Storage: More Deals Coming
By Eric Savitz
With Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) last week finally winning the heated bidding war with Dell (DELL) over 3Par (PAR), the market bid up the shares of a host of other storage stocks, hoping to find the next target of consolidation in the sector.
This morning, Oppenheimer analyst Ittai Kidron weighs in with a few thoughts on the subject on what might be the next storage company to go on the block.
“We believe the recent consolidation activity in the storage space needs to be viewed in the greater context of data center consolidation and the growing importance of offering an integrated and complete end-to-end data center solution,” he writes in a research note. “Thus, we expect Dell, which we view as weak overall within the enterprise, to continue to aggressively expand its storage presence and perhaps even venture into networking. HP is more well rounded, but could also add a few pieces to the puzzle. We believe IBM (IBM), EMC (EMC) and NetApp (NTAP) could be active but are likely to be less aggressive given their position and relative portfolio completeness.”
His forecasts for the most likely deals:
He see Dell buying Brocade (BRCD), Compellent (CML) or CommVault (CVLT), or privately held Pillar Data Systems; he considers data warehousing players Teradata (TDC) and Netezza (NZ) as alternative potential targets for Dell.
He envisions EMC buying Isilon (ISLN).
Hewlett-Packard isn’t likely to make additional moves after winning 3Par, although he thinks they, too, could go after TDC or NZ.
IBM, he notes, “is missing an in-house iSCSI solution,” and could target BlueArc, DataCore, FalconStor or Nimbus Data Systems. He adds that “Netezza could be a way for IBM to enter the
data warehousing market,” noting that Netezza already runs on IBM’s servers.
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