Contact: Scott Denne Simon Robinson
Scorched by Sun Microsystems, GreenBytes finds an unlikely savior in Oracle. The database giant has struck a deal to buy the VDI-focused storage vendor in a deal that we believe delivered a better return than its small customer base would suggest.
Shortly after going to market in 2008 with a NAS appliance built on the open source ZFS file system, GreenBytes was hit with a trademark and intellectual property lawsuit by Sun Microsystems. Though that suit was settled shortly before Sun sold to Oracle in early 2010, GreenBytes pivoted to selling a hybrid flash and disk appliance, but had trouble attracting new venture capital beyond an initial round from Battery Ventures in 2009. In 2012, GreenBytes pivoted again to a VDI-focused storage product and attracted $12m from cleantech investor Generation Investment Management and Battery. Evercore Partners advised GreenBytes on its sale.
As of November, GreenBytes had landed more than 100 customers for its VDI offerings, though it’s unlikely that attracted Oracle. More likely, Oracle was drawn to the company for its inline de-duplication technology built on top of ZFS, the file system that Oracle obtained as part of its acquisition of Sun. Oracle has limited interest in VDI, but GreenBytes’ de-dupe software should boost the performance and efficiency of its ZFS Storage and Exadata appliances.
We’ll have a more detailed report on this deal in our next 451 Market Insight.
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