Nigel left an interesting comment on the last post wondering why EMC didn't buy Diligent and the response turned into a post so here it is.
Having good technology isn't good enough you need to be good at business so lets guess at some numbers before talking tech turkey.
The last time I checked, which was back in 2002 admittedly, EMC owned somewhere around 24 or 25% of Diligent. Now, people say that Diligent has received $47M+ in VC funding and IBM are going to flip them for about $200M.
Assuming EMC hasn't decreased it's position in Diligent (Big assumption), looking at Diligent's market position and from a back of an envelop (The one the phone bill came in) revenue calculation performed while drinking a hot whisky it looks to me like EMC could make nearly as much if not more from this transaction pre-tax than Diligent made as a company in it's entire existence.
Those numbers while entirely speculative tell me that EMC might have blessed the deal before they finished reading IBM's proposal. Free money is free money after all.
Now lets talk tech.
Diligent fought the wrong war from the very start. They went after the Enterprise space which has been the slowest market segment to embrace de-duplication due to the volume of backup data involved and frequency of restore requests.
While Diligent were ranting about mathematical aberrations like hash collisions (Which is just technical Snake Oil when you understand the maths behind it but now everyone has to say they're collision resistant as a competitive spin point.) Data Domain grew like crazy in the Commercial market.
By the time Diligent managed to limbo down to that level Data Domain had a ton of commercial customers floated themselves on the stock exchange and was running around trying to redefine what Enterprise means so they could look like they were punching above their weight class.
Hey Slootman here's a hint: Enterprise does not mean restoring slower than tape.
Anyhoo. Diligent in IBM's back pocket automatically puts it in front of vastly more eyeballs than HDS were willing or able to but the lesson here is that IBM's frantic deal making is going to continue until Moshe runs out of things to sell them.
Monshaw has a number of gaps to fill and IBM's wallet is bottomless. If he's willing to turn Moshe into the Five Hundred Million Dollar Man before the end of Q1 he's probably only a step away from hand washing his dirty underpants too.
