As those of you who regularly visit this dusty outpost of the blogosphere will know, I recently took a shot at handicapping which networking company Dell might acquire. I assembled a field of nine entries, considered the likelihood that Dell would pursue a transaction with each of them, and assigned odds to each scenario.
Before writing that post, I had read and heard mounting speculation about the increasing likelihood of Dell buying its way into networking to consummate and round out integrated data-center solutions (servers, storage, networking) and to compete more effectively against competitors HP and Cisco.
The drumbeat for a networking acquisition by Dell has only gotten louder and more insistent since then. Now the word on the street — and in the pubs, in the cafes, on the patios, at the gyms, and on the fairways — is that Dell might announce its networking buy as early as next week.
Furthermore, multiple sources, spanning the gamut of reliability, tell me that the company Dell will buy is the one I listed as the 5-2 favorite in my mildly diverting handicapping exercise. (The candidate I listed at 7-2 was alleged to have been in the running, too.)
Nothing is a given, of course, until the announcement goes out over the wires, but the word is that Dell has made its choice, going with the favorite, and will tell the world all about it imminently.
Maybe I should shorten the odds accordingly.
Twilight in the Valley of the Nerds 