IT Vendors Look to Acquire SoftLayer Technologies in Possible B2B Deal
IT Vendors Look to Acquire SoftLayer Technologies in Possible B2B Deal by UCStrategies Staff
SoftLayer Technologies, a web-hosting company, could be in private discussions with EMC and IBM amongst other potential suitors, who are looking at it as a possible acquisition.
Reuters made reference to three unnamed sources last week, and stated that both IBM and EMC could be potential suitors for Dallas, Texas-based SoftLayer Technologies. The deal may be worth $2 billion.
In the U.S., Asia and Europe, SoftLayer operates worldwide global infrastructure platforms across 13 data centers situated on those continents. According to the company, it is the largest privately held Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) provider, and has 100,000 devices in its management.
Reuters also noted that at one time AT&T was in talks with SoftLayer regarding the possible acquisition, but those discussions have now ended.
At this point in time, IBM, EMC and other large IT vendors are seeking out the best ways to offer hardware and software products customers their cloud services. IBM SmartCloud Enterprise is provided by IBM, while HP Cloud Services is offered by rival Hewlett-Packard.
EMC owns the majority of VMware, and announced this month that it has its own plans for the public cloud. If SoftLayer was acquired, it would be the most recent in a line of big acquisition deals in the cloud-hosting business.
Telephone carrier CenturyLink purchased Savvis in 2011, and this was one of the biggest deals so far. Savvis is a managed hosting and collocation provider, and the deal merged 48 data centers in North America, Europe and Asia, resulting in a $3.2 billion deal.
In that same year, IaaS provider Terremark Worldwide was purchased by Verizon in a deal worth $1.4 billion.
SoftLayer Technologies, IBM and EMC all refused to offer more information on the speculations. (CY) Link