History 2001: HighGround Systems under Sun Lamp

In order to strengthen its data storage management business, Sun Microsystems will fork over nearly $400 million to acquire HighGround Systems, a privately-held company in Marlborough, MA, which was thinking about an IPO.

The firm’s flagship product is Storage Resource Manager, a Web-based software under Unix, Linux or Windows NT that monitors storage subsystems.

NetApp and Brocade were among HighGround’s investors, but the largest outside shareholder was major customer Compaq, following a $20 million investment in the software company.

The 170-employee HighGround will become part of Sun’s network storage business and will continue to be headed by its founder and CEO Dennis Grant.

Compaq and HighGround are expected to continue to work together. Meanwhile, Compaq has decided to allocate another $100 million this year to expand its storage offerings.

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 156 on January 2001 from the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter.