LSI Acquires SandForce For $322 Million

Just when everyone is expecting Intel to make this exact announcement, LSI Corporation announces acquisition of SandForce for 322 million dollars US which opens up an entirely new market space for LSI, a company that has excelled purely through enterprise interest for some time now.

Official release news can be found here  and we hope to bring word from both companies once the dust settles a bit.

The acquisition of SandForce will bring LSI that much closer to the consumer market space although they are no stranger to SandForce as it stands with their WarpDrive PCIe SSD being ‘SandForce Driven’.  The acquisition does amazing things for LSI’s competitive position where one has to wonder the direction they will follow with respect to their ability to adapt their own strengths with SandForce to market their own new brand of consumer products.

To be very clear, there has been absolutely no mention of any entry into the consumer market but how can we fail to mention something that just makes sense.

From the release:

“Flash-based solutions are critical for accelerating application performance in servers, storage and client devices,” said Abhi Talwalkar, LSI president and chief executive officer. “Adding SandForce’s technology to LSI’s broad storage portfolio is consistent with our mission to accelerate storage and networking. The acquisition represents a significant, rapidly growing market opportunity for LSI over the next several years.”

Michael Raam, SandForce president and CEO, said, “The combination of SandForce and LSI allows us to deliver differentiated solutions in the PCIe flash adapter segment by tightly integrating flash memory and management. In addition, leveraging our flash storage processors with LSI’s comprehensive IP portfolio and leading-edge silicon design platforms will lead to innovative solutions.”

For those familiar with LSI and SandForce, it can’t go without mention that LSI seems to be taking all the right steps to get just the right people on board.  It wasn’t so long ago that LSI purchased SiliconStor Technology at which time SandForces present Director of Marketing Kent Smith was moved from SiliconStor to LSI in the transition.  Kent, who has since left LSI for SandForce has just received news that he is once again a LSI employee!  Congrats Kent.