After purchasing Terremark in January for $1.4 billion, Verizon today announced an expanded suite of cloud infrastructure services for enterprises. Bob Toohey, President of Verizon Business, says the company knows it has to give some control and flexibility in order to attract customers to its cloud.
Hot on the heels of its Qwest acquisition, CenturyLink plans to buy Savvis, the data center provider. The $3.2 billion deal mirrors the $1.4 billion Terremark buy that Verizon completed earlier this month as telecommunications providers buy their way into providing cloud and managed hosting services.
The merger between CenturyLink and Qwest officially closed today, creating the nation’s third largest phone company in a world where being a phone company means less and less. I spoke with a company executive about making cloud acquisitions and the ever-growing demand for bandwidth.
Verizon announcing plans to buy Terremark for $1.4 billion is a big deal, but I don’t think Terremark will be the biggest winner as a result. Rather, I think Rackspace looks great as the company straddling the line between the MSP and cloud worlds.
Jim Ousley, CEO and Chairman of Savvis is having a great day. Yesterday Verizon agreed to buy a rival for $1.4 billion, and today he has joined a small group of companies that are suddenly sought after as acquisition targets. In response Savvis stock has traded up.
Verizon has agreed to buy Terremark, a provider of managed and cloud services for $1.4 billion. The deal is an aggressive move to gain customers in the red-hot cloud computing market, and makes sense, as the network and the computer are moving ever closer.
When all is said and done, Google, Microsoft and Salesforce.com might be battling it out for PaaS (and SaaS) dollars against a whole slew of smaller providers operating within the infrastructural confines of AWS, Rackspace, Terremark and Savvis.
If the data center is the new computer, then the job of providing the de facto operating system of that new computer is up for grabs, as was made clear this week at VMware’s industry conference, VMworld — a vendor event-turned-virtualization trade show. VMware (s vmw) has had its eye on that prize for some time, but more recently, so has Microsoft.
The show in San Francisco this week highlighted the fact that virtualization is about more than just hypervisors, which have become commodities. It also revealed the extent to which both VMware and Microsoft are hoping virtualization becomes less about maxing out each server and more about delivering applications to employee desktops and through remote terminals with less complexity and lower overhead. Read More about VMware Wants to Provide the OS for the Cloud
