Dell today announced the acquisition of Enstratius, a cloud-management software and services provider that delivers single and multi-cloud management capabilities. Enstratius helps organizations manage applications across private, public and hybrid clouds, including automated application provisioning and scaling, application configuration management, usage governance, and cloud utilization monitoring.

Dell seems to be following the recent acquisitions of Layer 7 by CA, and Mashery by Intel, as the movement to place a higher value on cloud governance and management. Enstratius has done a good job in building governance and management technology that Dell should be able to exploit around its new cloud computing strategy, which includes many other acquisitions. Clearly, Dell is mixing an interesting cloud computing cocktail.

The larger question is how Dell will do in a world that includes some pretty strong players. While Dell has a good brand, the movement into cloud-based technologies may prove to be more of a challenge, and within an already crowded market. This most recent purchase is a strong indication that Dell is serious about moving forward with a strong suite of cloud computing technology in a market that they see as one that is still emerging.