Dell’s acquisition of Gale Technologies, announced last week, is the same play Cisco is making with its  intent to buy Cloupia (announced the same week), and Andy Rhodes, executive director of the Enterprise Systems and Solutions group at Dell, does not deny it.

“Yeah, I think it’s very similar,” he says, comparing Cisco’s US$125m deal to Dell’s. “I can’t comment on the [Cisco] acquisition, but Cloupia are in the same space” as Gale. Both acquisitions are converged-infrastructure moves, where each buyer is getting a hardware-orchestration technology that automates management of servers, network and storage.

Customers want to get away from the old way of “buying servers, storage, networking and discrete parts of their data center and putting them all together themselves and trying to manage them with all the different sets of tools and process and procedures,” Rhodes says. “It’s making them very-very slow, and it’s making the business users really feel that IT is not responding rapidly enough to their needs and requirements.”

Dell has not said how much it is shelling out for Gale in its announcement that it is buying the four-year old Santa Clara, California-based software company. It did, however, announce a new product based on Gale’s technology: an Infrastructure-as-a-Service platform for deployment of applications, virtual desktop infrastructure and private clouds on VMware’s vSphere or Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisors.

Dell will offer the IaaS product as part of Active System Manager, the tool for administering common infrastructure tasks it unveiled in October. Gale gives Dell, whose converged-infrastructure play up until now has consisted of selling pre-integrated hardware packages, the virtual-infrastructure management layer for those bundles.

Customers will be able to buy Dell’s converged-infrastructure stacks and use canned blueprints to quickly deploy virtual desktops for 1,000 users, for example, or Microsoft Lync for 500 users, Rhodes explains. They will also be able to create their own blueprints.

In Rhodes’ opinion, Dell’s converged-infrastructure strength lies in storage intellectual property (IP), which Cisco does not have. “That’s the reason Cisco have to partner with EMC and NetApp.” Dell can plug its own storage products into its infrastructure bundles, while Cisco has teamed up with the two storage vendors to create converged-infrastructure stacks together, using their storage products and its network switches and Unified Computing System servers.

Gale’s software, by the way, has supported those stacks by Cisco and its partners: FlexPod and Vblock. That support will stop, at least for the near future, according to Rhodes. “Initially, we’ll really look to optimize it for Dell,” he says. We’ll carry on supporting [existing Gale customers with FlexPods and Vblocks] until they can transition to Dell-branded products.”

Extending the infrastructure-automation platform’s support to other vendors’ hardware is in the plans, just not in the immediate ones. “There is absolutely a desire to have heterogeneous hardware support, as we build out our portfolio and roadmap,” Rhodes says. When and how that desire is going to realize, however, has not been decided.