BeachRider

Expect Tech Mergers to Increase

VMWare has certainly been a roller-coaster for EMC. It competes with Microsoft on MS's home-turf, so investors have been very fidgety. Palm could be at a local high-point, so an acquisition would need to take that into account. Red Hat has been on the M/A chart for so long, it seems like no one really wants to own them. BMC has been tracking that life-cycle that so many have followed before. If it follows their pattern, it won't be sold until it is on some kind of down-tick. This might be similar for ERTS. There can't be a lot of buyers for ATML, so the opportunity would have to be special.

Cisco's Odd, But Logical, Move into Servers

...Blade Servers that are optimized for virtualization...

I don't get it. You are either for blade servers, to minimize the footprint for physically isolated environments, or you are for significant virtualization.

Blade servers can be lashed together or made easily adaptable to chainging IP addresses, etc., but that isn't virtualization.

Servers for Virtualization are larger than 95% of all blade servers. They have extra memory and CPUs. They have faster-than-average I/O throughput.

Both are technologies worth pursuing. They are going different directions to accomplish a purpose, though.