Dell is making acquisitions to strengthen its offerings in its cloud services business, especially DevOps. The company has acquired Cloudify, an Israeli startup that built a platform for cloud orchestration and infrastructure automation. Cloudify’s tools are used by a cloud architect and his DevOps engineers to manage containers, workloads, and more across hybrid environments.
Dell didn’t officially announce the acquisition, but after a source reached out to us, we learned that Dell had indeed released documents to the SEC related to several stock awards to Cloudify employees. A spokesperson also confirmed the purchase to TechCrunch.
“Dell Technologies has announced that it has completed its acquisition of Cloudify,” said a spokesperson. “This transaction allows Dell to continue innovating in Edge products.”
Dell did not disclose the value or other details of the acquisition. Our sources say the deal is valued at around $100 million.
This would be a solid exit for Cloudify. Founder and CTO of Cloudify, her Nati Shalom was also the co-founder of GigaSpaces. Since then, the startup has raised less than $8 million, according to PitchBook data. The cap table has multiple strategic backers. VMware, KPN, and Intel were all Cloudify investors.
Dell has been active in Israel since its acquisition of Exanet in 2010, which formed the basis of its R&D operations in the country. That acquisition was for the song, relatively speaking: Exanet was bankrupt at the time, and the deal was for $12 million.
From what we understand, Dell has been looking for acquisitions in this area for some time.
Cloudify’s pitch is aimed at engineers working to manage network and data infrastructure in scaling organizations. DevOps engineers work with Ansible, Terraform, Kubernetes, ServiceNow, Jenkins, Azure, among them ARM and TOSCA, to automate their work.
Avihai Michaeli, a national startup advisor, tells me that Dell has been eyeing Cloudify for a long time. Cloudify counts big names like AT&T, Cox and Accenture among its customers (in addition to its strategic backers).
“Cloudify was challenging Dell in multiple ways,” he said. “For example, it conflicted with Dell’s Enstratius.”
Dell reported its fourth quarter results in early March. Its market capitalization is now $29 billion.
