EMC's Hauck: $2.1B bet on Data Domain will pay off

Earlier this month, EMC signed a $2.1 billion agreement to acquire data deduplication specialist Data Domain, declaring victory over rival Network Appliance in a bidding war to acquire the company. The deal was remarkable because Joe Tucci, EMC's chairman, president and CEO, along with other senior EMC executives, had no opportunity to conduct the usual due diligence on Data Domain or even get to know its management team before bidding to buy the company.

The all-cash acquisition offer represents a huge bet for EMC, which will buy Data Domain at a price of $33.50 per share -- more than 100 times higher than its earnings per share of $0.31 over the last 12 months. That price represents EMC's strong belief in Data Domain's technology, which identifies and removes redundant data and files when they're being stored, saving storage space and cutting costs for companies.

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Since clinching the deal to acquire Data Domain, EMC executives have had a chance to get a closer look at the company and its technology, and say they like what they see, despite the very high earnings multiple they paid to acquire it.

When the acquisition deal is completed, Frank Hauck, EMC's executive vice president of global marketing and customer quality, will help oversee Data Domain and its integration into EMC's storage business unit. Hauck sat down with IDG News Service during a visit to Singapore to discuss the acquisition and what happens next for the acquired company.

What follows is an edited transcript of that conversation:

The Data Domain acquisition is pretty much a done deal at this point. How are things going?

We had folks up there last week, really for the first time, learning about the company and what they do. The acquisition went outside the normal way of doing an acquisition. We had a lot of folks there, getting up to speed on the products and the people and technology. We had some calls at the end of last week and everyone walked away incredibly impressed. So far, the results have exceeded what our expectations were as far as what they have and what they are capable of doing. It looks pretty good.

How was this acquisition process different from other EMC acquisitions?

There was already an offer from Network Appliance for Data Domain. We felt that this was technology that we wanted to make part of EMC, so we bid on top of their bid. We didn't really have a chance to do any due diligence. Normally, when you do these things you drop a few people into a company, you look around and figure out what they have, the leadership team, and you make a decision about whether you want to buy them based on some insight and knowledge that you have from spending time there.

We really went after this thing with very limited insight. It was really based on understanding the technology and we had some relationships that we had developed over the years, but they were still probably not strong. We had an awareness, folks knew each other. But we did a lot of this based on the product set, not really understanding even the leadership team that was in place, but based on how strong the product set was.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.