So The Rumor's True - IBM Snaps Up Diligent

In its third storage acquisition in short order, IBM proved the rumor mill right Friday by snapping up deduping VTL vendor Diligent Technologies for what Israeli business site Globes says was $200 million. For IBM's spin on the deal, see the release here. If rumors about EMC and Quantum making a deal for deduplicating backup hardware are right, that leaves HP as the only major enterprise player without a deduplication solution.This deal leaves us wondering how the vendors currently using Diligent's ProtecTier are going to be effected. As reported here, HDS has been reselling ProtecTier as part of a new series of packaged solutions. Sun has been reselling Diligent's software as a deduplicting alternative to its VTL using FalconStor's software and recently announced it will be adding FalconStor's SIR (Single Instance Repository)see here . Overland OEM's ProtecTier into its REO 9500D VTL.

IBM says the HDS deal will continue but hasn't commented on the others. I have a feeling Sun will quietly push SIR while downgrading ProtecTier.

Diligent started off as EMC's Israeli R&D group and EMC still holds an estimated 25%, so it will be getting around $50 million from the deal. It also reunites Diligent CEO Doran Kempel and Moshe Yanai, chairman of XIV, a grid storage specialist IBM bought earlier this year, and the primary designer of EMC's Symmetrix array.

Are there any more Israeli storage companies for IBM to buy?