EMC on Monday increased its offer to acquire storage vendor Data Domain from US$1.8 billion to $2.1 billion in its latest effort to shove aside original bidder NetApp.
The all-cash offer is “clearly superior” to NetApp’s US$1.9 billion proposal, which includes stock and cash, EMC CEO Joe Tucci said in a letter to Data Domain’s board that EMC publicly released. EMC is also ready to close the deal within two weeks, which is faster than NetApp, Tucci added.
NetApp had originally entered an acquisition agreement with Data Domain in late May, but EMC subsequently moved with counteroffers in an effort to squelch the deal.
Also on Monday, NetApp announced that it had cleared all necessary U.S. regulatory hurdles to proceed with the acquisition.
Data Domain makes deduplication storage systems, which pinpoint redundant data and help companies save disk space. The company and NetApp could not immediately be reached Monday.
