Posted on Tuesday, June 24 2008 @ 23:19 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
eWeek
writes Seagate may be planning to acquire a NAND flash memory maker:
Analyst Daniel Amir of financial advisory/asset management firm Lazard put out a mergers-and-acquisition research note June 19 speculating that Seagate Technology may buy out Intel's 49 percent interest—worth anywhere from $1 billion to $2 billion -- in its IM Flash Technologies flash memory joint venture with Micron Technology.
Other flash industry watchers, skeptical of that opinion, believe that Seagate may looking instead at flash chip makers Hynix and SanDisk as possible acquisition or partnership targets.
Seagate, Intel and Micron -- like virtually all companies -- do not comment on acquisition speculation.
In any case, server and storage arrays makers EMC, Dell, Sun Microsystems, Xiotech and others are either producing such solid-state hardware options now or will be bringing them to market in the next few months. So it's incumbent upon drive makers such as Seagate, Western Digital and Samsung to have the new SSDs ready when they will be needed, and that may be sooner rather than later.
"Because [Seagate] is the largest provider of enterprise storage solutions, it makes sense for them to migrate part of their business to include SSDs," Avi Cohen, director of research at Avian Securities, told me June 20.
