Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat

The stock market was alive with rumors that Seagate might be bought by an unnamed Chinese company, as reported in the New York Times, among others. This comes after a week of insider whispers about a possible tieup between Seagate and memory-makers, Micron or SanDisk, itself a Seagate spin-off. It seems that the hot disk drive and flash memory markets are shaking as sales heat up and margins thin out. Note that this is far from a done-deal. Rather, Seagate CEO, William Watkins, was merely noting in an interview that there was such an inquiry.

To my eyes, a Seagate buy-out would be little different from the sale of IBM’s disk drive operations to Hitachi back in 2002 or their sale of the PC group to Lenovo two years later. Seagate is a component maker, and although it is a critical piece of the storage industry it is not really a strategic entity. Certainly, the company’s contributions to standards like SATA, SAS, and (yes) hybrid drives are worthwhile, but apart from evault, the company contributes little to the value-added services landscape.

Still, if a buy-out softened scrappy Seagate I would miss the healthy contribution between them, Western Digital, Hitachi, and the other disk vendors. And it would be an end of an era, with Alan Shugart’s old company going the way of MG Rover and the rest.

As the virtualization world turns, hot on the heels of VMware’s successful IPO (it’s riding over $50 today), many might wonder about that company’s only major competitor.  Well, the answer is here: XenSource is being acquired by client-side virtualizer, Citrix!  Word is it’s a $500 million deal.  Not bad for little XenSource!

This looks like a replay for Citrix, which has long fought Microsoft’s Terminal Services in the client application access world and now will set itself up against both Microsoft and VMware in the server virtualization market.

Wonder no more - 3PAR will hit the street sometime at some price to raise some money so they can do something. That’s right, their vague initial S-1 was announced yesterday. About the only thing we do know about 3PAR’s IPO is that it’s being handled jointly by Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse. Good luck, guys!

EMC floated 10% of VMware today as an IPO (NYSE:VMW) and wow, is it taking off. Starting at $29, it’s at $51 after a couple of hours of trading, making EMC’s $635 million investment in 2003 worth $19 billion today. If this price is maintained (which I doubt it will be), VMware would be half as valuable as EMC itself, according to the market. It also has a market cap higher than some other enterprise names you might have heard of: Network Appliance, Sun, Seagate, Symantec, CA…

This just in: Greg Reyes, former CEO of Brocade, was just found guilty on all 10 counts relating to stock option backdating.  Reyes maintains his innocence and vows to appeal.

It’s acquisition month! After Siafu and Acopia, now comes Princeton Softech. IBM will undoubtedly spread their tech far and wide, or at least further and wider.

Who’s next?