The news of the day is that Dell is acquiring Ocarina Networks. (Ocarina has a great set of products designed to optimize the unstructured data used space with dedupe and compression)
It’s one more step forward in its new acquisitions policy (some months ago, exanet was acquired to expand the NAS capabilities of its Equallogic portfolio).
The are a lot of rumors in last months about other possible deals in the storage panorama: CommVault and Brocade are often mentioned and they are possible targets for Dell too. IMHO, these two companies can fill two important key holes preventing them to fight on equal terms against HP and CISCO in the stacks war!
I’m happy to see Dell buying so intelligently companies to broaden its proposition, and I hope they will go in this way.
Just a couple of thoughts:
- the HP risk: I hope that Dell will be less aggressive in acquisitions policy and smarter than HP in integration.
- the EMC risk: it’s clear that the EMC partnership won’t be eternal, day after day Dell seems to add more and more storage offering that overlaps with EMC, and sooner or later something this might spoil their relationship.