Dell this morning announced its intent to acquire privately-held Wyse Technology (Wyse), a cloud client computing company founded back in 1981.

Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, though Dell says the transaction is expected to be “accretive to its non-GAAP earnings in the second half of its Fiscal Year 2013″.

With the acquisition, Dell hopes to bolster its desktop virtualization capabilities. The purchase comes a few weeks after Dell’s acquisition of network security company SonicWALL, which added 1,000 employees.

Earlier this year, Dell acquired backup software firm AppAssure.

Wyse offers thin, zero and cloud PC client solutions with management, desktop virtualization and cloud software supporting desktops, laptops and a range of mobile devices. The company says it has shipped more than 20 million units and has over 200 million people interacting with its products on a daily basis.

Wyse has partnerships in place with the likes of Cisco, Citrix, IBM, Microsoft and VMware; it boasts over 3,000 resellers worldwide. The company is headquartered in San Jose, California, with offices around the globe.

Lollapalooza (Chicago). New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival (New Orleans). Bonnaroo (Manchester, Tennessee); Austin City Limits (Austin, Texas).

Those are the four major summer music festivals in the United States that YouTube, in partnership with Dell, will be live-streaming.

What you can expect: multiple live channels, behind-the-scenes content and exclusive artist interviews. Says Robert Kyncl, global head of content for YouTube:

“As a platform, YouTube is committed to bringing original content and unique music experiences to fans, artists, and festivals in a way that benefits the entire music ecosystem”.

And where does Dell come in, exactly, you ask?

Well, the company will be supplying Dell Precision workstations to support the live and recorded video feeds from the festivals.

They’ve already been put to the test. Austin City Limits and Lollapalooza’s video production team have already used Dell Precision workstations at the 2011 festivals to produce video extras to support and surround the live broadcasts.

At SXSW, YouTube will today host a panel on “How YouTube Festival Webcasts Changed the World” (3:30pm CDT at the Austin Convention Center).

Dell this morning announced its intent to acquire SonicWALL, a provider of enterprise-grade network security and data protection solutions.

Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, but Dell is welcoming approximately 950 employees to the company as a result of the deal.

SonicWALL, founded in 1991 and headquartered in San Jose, California, serves more than 300,000 customers in 50 countries around the world.

SonicWALL went public in November 1999 but was delisted from NASDAQ after an investor group led by private equity firm Thoma Bravo took over the company back in June 2010, for $717 million.

The company offers a range of firewall, anti-spam, remote access and network, backup and email security solutions, rivaling the likes of Cisco, Juniper, McAfee, Barracuda Networks and Sourcefire, among many other vendors.

SonicWALL’s products are meant to complement Dell’s security solutions portfolio, enabling it provide a broader range of offerings to its enterprise customers.

It helps that the company also has a solid channel program, with 15,000 resellers providing global coverage.

Another important aspect about this purchase is SonicWALL’s IP; the company is said to have more than 130 patents, registered and pending.

Full press release below.

Announces Intent to Acquire SonicWALL, Inc.

SonicWALL designs comprehensive security solutions combining advanced capability with ease of use, delivering a high return on investment for customers

SonicWALL expands Dell’s rapidly growing security software and services portfolio, which includes security services, cloud security solutions, data encryption solutions and vulnerability and patch management

ROUND ROCK, Texas–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Dell today announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire SonicWALL, Inc., a leader in advanced network security and data protection. SonicWALL’s industry-leading Next-Generation Firewalls and Unified Threat Management (UTM) Firewalls complement Dell’s security solutions portfolio, enabling it to offer customers a broader range of enterprise offerings.

“We are building a strategic software portfolio to address the needs of our customers with key assets in the fast-growing and highly profitable IT security solutions business. Our customers see security as a key IT concern for the foreseeable future”
Customers of all sizes face increasing challenges in maintaining effective IT security, from the exponential growth of data and rapid adoption of cloud-based solutions, to the increased presence of consumer devices brought into the enterprise environment.

SonicWALL expands Dell’s rapidly growing security portfolio, which includes Dell SecureWorks security services, cloud security solutions and data encryption solutions, and Dell KACE vulnerability and patch management.

Dell has taken significant steps to expand its enterprise solutions portfolio to offer customers a complete range of products and solutions to help customers simplify the management of their IT infrastructure. Dell remains committed to delivering complete security solutions using the most effective technologies and services from both Dell and from other providers.

SonicWALL Leadership

SonicWALL designs comprehensive security solutions that combine advanced capability with ease of use, delivering a high return on investment for their customers. The company has more than 130 patents, registered and pending, and develops all of its own key security gateway intellectual property. Today, more than 300,000 customers use SonicWALL security solutions, including firewalls, secure remote access, email security, backup and recovery, and policy, management and reporting.

The increased frequency and diversity of security threats requires customers to deploy more comprehensive security solutions. SonicWALL’s award-winning Global Management System allows network administrators to centrally manage and provision thousands of security appliances across a widely distributed network:

SonicWALL’s Unified Threat Management solution is comprehensive, easy to use, and affordable. It is ranked as a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Unified Threat Management appliances.

SonicWALL’s SuperMassive provides Next-Generation Firewall specifically designed for the unique needs of enterprise, government, university and service provider deployments that require scalability, high availability and high performance. It was rated the most effective Next-Generation Firewall of those that achieved the NSS Labs “Recommended” status.

SonicWALL integrates advanced networking and remote access technologies to verify and defend the security of traditional and wireless networks, users and applications — and their endpoint devices — while scanning the entire data stream across platforms and perimeters.

Committed to Channel Partners

SonicWALL solutions are available for small, mid-sized business customers and large enterprise customers, and are deployed in large campus environments, distributed enterprise settings, government, retail point-of-sale and healthcare segments. The company has a strong channel program with 15,000 resellers providing extensive global coverage.

Dell plans to take the very best of the SonicWALL channel programs and combine it with Dell’s PartnerDirect program to bring the best to channel members. Likewise, Dell’s existing PartnerDirect members will be able to sell SonicWALL solutions to meet their customers’ IT security needs.

SonicWALL, founded in 1991, is headquartered in San Jose, Calif., and serves customers in 50 countries around the world. Thoma Bravo is the lead institutional investor in SonicWALL. Dell looks forward to welcoming SonicWALL’s approximately 950 employees to the Dell team, and plans continued investments to grow this business.

The transaction was approved by the board of directors of each company. Additional terms of the transaction were not disclosed. The transaction remains subject to customary conditions and is expected to close in the second quarter of Dell’s FY13.

Quotes

“We are building a strategic software portfolio to address the needs of our customers with key assets in the fast-growing and highly profitable IT security solutions business. Our customers see security as a key IT concern for the foreseeable future,” said John Swainson, president, Dell Software Group. “SonicWALL gives Dell access to unique intellectual property resources and technology that position us well in fast growing parts of the software security business.”

“Dell’s distribution, reach and brand are well-recognized across the industry. This transaction aligns well with Dell’s mid-market design focus and allows us to accelerate growth of our flagship SuperMassive Next-Generation Firewall solutions with Large Enterprise customers,” said Matt Medeiros, president and CEO, SonicWALL. “Additionally, SonicWALL is recognized as a leading security solutions provider for small and medium businesses through our UTM solutions. Dell’s phenomenal breadth and reach into small and midsize companies provides a significant opportunity to expand our customer base.”

An analyst call with John Swainson, president, Dell Software; Dave Johnson, senior vice president, Dell Corporate Strategy; and Matt Medeiros, president and CEO, SonicWALL; will be webcast live today at 8:45 a.m. CST and archived at www.dell.com/investor.

About SonicWALL

Guided by its vision of Dynamic Security for the Global Network, SonicWALL develops advanced intelligent network security and data protection solutions that adapt as organizations evolve and as threats evolve. Trusted by small and large enterprises worldwide, SonicWALL solutions are designed to detect and control applications and protect networks from intrusions and malware attacks through award-winning hardware, software and virtual appliance-based solutions.

Dell this morning announced that it has acquired AppAssure, a company that offers backup and replication software for virtual, physical and cloud infrastructures.

Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, but Dell says the purchase will enhance its storage and software portfolios. In fact, this is Dell’s first software acquisition since the formation of its software group, the company points out.

Dell says it plans to keep AppAssure’s roughly 230 employees.

AppAssure’s technology delivers reliable application recovery from customers’ servers to their datacenter and cloud environments, offering backup and recovery software for VMware, Hyper-V and XenServer as well as physical servers.

AppAssure claims its solutions are used by more than 6,000 customers in over 50 countries.

Here’s what Dell plans to do next:

Dell will extend the benefit of AppAssure across our enterprise solutions and services portfolio.

Initially, it will be a software-only solution, and then over time we will offer additional data protection solutions tightly integrated in our Fluid Data architecture as we’ve done with our other acquired IP, including EqualLogic, Compellent and the Fluid File System. Customers will be able to manage data end-to-end, not in silos of servers and storage, or islands of sites.

Founded in 2006, AppAssure was backed by VC firm Bain Capital Ventures as its lead institutional investor, although the part of the company not owned by investor is entirely employee-owned.

The company was co-founded by Naj Husain (CEO / Chairman), Todd Fredric (COO) and Dan Kyler (Chief Architect); all three are WQuinn veterans and former Symantec/Veritas executives.

There’s probably a number of reasons why PC shipments stalled overall at the end of 2011. One of them could be the emergence of mobile devices like the iPad and several hundred different Android tablets. Another reason could be that there hasn’t been anything really exciting going on in the desktop space for some time.

Research firm Gartner shared numbers that showed a Q4 decline after two strong quarters before it. The drop was 1.4% among all vendors, and ended the year selling a total of 92.2 million units.

HP stayed on top of PC sellers at number one, but had a global dip of almost 16% compared to its shipments in 2010.

Here’s a similar study from IDC, broken into a global list and US only list:

Apple fared rather well in the US with an astounding 18% year over year growth, according to these numbers from IDC, even though they’re stuck at number three behind HP and Dell in the US.

Where will the PC market go from here? The introduction of Windows 8 should boost sales at some point this year, with new machines shipping with it pre-installed, but the first two quarters of this year should be fairly quiet thanks to the whisper-end to an otherwise strong 2011.

Sites like Sina Weibo, China’s largest micro-blogging website,  have been quick to capitalize on the void left by the blocking of Twitter by the Chinese government.

Projections suggest that there will be nearly 150 million micro blog users in the country by the end of next year.  This fact has been picked up by several major multi-nationals like Nokia, Dell and China’s own Lenovo who are already seeing the potential of micro blogs as an advertising platform and are using them to promote their products.

One example is Nokia’s October news briefings that were held completely on social networking websites, mainly in micro blogging services. Micro-bloggers could wear a 3D eyepiece to watch Nokia’s online 3D promotion video and interact with the company through its micro blog on Sina Weibo, .

“Micro blogs provide a new tool for us to interact with our potential consumers here in China,”  Yang Weidong, head of marketing for Nokia in China.

According to Nokia, at least 400,000 users ‘attended’ this online event wich resulted in more than 1,000 orders for Nokia’s N8 smartphone making the experiment a success for the company.

Another international company eyeing the potential for micro blog marketing is US computer manufacturer Dell which has already run successful campaigns on Twitter in America and has now set up its own micro blog on Sina Weibo that has received “hundreds of thousands” of visits and responses from Chinese micro-bloggers.