EMC is buying Isilon for $2.25 billion. They want the video market, which seems to just be growing and growing. EMC stock dipped a little on the news, which is not surprising because Isilon isn’t worth what EMC is paying for it. What does this mean for the video market? More uncertainty. EMC has been an acquisition marathon runner since 2002, buying up Avamar, Documentum, Epoch, McData, Iomega, Archer, Greenplum, Bus-Tech, Kashya, Dantz, Mozy, Data Domain and even VMware (not to mention a bunch of other companies).
So what does this mean for Isilon’s product line moving forward. If you look at how the acquisition of Dantz and Iomega sparked the Insignia line at EMC and how profits from those lines jumped well over 60% it isn’t hard to think that Isilon will almost instantly become more profitable. Of course, the Mac Retrospect software was sold off and now has an uncertain future… One would like to think that the combination of EMC’s wide variety of technologies and Isilon will result in even more environments that Isilon can play and even more technical advances to the product line. But I guess we’ll see what happens there…