Room for Dessert

4:15 PM -- If EMC really stops acquiring companies, how will the M&A bankers make a buck? More importantly, what will we write about and who will we second guess?

Ah, no worries. Joe Tucci is leaving the door open for what he called "tuck-in" acquisitions while EMC digests nearly two dozens additions from the last three years. (See Tucci Aims for 'One EMC'.)

In other words, EMC is full, but it might pick. That means we might see deals around the size of last year's acquisitions of Avamar and Kashya but not nearly as large as RSA. (See EMC Picks Up Avamar, EMC Coughs Up for Kashya, and EMC Secures RSA for $2.1B)

So who might get tucked in? EMC has fewer holes than it did a year ago, and the recent spate of acquisitions and IPOs leaves fewer candidates, but here are a few good fits.

Onaro: By now it's clear that traditional SRM packages aren't cutting it, and Onaro can fill in some of the gaps in EMC's ControlCenter. Onaro's configuration management and other capabilities may be built into EMC's network management Smarts software as well. (See Onaro Adds New Storage Views.) Onaro has a reseller deal with Hitachi Data Systems that could complicate things, though. (See Hitachi to Resell Onaro.)Ibrix: The future of NAS is clustered storage, and Ibrix's parallel file system would help EMC deliver that. EMC already resells Ibrix, and that relationship has brought it into some high profile deals. (See Ibrix Joins EMC Select, Disney, and Pixar.)

WySDM: This is another EMC partner with technology that would be more helpful inside EMC. EMC OEMs WyDM's backup reporting and monitoring tool as Backup Advisor, but WySDM has gone beyond merely backup reporting. (See EMC Makes Legato 'Wyser' and WysDM Enhances Software.) It also does cross-domain analysis, which understands relationships between storage, servers, networks, and applications, and helps identify the root causes of problems. This technology would fit into Smarts.

Scentric: EMC's Infoscape is in its early days, and still has a way to go before fulfilling its goal of driving ILM. (See EMC Vows More for Infoscape.) Data classification technology can jump start Infoscape, the way EMC hopes Kashya's replication and CDP can boost its Invista virtualization platform. Kazeon is cozy with NetApp, making Scentric the obvious choice for EMC. (See Kazeon Pairs With NetApp, Scentric Gets Classified, and De-Classifying Data Classification.)

Dave Raffo, News Editor, Byte and Switch