acquisition

Sources are reporting that IBM is planning to acquire Sun, its rival in the computer server and software markets. According to the NYTimes, the price is nearly $7 billion. The merger will create a corporate entity, which owns some of the most recognizable software and hardware brands in the hosting and IT industries.

Last week, Rackspace announced the acquisition of two companies - VPS provider Slicehost and cloud storage service Jungle Disk. While both acquisitions are indicative of Rackspace's new cloud hosting strategy, Jungle Disk is an interesting case, being a cloud storage/backup service originally based on Amazon S3. JungleDisk uses Amazon's global cloud service to allow the sharing of an unlimited amount of information through a secure, mountable network drive and automatic backup. The pricing model is also innovative -- users pay only for the amount of data they store, per gigabyte, without additional setup and support fees.