Rackable quietly purchased SGI from bankruptcy court for a mere $42.5 million. It’s a sad end for SGI, a once great computing pioneer that missed the x86 and Window’s revolution. For Rackable, this gives them access to SGI’s high performance computing products and research and development in the areas of power, cooling, visualization, and storage.
While Rackable is known for their servers and storage portfolio, they have entered the world of green datacenters with their Eco-Logical chassis. As the datacenter market is rapidly changing, the competitive walls are surely closing-in on Rackable. After-all, who would expect Rackable to survive a battle against Oracle, Cisco, HP, and IBM? At least that’s what the big boys want you to think.
Rackable’s portfolio compares quite favorably to the others in the marketplace; albeit without the marketing and services flash of their larger rivals. Additionally, Rackable has some unique products with their CloudRack and CloudRack C2 product lines achieving remarkable density and power/cooling ratios. Heck, Rackable even overs a data center in a container (ICE Cube).
It seems to me with all these goodies, Rackable is a legitimate takeover target. As of this posting, their market cap is around $161 Million. That’s a far cry from the billions Oracle Spent on Sun or Dell’s current $23 Billion valuation. If Brocade, Juniper, Siemens (Extreme Networks), Adtran, Turin, or more wanted into the “unified computing” space, then why not Rackable? Or, does private equity / venture capitalist firms show some vision and combine the assets of several companies together to create a viable challenger to Cisco, HP, and IBM?
M&A speculation is always a fascinating discussion, but for now I’ll say goodbye to a once great visionary company (SGI) while tipping the cap to Rackable for taking advantage of the current economic state of affairs.
PlatenReport 