Yesterday there was the official announcement of an agreement for Dell to acquire Compellent Technologies, Inc., supplier of virtualized and cloud computing storage solutions. Dell is buying Compellent shares at $27,75 each in cash for a total amount of about $960 millions.

During the summer there was a race to buy 3Par, another company in the storage and data management sector that eventually at the beginning of Semptember became property of Hewlett Packard. Now Dell answers acquiring Compellent showing how virtualization and could computing are solutions more and more important for the hardware giants.

In its announcement Dell clarifies that it plans to invest more money in Compellent’s solutions and enhance the commercial partners network Compellent sold its products through. In this way Dell shows that it consideres Compellent’s products strategical to strengthen its offer in the storage sector.

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So far Dell offered low-end storage solutions in partnership with EMC and in its press announcement it states that it consideres Compellent acquisition an important addition to its offering in the storage sector. Now we’ll see if in the future Dell will prefer to focus on the new solutions it will be able to offer after this acquisition. Certainly its enterprise customers it supplied with solutions in partership with EMC won’t be dumped but Dell’s orientation could slowly shift to its own solutions during the next years. There’s also the possibility that Dell will keep on supplying low-end solutions together with EMC while it will supply its own mid-end and high-end ones.

Concerning the storage and data management sector and particularly virtualization and cloud computing solutions it will be interesting to see Dell’s competitors next moves as they can’t just watch without reacting.