NetApp, Inc. (NASDAQ: NTAP) announced its decision to acquire SolidFire for $870 million in cash to improve its position the market for flash systems.
Data from Gartner showed that NetApp is the fourth largest player in the all-flash devices market and recorded approximately $110 million in sales last year.
SolidFire is also market leader in all-flash storage systems built for the next-generation data center where simple scaling, set-and-forget management, assured performance and multi-tenancy, and cloud economic models are driving new market growth. The company generated $50 million sales last year.
In a statement, the company’s CEO George Kurian, said, “This acquisition will benefit current and future customers looking to gain the benefits of webscale cloud providers for their own data centers.”
“SolidFire combines the performance and economics of all-flash storage with a webscale architecture that radically simplifies data center operations and enables rapid deployments of new applications,” he added.
NetApp will now have offerings for the three largest all-flash market segments
Acquiring SolidFire allows NetApp to have offerings for the three largest All-Flash Array market segments.
According to the company, the NetApp All Flash FAS (AFF) product line delivers enterprise-grade features across flash, disk and cloud resources for traditional enterprise infrastructure buyers.
The NetApp EF Series product line offers world-class SPC-1 benchmarks with consistent low-latency performance and proven 6×9’s reliability for the application owners.
SolidFire’s distributed, self-healing, webscale architecture delivers seamless scalability, white box economics, and radically simple management for next-generation infrastructure buyers.
NetApp and SolidFire have deep customer-centric cultures
SolidFire CEO Dave Wright said they are looking forward to improving the NetApp’s position in the all-flash array market while helping the customers and partners of both companies to achieve success.
Wright said, Both companies have “deep technical, customer-centric cultures, which are focused on delivering innovations that give customers a competitive advantage.”
NetApp will integrate SolidFire’s products into its data fabric strategy over time to deliver seamless data management across flash, disk and cloud resources. The company expects to close the acquisition in the fourth quarter of its fiscal 2016. The transaction is subject to customary closing conditions.
