Mystery surrounds EMC's purchase of Source Labs

In a move that seemed to baffle many observers including me, EMC purchased open source vendor Source Labs last week. The details of the purchase are rather sketchy as it seems that neither EMC nor Source Labs has been forthcoming with details, which has lead to speculation.

What is clear is that Source Labs is an open source vendor, which runs a community site called Swik.net and sells a suite of support tools for open source Linux and Java. The company, which is run by Byron Sebastian, whose resume includes BEA and Amazon (among others), had some heavy duty customers such as Fidelity and Merrill Lynch (which ran into trouble last fall during the financial crisis and was absorbed by Bank of America). If the Source Labs customer base was in financial services, it could explain why it wanted to sell now.

What remains unclear, however, is exactly what EMC bought, for how much, and more importantly--at least from my perspective--why? There was no press release about the purchase on the EMC or Source Labs websites. For that matter, there was no mention of the purchase on the Source Labs site, a fairly common practice after a company has been purchased. Most believe that EMC was interested in the software, not the community site, but even that is not confirmed reliably. What's more, it is unknown what EMC will do with this software, although speculation centers around its storage cloud initiative.

This probably wouldn't be much of a story if EMC just handled this normally, but without confirmation or much information, the sale remains shrouded in mystery.

For more information:
- see John Cook's Venture blog on TechFlash
- read the ComputerWorld article
- and the Cnet column

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