EMC wins Data Domain storage acquisition battle

After a good old fashioned bidding battle, storage company EMC has won control of storage company Data Domain over rival suitor storage company NetApp.

DataDomain is best known for its deduplication technology, which aggressively spots and removes redundancy in stored data. This is currently a hot topic, as corporate users struggle to keep up with rapidly increasing storage demands on rapidly stagnating capital expenditure budgets.

NetApp started the contest for DataDomain on May 20th, with an initial bid of $1.5 billion. EMC countered with a bid of $1.8 billion, with NetApp then raising its stake to $1.9 billion. The contest has just finished, with NetApp bowing out yesterday after EMC made a bid of $2.1 billion on Monday.

DataDomain had 2008 revenues of around $274 million, making the acquisition one of the more generous of recent times. NetApp said in a statement that it had a disciplined approach to dealmaking and that continuing in the bidding war would have diminished the value of the deal to its shareholders.