Western Digital Corp.’s recent acquisition of Carlsbad-based Arkeia Software Inc. builds on the company’s strategy to boost market share among small and medium-sized businesses.
The Irvine-based disk drive maker singled out that segment for growth about three years ago, when it discovered that about 10% of its external storage devices were sold for home offices or businesses.
“We made a commitment to invest and deliver products” in that segment, said Thomas Gallivan, vice president of marketing for Western Digital’s SMB Solutions group, speaking from London shortly after the deal for Arkeia was announced late last month.
Western Digital is a longtime leader in the consumer segment. It rolled out its first product geared for small businesses—the WD Sentinel DX4000, a server that provides storage backup for as many as 25 devices, along with remote access—in November 2011.
Arkeia makes data backup software, and provides other services such as data deduplication.
Its products are used on more than 150 platforms, including Windows and Linux. Deduplication is a more efficient and cost-effective way of crunching large file systems and networks of disk drives, protecting and restoring them.
Arkeia will be folded into Western Digital’s SMB unit, which now accounts for a small but growing part of its $12.4 billion in annual revenue.
“Arkeia will help us continue that momentum,” Gallivan said.
Western Digital will add nearly 30 Arkeia employees to its SMB unit, along with offices in Carlsbad and Paris.
Employees at Arkeia’s office in Los Altos have moved into Western Digital’s location in Mountain View.
Arkeia Chief Executive Bill Evans took the title of senior director of worldwide software marketing with Western Digital.
About Apple
The talk of softening demand for Apple Inc.’s iPhones leading up to its Jan. 23 earnings report turned out to be just talk.
The Cupertino-based consumer electronics maker sold a record 47.8 million iPhones in the December quarter, up 29% from a year earlier. The product line—Apple’s largest source of revenue—drove record quarterly sales of $54.5 billion and profits of $13.1 billion.
Wall Street still punished Apple shares, based on expectations that it would sell 50 million iPhones during the quarter. Shares fell by about 14% over two days and then stabilized at a market value of about $442 billion.
That was likely welcome news for a number of companies in OC, including Irvine-based chipmaker Broadcom Corp. and Anaheim-based printed circuit board maker Multi-Fineline Electronix Inc.
Apple was Broadcom’s largest customer in 2011, accounting for 13.1% of the company’s nearly $7.4 billion in revenue, according to the company.
Broadcom’s shares have sagged slightly since Apple’s report; the company had a market value of about $19.2 billion last week.
M-Flex makes circuit boards used in cell phones, smart phones and other mobile devices, and counts Apple as a customer. The company saw its shares plummet before Apple reported, dropping more than 21% on the day it announced it would scale back production, prompting some analysts to project a dip in iPhone sales.
Analyst Aaron Rakers of St. Louis-based Stifel Nicolaus & Co. noted that M-Flex generated 86% of its $201.5 million in sales in the September quarter from a single customer, believed to be Apple.
M-Flex’s shares continued downward until the day after the Apple report, but have regained some ground since then, with a market value of about $381 million.
Windows 8 Rooting Section
The first tallies for Windows 8 are in, although analyzing the numbers is a little tricky.
Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft Corp. said it sold more than 60 million licenses for its latest version of its PC operating system.
Windows sales jumped 24% to $5.8 billion in the December quarter, accounting for the lion’s share of the company’s $6.38 billion in sales.
Miscrosoft saw bigger revenue spikes on the releases of earlier versions of Windows, which hit the market when the PC industry was on better footing. Sales soared 76% when Windows 7 was launched, and rose 65% after the debut of Windows Vista.
Several OC companies have more than a rooting interest in the success of Windows 8, including Irvine-based consumer electronics brand Vizio Inc., which touted the new operating system in its PC lineup during the International Consumer Electronics Show.
Santa Ana-based Ingram Micro Inc., the world’s largest technology distributor, is generally in line for a boost from strong sales of any new major product launch.
Western Digital late last year released one of the first portable hard drives designed for Microsoft’s Windows To Go product, which enables corporate customers to access Windows 8 on a USB drive if they have an earlier version of the operating system.
Fountain Valley-based memory products maker Kingston Technology Inc. also released a product geared for corporate customers upgrading to Windows 8. The Kingston DataTraveler Workspace USB flash drive is certified for Windows To Go and allows users to boot up and operate Windows 8 from portable devices.
Anaheim-based Targus Inc. drew some buzz at CES with its Touch Pen, which enables touch-screen communication on older laptops running Windows 8 that lack that function.
