Dell crossed EMC road

Having lost Hewlett-Packard at the beginning of this year fight for purchase of vendor of storage systems 3Par, Dell was not given and with new forces began to prepare for acquisition of other company - Compellent Technologies, hoping to strengthen thus the offer in a storage-area network segment (SAN). The attempt of Dell to purchase 3Par considerably cooled her partnership with EMC. And if new purchase will take place, it is obvious that they will be broken finally off.

The other day declared Dell officially that conducts active negotiations with Compellent on its acquisition. The price offered Dell is $27.5 for an action, or about $876 million. And though from the moment of signing of the partner agreement between Dell and EMC in 2001 there passed more than two years, it is improbable that Dell will save these relations with the same eagerness, having purchased Compellent.

Meanwhile, partnership between Dell and EMC means billions of dollars for both companies. Only last year EMC earned from partnership with Dell about 8-9% of the profit. For Dell their partnership was measured by 50% of revenue of sales of storage systems last year, and about 90% of this amount were the share of sales of a line of EMC Clariion and another 10% - of Symmetrix system high-end. If Dell purchases Compellent, then its solutions will compete directly with EMC Clariion which Dell sells.

The expected transaction between Dell and Compellent also means that sales of one of independent vendors of SAN will become under control of the largest player in the market of data centers. In the market in a segment of SAN there will be only such independent players as Xiotech, Data Direct, Pillar Data and Nexsan, but any of them cannot be compared on market position to Compellent.

"Compellent is the shining star", - the founder of consulting company The Taneja Group Arun Taneja commented. "The concept of their architecture is in many respects similar to solutions 3Par", - he added.

Analysts of the market consider that hardly Dell will collide obstacles in a way of acquisition of Compellent as other large vendors. EMC, NetApp, [Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Oracle and Hitachi Data Systems, already have own solutions in the field of technologies of storage. Of course, there is a small chance that someone from these suppliers will enter fight only behind salting Dell. It is unlikely it can also be Cisco Systems which sells own DWH too.

Compellent specializes in sales of SAN and software for managements of them. In particular, the company offers software which allows to automate data movement between different levels of storage. Last month the company put on the market the new version of technology SAN, Storage Center 5.4 in which key updates are made and emphasis on virtualization is put.

Compellent has no debt obligations and is the public company, selling the products only through network of sales in 35 countries of the world. According to own data, its solutions are used by 3 thousand clients. If Dell purchases this vendor, the long way on integration of its solutions into own product line is necessary to it.