Graveyard or Greenfield?

I recently came across an article about Western Digital and their acquisitions in the past decade or so : https://nimbusdata.com/blog/wd-expands-graveyard-tegile-acquisition/

The title and tone of the article was harsh and kind of uncalled for, from a company so close to WD in the storage ecosystem. While I am not part of WD now, some of the contents struck a chord with me as I have been associated with several of the companies mentioned in the post. First and foremost, 'Graveyard' is a derogatory term to be used in context with any company, let alone a company like Western Digital which is doing fairly well in the storage area. They are in fact one of the forces to reckon with by any OEM or media supplier. Their influence can not be ignored or countered with , by even some of the giants of the Technology sector, let alone a struggling storage company such as Nimbus Data Systems.

Now coming to the article and its assertions about the acquisitions and their impact to Western Digital. My opinions herewith are my personal opinions based on the last 7 or 8 years I have interacted closely with Western Digital/HGST as buyer of their HDDs/SSDs while employed at Dell and my stint at Sandisk for 3 years when I was closely associated with Pliant/Smart Storage and Fusion-io/Infiniflash/Flashsoft products. These opinions are entirely mine and do not represent Western Digital or my current employer's views.

While the article states that Pliant based products were shut down after acquisition, it fails to notice that the acquisition yielded several key facets to Sandisk's enterprise arena entrance. The technology and IP coupled with the highly savvy bunch of start-up minded folks from Pliant helped Sandisk at least for 6 to 7 years. The $$$ of revenue generated from 2 to 3 generations of Pliant based products were several multi-folds of the price that was paid to acquire it and helped Sandisk gain Marketshare in the SAS SSD space. It also established a strong bond with key server and Storage OEMs which kept going even after the Plaint based products were End of Life'd. The people that Sandisk gained from the Pliant acquisition have had a telling mark on the future of Sandisk's enterprise SAS/SATA SSDs.

Almost the same goes to the SMART storage acquisition. The blending of different cultures and mindsets helped Sandisk shape itself to be a multi-faceted enterprise company. The publicly available info about SMART storage's endurance enhancing technology - which is branded as GUARDIAN technology, was well received by the enterprise SATA customers who were looking to lower the $/G as much as possible to get the TCO advantages over using HDDs in data-centers. The SMART storage acquisition again is a great example were the doors to the Hyperscale customers and several key OEM customers and the channel were opened up. The products continue to live and thrive to this day even after 3 years after acquisition. The test facilities and performance labs etc gain from the acquisitions continue to live even after some of the products went EOL.

Fusion-io and Flashsoft acquisitions exposed Sandisk to a completely different facet on Enterprise customers and technologies.It helped add the software dimension to the otherwise hardware/SSD focussed Sandisk. The Fusion-io Salesforce and solution engineers were of a different breed. They did grassroots level marketing wherein they directly went to prospective clients and demonstrated the capabilities of the PCIe products; showed them the effectiveness of the solution and ended up making several big $$$ sales from key accounts. This mode of Sales/solution based customer acquisition was quite different then Sandisk's traditional way of courting a few key OEMs and milking the revenue for 2 to 3 years. So I would say that even if the Fusion-io products ceased to exist on Sandisk roadmaps after 2 years or so, the new way of solution based selling got ingrained into Sandisk/Western digital selling motion. The solutions labs and the expertise of the personnel must be coming to use of several other products for WD.

Infiniflash was a bold way of thinking by Sandisk. Having gained the enterprise expertise from several acquisitions in the past 4 or 5 years, this was Sandisk trying to Move up the stack. Granted that there was too much hype into it and that the market was not that ready for a half or 1PB level archival flash storage, but still it established Sandisk as a player in the JBOF arena. Every box of Infiniflash sold was a dent to some storage OEM's sale of their HDD or Flash based array. The Tegile acquisition slowly leads WD into the storage OEM space. What Tegile brings is again a start-up mindset, new technology and several thousand new customers. The possibility of cross-selling WD's  other products in its portfolio to these customers, in itself lends a great business case. The Tegile customers who might have felt that Flash based AFA/JBOF was an overkill to their workloads could easily be made to consider HGST's hybrid archival storage solutions that mix their Helium based Nearline SAS HDDs and high capacity SSDs to create Petabyte scale solutions with a better TCO. That should be a great win-win for both the parties involved. It is to be seen how WD executes with Tegile based products alongside its home developed system based products.

With every acquisition, comes the goodness of different technologies,different mindset and this definitely leads to clash of personalities, in-house politics, favoritism etc. But then in the long run, this only helps the company like Western Digital to succeed. The diversity of the people that came with the acquisitions also help in bringing forth different ways of thinking and collaborating.There were several heated conversations, many layoffs and voluntary leaving of personal due to clash on cultures . But the folks that stayed have gone on to establish themselves and lead the company forward. When the big tree shakes, some bad fruits fall and some good birds fly away but then the tree still lives and bears fruits every season forward. I am sure that HGST must have also got several new perspectives with their acquisitions. While some of the acquisitions might have met a strange dead-end, there is always the element of learning that lingers. Either the technology or the people from the acquisitions continue to stay and positively contribute.

To pinpoint each acquisition and call out that the products from the acquired companies were EOL'd after 2 or 3 generations after the acquisition and so they were sent to the 'Graveyard' is not the right way to think about these strategic decisions. Mergers and acquisitions are not meant to always keep the new company as a standalone entity with its products showing up on the roadmap for several generations. The key objective is to integrate the company and create new experiences and value proposition to the customers.

Within the storage ecosystem, looking at the key remaining vendors, Western Digital, Samsung and Micron/Intel are the key forces that shape the industry. Toshiba , once it sorts out its Fab acquisition issues and bankruptcy problems, should be able to remain relevant. Seagate is the company that is the most concerning. With every analyst mocking its flash strategy and stubborn way of focussing only on HDDs, it baffles me as to why they continue to spiral into this approach of a slow death.