What is Happening? — Google helped wake up and shake up Cloud, mobility, consumer, and enterprise IT markets with its announcement early Monday August 14 that it plans to acquire Motorola Mobility. Motorola Mobility in turn announced Monday that it had accepted Google’s offer of $40 per share, about a 60 percent premium over its traded share price on Friday August 12. The total deal value is placed at $12.5B, assuming regulatory and shareholder approval as structured. No timetable for deal approval and consummation has been released by either company, but it is widely expected to complete by the end of 2011.

Broadcast and web-based news, business and trade publications, blogospheres, the Twitterverse, and all other associated media have already pumped out millions of words and bytes of analysis and ideas about the deal. Opinion and analysis seem almost evenly split on whether or not it’s a good deal for Google, its competitors, and users.

Yesterday, Dimension Data, the South African-based services giant announced that it had acquired OpSource, in a deal that signals the acceleration of its Cloud services strategy and offerings. Since the early days of the company, the nine year old OpSource has maintained a focused strategy of serving pure-play Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers and a variety of Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) transitioning to the Cloud with a variety of highly available / secure hosting and managed services offerings. More recently, it has launched a line of robust private and public Cloud offerings targeting traditional businesses.

We see this as a win-win scenario for both companies, as there are a number of significant and obvious synergies that exist between them – from geographic reach, to customer and technology focus. Founded in 1983, Dimension Data identified the synergy of acquiring OpSource as a way to flesh out their interest in the Cloud, and with a company that shares a strong networking heritage/focus. Dimension Data is a very large V-Block implementer, the world’s largest Cisco integrator and has 60 percent (+) of the Global 500 as its customers (with a strong presence in Africa, Europe, Asia and on the East Coast of the U.S).  OpSource not only adds the Cloud hosting components that it offers, but also a West Coast presence, deep domain knowledge in the Cloud, and a “who’s who” network throughout Silicon Valley and in the Cloud beyond.  NTT, as the parent of Dimension Data (and a minority shareholder of OpSource – see below), was able to broker the introduction to this doubly synergistic deal.

What is Happening? — In a deal that almost perfectly illustrates the interwoven, Cloud-driven nature and approaches of business software and workflow in the 21st century, IT virtualization and management Master Brand VMware announced on Tuesday May 31 its acquisition of collaborative / social business software and service provider Socialcast.

Socialcast is described on its website as “an enterprise collaboration platform built on activity streams that unites people, data and applications in real-time.” The company provides microblogging services tailored to workgroups and process management within enterprise business applications.

With the recent acquisition of Radian 6, the Web has been abuzz with discussion on how social analytics are becoming mainstream. They are, and Salesforce.com has made a strong move there by bringing an analytics solution in house. It will not only benefit their customers, but will likely offer Salesforce.com themselves some insight into how their own systems such as Chatter can be improved to provide better value to their CRM customers.

Despite all this positive thinking though, it is important to remember the historical anecdote that resulted in the headline “Dewey Defeats Truman”. The punch line of the whole incident was how they arrived at that headline—Sampling error. The Gallup Poll, on which the Chicago Tribune article was based, was conducted by phone and that turned out to be the major hitch in the data. In 1948 Truman’s constituency (the Democrats) were significantly less likely to have phones at all, and those voting for him were significantly under-represented.  The poll showed an accurate percentage of the wrong population and could have told Truman that he wasn’t very popular among those people with phones.

What Is Happening? — On Tuesday March 22, 2011, the Open Networking Foundation (ONF) announced its intent to standardize and promote a series of data networking protocols, tools, interfaces, and controls known as Software-Defined Networking (SDN) that could enable more intelligent, programmable, and flexible networking. The linchpin of SDN is the OpenFlow interface, which controls how packets are forwarded through network switches. The SDN standard set also includes global management interfaces. See Note 1 for a current list of ONF member firms.

ONF members indicate that the organization will first coordinate the ongoing development of OpenFlow, and freely license it to member firms. Defining global management interfaces will follow next.