Dell makes an acquisition to strengthen its cloud services business, especially its offerings in DevOps: the company buys Clouding, an Israeli startup that has built a platform for cloud orchestration and infrastructure automation. Cloudify’s tools are used by cloud architects and DevOps engineers to manage containers, workloads and more in hybrid environments.
Dell has not officially announced the acquisition, but after sources contacted us, we learned that Dell had actual published documents with the SEC regarding some of the stock incentives for Cloudify employees. A spokesperson has now also confirmed the purchase to businesskinda.com.
Dell Technologies announced that it has completed its acquisition of Cloudify. “This transaction enables Dell to continue to innovate our edge offering.”
Dell is not disclosing the value or other details of the acquisition. Our sources tell us the deal is valued at around $100 million.
That would make it a solid exit for Cloudify. Originally the startup drawn out from GigaSpaces in 2017 – Nati Shalom, the founder and CTO of Cloudify, also co-founded GigaSpaces. Since then, the startup grossed less than $8 million, according to PitchBook data. It has several strategic lenders on its dressing table: VMware, KPN and Intel were all investors in Cloudify.
Dell has been active in Israel ever since acquiring Exanet in 2010, which formed the basis of an R&D operation in the country. That acquisition was relatively par for the course: Exanet was bankrupt at the time, and the deal closed for $12 million.
From what we understand, Dell had been looking for acquisitions in this space for a while.
Cloudify’s pitch is aimed at engineers struggling to manage network and data infrastructure at scale: it provides a platform for those DevOps engineers to integrate and manage several products they may already be using: Ansible, Terraform, Kubernetes, ServiceNow, Jenkins, Azure, ARM and TOSCA among them – and automating the work of those who work together.
Avihai Michaeli, a startup consultant in the country, tells me that Dell has long had an eye on Cloudify — which (in addition to its strategic backers) counts big names like AT&T, Cox, Accenture, and many more as customers.
“Cloudify challenged Dell in more ways than one,” he said. “For example, it competed with Dell’s Enstratius.”
Dell will report its fourth quarter results in early March. Its market cap currently stands at $29 billion.
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