History 2001: WD Sells Off Two Subsidiaries

Western Digital has evidently decided not to distract itself from HDDs with anything, and therefore no longer to invest in any related activities, even the most promising, if thus far unprofitable.

Let’s face it – a little spare cash would not be amiss in these hard times either. The company has consequently sold one of its largest subsidiaries, Connex, to Quantum for $11 million, and has also unloaded SANavigator, a Connex subsidiary, to McData for $30 million.

Quantum is clearly expanding its NAS offerings, a sector in which it leads the sub-$10,000 category, with 70,000 units shipped to date, with the addition of Connex’s main assets (excluding, of course, SANavigator), i.e. key technology, IP and twenty or so employees who will be absorbed by the Snap Appliances business. Connex is generally more oriented towards $20,000 NAS subsystems and had developed a Linux-based NAS OS, while Quantum’s NAS are built around the Unix-like FreeBSD environment (Maxtor’s NAS are based on Windows OS).

In addition, WD will supply HDDs to Quantum’s NAS on a non-exclusive basis.

Connex, formerly Ridge Technologies, was acquired by Adaptec in 1998 and then by WD in 1999.

McData, meanwhile, intends to incorporate SANavigator virtualization software into its switch line.

WD still has 3 subsidiaries (it has yet to sell off?):

• Keen Personal Media, which introduced the TV4me software suite, a PVR system that allows users to manage their personal television viewing by automatically recording programs based on their personal preferences;
• Sage Tree, a software company that provides packaged analytic applications for supply chain intelligence;
• Cameo, a relatively new entity, presided by Matt Milne, which has just launched CameoCAST, a software that enables viewing of broadcast-quality digital video by managing and storing the content locally on users’ PC HDDs.

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 164 on September 2001 from the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter.