Its definitely a good sign that HDS is starting to acquire companies, says one Wall Street analyst who follows the company. It could be a sign of desperation, too. They didnt really have much of a choice -- archiving is hot, EMC and NetApp have very good archiving products, and HDS was missing out on deals. Therefore, it is no surprise that HDS actually went out and bought a company.
Except for the desperation part, Hitachi execs wont dispute that.
Were going to go aggressively after this market, Mansfield says of archiving. We want to capitalize on a market growing at a clip of over 20 percent a year. We want to take share in a space that belongs predominantly to a single vendor with a proprietary product.
That vendor is EMC with Centera, which got into the market first and has held its lead despite its cost, proprietary nature, and scaleability problems. Archivas founder and CTO Andres Rodriguez has maintained from the start that his approach to CAS was better than EMCs. (See Ericsson Makes Cash Offer.) Now, as part of a big-time systems vendor, hell get a chance to prove it.
Dave Raffo, News Editor, Byte and Switch
Archivas Inc.
BlueArc Corp.
EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC)
Hitachi Data Systems (HDS)
Network Appliance Inc. (Nasdaq: NTAP)
Nexsan Technologies Inc.
Sun Microsystems Inc.