Grant Gross
Senior Writer

EMC acquires majority stake in Data Domain

news
Jul 20, 20092 mins

After winning its bidding war with NetApp, EMC is extending its stock purchase offer until Wednesday

EMC has officially acquired majority ownership of storage vendor Data Domain after a bidding war with NetApp.

After an initial stock purchase offering period ended Friday, EMC acquired 78.2 percent of the outstanding Data Domain shares, in addition to the 3.9 percent of shares previously held by EMC, the company said in a news release.

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A second offering period ending Wednesday will allow Data Domain shareholders to sell their stock at $33.50 a share, the original price offered by EMC. As of mid-day Monday, Data Domain shares were trading at $33.51 on the Nasdaq stock exchange.

Early this month, Data Domain signed a merger agreement with EMC and terminated a previously announced merger deal with NetApp.

Data Domain agreed to a $1.5 billion bid from NetApp on May 20, but EMC countered with an unsolicited offer of $1.8 billion. NetApp raised its bid, but early this month, EMC countered with a $33.50-per-share, $2.1 billion offer.

EMC said it expects to complete the merger and close the acquisition shortly, as long as it controls 90 percent of the outstanding Data Domain shares. The company plans to make Data Domain the foundation of a new product division within EMC’s storage business. Frank Slootman, Data Domain’s president and CEO, will lead that new division.

Grant Gross

Grant Gross, a senior writer at CIO, is a long-time IT journalist who has focused on AI, enterprise technology, and tech policy. He previously served as Washington, D.C., correspondent and later senior editor at IDG News Service. Earlier in his career, he was managing editor at Linux.com and news editor at tech careers site Techies.com. As a tech policy expert, he has appeared on C-SPAN and the giant NTN24 Spanish-language cable news network. In the distant past, he worked as a reporter and editor at newspapers in Minnesota and the Dakotas. A finalist for Best Range of Work by a Single Author for both the Eddie Awards and the Neal Awards, Grant was recently recognized with an ASBPE Regional Silver award for his article “Agentic AI: Decisive, operational AI arrives in business.”

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