By Balachander Suriyanarayanan: Subscribe to Balachander's RSS feed
July 29, 2010 3:26 PM EDT
IBM announced Thursday it has agreed to acquire online data compression software maker Storwize, a deal that will help improve its clients storage efficiency and reduce storage requirements up to 80 percent.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed. The IBM-Storwize deal was rumoured in June, when reports pegged the price at around $140 million.
Storwize has over one hundred customers such as Mobileye, Polycom Israel, Shopzilla and Sumitomo Mitsui Construction across a wide range of industries.
Storwize’s technology helps clients reduce physical storage requirements by up to 80 percent. This is in contrast to other storage compression technologies that only compress secondary or backup data. Storwize users can store up to five times more data using the same amount of storage.
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Storwize was founded in 2004 by Gal Naor and Jonathan Amit, and is based near Tel Aviv in Israel. The founders subsequently moved its headquarters to the United States in 2008 to be nearer their main customers, according to media reports.
Earlier this month, Dell agreed to acquire Storwize’s rival Ocarina Networks for an undisclosed sum. Ocarina provides storage optimization technology – data deduplication plus compression.
Investors in Storwize include Bessemer Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital, Tenaya Capital (formerly Lehman Brothers' venture capital arm), Tamares Group and Tokyo Electron Device Ltd.
"Real-time data compression helps address a significant client need -- making it affordable to analyze and make sense of massive amounts of data in order to provide new services,” Brian Truskowski, general manager, IBM System Storage and Networking said on Thursday.
According to IDC, enterprise demand for storage capacity worldwide is projected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of over 43 percent from 2008 to 2013.
The transaction is expected the close in the third quarter.
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