Today Datalink announced the acquisition of Midwave, a Minneapolis-based IT solutions and services company focused on optimizing data centers for enterprise customers. The specifics of the acquisition can be found here. This is great news for our customers, partners, and shareholders. Consolidation in the marketplace – like this – continues. And, also within the data center.
We're seeing consolidation on almost all fronts. Building a unified data center or private cloud requires technologies from a number of leading companies. For example, FlexPod leverages technologies from VMware, Cisco and NetApp. Consolidating technology to create unified virtual data centers has wide-ranging impacts.
For users of a solution like FlexPod, we're seeing a consolidation and unification of strategic architectural decision-making. Application, server, storage and network teams no longer make separate decisions. More and more, they're breaking down organization and political barriers to create a unified solution to address organizational business needs. This can start to impact purchasing. Previously, the organization may have dealt with separate providers of server, storage and networking. Now, many organizations are seeing the benefits of a unified approach, where a single provider designs, delivers, and supports the complete unified solution.
For solutions providers, there's pressure to break out of supplying a single technology set and broaden the approach across the data center. Many smaller or regional solutions providers are resource-limited and will find it difficult to migrate to a data center focus. Meanwhile, larger solutions providers like Datalink thrive. Technology companies are seeking qualified partners to transform customers' data centers into next-generation cloud-like infrastructures. Datalink is well-positioned to be the go-to partner for our manufacturers and the organizations we serve.
Over the past couple years, Datalink has been acquiring organizations to help us migrate from a storage-only focus to a leading unified data center solutions company. We’ve aggressively expanded our consulting, networking, virtualization, and server skills. Adding a great regional company like Midwave continues to expand our skills and breadth. Moves like this help Datalink increase our data center expertise and resources, which support our best-of-breed technology partners. And more importantly, help us raise the bar on value for our customers.