History 1999: Big Deal in SCSI with Adaptec to Buy DPT

Adaptec has signed a letter of intent to acquire the privately-held Distributed Processing Technology (DPT) for $235 million.

The price includes cash for the outstanding shares of DPT, plus the costs of assuming the company’s stock option plan.

This transaction reinforces Adaptec’s continuing effort to focus on the SCSI interface, a course mapped out by COB Larry Boucher, following the company’s difficulties, including its failed attempt (for anti-trust reasons) to acquire Symbios Logic.

The decision to focus only on SCSI was highly controversial at the time – after all, ignoring FC seemed a risky proposition, but seems to have paid off, given the company’s improved pros-pects.

Adaptec and DPT are both major SCSI players, but their activities seem fairly complementary:

“DPT brings tremendous experience in the RAID market, broadens our customer base into Unix, and enhances our complementary customer relationship,” said Adaptec’s COO Bob Schultz.

Adaptec is more oriented toward embedded RAIDs, DPT towards external RAIDs, and has begun to test the SAN waters, with a recent product, the Smart-RAID VI, a PCI controller that supports the Ultra160 SCSI interface but can also be upgraded to FC.

The acquirer is well aware of the RAID expertise of its latest acquisition, since if the DPT brand name will disappear, its Maitland, FL HQs will become the center of the group’s RAID activity. At least this time, the deal is unlikely to be challenged by the US FTC, since the 2 companies are still far behind the RAID controller board leader, American Megatrends.

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 143 on December 1999 from the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter.