SingleHop, IBM Acquisitions Boost Private Clouds, Cognitive Computing

**Editor’s Note: Please click here for a recap of the biggest channel-impacting mergers in Q4 2014.**

By Perry Vandell

SingleHop, the private cloud hosting company, said on Tuesday that it is acquiring Server Intellect, which is best known for providing Microsoft-managed hosting solutions. SingleHop believes Server Intellect’s experience in Microsoft’s Hyper-V native hypervisor will give it an advantage over the competition.

More than half of the enterprise hypervisor market has found a home with VMware – which SingleHop also supports – but notes that Microsoft’s Hyper-V encompasses approximately 30 percent of the market.

“At the end of the day, it’s our customers who will benefit from being able to choose from the two leading hypervisors when deploying their hosted private clouds on our platform,” SingleHop COO Andy Pace said. “For many enterprises, Microsoft Hyper-V is the best choice, and we are committed to extending SingleHop solutions to a broader set of customers.”

The company says it already has integrated Hyper-V with its own VMware-powered cloud offerings.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

IBM has made an acquisition of its own with AlchemyAPI, which developed an API for scalable cognitive computing. It’s a natural fit with IBM’s cognitive computing platform, Watson, potentially improving Watson’s ability to understand relationships between large data sets. IBM says the acquisition will also equip developers, clients and partners with scalable, cognitive computing APIs.

“Today is the start of a new journey for AlchemyAPI, our customers and our user community, as we join IBM … ” said Elliot Turner, founder and CEO, AlchemyAPI. “We founded AlchemyAPI with the mission of democratizing deep learning artificial intelligence for real-time analysis of unstructured data and giving the world’s developers access to these capabilities to innovate. As part of IBM’s Watson unit, we have an infinite opportunity to further that goal.”

The sale price of this deal also was not revealed.

Both deals hold potential promise for channel partners selling private clouds and/or entering the world of cognitive computing.