Acquisitions: The year that was for storage industry

BANGALORE, INDIA: Throughout the year, data storage players were busy making hay when the 'cloud' shined. And those who couldn't, or felt that they lacked in some areas, were seen lapping up smaller data storage specialists, so as to make for the loss next year, when it is predicted that the 'cloud' will 'shine' the best.

It is the computing-over-the-cloud mania, also bluntly put, storing data over the Internet, that has caught hold of the storage industry today.

We have already seen how Dell spruced up itself for the coming year with almost six acquisitions in data storage space.

Not just Dell, but even the rest of data storage majors such as EMC, International Business Machines Corp. (IBM), Hewlett-Packard (HP), NetApp etc were also seen strengthening themselves for the race to get to the cloud.

Though acquisitions were happening almost at the rate of one per month, I would begin with what happened towards the end of the year in November, a month which turned out to be the busiest month of all with three high-profile acquisitions.

On one hand, we saw printing major HP, who in a bid to make it big in the networking and storage space as well, fighting tooth and nail with Dell to clinch 3Par for a whopping $2.4 billion. On the other, we also saw IBM doing its bit by purchasing Netezza, and then EMC Corp. lapped up Seattle, Washington-based Isilon Systems Inc. for $2.25 billion, so as to get scale-out network attached technology.

3Par was HP's lone major acquisition for its storage portfolio for the whole year, where it faced a tough competition from another suitor, Dell. The HP-3Par-Dell triangular love story, which began in the month of August, saw the two major PC vendors locking horns for the California-based small utility storage provider.

Though in the end Dell got trumped by HP, who had in fact entered into the whole scene much later, the former made up for the loss with Compellent's take-over the very next month.

EMC's Isilon takeover was seen as a move to brace itself for competition from NAS player NetApp. EMC plans to merge Isilon's technology with its Atmos service so as to manage 'Big Data', or data produced by a new generation of applications such as life sciences, media and entertainment, and oil and gas, in private or public cloud environments. EMC is expecting a revenue of $1 billion from this joined entity.

Moving forward, EMC also acquired Greenplum, a data warehousing and analytics specialist, for its massively parallel processing (MPP) Greenplum Database, and Greenplum Chorus, a cloud platform for collaboration and data sharing.

Let's now see what IBM did to strengthen its portfolio.

IBM started out with the acquisition of Cast Iron Systems, a cloud integration player, in the month of May and then went on to acquire data compression technology provider Storwiz in July.

With Storwiz, IBM will add up storage technology that can compress primary data from files to virtualization images to databases.

In August, it acquired Datacap. a New York-based company that provides data management software, for an undisclosed amount. IBM intends to integrate Datacap within its Enterprise Content Management (ECM) business, which is part of IBM's Software Solutions Group.

Netezza, the data warehousing and analytics company based in Marlborough, Massachusetts, whom IBM acquired in November, designs and markets data warehouse appliances and analytics applications for enterprise data warehousing, business intelligence, predictive analytics and business continuity planning.

Last year, when EMC trumped NetApp by winning data dedupe specialist Data Domain, there were a lot of speculations that NetApp might be the next acquisition target. However, today with 33 percent year-over-year growth this mid-range storage equipment maker can very easily burn a hole in its suitor's pocket.

Although it will take some more time to know whether IBM, Cisco, Dell and even HP, are still nurturing the idea to acquire this NAS player, it is obvious that they can add another company to their kitty, along with NetApp, i.e Bycast, a virtualization software maker.

NetApp took over the reigns of this developer of object-based storage virtualization software early last year. It is said that Bycast's storage virtualization software can turn multiple storage devices across geographically dispersed locations into a single pool for storing fixed content data.

This brings us to the end of the list of major acquisitions of this year. Where many have gained, many others were wounded in the process, as was the case of Dell. And in the M&A gush, a few others such as NetApp, or Commvault, or Quantum or Seagate escaped unhurt, without any major gain though.

2011 will be a year of happening, where we will get to see all these majors bringing out the solutions from their joint entities. It is sure that the race is only going to get tougher.