Stec Acquires Assets of KQ Infotech

STEC, Inc. announced that its wholly-owned subsidiary, STEC India Private Limited, has acquired certain assets of Knowledge Quest Infotech Private Limited or KQI, a software development company based in Pune, India.

The portfolio of acquired assets includes KQI’s intellectual property rights. In addition, STEC has hired approximately 30 key employees of KQI to augment its existing software development team. The financial terms of this transaction are not disclosed.

"The team of skilled software engineers from KQI has significant experience in such areas as system software development and virtualization," said Manouch Moshayedi, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of STEC. "As the overall trend of hardware and software convergence in the storage industry continues, it is important for us to expand our product portfolio by creating increasingly intelligent storage solutions that accelerate the adoption of solid-state drives in enterprise servers. Establishing a presence in India provides us with strategic access to a global software hub with a pool of top engineering talent to cost-effectively meet our R&D expansion plans."

KQI has a record of developing storage software solutions for a variety of application environments and has proven execution capabilities. The team’s system design knowledge, storage software expertise, and virtualization capabilities will be important in the development of STEC’s future generations of solid-state solutions.

"It is truly exciting to be joining the industry leader in enterprise solid-state storage solutions," said Anurag Agarwal, CEO and co-founder of KQI. "There are valuable synergies between STEC’s core business and our intimate knowledge of storage file systems and application development expertise through which we aim to deliver value-added features and designs for future products.

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Founded in 2008, KQI offers a lot of different collaborative services and solutions: in OPD, testing, technical documentation, storage and virtualization, infrastructure management services, usability, ODC & DDC, support, maintenance and sustenance engineering, application development with agile development, cloud computing including SaaS-based applications, web application development, module and product development, to clients ranging from SMBs to large enterprises.

Anurag Agarwal, co-founder and CEO, started his career with Veritas where he was one of those team veterans joined from its inception. This team was responsible for setting up cluster file system. He has played a key role in developing various features for Veritas File System. Later associated with Symantec as technical director, he was responsible for initiating new products in clustering group. He filed for six patents during his tenure at Symantec.

Anand Mitra, co-founder and CTO, led the team to port ZFS to Linux under an open source initiative. He designed the 'write fastpath' for Veritas File system which improved performance of VxFS in high end enterprise servers, the integration of Power6 feature of storage keys for the Veritas storage stack and a VxFS space pre-allocation feature for use with DB2 database, as well as architected the online upgrade for the Veritas file system. Furthermore, he architected a high performance flash translation layer for one of KQI's clients for which there are patents filed.