Contact: Tim Stammers Scott Denne
Could Western Digital’s Skyera acquisition be its first step to becoming a full storage systems vendor? The purchase brings the disk drive giant a product to immediately move up the stack and become a systems provider. We don’t believe, however, that Skyera’s systems were the main motivation for the deal.
Skyera was building all-flash storage arrays, with much of the focus on building its own flash drives and controllers. That intellectual property and expertise will fit well inside WD’s existing lines of PCIe, SAS and SATA enterprise flash drives, as well as its embedded offerings. It could also provide some of the building blocks for WD’s HGST subsidiary to put together its own array.
Skyera’s systems have not seen huge success in the highly competitive all-flash array market, as they lack standard enterprise features such as multi-controller availability, as well as data management services. And the company appears to have had trouble attracting new capital to its most recent round, relying on existing investors (including WD) to fund it with an undisclosed amount of capital, on top of the roughly $70m that Skyera raised across two earlier rounds.
We’ll have a full report on this transaction in tomorrow’s 451 Market Insight.
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