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September 09, 2011

Hitachi Data Systems Acquires BlueArc

By Ed Silverstein, TMCnet Contributor

Hitachi Data Systems (News - Alert) has acquired BlueArc – a network attached storage vendor. BlueArc was purchased for between $500 million and $600 million, Japan's Asahi newspaper reported. The cash transaction comes after a five-year OEM partnership between the two companies.



The deal was seen as a way for Hitachi to increase its customer base, according to a report carried on TMCnet.

“The exponential growth of digital content, particularly unstructured content, has had a dramatic effect on all businesses, including the requirements on IT,” Jack Domme, CEO, Hitachi Data Systems, said in a company press release. “Over the past 5 years, BlueArc has been an integral part of our strategy to help customers store and manage unstructured data of all types, such as video, e-mail, medical imaging, scientific data and more. Bringing BlueArc into the Hitachi family will enable us to better serve customers with more tightly integrated technologies, broader capabilities and deeper expertise globally. Our combined efforts will deliver cost-effective infrastructure cloud and content cloud solutions that customers can take advantage of as they look to further transform their data centers.”

In addition, the companies note that IDC (News - Alert) projects that by 2014 more than 83 percent of enterprise storage system capacity will be shipped for file-based data.

“With this acquisition, Hitachi Data Systems is making a significant move to address the fastest growing segment of the storage market,” the companies said in the press release.

“Joining forces with Hitachi Data Systems is a win-win situation for our employees, our partners, our customers and our shareholders,” Mike Gustafson, CEO, BlueArc, said in the press release. “The strength of the long-standing partnership between the two companies spanning product integration, customer momentum and cross-functional collaboration is the foundation for this union.”

BlueArc has about 1,000 customers in segments such as media, life sciences, energy, hosted services and the virtualization-over-NFS storage market.

Reuters described BlueArc as a “struggling California-based network storage company.”

The acquisition appears to “take advantage of the yen's strength,” Reuters (News - Alert) added. “The yen hit a record high 75.94 yen to the dollar last month, compared with about 85 yen a year ago, making overseas acquisitions cheaper for Japanese firms.”

To find out more about Hitachi Data Systems, visit the company at ITEXPO West 2011. To be held Sept. 13-15 in Austin, TX,  ITEXPO (News - Alert) is the world’s premier IP communications event. Visit Hitachi Data Systems in booth #1608. Don’t wait. Register now. 

Stay in touch with everything happening at ITEXPO… follow us on Twitter.



Ed Silverstein is a TMCnet contributor. To read more of his articles, please visit his columnist page.

Edited by Jennifer Russell
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