Business News Holding

Tag: acquisition

  • NextGenTel Buys Tele2 Norge Broadband/VoIP Operations


    Norway’s second largest broadband supplier, NextGenTel, has bought the broadband and VOIP business of Tele2 Norway.

    The deal will strengthen NextGenTel’s position in the Norwegian market by adding 97,000 broadband subscriptions – of these 23,000 are VOIP subscriptions.

    It also brings with it technical assets and key supplier contracts.

    A subsidiary of TeliaSonera, NextGenTel is to pay NOK 100 million (approx. USD $15.5 million) for the business, cash and debt free.

    The acquisition requires the approval of the Norwegian Competition Authority.

    But once completed, NextGenTel’s market share on the ADSL market will increase from 15 per cent to approximately 22 per cent.

    Håkan Dahlström, president of broadband services at TeliaSonera, said that both the Tele2 national network and the customers’ equipment will be easily integrated with NextGenTel’s network.

    He said Tele2’s broadband and VOIP business is an attractive asset that will strengthen NextGenTel’s position in the Norwegian market.

    "The increased customer base will also result in improved capacity utilization of the network," he said.

  • NetApp Buys Data Domain For $1.5bn


    NetApp announced this week that it has agreed to buy data backup and disaster recovery systems provider Data Domain Inc. for USD $25 per share in cash and stock, or about USD $1.5 billion.

    The data storage company said it will operate Data Domain as a product line.

    The result should accelerated growth and market adoption, according to NetApp, since Data Domain has the distribution channels and global reach to offer its products to more customers.

    Data Domain’s board has unanimously approved the deal, which is expected to close in the next two to four months.

    On Wednesday, NetApp reported a drop in fiscal fourth-quarter profit as revenue declined amid the economic turmoil.

  • WD Enters Solid-State Drive Market With Acquisition Of SiliconSystems


    Western Digital has completed a USD $65 million cash acquisition of leading solid-state drives supplier, SiliconSystems.

    SiliconSystems’ product portfolio includes solid-state drives with SATA, EIDE, PC Card, USB and CF interfaces in 2.5-inch, 1.8-inch, CF and other form factors.

    Since its inception in 2002, SiliconSystems has sold millions of SiliconDrive products to the network-communications, industrial, embedded-computing, medical, military and aerospace markets.

    These markets accounted for approximately one third of worldwide solid-state drive revenues in 2008.

    John Coyne, president and CEO of WD, said its worldwide infrastructure and technical and financial resources will enable further growth in SiliconSystems’ existing markets and customer relationships.

    He said SiliconSystems’ intellectual property and technical expertise will provide additional building blocks for future products to address emerging opportunities in WD’s existing markets.

    "The combination will be modestly accretive to revenue and margins as a result of SiliconSystems’ existing position as a trusted supplier to the well-established USD $400 million market for embedded solid-state drives," he said.

    "SiliconSystems’ intellectual property and technical expertise will significantly accelerate WD’s solid-state drive development programs for the netbook, client and enterprise markets, providing greater choice for our customers to satisfy all their storage requirements."

    Integration into WD begins immediately, with SiliconSystems now becoming known as the WD Solid-State Storage business unit, complementing WD’s existing Branded Products, Client Storage, Consumer Storage and Enterprise Storage business units.

  • Hitachi GST Takes Another Shot At Consumer Storage Market

















    Hitachi GST is making a fresh attempt at entering the consumer storage market after its first abortive attempt in 2007, writes Samantha Sai for storage-biz.news.

    Brenden Collins, Hitachi’s vice president of product marketing, dismisses the earlier attempt as one that "didn’t take off that well".

    The latest move follows in the wake of Hitachi GST’s decision to acquire Fabrik Inc, which makes G-Technology external hard drive systems for Macintosh computers and SimpleTech systems for PCs.

    While the financial terms of the acquisition haven’t been revealed, the Fabrik deal has been announced.

    It is interesting to note that hard drive competitors Seagate Technology LLC and Western Digital Corp. and several other storage players including EMC Corp, seem to find the acquisition route an ideal means of entering the consumer storage product market.

    Fabrik has renamed its Mozy product as Fabrik Ultimate Backup and has sold its option with SimpleTech systems.

    The newly named product continues to provide its users with the 2GB free space and has retained the charge at $4.95 per month for unlimited online backups.

    The company has also entered into a partnership with ArcSoft Inc for local backup software, so competing with EMC’s Iomega and Retrospect.

    The drag-drop-store in Apple Mac or external devices feature for G-Technology has also been enabled.

    Hitachi GST plans to run Fabrik as a standalone business and will allow all its partnerships continue even where the Fabrik partners compete with Hitachi’s external disk storage partners.

    Brian Babineau, a senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, told Search Storage that such partnerships and relationships are becoming commonplace in the storage industry.

    "There’s a new class of products emerging," he said. "You’re starting to see a blend of enterprise functionality, simplified and masked, as well as redundancy built in.

    What’s interesting about these deals is to see how the simplified consumer solutions can then move upmarket."

    Wolfgang Schlichting, IDC’s Research Director is concerned that Hitachi should not upset its traditional client base in the process of acquiring Fabrik.

    "Hitachi is one of the last remaining hard drive manufacturers without its own branded external solution.

    "They have to be careful not to upset their traditional client base, but that’s also the case with the other hard drive manufacturers."





  • Vodafone To Buy Swedish LBS Firm


    UK-based Vodafone is to acquire Swedish firm Wayfinder for USD $29.4 million.

    The move is being seen as a bid by Vodafone to boost its location-based services (LBS) offering and drive mobile data growth.

    Wayfinder’s services are available in 19 languages to a global user base of more than 2 million.

    Its software enables mobile phones to display user-friendly maps as well as deliver voice directions to drivers in the same way as dedicated navigation devices.

    Vodafone has said that Wayfinder’s board is recommending the bid and Wayfinder shareholders, controlling 45 per cent of shares, have agreed to accept the offer.

    The acquisition is the latest in Vodafone’s acquisition strategy in new mobile Internet services.

    In May it purchased European social networking company ZYB for €31.5 million.

    Vodafone’s latest deal will be seen as its response to Nokia’s moves into the navigation and LBS space.

    The wireless and location industries have seen a fair degree of activity recently, with TomTom and Nokia acquiring digital map providers.

  • IBM Buys Transitive To Cut Customer Costs


    IBM is to to buy Transitive in an acquisition intended to help its customers cut costs.

    Once the deal is completed, IBM is expected to move the virtualization software company’s California personnel to one of IBM’s local sites.

    Research and development staff located in Manchester, UK, will remain at their current facilities.

    IBM has been using Transitive’s technology in its IBM PowerVMTM software, which consolidates customers’ Linux workloads onto IBM systems, since January .

    Transitive has sold more than 10 million copies of its cross-platform virtualization technology and has 48 patents.

    Its product, QuickTransit, allows software applications that have been compiled for one operating system run on systems with different processors or operating systems without modifications.

    Transitive’s technology is based on research developed at Manchester University in 1992. The company was founded five years later by Alasdair Rawsthorne, a computer-science lecturer, and a team of his graduate students to bring QuickTransit to market.

    In 2005 the company signed Apple as its first major customer.

    Apple and Silicon Graphics, along with IBM, are Transitive’s OEM customers. The company has been providing QuickTransit technology to run Apple’s Rosetta translation software and the product is shipped on all of Apple’s Intel-based computers.

    No price has been released for the purchase.