Sun acquires StorageTek

Looking to stem losses and significantly boost its data protection, management and storage wares, Sun this week dug deep and grabbed up Storage Technology (StorageTek ) for $4.1 billion in cash.

Sun blamed its StorEdge storage product line as a cause for weak financial results reported in April. Sun reported a net loss of $61 million for the quarter ending March 27. Company executives said one problem was that the rate at which customers purchase Sun’s storage products, along with servers, had dropped over the last three quarters. Sun competitors, such as IBM, have been selling storage devices with servers, but Sun has lagged in that market.

Though Sun created the Network File System (NFS) protocol used in the network-attached storage (NAS) market, it is widely recognized that the company has not matched the success of competitors IBM and HP at selling storage products with its server systems.

Meanwhile, StorageTek and Sun had a close relationship before the acquisition. StorageTek had a continuing OEM agreement with Sun, starting in 1999. Sun has been StorageTek’s largest OEM partner, offering StorageTek libraries under Sun’s own StorEdge brand, according to StorageTek.

The acquisition, according to Sun’s CEO Scott McNealy, might just be the beginning. “Sun’s technical and financial strength puts us in a great position to act as a consolidator in the [IT] industry,” McNealy said.  With StorageTek “we have an end-to-end capability from the development, create, capture, manage, storage and archive data securely.”

Analysts and at least one user thought the deal was a good one.

“It certainly fills out Sun’s storage offerings — they will now be able to control tape library, as well as drive offerings,” says Randy Kerns, senior analyst for the Evaluator Group. StorageTek’s tape products accounted for 77% of its revenue in 2004.

This acquisition also will give Sun a sales and support channel it didn’t have, both analysts and users say. Through the acquisition, Sun will acquire a 1,000+-strong salesforce.

“Even though it is going to take Sun some time to rationalize all the storage products between the two companies, the most important thing it accomplishes for Sun is providing them with a sales and pre-sales technology force that can actually understand and can sell storage,” says Stephanie Balaouras, senior analyst at The Yankee Group.

Gordon Haff, senior analyst for Illuminata, adds: “It seems as if Sun was trying to leverage their existing salesforce to a large degree to sell storage,” he says. “And it wasn’t working. They’ve been adding storage specialists but it’s hard to gain critical mass with onesy-twosy additions.”

Ron Godine, manager of IS operations for Glenwillow, Ohio, Royal Appliance, says that the deal will benefit him, particularly in light of Sun’s sales efforts in the past.

“Some of Sun’s storage has been faltering badly,” Godine says. “Sun has always wanted to make an impact in storage, but they quite honestly need a salesforce — that’s one of the troubles we’re getting into — we are only seeing mom and pop local places that do it all and none of it well in addressing enterprise-class customers.”