Dell Buys Mainframe Modernizer in Cloud Push
April 3, 2012
For the second day in a row Dell Tuesday bought a company and left everybody to wonder what it paid. This time it said it bought Chicago-based Clerity Solutions. It’s kinda amusing for a PC maker to be buying a mainframe company.
To IBM’s irritation, Clerity, which has been around almost 20 years, migrates mainframe users’ applications off the beasts and over to more modern x86-based widgetry.
Dell will put Clerity’s applications re-hosting UniKix automation widgetry and other soothing tricks with its services operation, which will get to rub elbows with the high-class set of corporations and public sector agencies still using mainframes. It says they will get a faster path to the cloud…
Clerity recently announced plans to optimize UniKix for migrating mainframe apps to Microsoft’s Azure. (Gotta see if that lasts. Ditto Clerity’s use of HP and Oracle hardware.)
Clerity’s 70 employees are supposed to join Dell’s Services team.
Dell says it plans to make continued investments in Clerity’s technology, which now gets more global reach. Its customers already include some of the largest financial services ISVs and Fortune-class end users. Clerity has reportedly been used in 1,300 sites worldwide.
The company is estimated to have done $14.1 million in the last six months of last year, up 61.4%, and moving into the black. It had a few million in the bank. Reportedly it had orders worth $60 million.
UniKix works in Windows, Unix and Linux environments.