NetApp Acquired Discreetly ionGrid

Included in the press release announcing the results of its third fiscal quarter 2013, NetApp published discreetly these three sentences: "NetApp has completed the acquisition of ionGrid, a privately-held software company based in Mountain View, CA. The acquisition provides NetApp customers with a secure, simple to use solution for accessing enterprise file shares from mobile devices. Financial terms of the acquisition are not being disclosed at this time."

On ionGrid’s blog, Nick Triantos, cofounder and CEO at ionGrid, Inc., confirmed the deal:" After weighing all the growth options for our company, which included raising venture capital from well-known VCs, we chose to become a part of NetApp because it would help us achieve our key milestones faster."

Born two year ago, ionGrid’s flagship product is Stratos – formerly Nexus Enterprise – a native iOS solution that enables secure mobile access to enterprise content, applications and data behind the firewall. It authorizes to securely access company file servers, SharePoint sites, and other content repositories from iPad and iPhone, without copying data to the cloud. You can view, present, and annotate documents even if you’re offline, and access business applications and other intranet web sites using Active Directory credentials. It’s like Dropbox for enterprise to sync and share files.

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ionGrid was founded two years ago by former Nvidia executives Nick Triantos, Ben de Waal, Gary King, and Michael Rothrock. Angel investors include Simon Crosby, CTO of Bromium and founder and former CTO of XenSource, now part of Citrix, and Nigel Stokes, chairman of AppZero and former CEO of DataMirror, acquired by IBM in 2007.

Comments

The acquisition of this tiny start-up practically unknown in the storage industry is not going to change the face of big company NetApp.

You can imagine in the future the possibility for its enterprise cusstomers to access (or maybe also to manage and monitor?) their NAS through smartphones.

That the thirteenth firm acquired by NetApp since 2000, the most recent one being last November start-up CacheIQ in more interesting caching solutions for file-based storage.