History (1998): Adaptec Acquires Ridge Technologies for $60 Million

Adaptec is continuing its acquisition activity.

After the major purchase of Symbios, it has now signed a letter of intent to acquire, for the sum of $21.2 million, Ridge Technologies, a San-Jose, CA-based company focused on storage solutions for NT servers.

Adaptec intends to form a new storage systems division, led by Ridge president Bob Graham, that combines Ridge with its own RAID and FC business, with the objective of delivering SAN.

Last March, Adaptec also bought the read channel ASIC technology of Analog Devices. The initial payment calls for an initial cash payment of $34 million, to be followed by $6 million for R&D during a transition period, and up to $20 million in royalties on sales by Adaptec of products incorporating ADI technology.

Incidentally, Adaptec’s acquisition of Symbios is still not final. The US Federal Trade Commission was, the last time we checked, filing a second formal request for information to study the anti-competitive implications of a group that will command a huge portion of the WW SCSI connection market.

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 124 on May 1998 from the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter.

Note: PMC-Sierra completes acquisition of Adaptec RAID channel business for $34 million in cash in 2010 and was then acquired by Microsemi in 2016, this later then being acquired by Microchip Technology in 2018.