In case you missed it because you were too busy eating turkey, last week Dell announced it is going to buy privately-held Everdream Corporation, a nine-year old ISV that does agent-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution for remote-service management. The planned acquisition is part of Dell’s newfangled attempt of simplifying IT, with Everdream’s capabilities providing a nice complement to those of Dell’s recent Silverback Technologies acquisition, further enabling end-to-end remote management of customers’ IT environments. With Everdream, Dell can extend remote management of IT assets from backend infrastructure like servers, storage, and printers to desktops, notebooks, and other end-user devices globally.

It’s an intriguing purchase, and one that I think is representative of the fact that Dell has realized that just selling hardware products isn’t going to be good enough. I also found it intriguing that Everdream claims to manage over 140,000 desktops in 60 countries. Everdream has kept a low-profile -focused on customer value rather than On-Demand hype. Joshua Greenbaum nails the difference in his recent blog:

“Everdream’s success as a SaaS platform company is based on three major components of its business model, independent of the technological capabilities of its platform. The first is that Everdream’s core market – providing SMB customers with SaaS-based asset and security management for PCs and other mobile IT assets – is perfectly suited for a SaaS (and along with it, a business process outsourcing) play. SMB’s have limited IT resources and lots of PCs, laptops, PDAs and the like that need to be provisioned with legally licensed software, protected from viruses, backed up, and otherwise professionally managed without a large management staff.”