SoftLayer's public cloud business has IBM and EMC sniffing around for a reported $2bn buyout as both companies look to bolster their own networks.
IBM has made no secret of its plans to build up its cloud computing and storage business. And EMC's server virtualization and cloud controller minion VMware said earlier this week that it was going to build its own public cloud - dubbed the "vCloud Hybrid Cloud" - so enterprises could get an absolutely compatible public cloud that could onload apps from data centers using VMware's ESXi hypervisor and its vCloud extensions.
Both companies, according to rumors, are sniffing around to do a possible acquisition of SoftLayer.
According to a Reuters report, sources familiar with the situation say that telecom giant and hosting player AT&T came to SoftLayer "in recent months" looking for some kind of exclusive deal to acquire it, but is no longer interested.
The report says that SoftLayer has tapped Credit Suisse and Morgan Stanley to broker a deal with either EMC or IBM, which are both apparently interested in acquiring the company for someone in excess of $2bn.
A spokesperson for SoftLayer told El Reg that it does not comment on rumor or speculation.
SoftLayer was founded in 2005 and merged with hosting rival The Planet before being bought up by private equity firm GI Partners back in 2010. GI Partners was itself founded in 2001, is co-headquartered in Menlo Park and London, and has $8.2bn in assets, including data center and telecom operators and real estate - and a little more than half of that is real estate. SoftLayer is a privately held company, but gave El Reg a peek into its operations a year ago when it was launching its cloud for running HPC workloads on hybrid CPU-GPU clusters.
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