NetApp Awaits EMC Response to Data Domain Bid

The bidding war for Data Domain stepped up this week after NetApp raised the stakes with rival EMC by making a new cash and stock offer of USD $1.9 billion.

It came two days after EMC's offer of USD $30 per share in a deal worth about USD $1.8 billion - around 20 per cent over the original USD $1.5 billion offered LINK last month by NetApp.

Data Domain, a market leader in data deduplication technology, manufactures a series of storage appliances that tightly integrates its dedupe technology with dedicated storage capacity.

It also offers software for data replication and virtual tape libraries.

Both EMC and NetApp currently offer data dedupe technology.

The increased offer from NetApp means that, if accepted, its offer would use up almost all it's US cash balance of USD $1.26 billion.

However, EMC is widely expected to counter with an all-cash offer.