We’re all in agreement, right? Dell’s decision to buy Quest Software for $2.4 billion means it’s putting its hardware-junkie days behind and moving with the market by adopting a more software-focused strategy.

But hey, could we please get a little more specific? The New York Times’ Dealbook blog takes a stab at what John Swainson, president of Dell’s software group, means when he says, “The addition of Quest will enable Dell to deliver more competitive server, storage, networking and end user computing solutions and services to customers” in the canned statement everyone is quoting.

Dealbook, quoting an analyst from Pacific Crest Securities, suggests that Dell may be after Quest’s “back-up and recovery applications, virtualization services and its single sign-on solution,” noting that its other software products are “slower-growth businesses.”

Is there any cloud play here? Maybe not, and what’s a blog good for anyway if not conjecture? But the points about virtualization and single sign-on seems to indicate we’re at least getting warmer. Joe Panettieri at Talkin’ Cloud offered an intriguing theory — posted yesterday before the deal was announced:

Quest Software specializes in IT management, desktop virtualization and cloud migration software and services. The company is one of the best-known providers of Office 365 migration services, helping customers to shift from on-premises Microsoft applications to SaaS versions of Exchange, SharePoint and more.

But here’s the interesting twist: A lot of those on-premises customers use Dell servers. It’s a safe bet Dell will leverage Quest Software to shift customers into Dell’s own cloud — assuming Dell really is buying Quest.

If he’s right, could it be what Dell needs to establish itself in the cloud provider market?

They say a magician’s best trick is diverting the audience’s attention long enough to create the illusion that he just pulled a rabbit out of a hat or made a scantily-clad assistant disappear. I’m not quite so cynical to believe that there’s anything subversive about all of the analysis of what SAP’s $3.4 billion bid this weekend for SuccessFactors Inc. means for Wall Street or whether SAP overpaid. But I do think there are some other interesting things to look at besides the rabbit in the hat.

Here’s a quick rundown at some other interesting angles the tech media and blogosphere is exploring.

• Bloomberg pulls no punches: This acquisition is the anti-Apotheker.

SAP AG’s then-chief Léo Apotheker told investors in 2009 that the German company’s homegrown technology was “significantly better” than that of Oracle Corp. (ORCL), which had “not done a good job with acquisitions.”

[...]

[Successors and co-CEOs Bill] McDermott and [Jim Hagemann] Snabe have changed tack at the largest maker of business-management software to do a better job meeting demand for new technologies, such as cloud computing, real-time analytics and mobile applications. The SuccessFactors deal shows SAP’s previous go-it-alone approach to the cloud was lacking, said Thomas Otter, a vice president at Gartner Inc.

“My first reaction was: what took you so long?” Otter said in a phone interview from Heidelberg, Germany, less than 50 miles away from SAP’s headquarters in Walldorf. “This means a fundamental shift in terms of their cloud strategy, which has been rather slow to get off the ground. This is a tacit admission that their cloud strategy was a failure.”

• All Things D says this is the start of a SaaS feeding frenzy, crunching the numbers to speculate on the next M&A target:

The first and most obvious thing that’s going to result from the SAP deal is that speculation will surge about another, similar deal. Already this morning, analysts at BMO Capital have upgraded Taleo, a SuccessFactors rival, on the theory that it is now in play and that Oracle is the most likely buyer. Taleo specializes in cloud-based talent management software, and is about the same size by revenue as SuccessFactors. Publicly traded since 2005, Taleo saw its shares close Friday at $32.96, within 13 percent of its historic high of $37.10, giving the company a market capitalization of about $1.4 billion, making it a relatively easy target for Oracle and its $32 billion war chest. BMO boosted its price target on Taleo shares to $40 from $28.

Another one to watch is Workday, yet another provider of cloud-based human resources software, which last month raised $85 million at an implied valuation of $2 billion as warm-up for an expected IPO next year. It’s on track to do about $320 million in billings in 2011, and is nearing profitability.

Another company that will probably be considered for takeout is NetSuite, the company that specializes [in] cloud-based software for running a business. Trading as of Friday at a valuation just shy of $3 billion, it could be a takeover target, too, though its business is humming along just fine. It’s on its way to closing the year with sales north of $235 million — much of that derives from taking customers away from SAP.

• The New York Times’ Bits blog calls us all back down to Earth regarding how long it’s taken SAP to respond to Oracle’s acquisition of RightNow Technologies. Enterprise customers are not moving as fast on the cloud as vendor marketing machines and frenzied bloggers and journalists seem to be:

After the sales boost, as the plan runs, SuccessFactors is the means by which SAP migrates the data bases of big business over to the new computing world.

This is a long-range plan, and not tomorrow’s work at SAP. And so it is an interesting counterpoint to much of the rhetoric inside the tech world about the speed with which the new paradigm for computing — big data centers accessed over the Internet instead of computing systems run inside a company — will take hold among tech’s biggest customers.

In Silicon Valley, said Lars Dalgaard, the chief executive of SuccessFactors, “There is a lack of understanding of how companies do things, and how lethargic they are about change.”

He added that the existing systems “that tell how a plane lands, that keep a heart beating, you don’t change that quickly.”

Is there such a thing as a quiet news week for cloud providers? No, we didn’t think so either. Here are a few things worth watching from the past week:

• Salesforce.com acquires Model Metrics: What do pigs, rabbits and polar bears have in common with Salesforce.com? They’re all now on the list of animals known to eat their young. The cloud CRM powerhouse acquired one of its own partners, cloud integrator and consulting shop Model Metrics, for an undisclosed sum. Salesforce.com execs, including new COO George Hu and EVP Maria Martinez, said in prepared statements on Monday that Model Metrics‘ success in mobile and social cloud services will help Salesforce further “empower” its partners. Talkin’ Cloud‘s blog had some interesting ideas about how this deal may play out for cloud partners:
  

  “Model Metrics, in its previous life a Salesforce partner with more than 1,000 deployments under its belt, specialized in developing mobile applications that bridged the gap between a customer’s smartphone or tablet and their cloud data according to their specific needs. If Model Metrics can teach that strategy to Salesforce’s partners — maybe even helping resellers become mobile ISVs — it could boost business all around.”

• Nirvanix finds recurring revenue in private cloud: Cloud storage provider Nirvanix announced that it has inked its biggest deployment this year: eight petabytes of unstructured data in a private cloud built for the University of Southern California school system. Note the key words there: private cloud. Large enterprises (and, yes, universities) are highly unlikely to put all or perhaps even most of their storage in the public cloud (at this point in the game, at least). But on-premises private cloud? That sounds less scary to them. It also sounds, at first blush perhaps, like a vanilla software sale for the provider — except for the fact that this will be fully managed as a service for USC (the “recurring revenue stream” alarm bells should be going off now). And this is how cloud providers will compete and stay afloat in the market. Nirvanix describes its private cloud storage as “a local instance of a cloud storage node in your organization’s data center premises while you only pay for storage that you actually consume.” And in case anyone wanted to take a page from its playbook, here’s what Nirvanix had to say about the USC deal specifically:
  

  Deployed within USC’s central data center, the Nirvanix Private Cloud Storage solution will enable the university and its clients to upload digital content from any location and ensure that it is available anywhere around the world by virtue of Nirvanix’s Cloud File System software. Additionally, any changes made to files stored in the Nirvanix Private Cloud will be immediately reflected across the whole cloud, ensuring that multiple users collaborating and accessing the same file always have the latest version. This level of data consistency is critical for such a massive amount of unstructured data and is not available from any other cloud storage service or storage system vendor.

  “How many conventional storage devices can even handle eight Petabytes distributed around the world?” said Paul Froutan, former head of Google data center operations and current Nirvanix CTO. “The answer: none. This is why companies are shifting to the consumption economics and business flexibility inherent in cloud storage services.”

• CompTIA launches cloud credentials: Fellow TechTarget blogger and veteran tech writer Ed Tittel blogged about this last week, but we thought it was worth highlighting here, too, in case you missed it. Nonprofit trade association and IT certification giant CompTIA announced it will launch a cloud computing credential and exam in December 2011 for enterprises and cloud providers, CompTIA Cloud Essentials: 50 questions, 60 minutes, 720 minimum passing score (meaning 72%, or 36 out of 50 correct answers). The exam will cover: configuration of networks, including archive, backup and restoration technologies; business continuity and storage administration; system integration and application workload; and basic troubleshooting and connectivity. CompTIA consulted a variety of large, established cloud providers — including Amazon, Cisco, Citrix, EMC, Google, HP, IBM, Microsoft, Rackspace and VMware — to develop the exam’s content. In the standard-less Wild West of the cloud market, something like this could be good news for MSPs and resellers that want to give customers an industry stamp of approval and/or become more knowledgeable and confidant about the technology itself. Tittel notes that CompTIA has not released any pricing information, but speculates that the exam will “probably be between $180 and $250 in keeping with other typical CompTIA exam price points.”