It remains to be seen
how long IBM Corp.'s (NYSE:IBM) suit against David Johnson, the company's former VP of corporate development, will impede him from taking up his full responsibilities in a similar role at rival Dell Inc. (NASDAQ:DELL).
Meanwhile, there's a
new report from the 451 Group to remind us that the competition between the two companies does extend to M&A. The report describes Dell's interest in storage acquisitions, an area where IBM has bought extensively, and looks at a number of potential targets for Dell, whose biggest deal to date was the $1.4 billion purchase of storage systems vendor Equallogic in 2007.
Analyst Henry Baltazar throws out numerous names of potential targets, including those of 3PAR (NASDAQ:PAR),
CommVault (NASDAQ:CVMT) and even NetApp (NASDAQ:NTAP), currently contending with EMC Corp. (NYSE:EMC) to buy Data Domain (NASDAQ:DDUP).
So does Johnson know what IBM thinks about these companies? Put it this way: He probably wouldn't have been doing his job if they hadn't been somewhere on the IBM watchlist. Still, the heart of his assignment was really the transaction-execution part, with the deepest knowledge about the technology and its fit (or lack thereof) with IBM possessed by the folks in the relevant business units.
If and when Johnson takes up his new duties at Dell, he'll inevitably be discussing these kinds of targets with
Brad Anderson, SVP for Dell's Enterprise Product Group -- who, like his counterparts at IBM, probably already knows a lot about them. Anderson joined Dell in 2005 from another fierce rival, Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE:HPQ). -
Kenneth Klee
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