EMC is buying Conchango, a UK-based Microsoft-shop for £42m ( $84m). That's a little more than '07 revenues (£38m) and 30 times pre-tax profits (£2.8m) for the AIM-listed firm.

Conchango's "300 professionals" supply IT consulting services for the likes of Tesco, Virgin Atlantic and SKY. It builds big ecommerce websites too.

Conchango bosses Mike Altendorf and Richard Thwaite will run the show post acquisition, this time as heads of EMC's European Microsoft consulting business, within EMC's Consulting & Solutions Integration Services (CSIS) organization. How will that fit on one business card?

EMC has 12,000 worker bees in its global services division. This gives it a useful safety net in the wake of the inevitable fall in prices in its core storage business. Of course, it could always sell more of VMware, the virtualization wonder stock, before that price bubble bursts. ®