Four Acquisitions Announced in Only Two Days

There were 52 acquisitions in 2014 up to now in the worldwide storage industry or an average of five per month – six per month in 2013.

Here EMC and NetApp announced in just two days (October 27 and 28) four more deals.

EMC always has a big appetite and prefers to buy rather that develop new techonologies, acquiring a total of 78 firms since 1994. This year it also got DSSD and Twinstrata.

The price of EMC’s three acquisitions is unknown. When the amount is not revealed, it’s generally under $10 million. But it seems a rather small sum for all of them.

NetApp globally prefers to use its own R&D and does not like to spend its cash for acquisitions. They were only 14 since 2000 and Riverbed SteelStore is the first one in 2014.

One month before the acquisition, Kash Shaikh, VP, platform marketing, Riverbed, stated: “Riverbed SteelStore has worked with NetApp to provide our joint customers with the solutions to validate, test and manage their data. Our technology, coupled with NetApp’s new StorageGRID Webscale object-storage software, provides our customers with the tools needed to take advantage of the cloud.”

EMC acquisitions

Company	Web site	HQ	Founded in	CEO	Financial funding	Activity
Cloudscaling	cloudscaling.com	San Francisco, CA	2013	Randy Bias	$10 million in 2013 including Seagate as investor	OpenStack powered Infrastructure-as-a-Service for private and hybrid cloud
Maginatics	maginatics.com	Mountain View, CA	2010	Amarjit Gil	$27 million	cloud technology provider offering a consistent global namespace accessible from any device or location, unlocking enterprise hybrid cloud choice
Spanning Cloud Apps	spanning.com	Austin, TX	2010	Jeff Erramouspe	$9 million	enterprise data protection for Google Apps and Salesforce, thousands of organizations and 1.8 million users

NetApp acquisition

Company	Web site	HQ	Founded in	CEO	Financial funding	Activity
Riverbed Technology (assets)	riverbed.com	San Francisco, CA	2002	Jerry M. Kennelly	$38 million, $86 million IPO in 2006	SteelStore/Whitewater storage backup appliance, company already partner of NetApp – but also EMC