Each side is doing what it would normally do; the difference is that the services are being offered together, extending the all-in-one angle that Cisco has been working with UCS.
It also gives Cisco more clout in big, big clouds, the multi-tenant type. Cisco and BMC can "break out a chunk of the cloud and keep it unique for one customer," says Simon Aspinall, Cisco senior director of service provider marketing.
Juniper already has plenty of security products, but as executive vice president Mark Bauhaus explains on the company's blog, Altor adds the virtualized dimension, providing control over the traffic that's going from one virtual machine to another.
VentureBeat notes that Altor also offers security for a host computer that runs multiple operating systems. The acquisition gives Juniper one security package that can work with the host's multiple personalities.
Juniper had already invested in Altor. Minus that stake, the acquisition cost $95 million cash. (See Altor Raises $10M.)
That's likely to lead to more deals. Speaking of which: Deloitte thinks cloud-computing companies will do well in what should be a deal-heavy 2011, as IT Pro reports.
— Craig Matsumoto, West Coast Editor, Light Reading
Unified Computing System