It’s unclear to me what EMC would want with Data Domain (DD) other than to lockup deduplication technology across the enterprise. EMC has Avamar for Source dedupe, has DL for target dedupe, has Celerra Dedupe and the only one’s missing are V-Max, Symm & Clariion dedupe.
My guess is that EMC sees Data Domain’s market share as the primary target. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to figure that once Data Domain is a part of EMC, EMC’s Disk Library (DL) offerings will move over to DD technology. Which probably leaves FalconStor/Quantum technology used in DL today as outsiders.
EMC’s $100M loan to Quantum last month probably was just insurance to keep a business partner afloat until something better came along or they could make it on their own. The DD deal would leave Quantum parntership supporting EMC with just Quantum’s tape offerings.
Quantum deduplication technology doesn’t have nearly the market share that DD has in the enterprise but they have won a number of OEM deals not the least of which is EMC and they were looking to expand. But if EMC buys DD, this OEM agreement will end soon.
I wonder if DD is worth $1.8B in cash what could Sepaton be worth. They seem to be the only pure play dedupe appliance left standing out there.
Not sure whether NetApp will up their bid but they always seem to enjoy competing with EMC. Also unclear how much of this bid is EMC wanting DD or EMC just wanting to hurt NetApp, either way DD stockholders win out in the end.
