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Data Centers

Summertime Tech Bidding Wars, Part Deux: Page 2 of 2

In 2009, we saw what we thought was a bit of an anomaly within the Information Technology industry: a multi-billion dollar summertime bidding war between two tech heavy-weights over a smaller technology company. EMC battled it out with Network Appliance over the acquisition of much smaller Data Domain which had cornered the market on data deduplication. This year, in a similar time frame, we are experiencing another summertime bidding war, this time between Hewlett Packard (HP) and Dell over uti
Tom Trainer
August 30, 2010

So, now that we are going through our second summer of tech superpower bidding wars, I believe we will see this become a yearly pattern for a several years to come. Why? Because the tech titans are sitting on piles of cash, and in many cases, the make vs. buy decision is an easy one to resolve. Today's global economic climate necessitates a diamond-like competitive edge and a product time-to-market that is a short as possible. Buying an existing technology and being able to amplify its success via a more broad global reach can help the tech titans continue to recognize revenues that ultimately fuel the continued company/technology acquisition strategy and perhaps improve the overall earnings per share for share holders.

I took some time to ponder who may be next to be purchased? Could companies such as Compellent, Panasas, or some of new start-ups such as EvoStor, or Tintri be in the cross hairs of the mergers and acquisitions groups at one of the big tech companies? In my opinion, absolutely.  These companies have truly innovative solutions for a number of problems that systems and storage administrators experience every day. Technology companies that provide demonstrable solutions for VMware, Hyper-V and Citrix Zen virtual machine environments will be highly interesting to private investors and large companies over the next five years.  

Who do you think will win this year's technology bidding war?  HP, Dell, or will a third party jump in and upset the apple cart?   

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