More M&A

Two items.

1. our friends at Virident are now part of WD. I am happy Kumar, Yatin and crew got a nice exit. I am not thrilled at where they landed. Virident joins STEC at WD. But as with STEC, this looks like this is on the HGST side of things, which appears to still be building separate and quality product. We will buy and ship HGST.
2. Whiptail was acquired by Cisco. This is a major step for Cisco, as it now is directly competing with some of its partners in its UCS stack. More importantly, this is Cisco reaching further outside networking into its partners spaces. What I think is going on is that there is a massive girding for battle, and many small companies are going to be snarfed up by bigger ones. I think the phrase “feeding frenzy” is in line. I am guessing that OCZ is now looking for a buyer. And likely Nimble, Nimbus, eany-meany-miney-mo … Pure is looking to IPO (likely, with a recent $150M raise). Nutanix is talking IPO at some point. Nexenta might be looking for a buyer, preferentially a hardware company, as I don’t think that there will be many pure software storage plays outside of Ceph, and a few other more targeted companies (FhGFS, …). I expect the feeding frenzy to continue and to expand.