Google Inc. and Amazon.com’s recent entrance into the emerging solid-state drive market doesn’t appear to pose an imminent threat to Irvine-based memory products maker Western Digital Corp. or its Cupertino rival, Seagate Technology Inc.
Google and Amazon entered the segment a few months ago, while Western Digital established an SSD foundation with its 2012 acquisition of Hitachi Global Storage Technologies Inc. for $4.8 billion.
Google Cloud storage and the offering from Amazon Web Services are targeting small and medium-sized businesses, a market Western Digital hasn’t aggressively targeted with SSDs, which use chips instead of spinning disks to store data.
SSDs are expected to eventually replace the majority of hard drives, especially in the business segment. Western Digital picked a more lucrative spot in the market by focusing its SSD offerings on large companies.
“This is not likely to be a big problem,” Joseph Gacinga said in a recent post on investor website Motley Fool. “Western Digital and Seagate mainly sell their cloud storage products to large organizations.”
The developing SSD market is still small compared to the maturing hard disk drive market, a segment Western Digital leads in units sold and revenue.
Its San Jose-based subsidiary, HGST, forecast SSD sales to hit 5.8 million units in the 12 months through June, generating global sales of about $3.8 billion.
Western Digital sold about 60.4 million hard drive units in the March quarter alone.
The company has long eyed the developing segment for growth, estimating that SSD sales will top $6.7 billion by 2017, with a compound annual growth rate of 21%.
It bolstered its position with a trio of SSD acquisitions last year, paying $340 million for Santa Ana-based sTec Inc. and $685 million for Milpitas-based Virident Systems Inc., and acquiring Lincoln, Mass.-based VeloBit Inc. on undisclosed terms.
Toba Investment
Irvine-based Toba Capital, OC’s largest venture capital firm, led a $4 million investment round for a San Francisco software maker.
Seal Software Ltd.’s analytics and search software, billed as providing transparency in contract terms and clauses, is used by hundreds of companies, including Fortune 500 financial firms, Seal said.
Most of the proceeds have been earmarked for bolstering sales, according to Toba principal Wilder Ramsey.
“It’s one of those companies that came out of nowhere that you see an opportunity for a business to build up a whole new category,” Ramsey said. “Any large business has more legal obligations and contracts than they can parcel out reliably.”
Toba’s initial fund has grown to more than $300 million since former Quest Software Chief Executive Vinny Smith launched the firm in 2012.
3-D News Feeds?
Engineers behind the lucrative Bloomberg news terminal have incorporated the Oculus Rift into the device to provide users with a 3-D experience in navigating business news, stock tickers and market updates through endless streams of data that can be pulled into view at a moment’s notice.
The company debuted the developing product last month at the Bloomberg Next Big Thing Summit in Sausalito.
If you’re more into cartoons than stock indexes, you might find production studio Tool’s riff on Irvine-based startup Oculus VR Inc.’s breakthrough virtual reality headset more to your liking.
Tool, which has offices in L.A., New York and London, developed an application to explore the world of the “South Park” Comedy Central show in which users encounter characters walking the streets and passing by locations of interest from the show.
