Dell complaints

By Kirk Ladendorf

AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Published: 8:44 p.m. Friday, Feb. 24, 2012

Dell Inc. has acquired AppAssure, which provides application recovery from customers' servers, data centers and cloud computing setups.

No financial terms were disclosed about the deal, which was announced Friday.

Based in Reston, Va., AppAssure has 230 workers and more than 6000 customers. It was founded in 2006 with Bain Capital as the lead investor, and its customers are primarily small and mid-size businesses.

Dell calls AppAssure the nation's fastest-growing backup software technology company and said the acquisition "further extends Dell's comprehensive storage and software strategy."

Dell said it will keep all of AppAssure's workers and add more engineering and sales resources to the company over time to accelerate its growth.

The acquisition is the first for Dell since August, when it acquired Force10 Networks, a California-based network equipment company.

Dell has made 11 business acquisitions over the past three years in an effort to become more of a one-stop information technology shop for its large and mid-sized business customers.

"AppAssure's unique architecture delivers innovative cloud-enabled backup and replication solutions that meet the challenges of protecting the explosive growth of data," said Brad Anderson, president of Dell's enterprise solutions group.

AppAssure ranked 62nd on Inc. magazine's list of fast-growing companies last year with $6.8 million in annual revenue and 3,450 percent growth over three years.

Industry analyst Roger Kay with Endpoint Technologies Associates said AppAssure appears to be another small company that offers technology that appeals to some of Dell's mid-size business customers. Dell has experience at taking companies with well-regarded products and accelerating their growth by putting the Dell brand and sales system behind them, he said.

"Dell is looking for a richer product portfolio, and it has great distribution. Dell can take this and leverage it," Kay said. "Of the various enterprise (information technology) players, Dell is the furthest behind in filling out its product portfolio. They have a long way to go, and each of these acquisitions is a step along the way."

Analyst Brian Marshall of ISI Group said the AppAssure deal is "synergistic" to Dell. "It is something to build on top of their software portfolio," he said.

Dell has been growing in the past few years through acquisitions and adding key engineering and sales resources to support the growth of those acquisitions.

The Round Rock company reported 109,000 employees worldwide as of early February, an increase of 6,000 from the previous year. Three thousand of those added workers were in the U.S.

The computer maker said it also added an undisclosed number of workers in Central Texas, where it employs more than 16,000 people.

Dell's acquisitions since 2009 include Perot Systems Corp., which it bought for $3.9 billion, and Compellent Technologies, which it acquired last year for $980 million. ISI Group estimates Dell paid $700 million for Force10 Networks, $525 million for SecureWorks and $150 million for Ocarina Networks .

kladendorf@statesman.com; (512) 445-3622

Well the owners of the company will walk away with lots of money in their pockets. Dhell will gut and close the company taking whatever they can and thus add more people to the unemployment lines as usual. It's the death of another company via Mikey and Dhell!

That's not true at all.

If your even remotely close to what Dhell does. Maybe you might want to read more than just one small snipe of a statment. Then you will know that this is Dhell's total MO when taking over companys.