Comments on: EMC Trying to Outbid Netapp on Data Domain

By: Matt

Matt — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 01:49:33 +0000

Steve, HP seems left out in the cold, Symantec needs to be a player and maybe less committed to a software only model than people think, Dell has $11 bill in cash including what they raised today (see the WSJ article today where Darren Thomas, head of storage,was quoted as saying they are looking for acquisitions in storage. No one has really mentioned Oracle in all of this but clearly if Falconstor were so good wouldn’t Sun have been more competitive in dedupe? What I am saying is that the Netapp, EMC competition for DDUP could be the catalyst for the “orphans” out there to get adopted. One theory is that Netapp will bring HP in to help finance their bid for DDUP…that would be interesting.

By: Dr. Fred

Dr. Fred — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 21:26:15 +0000

Maybe a weird Freudian employee re-retention policy. Since a number of senior people seem to have left NetApp for DD and they would presumably be locked up for a while after an acquisition …
—I don’t think there can be a lockup unless there is additional compensation involved – this is a public company, so it’s not the same as when you buy a private entity I think. Regardless, there are a bunch of NetApp folks and a bunch of EMC folks inside of DD, each probably hoping that the other guy wins. There is probably a reason they aren’t still at their former company!
How great would that be? You leave EMC/NetApp after a fiery blowout with your boss, leave a dog turd in his filing cabinet, and two months later he owns you again!!!! Steve

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 16:15:56 +0000

What makes it more interesting to watch is that EMC owns 400 of the 800 ways to dedupe. NetApp’s Dedupe only scaled to 16tb, so it made some sort of sense for their bid… but DD’s only scales to around 30TB, so actually, not that much sense. Unless they are targetting the mid tier with it, which likely, they are. IMHO, EMC is purely trying to stop NTAP from buyuing it.

By: Bob Thomson

Bob Thomson — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 09:15:08 +0000

Money sitting in the bank is losing value all the time. Interest rates are terrible, the dollar is plummeting and real inflation is horrendous (and many companies are preparing themselves for even higher inflation). People and companies with cash are trying desperately to get out of it and into any other asset class. This may help to explain the rationale for this deal.

By: Michel

Michel — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 06:49:33 +0000

“Why on earth would they want to pay that much for another version of a feature”.
Maybe because they realize that DataDomain is the only one having a deduplication solution that really works!

By: Dipesh Patel

Dipesh Patel — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 01:32:47 +0000

I think that whoever wins (and this is my personal opinion, not that of CommVault), that it’ll be race against time.
Either company will need to extract out revenue from the acquisition faster than the dedupe market evolves and commoditizes.
It was a rich deal at $1.5B, but at $2B it feels positively giddy. You many be right though that forcing NetApp to spend $2B in cash enables them to drain NetApp’s own cash pile. That makes more sense. “Lose” to the other guy, and leave them with little extra cash to make other strategic acquisition, survive a price war, etc.

By: st0ragebear

st0ragebear — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 23:22:37 +0000

I asked a friend of mine about this. who knows both companies well, and his response was, “EMC don’t play, you know that.”

By: Thomas

Thomas — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 21:24:41 +0000

Maybe it says something about the underlying strengths of EMC & NetApp’s businesses that they are so desperate to own DataDomain.