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By Ann Silverthorn
January 3, 2008—Although far from being a record-setting year in terms of either the number of acquisitions or the money spent, the merger and acquisition fever of previous years did carry into 2007. Here's a quick recap of storage-related acquisition activity in 2007:
IBM chalked up five acquisitions last year. Big Blue bought Softek, which specialized in heterogeneous storage management and data migration, in January. Then IBM bought DataMirror, a provider of real-time data integration and protection solutions for $162 million in July. In November, the company purchased the NovusCG consulting firm as well as Cognos for $5 billion to accelerate IBM's information-on-demand business initiative. Lastly, IBM bought Arsenal Digital in December (see Online backup heats up with IBM acquisition).
Following closely behind IBM was LSI with four transactions—two acquisitions and two business-unit sales. LSI signed a definitive agreement in February 2007 to acquire SiliconStor, a privately held company that provides silicon solutions for storage networks. In April, LSI completed its merger with Agere Systems, a semiconductor manufacturer. A few months later, LSI and Magnum Semiconductor agreed that Magnum would acquire LSI's consumer products business. Then in October, LSI sold its mobility products business to Infineon Technologies AG for $450 million, plus a performance-based payment of up to $50 million payable in Q1 2009.
Here's a rundown of other vendors that were involved in mergers and acquisitions in 2007:
Dell acquired iSCSI specialist EqualLogic for $1.4 billion in November (see Dell-EqualLogic creates challenges).
Autonomy bought Zantaz for $375 million in July. Zantaz specialized in e-mail management and archiving, information retention, and data recovery.
In January, Brocade acquired privately held Silverback Systems, a provider of network acceleration technologies, including iSCSI products.
Cisco invested in NeoPath in May 2006 and then purchased the company in March 2007.
Crossroads bought Grau Data Storage's FileMigrator Agent hierarchical storage management (HSM) system in July.
Double-Take bought continuous data protection (CDP) specialist TimeSpring in December.
EMC acquired Indigo Stone (bare-metal restore) in Q2 2007, and Mozy (online backup and recovery) in Q4 2007.
F5 Networks, a WAN optimization specialist, bought Acopia, a file-virtualization vendor, for $210 million in August.
Hewlett-Packard inked a deal to acquire OEM partner and clustered file system vendor PolyServe in March 2007, and then in July, bought Opsware, a specialist in storage resource management (SRM), SAN management, and server and storage automation, for $1.6 billion.
Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) acquired Archivas in February for $120 million. Archivas specialized in digital archiving, capacity optimization, and content-addressed storage (CAS).
Hifn bought Siafu for storage and security solutions in July.
Iron Mountain bought Accutrac, a records-management company, in July, and then Xepa Digital, an information lifecycle company (ILM), in November.
nCipher acquired the assets of NeoScale Systems after the storage security vendor wound down operations. nCipher, a key management specialist, paid $1.95 million in December for most of the intellectual property and assets of NeoScale.
Xiotech bought Seagate's Advanced Storage Architecture (ASA) in November.
Yosemite bought CDP specialist FileKeeper in February. And finally, Xyratex purchased Ario Data in January.
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