Western Digital enters solid state drive market with acquisition

Peter Dinham
Thursday, 02 April 2009 16:20

Business IT - Technology

Hard drive vendor Western Digital (WD) has pushed into the solid state storage market with a US$65 million acquisition of California based solid state drives maker SiliconSystems.

WD president and CEO, John Coyne, said WD’s storage industry leadership, worldwide infrastructure, and technical and financial resources would enable further growth in SiliconSystems’ existing markets and customer relationships, while its intellectual property and technical expertise would provide additional building blocks for future products to address emerging opportunities in WD’s existing markets.
 
“The combination will be modestly accretive to revenue and margins as a result of SiliconSystems’ existing position as a trusted supplier to the well-established US$400 million market for embedded solid-state drives.

“SiliconSystems’ intellectual property and technical expertise will significantly accelerate WD’s solid-state drive development programs for the netbook, client and enterprise markets, providing greater choice for our customers to satisfy all their storage requirements.”

According to Coyne, since its inception in 2002, SiliconSystems had sold millions of products to meet the high performance, high reliability and multi-year product lifecycle demands of the network-communications, industrial, embedded-computing, medical, military and aerospace markets.
 
Coyne said integration into WD begins immediately, with SiliconSystems now becoming known as the WD Solid-State Storage business unit, complementing WD’s existing branded products, Cpclient storage, consumer storage and enterprise storage business units.

Michael Hajeck, a founder and CEO of SiliconSystems, now senior vice president and general manager of WD’s solid-state storage business unit, said WD’s strong balance sheet, sales reach, and operations and logistics capabilities would allow the company to greatly accelerate penetration of its existing markets.

“Combining our engineering expertise with WD will enable us to develop new solid-state drives to broaden the overall product portfolio and address the emerging applications for solid-state storage in WD’s existing customer base.”