It’s official, the future of information management and infrastructure is software as a service (SaaS). Today, Dell announced its intent to acquire the powerhouse in email continuity and archiving, MessageOne. This acquisition will give Dell the cornerstone that it needs to build out its own suite of SaaS offerings. Dell clearly didn’t want to be left out of race as it watched Iron Mountain successfully building out its SaaS offerings and watched its competitors and partners complete significant acquisitions in the market including Seagate Services’ acquisition of Evault, EMC’s acquisition of Mozy and IBM’s recent acquisition of Arsenal Digital Solutions. Then there’s Symantec who is building out its Symantec Protection Network.

Dell’s acquisition of MessageOne is good for IT Infrastructure and Operations professionals. Increase competition will force the more rapid development of additional SaaS services for information management and infrastructure and it will put pressure not only on pricing but on improved customer service. Going forward there will be a lot of focus on customer service such as who can provide the absolute most secure environment in a multi-tenant architecture, who can provide 24X7 customer support and who can provide a unified customer experience when it comes to metering, billing and reporting across all SaaS services.

The acquisition also means that the next time IT is considering new approaches and strategies to backup, archiving and disaster recovery, IT must consider SaaS services in addition to premise-based deployments of these solutions.

By Stephanie Balaouras

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