According to TechCrunch, Cisco made a formal offer to acquire Skype just before the company’s recent SEC filing of its intent to make an initial public offering (IPO).

The IPO plans mean there is little or no chance of Skype even acknowledging that Cisco has made an offer, and the networking giant is unlikely to spill the beans in case it sparks a counter offer from an interested potential rival – such as Google. But TechCrunch, a well connected IT market blogsite, reckons it is working with well sourced information.

In its recent IPO filing, Skype revealed that it was profitable (albeit only just) and generated revenue of $406 million in the first six months of 2010. This would not be enough to justify its IPO tender, which would value it around $5 billion if fully subscribed, except that it has also revealed healthy gross margins of 50%, which are expected to widen as its scale allows it to negotiate better termination rates from telcos.

Others also note that Cisco CEO John Chambers recently identified video as net killer app for the Internet, and promised that Cisco would unveil a consumer-oriented version of its enteprise video conferencing technology at next year’s Consumer Electronics Show. Acquiring Skype would allow Cisco to accelerate its delivery of a consumer video service, and in all probability do so at a much reduced price compared to what it is likely to be able to offer based on its current technology.

As well as floating the prospect of a Cisco bid for Skype, TechCrunch took the opportunity to refresh memories of earlier speculation that Google – owner of YouTube – might have similar interest in kick-starting a video telephony business by acquiring Skype. Those rumours were rife two years ago, when Ebay was desperate to off-load its loss-making subsidiary, but since then Google has made a decent fist of creating its own voice services based on its own technology.

This time around TechCrunch thinks likely anti-trust intervention will dissuade Google from getting involved in any bidding war for Skype, and it may be right. But, this doesn’t mean there may not be other suitors waiting in if Cisco’s interest is real. Didn’t Microsoft just ink a strategic pact with PolyCom to leverage video technology in its unified comms contest with Cisco? If so, why shouldn’t Microsoft go a step further a spend a few billions acquiring Skype for itself? It’s not as if it couldn’t afford to, particularly if it considers that buying Skype will be one in the eye not just for Cisco, but arch Internet rival Google too.

Although the outcome is still uncertain, the short but vicious bidding war for 3PAR has already underlined how vital the role of high-end storage management technology is expected to be in the next generation of cloud-based IT infrastructure services. Dell and HP are both intent on establishing themselves as preferred technology infrastructure to tomorrow’s public and private cloud service operators, and both clearly believe 3PAR’s technology is worth paying a high price to control.

Despite making barely any profit since its foundation in 1999, Dell’s opening $18 per share bid for 3PAR was an 80% premium on its current trading price, and valued it at $1.15 billion. HP’s latest $30 per share offer values 3PAR at a cool $2 billion.

The escalating valuation of 3PAR has nothing to do with the company’s sales or market share of course. Instead, it is entirely a reflection of what Dell and HP believe to be the potential value of the company’s technology and, assuming they can be persuaded to stay on and work for any new owners, the talented engineering team that has spent the last 10 years developing it.

As far as the rest of the market is concerned, 3PAR’s elevation to the top tier of the IT infrastructure market is expected to be a catalyst for change. Certainly, EMC’s comfortable position at the top of the high-end storage infrastructure market may now come under question. HP and Dell have do far both been valuable partners of EMC in this market, but now at least one of these companies is set to change from partner to competitor in what is seen as an increasingly strategic market.

Many IT professionals are, quite reasonably, asking question such as: “What does my job look like as the tech industry and my company move toward cloud computing?”

Of course, IT managers know that their roles never stop evolving. New technologies and business demands arise every day. Business leaders and employees always want more from IT. And yes, cloud computing will accelerate that evolution. As Bob Muglia, president of our Server and Tools Business says in this video, the cloud is “a world-class, dramatic shift.”

The good news, as Muglia points out, is that the shift presents great opportunities for IT to contribute more to their organization’s bottom line. The cloud will help IT more quickly deploy new capabilities – applications, services, access – that will enable business to happen more efficiently and effectively.

Simply put, the cloud can help IT do more and be more important than ever. With the cloud, IT managers can help the business bring a new service to market faster than the competition. Or, it can help IT take advantage of extra computing horsepower to meet seasonal demand without acquiring new hardware and software. And IT can use the cloud to offload the management and delivery of traditional applications, such as email, in order to devote more time and resources to implementing new, strategic solutions.

For example, Siemens IT Solutions and Services uses the Microsoft Windows Azure platform to distribute software to thousands of Siemens devices around the world – enhancing services and avoiding significant new capital investment. In another example, Kelley Blue Book runs its high-traffic automotive Web site on the Windows Azure platform, saving $100,000 annually and freeing up IT sources for other projects.

The Australian Telco (and former national PTO) switched on the world’s first commercially available High Speed Packet Access + services on Monday, and claimed that early users could expect to enjoy wireless downloads at speeds of “upto 20 Mbps.” This is still well short of the 42 Mbps speeds that HSPA+ is theoretically capable of, and less than the 30Mbps that Telstra’s infrastructure provider, Ericsson claims it can support today. However, it is still the best wireless download speed supported by any mobile operator so far.

To beat the world to market Telstra has had to work closely with Ericsson to develop dual carrier technology that allows HSPA+ terminals to send and receive simultaneously over two carrier channels. It has also probably had to cosy up to Qualcomm to acquire early access to that manufacturer’s Sirerra Wireless modems, currently the only devices on the market capable of supporting even half-speed HSPA+.

Nearer to home, wireless operators remain tight-lipped about the timing of their HSPA+ services, with only 3 Scandinavia prepared to admit that it wants to launch services this year.

The deal is expected to lead to the widespread deployment of embedded security features in smartphones and other handheld Internet terminals. Intel says this will prevent the mobile Internet falling victim to the same levels of malware penetration that have afflicted the PC world. However, critics of the deal claim Intel has miscalculated the value of McAfee’s technology, and argue that an embedded approach to security can ever be agile enough to respond to the ever evolving nature IT security exploits.

Intel itself is in doubt that its acquisition of McAfee will prove to be value for money. Although a number of market analysts have expressed surprise at the size of Intel’s $48 per share cash offer, Intel can reflect that this is substantially less than it would have had to pay before McAfee’s recent failure to meet its quarterly earnings estimate, and it’s the negative impact on its share price of this summer’s software upgrade debacle.

However, although Intel will retain McAfee’s senior management and allow the company to continue to operate as a separate entity, it has not been bought simply to add much needed profitability to Intel’s software and services group.

Otellini’s remarks, and his assertion that security is now a key strategic focus for  Intel, should be greeted as encouraging by the many critics of information security technology that believe it is too often deployed as bolt-on addition to core systems, and too rarely “baked-in” to heart of many business applications. However, even supporters of the concept of embedded security are likely to remain skeptical of Intel’s strategy until it has more deliverables in the market – which may take some time.

Initially at least, Intel is likely to focus on accelerating delivery of McAfee products that are already in the pipeline, including its evolving collection of end-point-protection (EPP), network and anti-virus software suites. Ultimately, this will include providing chip-level hooks for these products which will allow them to be more closely integrated with embedded systems level services, whilst remaining accessible to enterprise management tools. But, Intel has yet to say when this may happen.

The $884 million Wind River deal, completed in July last year, was expected to spearhead a major Intel assault on the embedded device market, and in particular to provide it with a much needed edge over ARM, the UK-based mobile chip designer. So far this assault has failed to materialise, but it may now be that Intel expects to use security as key differentiator in its battle with ARM.

In all probability, we will have to wait until the early part of 2011 or even later to discover what Intel really has up its sleeve for McAfee, and for the security market in general. For the time being, McAfee’s AV competitors may take some comfort in noting that Intel’s earlier security adventures, revolving around products like LANDesk and Shiva, were far from being an unqualified success.

Earlier this year Gartner said it saw signs of strong recovery from last year’s 5.9% decline in global IT spending, and forecast a return to 4.1% growth. Gartner now says it expects spending growth in 2010 to reach $2.4 trillion, an increase of just 2.9% from last year.

Gartner said that its “most likely scenario” for IT spending in 2011 will see a 3.5% rise overall. However, the company has hedged its bets somewhat and added that whilst IT vendors should still go-ahead and budget for growth in 2011, they would be wise to also make contigency plans for the less likely, but potentially more dramatic chance of zero growth in IT spending next year.

Although the two companies have long-standing research and development agreements in place, this latest agreement is the first to see the companies partnering in the delivery of end-to-end UC solutions based on Microsoft business software products. It promises to be a stern test for Cisco in the UC market, and could also present new challenges to other smaller players with links to either or both of the two companies.

Nevertheless other analysts, notably CurrentAnalysis are critical of what they see as a lack of transparency in the new agreement. According to CurrentAnalysis: “the two companies have provided little insight into what new solutions will be jointly developed, when they will be available, and precisely what new sales and marketing programs will be in place around them.”

CurrentAnalysis’ criticism may be valid in the short-term, but with Microsoft preparing to host a major gathering of its UC eco-system community at IP EXPO in October, it won’t be long before existing and prospective UC customers of Microsft and Polycom will be able to have their questions about their future UC product strategies answered.

The companies’ already tight relationship has made this latest announcement no surprise to market analysts such as Forrester Research, which called it a “great deal for HP” as it seeks to fill a potential critical gap in its portfolio of enterprise security and software testing and assurance products.

Static application assurance products such as Fortify’s help enterprise software development teams to discover potential security vulnerabilities in their code during the development phase. They have become increasingly popular within organisations from highly regulated industries such as the financial services sector, they are expected to become even more in demand as organisations look for an automated means of verifying the security of third party code accessed via remote, and cloud-based services.

Last year IBM also paid an undisclosed sum for Ounce Labs, another application security testing specialist which has since been folded into the company’s Rational AppScan range of web application analysis tools.

However, the most immediate impact of 3PAR’s acquisition will be to give Dell a leading-edge offering in the increasingly strategic market for automated data management systems. 3PAR owns technology capable of managing dynamic data tiering in multi-tenant environments, and its acquisition will put Dell on at least equal footing with Hitachi, HP, and IBM in this lucrative high-end market.

However, if Dell is to complete its transformation from commodity server and desktop supplier into fully-fledged suppler of an integrated enterprise infrastructure stack, it still needs to address its own network capabilities. With its storage portfolio now surely close to completion, is it time for Dell to seek suitable acquisitions in the Ethernet switch market?

Although it won’t be formally announced until the company’s VMworld 2010 show in San Francisco at the end of this month, VMware’s new network virtualization initiative is already shaping up to be the virtualization technology event of the year. Thanks to some carefully phrased pre-show publicity from the company’s R&D director, Howie Xu, the virtualization community is already buzzing with anticipation, and based on what little is known, there are already voices predicting that VMware’s plans for the network edge pay turn out to be truly ground breaking – the catalyst for an entirely new phase in the evolution of both virtualization and cloud computing. But, let’s try not to get too carried away just yet.

What is known about VMware’s plans is still pretty interesting. In a teasing promotional video for his VMworld talk on The Future of Network Virtualization, Xu said VMware is ready to release technology that will extend the virtues of virtualization to the edge network, and make it much easier for network services like load balancing, application prioritisation, and IP address management to be deployed, managed and billed for.

That should be enough to ensure that Xu is speaking to full house when he gets up to address VMworld  in a couple of weeks time, but does it really mean that we’re on the threshold in a fundamentally new phase in the evolution of virtualization and the cloud? Some would say that we have already reached that threshold, and that we destined to cross it in the near future regardless of whatever it is that VMware has up its sleeve.

Although the majority of organisations deploying hypervisor driven systems today are still largely focussed on mastering the complexities of server and desktop virtualization, a significant and growing number of organisations are starting to be frustrated by the limits to present virtualization. Specifically, organisations that want build hybrid public/private cloud infrastructures that allow the seamless scaling and migration of entire systems workloads and not simply individual applications are noticing that the virtues of virtualization don’t yet extend to the network.

VMware says it is going to fix these problems, but it isn’t the only company thinking along these lines. Emerging players such as Nicira, (which happens to number former VMware CEO Diane Greene among its seed investors) are already working toward creation of a network hypervisor and may yet beat VMware to market. Others, particularly in the Xen community, believe that the I/O constraints that are at the root of today’s network virtualization constraints are really a VMware-specific problem, and argue that the open source community is well on the way to addressing the issue without the need for anything radically new.

Today of course, it is still much too early to say whether VMware’s product pipeline is already loaded with the silver bullet that will cure the network virtualisation issue, or whether it will simply to turn out to be the starting gun for a more complex race to find the right solution. However, what does seem to be universally agreed on is the that VMware is shortly proposing to offer to an answer to a question that urgently needs to be answered. When IP EXPO 2010 begins on October 20^th, you can be sure that there will plenty of voices ready to join the debate.