Is IBM Buying Israel?

XIV, Files-X, and now Diligent. It's been a busy month for big Blue.

First, allow me to take full credit for calling the Diligent play. I said "Diligent will be the next to go - with the run on bulk storage plays designed to support the new era of digital content, a big honking de-dupe data protection play for big data centers like them will get scooped up this year" in this blog – back on January 8^th. I should have said "this quarter" and I would have looked smarter.

XIV is being left alone, heavily funded and encouraged, and has begun to start the war. They thus far are building an EMC 1986 sales force as far as I can tell, which I still haven't figured out is a good thing or a bad one. Clearly that genre knows how to sell storage, but I'm afraid they may point at the wrong battle – namely "Kill the Symmetrix at all costs!" which won't work, of course. Sooner or later they will get their market position sorted out and then it will be really interesting. I can't see how IBM can do anything but benefit by the effort eventually. It may ruffle a lot of feathers, but I'm a big fan of ruffling.

I probably should have seen the Diligent move as inevitable. Mr. Yanai and Diligent CEO Doron Kemple are pals from the days no one openly talks about if you are Israeli, and just looking at Doron you know he can kill you 11 ways with a Q-Tip, while never losing that disarming smile. Both these guys come from big iron, big data center pedigrees and IBM was a natural spot to end up even without the fact that Yanai is now there and the band seems to be getting back together in Haifa. Most interesting is that Diligent was an EMC spin out (formerly the Copy Cross team). I wonder how much EMC got on the deal.

Files-X I can't really comment on, other than to say I hope my permanently 9/11 bonded friend and founder Jacob Herbst got out with some money. Somebody must have had pictures of somebody else to get that thing sold for the rumored $50M – but we are talking about people good at taking pictures. I'm not sure where it even fits, as this was a Tivoli deal.

SANRAD, Continuity, and StorWize are still standing, but for how long? Like most Israeli companies, they don't emphasize little things like Marketing very much, so few know them, but they all have killer stuff. If they go, who's left? And, as it just so happens, all three would fit nicely into the New Blue world. SANRAD has some of the best packaged up storage virtualization services out there and is a killer play with server virtualization for DR (I'm doing a webcast soon on the subject). Continuity is helping big shops discover the holes in their DR (a wonderful little tool to be used by IGS to keep tabs on how well they are meeting SLAs – or for them to see where some products are not working – or for some customers to use to keep IGS honest). Finally, StorWize has hardware acceleration/compression technologies that enable de-duplication type functions for primary storage environments – even hard ones like database. IBM has big plays in all these areas.

Is there such a thing as some anti-competitive regulation if one buys all the tech companies in an entire country?