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It's true; we bought Diligent

posted on 18 April 2008 09:11

Yanai's huge payday: $200 million

IBM and Diligent have confirmed that Diligent has been sold to IBM for an undiclosed amount. Isreali media outlet Haaretz speculates it was $168 million whilst Globes reckons it was $200 million. If it was the former then Diligent co-founder Moshe Yanai gets to pocket $200 million dollars from the combined Diligent and $415 million XIV sales to IBM.

Diligent becomes part of IBM's System Storage business unit, headed by general manager Andy Monshaw, which is part of IBM's Systems and Technology group. IBM has a New Enterprise Data Centre model and Diligent's de-dupe technology fits nicely in there, helping to enable a more efficient and cost-effective data centre. The IBM model includes 'best practices for virtualization, green IT, service management and cloud computing.'

Monshaw said: “Diligent’s data de-duplication software is a critical technology that will be integrated into the IBM Storage portfolio to further extend our information infrastructure strategy, allowing our clients to eliminate redundant data and streamline the infrastructure required to support their business – which can result in dramatic improvements in data center efficiency.”

“Diligent’s industry-proven data de-duplication offerings are exceptionally suited for mid-range and enterprise clients, uniquely combining in-line performance, scalability and data integrity and extends IBM’s strong portfolio of strategic offerings that will help our clients reduce infrastructure costs, improve energy efficiency in the data center, and enable them to fully utilize their information on demand.”

Diligent CEO Doron Kempel said: "With IBM, Diligent’s data de-duplication technology has the best opportunity to make a significant impact in the industry, on behalf of the end-users.”

It is rumoured that, originally, Yanai did not want to sell either XIV or Diligent, preferring to build a global storage-related enterprise based in Israel. But his partners preferred instead to take IBM's money and invest in pastures new.

IBM now has six storage acquisions under its belt: Diligent (de-dupe); XIV (grid filer clustering); FilesX (CDP); Arsenal (on-demand data protection); NovusCG (storage resource management); and Softek (data migration).

Has it finished? It does not have a file virtualisation capability yet.