Deals Done This Week

30 Aug 2010

An overview of the week in deals in the Irish technology sector including Dell and HP’s bidding war over 3Par, Louth County Council’s IT consolidation strategy and CA and Amazon’s cloud plans

Dell matches HP’s earlier offer, HP strikes back with US$2bn

The bidding war rages on, as Dell and HP fight for 3PAR. Earlier today, Dell matched HP’s previous offer of US$27 per share. Now HP has offered to buy out 3PAR for US$30 per share in cash.

This boosts the offer to $2bn in total, nearly doubling Dell’s initial bid of $1.13bn.

The offer came just 90 minutes after Dell matched HP’s earlier offer, intensifying the battle to acquire 3PAR.

The two companies have been bidding of 3PAR to integrate their virtualised utility storage services into their companies.

Both companies see these services as being a highly profitable area in the fast-growing cloud computing market.

It will be interesting to see how much longer the bidding will continue for – and how high the price will get.

Louth County Council embarks on IT consolidation strategy

Louth County Council has embarked on an IT consolidation programme that includes centralising its IT function and moving to a managed print model.

Louth County Council (LCC) is the administrative hub for the county, which has more than 100,000 residents, many of them living in three main towns. It awarded the contract for both projects to the IT services firm Ergo.

Phase one of the two-year managed print agreement has already been rolled out at County Hall, targeting hidden costs of printing. Over time LCC had built up a large amount of hardware and consumables, which have now been replaced with a smaller number of networked printers and multifunction devices.

Phases two and three are currently under way involving a further seventeen council sites – including Dundalk Town Council and LCC sub offices – moving to the same managed print model. 

LCC’s head of information systems Eugene Mulholland said the project sprung from a needed to reduce printing overheads and the organisation is not just cutting costs but controlling them. “We have much better visibility across the organisation and we are getting to a position where can use the printing platform to drive more efficient business processes,” he said.

Mindjet expands channel network to Ireland with BEE

Software and cloud-based applications provider Mindjet has developed a partnership with Irish technology distributor Business Electronic Equipment (BEE).

Mindjet wishes to utilise this deal to expand its channel network into Ireland in order to broaden its customer base, along with improving support for its existing customers.

“We’re thrilled to be Mindjet’s distribution partner in the Irish market,” said Dermot Hanna, director at BEE.

“We’ve already got strong connections with Mindjet through our existing partnership with Nuance, and look forward to bringing the software to the Irish market through our resellers.”

This will make BEE the national distributor of Mindjet software in Ireland. It will call upon its current network of reseller partners along with recruiting others for the products.

CA Technologies expands support for Amazon Web Services

CA Technologies has broadened its services for Amazon Web Services, extending it to Amazon Virtual Private Cloud.

Many of CA Technologies services can now be plugged into Amazon Virtual Private Cloud, such as CA Virtual, CA Service Automation, CA Service Assurance and the Nimsoft Monitoring Solution.

These solutions will allow businesses to automate the deployment of applications and resources within the Amazon Web Services cloud infrastructure, monitor the performance of these services and help ensure that resources are optimally aligned with business requirements.

“IDC expects most enterprises will adopt some type of cloud strategy in the near term,” said Mary Johnston Turner, IDC research director of Enterprise System Management Software.

“Their move to the cloud will be made easier by taking an integrated, coordinated approach that involves managing existing resources with cloud resources via workload automation, and application performance monitoring and reporting.”

John Kennedy is a journalist who served as editor of Silicon Republic for 17 years

editorial@siliconrepublic.com