Fujitsu-Siemens to Acquire Exanet?

The rumor came from Barron’s that wrote that Pacific Growth Equities analyst Kaushik Roy, commenting on NetApp, "notes that Fujitsu Siemens, the company’s second largest customer could
buy privately held storage systems provider Exanet, ‘which would be
incrementally negative’ for NetApp."

"Regarding your question, Fujitsu Siemens Computers does not comment on rumor or speculation," emailed us Sigrun Harsch, senior manager EMEA Press and Analyst Relations of the German company.

Recently, three other Israeli storage start-ups have been acquired, by IBM: XIV Information Systems, Diligent Technologies Corporation, and FilesX Ltd.

Born in 2000, Exanet Ltd. began to ship in 2003 its innovative ExaStore cluster NAS system. More than one hundred of them, for a total of more than 3PB capacity, have been sold by its distributors that include IBM.

The start-up is headquartered in Ra’anan, Israel with offices in U.S., Germany, France, UK and Japan. 

It raised a total of at least $55 million including $18 million in June 2007. Investors include Intel Capital, Evergreen Venture Partners, Japan’s ITX Corporation, Coral Capital Management, Hitachi CSK Venture Capital Co. Ltd., Israel’s Microdent Ltd. and LTG Development Capital Limited in UK.

This deal could be the first storage acquisition by €6.6 billion company Fujitsu Siemens Computers, the leading European storage company, with the tiny exception of Vixel SAN management software for $10 million in 2002 by Fujitsu Softek, finally acquired in 2007 by IBM.

Fujitsu-Siemens is more an integrator than a manufacturer, being a big reseller of EMC and NetApp. For its FY ending in March 2007, its storage revenues were €523 million, up only 2% from the preceding year.

The only (small) relation that we found between the two companies is the fact that Exanet certified, among other disk systems, Fujitsu-Siemens FibreCAT SX80.

Here are the storage start-ups founded in Israel and acquired these last years:
* Actona by Cisco
* Diligent by IBM
* DiskSites by Expand Networks
* FilesX by IBM
* Kashya by EMC
* Siliquent by Broadcom
* StoreAge Networking Technologies by LSI
* Topio by NetApp
* XIV by IBM
* XOsoft by CA

The other ones in the position to be acquired in the future:
* Continuity Software, Mellanox, Onaro and Voltaire with R&D in Israel
* Sanrad
* Storewize