BANGALORE, INDIA: In 2010, Dell has by far emerged as the most virulent player of the year in terms of acquisitions. The storage major was seen busy, throughout the year, wrapping up no less than half-a-dozen cloud deals, thus strengthening its cloud computing strategy.

This one time sole PC-maker who saw its profits dwindling, felt the need to diversify in order to hold on to its space in data storage industry.

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The company made no secret of its strategy for the next few years and announced that it will invest in data centre hardware, software and services for private cloud computing systems.

Moreover, recently Dell CEO Michael Dell had gone on record and claimed that today most of its margin and profit doesn't come from PCs.

Early this year, in February, it acquired application virtualization software and systems management appliances maker KACE for an undisclosed amount. And then, soon enough in the same month, struck another deal with New York-based storage vendor Exanet, for $12 million, in a move that would give it clustered NAS technology.

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After a gap of four months, in the month of July, Dell hit another deal and acquired data centre automation specialist Scalent Systems for an undisclosed amount.

Down the lane, giving rest to all speculations with regard to which cloud provider will it be acquiring, the storage vendor went on to acquire a software-as-a-service(SaaS) player Boomi, and not Rackspace as expected.

The Berwyn, Pa., headquartered SaaS player, Boomi, is powered by its AtomSphere technology and offers pure SaaS application integration platform that takes the cost and complexity out of integrating applications. This is done by allowing easy transfer of data between cloud-based and on-premise applications with no appliances, no software and no coding required.

Boomi's technology could give Dell an edge over others since it is used with major cloud-based applications, including Salesforce CRM.

Also read: How 2010 was for the storage industry

In the same month, Dell also signed an agreement to acquire Ocarina Networks, in a bid to boost its data management portfolio with the latter's storage optimization technologies, including compression and de-duplication for unstructured data. Many see this as a direct hit at data dedupe majors such as NetApp and EMC.

In December, Dell began talks with fluid data storage solutions provider Compellent Technologies Inc. for a deal valued at close to $1 billion, despite many arguments that this deal can hurt its relationship with EMC and Equalogic.

If the bidding goes on track, Dell would acquire all of the outstanding common stocks of Compellent at a price of $27.50 per share in cash.

However, the most interesting bid of the year 2010 is undoubtedly the triangular HP-3Par-Dell bid in September, where we saw Dell fighting with all its might  and losing to HP. Let's hope that Compellent will help this storage major to recover from this loss soon.