Flexera is going to buy minor parts of NetApp for roughly $100 million. The components stem from NetApp’s acquisitions of Spot and CloudCheckr.
NetApp bought Spot in 2020 and CloudCheckr a year later. Both parties offered solutions to optimize cloud usage. Spot in particular aims to eliminate misconfigurations and recognize other vulnerabilities, while CloudCheckr‘s goal has mainly been to reduce costs for organizations. These solutions were integrated into NetApp’s portfolio after the latter’s acquisitions, although some of Spot’s offerings launched separately.
Downsizing
Flexera’s objectives match those of Spot and CloudCheckr. This is in contrast to NetApp, where the emphasis is on unified data storage and a corresponding infrastructure which it is seeking to popularize among enterprises. The plans around this are particularly ambitious and aim to, among other things, standardize a so-called global metadata namespace for hybrid cloud environments. You can read exactly what that looks like in our extensive article below:
Read more: NetApp builds an Intelligent Data Infrastructure: what is it?
In addition, NetApp sells hardware based on all-flash storage, optimized for intensive AI workloads. It also offers services on various hyperscalers to complete such tasks in a public cloud.
In short, NetApp has more than enough of a business case in these areas to safely get rid of some extraneous parts. Flexera, majority owned by private equity Thoma Bravo, may see more upside in the components to be sold. After a frenzy period in 2022, investment companies have been looking for acquisitions to keep the money rolling in these days for some time, as Bloomberg rightly points out.
Also read: Why Thoma Bravo almost always places the right bets on tech