IBM buys Israel's Diligent

The price for the storage solutions company is estimated at $200 million.

17 April 08 12:15, Shmulik Shelah

Sources inform ''Globes'' that US computing giant IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM) has acquired Israeli storage solutions developer Diligent Technologies Corporation for $200 million. "Globes" first reported about the acquisition a month ago.

IBM is due to make an official announcement of the latest acquisition within the next few days.

Diligent Technologies is IBM's third acquisition in Israel so far this year. In January, it bought storage technology company XIV for a reported $300-350 million, and last week it bought data recovery company FilesX Ltd. for a reported $70-90 million

Diligent Technologies is closely linked with XIV executive chairman Moshe Yanai, who is now responsible for storage development at IBM. Yanai and Diligent chairman and CEO Doron Kempel co-founded the company as a spin-off of EMC Israel in 2002. EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC) still owns 20% of Diligent, which develops solutions for one of the hottest fields in data storage - the prevention of duplicating files when they are backed up (de-duplication). The company's solutions enables data storage facilities to back up only changes made in files, rather than duplicate the entire file, thereby eliminating redundancies to save space and memory mechanisms.

According to IVC Online, Diligent Technologies has raise $50 million. Its shareholders, in addition to EMC, include Accel Partners, Gemini Israel Funds, Eastward Capital Partners, and Matrix Partners.

Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on April 17, 2008

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