Thomas Weisel speculates on merger activity in storage
Thomas Weisel notes NTAP stock surged recently on speculation that IBM was looking at acquiring NetApp. The firm says although they believe that such a merger is extremely unlikely, they would not be surprised to see NetApp make some acquisitions of its own, primarily of smaller technology type deals. EMC made some noise a few years back with a string of larger software acquisitions (Legato, Documentum, VMWare) but was fairly silent in 2005, executing only a few small deals. The firm says they fully expect EMC to go back on the acquisition trail in 2006, possibly with some larger deals. The co appears interested in expanding its reach beyond storage on the software mgmt side, and a larger deal may jump-start that effort. Finally, the firm says they have the server guys, IBM, Sun (SUNW) and H.P (HPQ), all of which are trying to reinvigorate their storage businesses. Firm notes Sun, in particular, has shown a desire to "buy" a larger storage presence, so they can't rule any of them out, especially given their large cash hordes. The firm says combinations of some of the second tier storage systems vendors may also make some sense. |
