Who's Next On Dell's Shopping List?

After Dell Inc. (DELL) announced on Thursday the close of its acquisition of the creatively named the Networked Storage Co., a data storage consultancy, the question arises as to who will be the next storage acquisition? Dell has been acquiring storage networking companies at a good clip. Still pending is its $155 million agreement to buy MessageOne Inc., an e-mail archiving services company, and Dell recently spent $1.4 billion for EqualLogic Inc. in its biggest acquisition ever.

Who's next? In a new report, the 451 Group looks at a wide range of potential targets for Dell. Analysts Henry Baltazar and Simon Robinson write that the EqualLogic deal is likely to keep Dell busy for some time, but rattle off a comprehensive list of potential targets anyway. The report doesn't really give any of these companies a higher probability than the others that Dell will buy them, so here is a sample in no particular order:

• 3Par Inc. (PAR) -- A newly public, high-end storage systems vendor.
• DataDirect Networks -- High-performance storage hardware.
• Isilon Systems Inc. (ISLN) -- Network-attached storage.
• Nirvanix -- Online storage-as-service.
• Data Domain Inc. (DDUP) -- Back-up and archiving.

Absent from the list is Sanrad Inc., a storage networking software startup we recently profiled. Maybe it's an oversight by the report's authors, or perhaps the startup is focusing on bigger enterprise customers than Dell is willing to target, as evidenced by its EqualLogic buy. - Olaf de Senerpont Domis

See report from the 451 Group
See Feb. 19 post from Tech Confidential
See Feb. 12 story from Tech Confidential
See Nov. 5 story from Tech Confidential

Comments

[Jaded]

I think that Sanrad isn't an acquisition target since it isn't really clear what they do or who they target. They are making "bridges" from alternate storage protocols to convert to iSCSI, in the near future this won't be necessary, since people will either get dedicated arrays or use x86 versions of IP SANs. There isn't a ton of growth potential for Sanrad.