In September, flash company Virident Systems Inc. announced a $26 million round of venture financing and Nimble Storage, of San Jose, Calif., tapped $40.7 million in mezzanine funding.

They are part of what Robert W. Baird & Co. technology banker John Moriarty described as an emerging "wave of high-performance companies" in flash that could become candidates for buyouts or initial public offerings.

In addition to Virident and Nimble Storage, Moriarty points to Pure Storage Inc., Violin Memory Inc., Nimbus Data Systems Inc. and Fusionio Inc., which went public last year and has a market cap of nearly $3 billion.

"With big data, more virtualization and social media requiring Web-scale infrastructure, the amount of data being stored is bigger and bigger," Moriarty said. "It also needs to be higher performance."

He draws a parallel to a series of transactions from a previous spate of storage buyouts.

Storage company EMC Corp. outbid NetApp Inc. with a $2.2 billion takeout of data archiving company Data Domain Inc. Hewlett-Packard Co. trumped Dell Inc. with a $2.3 billion acquisition of data storage provider 3Par Inc. in 2010. Hitachi Ltd. purchased network storage equipment maker BlueArc Corp. in 2011

"They were also focused on handling large amounts of data at scale," Moriarty said.

Solid-state flash drives, which operate electronically, without moving parts, perform better than magnetic drives with spinning disks. "For fifty years all storage systems have been built around magnetic or mechanical disk drives," Nimble Storage CEO Suresh Vasudevan said. "This is the first time we have another form of stable storage media."

The process has been evolutionary.

Seven or eight years ago, Vasudevan said, flash memory became suitable for consumer devices such as iPhones, iPods and laptops. Apple Inc. was a driving force. It was appealing because drives were small, drew limited battery power and could survive handling and drops.

With widespread use in consumer devices, prices went down, which helped open the enterprise market. "The performance was always there but the price point was high enough that it was not commercially viable," he explained.

Nimble has raised $98 million, including the mezzanine funding from Sequoia Capital, Accel Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Artis Capital Management and GGV Capital in September.

Nimble has deployed close to 1,200 systems over the past two years, nearly half in the past six months.

"We believe that over the next decade in enterprise storage, which is roughly a $30 billion hardware market, not counting software, almost every product line will go from traditional disk drives to flash or a combination of flash and disk drives," Vasudevan said.

Along with its D round of financing, Virident has brought in new CEO Mike Gustafson, who led BlueArc when the company sold to Hitachi.

"Most of the enterprise customers today, the people who are the largest spenders on IT, and the movers of tech adoption, are thinking about this in a big enough way that every storage company has to think, 'What is my strategy?' " Gustafson noted.

He suggested flash's performance and other benefits would change the architecture of data centers, which have grappled with sprawling servers and high-power consumption as data usage has grown.

The demand could lead to partnerships between companies in different segments of networking and storage, Gustafson said, if not immediate M&A. The company has struck agreements with EMC's VMware, for example.

Virident has raised a total of $76 million. Mitsui Global Investments led its latest round, with Hercules Technology Growth Capital, Globespan Capital Partners, Sequoia Capital and Artiman Ventures.

Among other flash companies, Pure Storage raised $40 million in August from a group including Swiss venture capital firm Index Ventures, Greylock Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Sutter Hill Ventures, VMware and DataDomain.

Violin Memory had targeted an IPO in 2012, but now declined to comment. In April, the Mountain View, Calif., company raised $50 million and said that the investment valued the entire business at $800 million.

Salt Lake City flash company Fusionio went public in 2011. In its first year as a public company, revenue increased 82% to $360 million.

There are many others.

Vasudevan estimates that from 2008 to 2010, as many as 30 to 40 flash memory companies were started. Some have struggled to reach 100 product deployments. Many could flame out or be acquired, Vasudevan suggested.

In fact, some deals have already gone down. IBM Corp. bought Houston flash developer Texas Memory Systems in August. EMC announced the purchase of Israeli firm XtremIO in May.

IBM and EMC could still be acquirers, Moriarty said. And Dell has aggressively used M&A to build its services for corporations and other large organizations, going back to its $3.9 billion purchase of Perot Systems Corp. in 2009. The company won a bidding war for Quest Software Inc. earlier this year with a $2.4 billion offer.

Moriarty suggested that Hewlett-Packard and NetApp could also acquire flash companies.

With all that potential dealmaking, the industry could change in ... the blink of an eye.