Acquisition of Gale Technologies by Dell

Dell, Inc. announced the acquisition of Gale Technologies, Inc., provider of infrastructure automation software that allows organizations to streamline the deployment of on-premise and hybrid clouds for self-service access to infrastructure.

Dell also announced the formation of its Enterprise Systems & Solutions organization focused on the delivery of converged and enterprise workload topologies and solutions in alignment with its enterprise vision.

Gale Technologies helps customers turn discrete compute, network and storage components into integrated and optimized application, virtual desktop infrastructure, and private cloud solutions featuring self-service and advanced automation. It solution provides a management, automation and orchestration platform for simplifying end-to-end provisioning across heterogeneous infrastructures. It delivers automated physical and virtual resource allocation, preserves best practice enterprise infrastructure deployment through reusable templates, and masks that complexity from the end user to provide a valuable enterprise asset.

Gale Technologies’ solutions are complementary to Dell’s enterprise approach in that they provide cost-effective management and orchestration tools that are easy to deploy and customize in both homogeneous and heterogeneous IT environments. This approach allows customers to extend their current IT investments to capitalize on new IT models.

Dell has taken significant steps to expand its enterprise solutions portfolio to help IT organizations rapidly respond to business demands, improve efficiency, and strengthen IT services quality. In its 3rd fiscal quarter, Dell’s server and networking business grew 11% year-over-year. It was the only server provider among the top three to have positive unit growth in the quarter and expects Gale Technologies to benefit from that reach.

Through the acquisition and development of its own IP, Dell has built a set of assets to deliver the scalable IT infrastructure of the future based on standardized technologies. The addition of Gale Technologies will help accelerate the momentum of Dell’s converged infrastructure family, Active Infrastructure, and extend development of additional integrated enterprise solutions.

"Today, enterprises need solutions that enable operational benefits of speed, efficiency, and flexibility in the allocation and use of resources," said Marius Haas, president, Dell Enterprise Solutions Group. "Gale Technologies integrates well with our Active Infrastructure family, and provides an intuitive, flexible and comprehensive foundation for application, virtual desktop infrastructure and private cloud deployments for our customers."

"We are excited to join the Dell team and contribute to the company’s transformation into an end-to-end IT solutions provider by extending the Active Infrastructure family of converged solutions. Combining Dell’s global scale, reach and enterprise portfolio with our people and technology will allow IT organizations to greatly improve the agility and efficiency of today’s and tomorrow’s data centers," said Nariman Teymourian, CEO, Gale Technologies.

Enterprise Systems & Solutions Organization
Dell also announced the creation of a new division, the Enterprise Systems & Solutions organization, to develop converged and enterprise workload solutions. This group extends its enterprise momentum by focusing on optimizing infrastructure for enterprise applications and complex workloads to help customers achieve increased IT agility while balancing capital costs. This new organization will be led by VP and GM Dario Zamarian, who previously headed Dell’s Networking business as VP and GM. Zamarian will report to Marius Haas, president, Dell Enterprise Solutions Group.

The Enterprise Systems and Solutions organization will accelerate Dell’s ability to design solutions that enable complex topologies to be deployed more rapidly by customers.

The team’s charter includes:

• Designing repeatable enterprise infrastructure models which enable pre-built solutions that can be assembled by Dell or customer architects
• Develop a single framework to manage complex topologies that include server and storage resources, software images, and network connectivity.

"As customers increasingly move to fully-integrated solutions, we are favorably positioned to capitalize on these trends with industry-leading server, storage, networking, and software assets coupled together as end-to-end systems," said Zamarian. "In creating this new organization, we plan to accelerate our ability to deliver differentiated value to customers – providing them with improved operational efficiency and the right balance of capability and price."

As Zamarian moves to his new role, Tom Burns joins Dell as VP and GM, Dell Networking, reporting to Haas. Burns comes to Dell from Alcatel-Lucent where he was most recently the president of the Enterprise and Strategic Industries Business Group. Prior to this position, Burns was president of the Enterprise Product Group, responsible for product strategy and all sales and marketing activities for the company’s enterprise business which included, voice, unified communications and networking and security solutions.

Dell Adds to the Active Infrastructure Family
by Expanding Active System Manager
Dell last month announced the Active System Manager, a tool for the most common infrastructure administrative tasks that is central to the Active System converged infrastructure offering. Dell is announcing an expansion of Active System Manager to include a new, complementary product based on Gale Technologies technology. This new product will provide customers with an IaaS platform for end-to-end automation and orchestration of application, virtual desktop infrastructure and private cloud deployments using vSphere and Hyper-V virtualization technologies. It will be available on Dell’s current vStart models and the new Active System 800 early next year. Support for third-party infrastructure solutions will be available in later releases.

Terms of Transaction
Gale Technologies was founded in 2008 and is headquartered in Santa Clara, CA. Dell plans to keep employees and, consistent with its approach to previous acquisitions, will continue to invest in additional engineering and sales capability to grow this business.

Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.