Contact: Scott Denne
EMC makes another bet on an early-stage flash storage technology with the acquisition of stealthy startup DSSD. The deal comes almost two years to the day after EMC bought into the all-flash array market by purchasing XtremIO. That transaction, and another acquisition aimed at bolstering EMC’s position in flash, both got off to questionable starts.
Like DSSD, XtremIO had yet to bring its product to market when it was acquired by EMC for an estimated $430m in May 2012. Eighteen months passed before that technology was widely released, and even today some of its basic functions are still in beta release. Last summer, EMC bought disk-pooling software maker ScaleIO with the intention of focusing the product entirely on flash, but later backtracked on that strategy and said the software would continue to work on disk as well.
A changing storage landscape that includes the emergence of flash, as well as cheaper scale-out and cloud storage, is having an impact on EMC. Last quarter, its storage product revenue dropped 6.9% year over year, with the decline focused on its high-end products, where sales grew 2% in 2013.
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