Well, looks like I was right.  TheStreet tonight is reporting that Dell has signed an agreement to acquire Ocarina Networks.  In May I reported that the “word on the street” was that Dell was rumored to buy Ocarina and now it has happened.  It also looks like that the piece I put up regarding some of these companies (IBM, Dell, HP, NTAP etc…) are starting to open up their checkbooks and acquire some of the great technology that has been incubated over the past 3 to 5 years.

So what does Dell get?  An optimization technology that will be VERY difficult for them to integrate.  All the reading I do, and knowledge I have around primary storage optimization tells me that over the next few years this technology will be embedded in primary storage arrays.  Dell is NOT an innovator.  Dell takes good products and technology, puts in cost cutting measures in place for better, faster, cheaper delivery and sells the technology in volume and low margin.  This was easy to do with EqualLogic as it was an already defined product that didn’t need any development.  Most recently Dell acquired Exanet.  Now they have a clustered file system and a deduplication technology, neither which work with their storage product (EqualLogic) today, and not being known for their integration capabilities, perhaps we are seeing another NTAP on our storage hands.

I also stated in my May post that there were out of money (and rumors were sales guys were leaving).  In today’s announcement they specifically stated that they would be investing in Sales and Engineering.  The question is, does Dell sell products in the space that Ocarina plays well in?  Does Dell have a lot of customers with a lot of rich media type of data?  Granted on the personal desktops and laptops that go into the home there are no doubt a lot of music and photo type files but until they are able to embed this technology there (which is at least 5 years away) I am not so sure they have a lot of places to sell the technology.  Granted they did take the technology off the table for others, the question will be what happens to it in the long run.