Target Acquired?

So it looks like my prediction as to Compellent's future was pretty much on the mark and Dell and Compellent are now in talks. I guess that Dell must be feeling pretty secure that there is no-one coming to snatch away their prize at the last minute. I suspect that everybody who was interested as kicked the tyres (I know of a couple over the past two years) and decided that this was not for them. And Dell come away the winner.

I think Dell really are a winner in this case but whether it is the race that they wanted to run has got to be open to question? Compellent simply are not yet Enterprise but perhaps with their decent channel policy and sales, this is not that important. Dell have an opportunity to have a really good offering in the mid-range space and a chance to make some real money in this space. The sexy money might be in the Petabyte club but there's decent money to be made elsewhere. And whilst they are doing this, perhaps they can start to beef-up Compellent's credibility and move up the chain.

So that's 3Par, Isilon and Compellent gone to majors; so who does that leave and what will 2011 bring in the way of acquisitions?

CommVault and their existing partnership with Hitachi and their rumoured reseller/OEM deal with NetApp are an interesting prospect; I've certainly heard a couple of vendors speak of CommVault in glowing terms. And it might make a lot of sense for one of them. NetApp for example do need at some point need to start pushing beyond their traditional storage market place; partnerships with Cisco and the likes will only take them some way. 

BlueArc? When will Hitachi finally snap-up BlueArc? Or do they even need to bother as everyone else has products or at least IPR already in that space. BlueArc don't really suit anybody else's manufacturing strategy and really only make sense for Hitachi.

Avere? The next Isilon? Isilon were much admired as a company by many in vendor community; they were seen as having a potentially great product and an excellent culture. I hear some of those people now talking about Avere in the same sort of tones; perhaps someone will come in early and avoid having to pay a crazy premium for them.

I don't think that the acquistion cycle is done in storage yet but HP and Dell for example have some major work to do integrating product lines and leveraging the IPR that they've bought. HP have more work than anyone else to do in this space but there is part of me which feels that HP aren't over; despite all their product-lines, there appears to be something missing. It's not just a coherent strategy, it's something to glue it all together which is missing and perhaps they need to look down the back of the sofa to find that missing piece.