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Expand Finds Funding & Fixes Sights on M&A: Page 2 of 4

M&A has certainly become synonymous with WAN optimization in recent years, as evidenced by Blue Coat's $268 million purchase of Packeteer, F5's Acopia and Swan Labs acquisitions, Cisco’s purchases of FineGround and Actona, and Juniper’s $337 million Peribit deal.

Expand, in contrast, has been relatively restrained in its M&A strategy, apart from its acquisition of Wide Area File Services (WAFS) specialist DiskSites two years ago.

Virtualization is also looming large on Expand’s horizon, according to Efi Gatmor, the vendor’s CTO, who told Byte and Switch that a chunk of this week’s money will be spent on boosting the vendor’s virtual presence.

“That’s a focus area that we’re going after – we’re able to deploy in a virtual environment, and we’re able to accelerate Virtual Desktop Infrastructures (VDIs),” he says, adding that Expand's hardware can run as a virtual appliance on top of a hypervisor. “You will see an announcement about that as we go into the VMworld conference on September 15th.”

At the moment Expand’s main virtualization focus is VMware’s ESX and Server software, although the vendor is looking to broaden its target. ”All the major hypervisors will be supported,” says Gatmor, but he refused to offer a timeframe for when vendors such as Citrix and Microsoft could be added to this virtual mix.