As more and more businesses wade into cloud computing services, technologies and companies that can help save them from themselves will only grow in value.
Venturebeat reports that Blue Coat, a maker of hardware that helps companies understand what's running on their networks, will play $280 million for San Jose-based Elastica, which extends that visibility to cloud services.
RACKSPACE ANNOUNCES BETTER THAN EXPECTED Q3 RESULTS, INCLUDING REVENUE OF $509M, PLANS $350M DEBT OFFERING For a while there, it looked like Rackspace was going to be in serious trouble, but it delivered some good news this week with its third-quarter earnings.
As Techcrunch notes, initial reaction was mixed to Rackspace's better-than-expected earnings but hefty debt offering, perhaps because its growth rate continues to decline while Amazon Web Service's revenue skyrockets.
WHAT DOES CISCO GAIN BY PARTNERING WITH ERICSSON? Cisco's announcement that it plans to hook up with Ericsson on a technology and services-sharing deal is just the latest in a series of partnerships the venerable networking company has struck this year in hopes of staying current as the shift to cloud computing changes demand for on-premises networking equipment.
Fortune reports that Cisco is interested in Ericsson's mobile networking smarts and army of consultants, although I'm a little confused about what Ericsson is getting in return.
FIERCE 15: DEL MONTE FOODS SET UP A BRAND-NEW, CLOUD-ONLY INFRASTRUCTURE IN LESS THAN A YEAR Sometimes being forced to start from scratch is the best opportunity you can have. Del Monte Foods had to scramble to implement its own infrastructure following a corporate split, and chose to migrate a to of on-premises software to an all-cloud infrastructure, as
Fierce CIO shows in this case study.
DELL'S EMC DEAL COULD FALL APART ON TAX RULE Believe it or not, the largest proposed corporate merger in tech history is a complicated matter.
Recode reports that Dell insiders are concerned about what the IRS thinks about certain provisions of the deal, which could throw a wrench into the proceedings by making the deal significantly more expensive for Dell.
HOW INSTAGRAM SOLVED ITS JUSTIN BIEBER PROBLEM Oh, the Belibers, capable of bringing even the most thoughtful startups to their knees.
Wired revisits a fun story from Instagram's past about how fans of singer Justin Bieber would overwhelm its infrastructure with millions of likes. The solution, which we'll try to get Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger to expand on next week at Structure? "Denormalized counters."
It's finally here! Next week we'll put on 
When we set out to build this company five months ago, we weren't entirely sure what to expect. Sure, we knew that Structure was a well-known event that has been around basically since the beginning of the cloud-computing era, but as most of you know, any new venture requires you to accept a certain amount of risk.
