760RA One-Stop Shopping – Major Vendors Acquire Assets for the Cloud
Authors: Mike West, Robert McNeill, Bruce Guptill
The IT industry is in a major transition, impacted by several trends concurrently that have led to increasing partnering and consolidation, as major vendors seek to become the sole source for offerings up and down the IT EcoStackTM targeting the Cloud (please see Strategic Perspective, “Gorillas In the Cloud: Applying Saugatuck’s “Master Brand” Model to Cloud IT,” MKT-732, published 5 May 2010). Dell, HP, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and EMC/VMware are among the many examples of IT vendors pursuing a vertically-integrated stack approach to Cloud IT (please see Note 1 for related Saugatuck research on the Cloud strategies of these vendors).
The latest is NTT Group’s proposed $3.2B cash offer to acquire Dimension Data, a global IT services and solutions provider. Together, NTT Group and Dimension Data hope to become a one-stop, sole source provider with offerings that complement NTT Group’s telecommunications technology. Geographic expansion is also in the mix. NTT Group’s business mainly focuses on Asia and covers Europe and the USA, while Dimension Data also covers Africa, the Middle East and Australia. Thus the coverage areas of the two businesses are highly complementary.