A San Jose-based unit of Western Digital Corp. has acquired a maker of storage software for public and private cloud data centers.
Financial terms of HGST’s buy of Amplidata weren’t disclosed. The deal is expected to close this month.
The acquisition builds on Western Digital’s efforts to expand into higher margin data storage platforms and systems that can be scaled to address the explosive storage demand in cloud data centers. Amplidata specializes in object storage software, which manages data as objects rather than as file systems or data within sectors or blocks.
The 7-year-old company, which has major operations in Milpitas and Belgium, received a $10 million strategic investment from Western Digital’s venture capital arm in September.
HGST had been using Amplidata’s Himalaya software product to jointly develop a family of ultra-dense storage products to address the rapidly growing demand for data storage in public and private cloud data centers.
According to Framingham, Mass.-based market tracker IDC, the digital universe is doubling in size every two years. The data created and copied in 2013 was 4.4 zettabytes, which is expected to grow to 44 zettabytes by 2020.
One zettabtye is a billion terabytes.
Western Digital shares are down 3.3% in early afternoon trading, with a market value of about $24.3 billion.
The company is the world’s largest disk drive maker in units sold and revenue and is an emerging player in the higher-margin solid-state drive market geared for corporate customers.
