Dell has acquired Make Technologies, a company that helps businesses update their woefully out-of-date legacy applications for the modern age of computing. Most people see Dell as a hardware company, but this is the third software outfit it has acquired in the past four days.
Make seeks to update legacy apps for use with today's standards and web services, so that businesses save save costs without building new tools from scratch. In a canned statement, Dell Services president Steve Schuckenbrock said that with Make under its wing, Dell has "the capabilities to help customers with all their modernization needs—from re-hosting and re-platforming to code re-engineering.... These offerings will enable Dell to support the thousands of commercial and public sector customers looking to migrate business-critical applications to open, standards-based architectures, including the cloud."
Make's customers include such giants as IBM and Oracle. Based in British Columbia, the company will send roughly 100 employees to Schuckenbrock's services team. It's unclear whether Make will continue to operate as a self-contained operation.
On Tuesday, Dell said it would purchase Clerity Solutions, which does much the same work as Make Technologies, and Shuckenbrock says that the company is now positioned to lead this software modernization market.
Of late, Dell has been on a quite a tear when it comes to acquiring software companies. A day before the Clerity buy, Dell announced that it would buy Wyse Technologies, an outfit best known for providing thin client hardware and software and virtual desktop infrastructure, or VDI. In March, the company purchased SonicWall, a network security and data protection vendor. And the previous month, it nabbed AppAssure, which provides protection for both virtual and cloud computing environments.
At a recent event in San Francisco, Michael Dell said that his eponymous corporation isn't just a PC company anymore, but "an end-to-end IT solutions company." And the company is certainly putting its money where its mouth is. This is Dell's 16th acquisition in the past two years.
