ReadWriteEnterprise

Dell has been busy this week. Today they announced the acquisition of Clerity, a mainframe migration and modernization solution provider, and the intent to fold them into their services division. Clerity is one of the leaders in mainframe "rehosting" or the ability to migrate apps from legacy mainframes to equipment elsewhere that can provide the same service at reduced cost.

Yesterday, the company announced they would acquire Wyse Technology, which sells thin clients and cloud management and desktop virtualization (DVI) management software tools. Wyse also has a huge patent portfolio and has been around since the early days of the PC era. Back then, they sold low-cost green-screen terminals and became second only to IBM in that market. They used this expertise to move into selling thin clients that first worked with Windows Terminal Servers and eventually became more DVI-oriented.

With the world's #1 PC maker HP now in full transition mode, now may be the time for Dell to get its full come-uppance. On the enterprise side, it's had two big aces in the hole for a few years now: One is Optimized Deployment, which borrows Microsoft's data imaging technology to enable admins to rapidly deploy fully-configured Windows operating systems and applications to multiple clients in minutes. A 2010 study (PDF available here) showed automated image-based deployment could save businesses up to $337 per PC, in IT management costs alone.

Another is Dell's extraordinary KACE management appliances - literally plug-and-play tools that perform inventory analysis on corporate networks. A KACE tool lets admins deploy applications, patches, and updates to designated systems in the network.