It was only a matter of time. Amazon.com’s Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) will soon support both Windows Server and SQL Server, according to this blurb on the Amazon.com Web site.
Faced with the reality that Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss middleware were already available in the Amazon EC2 cloud, Microsoft pushed hard to ink the agreement with Amazon, according to one source close to the online retailer.
Mergers and acquisitions continue at a rapid pace in the managed services industry. The latest deal involves Alentus — a managed service provider with software as a service expertise — acquiring two Linux-centric hosting firms.
Based in Laguna Niguel, Calif., Alentus snapped up Austin, Texas-based Website Source, Inc. and SpeedFox, Inc., which specialize in Linux website hosting. The acquisitions reinforce the growing popularity of hosting both open source and closed source applications under one roof.
Alentus’s acquisitions are the latest in a growing list of MSP buyouts followed by our MSPmentor M&A Tracker.
mindSHIFT, a managed service provider, is pushing deeper into the software-as-a-service (SaaS) market. The company has acquired Collaboration Online, which specializes in hosted Microsoft applications.
This is the latest example of managed services converging with SaaS, and it reinforces many of the prime MSP opportunities we’ve been writing about in recent weeks — particularly hosted SharePoint, Dynamics and Exchange services.
It’s also the latest example of mergers and acquisitions within the MSP sector. (See our M&A Tracker for a list of deals.)
Here’s a bit more on mindSHIFT’s plans for Collaboration Online.
