anonymous writer
Best product acquisition target for Dell (or any large tech company) in my opinion would be Riverbed (NASDAQ:RVBD). Riverbed offers customer's an Immediate positive performance impact and an ROI better than anything out there besides VM Ware. The next competitor in the WAN Optimization space to Riverbed would be Cisco whose product doesn't work nearly as well. In competitive situations we'd do bake offs against CISCO WAAS and Riverbed would smoke them every time. Riverbed also has products that accelerate data to the cloud. Also, if you say the word "cloud" investors drool all over even though IT guys don't want to use it. (cost, risk, latency)
This is from a response to Merjerz' article on SeekingAlpha: http://seekingalpha.com/article/1031511-dell-s-m-a-10b-in-5-years-and-nothing-to-show-for-it
RVBD is currently valued at $2.8B, and is down about 60% from its 2011 high. Revenues of over $700M won't make a huge dent in Dell's overall revenue, but would make a nice contribution to the acceleration of moving revenue to the Servers & Networking BU. http://i.dell.com/sites/doccontent/corporate/secure/en/Documents/fvtyuiw13fq3rtios.pdf