Seagate and Maxtor squeezed in one last storage megadeal before the sands of 2005 ran out, in a $1.9 billion all-stock deal whereby the rival disk makers will merge into Seagate.
The deal comes at the end of a year in which Symantec closed its $13.1 billion acquisition of Veritas, Sun purchased StorageTek for $4.1 billion, and McData bought rival switch vendor CNT for $245 million. (See Symantec, Veritas Complete Merger, Sun to Acquire StorageTek for $4.1B, and McData Bags CNT for $235M.)
Enterprise users shouldn't expect a panoply of new options or hybrids. The deal was mostly driven by financial reasons: Seagate picks up extra revenue and sales channels, bumps up its manufacturing, gets rid of a competitor, and helps stabilize pricing. But Seagate doesnt gain any new technology in the deal.
Seagate already dominates the enterprise drive market, with Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (HGST) its only major Fibre Channel drive rival. Maxtor does not sell Fibre Channel drives. It makes a bigger mark with enterprise SATA and is pushing to cash in on the emergence of serial attached SCSI (SAS), but Seagate also has SATA and SAS drives. (See Maxtor, Adaptec Team Up, SATA Speeds Up, Seagate Unveils Barracuda , Adaptec, Seagate Push SAS, and Seagate Claims Lead.)
Both companies sell similar desktop, notebook, and consumer products, although Maxtor has been more successful with consumer/SOHO NAS and personal external storage. (See Maxtor Unveils OneTouch III and SMBs Get Their Backup.)
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