Dell Buys Clerity in Cloud Applications Push
Today, Dell made a second acquisition in as many days — see the Dell-Wyse deal — by taking Chicago-based Clerity Solutions off the market.
Clerity specializes in transitioning business applications off of mainframes and onto commodity servers and IT infrastructure via its automated UniKix Mainframe Rehosting software for Linux, Unix and Microsoft Windows. This capability helped the company tap into one of today's hottest trends: cloud computing.
As rising cloud adoption creates demand for enterprise IT systems, Dell believes Clerity's technology and services offerings dovetail neatly with Dell's focus on x86 computing and its increasingly cloud-enabled product and services portfolio.
“Unlike other providers, Dell remains committed to open architecture computing and to helping our customers implement optimal platforms for their applications,” said Steve Schuckenbrock, president of Dell Services, in an apparent jab at IBM.
Not letting up, he added, “Increasingly, these x86 platforms are enabling super-scale cloud environments, and the addition of Clerity gives us a clear advantage in helping customers modernize and migrate their applications off outdated hardware infrastructure to more current architectures.”
The shift from “legacy computing systems and onto more modern architectures” can also help rack up some sales for the IT vendor's server division.
Clerity's technology will also allow Dell Services to “cloud-ify” business-critical applications and data for its customers, according to the company.
Clerity offers an array of services aimed at helping companies transfer their on-premises business applications onto cloud platforms and making them available via a software as a service (SaaS) distribution model. According to the company, transitioning apps from aging Big Iron can help organizations slash their annual operating costs by up to 70 percent.
Since it was founded in 1994, Clerity has developed several partnerships with both hardware and software providers, including HP, EMC, CA and Red Hat Just last week, the company announced that it had helped Visiant Arcares, a financial software firm, move its ERP applications off an IBM mainframe onto the cloud for its clients. It has also assisted in migration projects for NYSE Euronext, SunGard and Equifax.
For Dell, Clerity will help fill the burgeoning app re-hosting niche. It's a line of business that the company expects “will become one of the flagship areas of expertise for our Applications and Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) Line of Business within Dell Services,” according to a blog post by Suresh Vaswani, chairman for Dell India.
Clerity's 70 employees will become part of the Dell Services team. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
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.
