprise suite, a collection of software tools used to analyze apps and help automate the process of migrating them to new platforms. According to the Clerity, its technology can reduce custom code by 60 percent or more.
For Dell, acquiring both application modernization specialists adds momentum to the server giant's pursuit of all things cloud.
New Clouds for Old Apps
Echoing his comments on the Clerity buy, Dell Services President Steve Schuckenbrock said the Make buy strengthens his company's focus on enterprise application systems and services. “The addition of Make Technologies and Clerity Solutions to Dell Services positions us to lead in the fast-growing applications modernization space,” he said.
Increasingly, that means supplying businesses with cloud-based alternatives for accessing their apps and their data. “These offerings will enable Dell to support the thousands of commercial and public sector customers looking to migrate business-critical applications to open, standards-based architectures, including the cloud,” Schuckenbrock added.
Nip ‘n Tuck for Legacy Apps
Business applications are showing their age. Earlier this week, Oracle President Mark Hurd told those gathered at Oracle OpenWorld Tokyo 2012, “The average age of a corporate application in the United States is 20 years old.”
Hurd used that eye-opening statistic to highlight the challenges of managing and drawing business intelligence from old apps and the huge stores of data they have generated over the decades. Like Oracle, Dell views this as an opportunity to capture a bigger slice of data center budgets. By applying Big Data and business analytics solutions to unlock the profit-generating potential of legacy apps, Dell Services plans to rejuvenate them.
In a blog post, Suresh Vaswani, chairman for Dell India, wrote how Clerity and Make bolster Dell's strategy. “Our capability to re-host applications through their migration from legacy systems to standard architectures was expanded with the acquisition of Clerity Solutions. Now, our application re-engineering solutions and automated application and code migration are enhanced by the intended acquisition of Make Technologies,” he noted.
He added that Make's technology lowers the cost of maintaining and managing legacy applications. Part of that value proposition involves protecting legacy data while reducing the amount of high-maintenance custom code.
Pedro Hernandez is a contributing editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals. Previously, he served as a managing editor for the Internet.com network of IT-related websites and as the Green IT curator for GigaOM Pro. Follow him on Twitter @ecoINSITE.
Pedro Hernandez contributes to Enterprise Apps Today, and 11Press, the technology network. He was previously the managing editor of Internet.com, an IT-related website network. He has expertise in Smart Tech, CRM, and Mobile Tech, Helping Banks and Fintechs, Telcos and Automotive OEMs, and Healthcare and Identity Service Providers to Protect Mobile Apps.
