Managed Service Provider Week in Review

If you thought the moving and the shaking within the cloud and managed services space might have slowed down by now, you would be wrong. This week brought some major mergers and acquisitions and the end result is that quite a bit of cash has been infused into the MSP arena.

Topping the list of giant acquisitions this week was VMware’s purchase of mobile device management (MDM) market leader AirWatch for $1.17 billion. The massive deal has the virtualization company rolling AirWatch into its end-user computing group. The MDM company targets both resellers and service providers, who can offer MDM as a managed service, making it a compelling addition to VMware’s portfolio.

Australian cloud provider Telstra also scooped up network integrator O2 Networks this week for a reported $60 million. The company specializes in creating networks for Australian government agencies and financial companies and will help Telstra become further entrenched in the Australian cloud market.

In yet another cloud acquisition, the European subsidiary of Aastra Technolgies Ltd. has purchased Stockholm-based Telepo Ltd. The company will expand its growing global presence through the buyout, while incorporating Telepo’s cloud-based, multi-tenant services for enterprise communications. The Swedish company specializes in carrier-grade, cloud-based unified communications solutions that provide mobility, PBX and call center features.

And in funding news, virtualization solution company Docker received $15 million in Series B funding this week. The company offers an open-source engine for automating the deployment of virtual, containerized applications. Containers built by developers will run at scale in production on VMs, bare-metal servers, OpenStack cluster and public instances. The tool may be used for building private, lightweight platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environments quickly and cost effectively.