Avago to Acquire LSI
by Kristian Vättö on December 16, 2013 2:50 PM EST
Within the last year, there have been several major acquisitions in the storage industry. Western Digital acquired STEC, Virident, and Velobit; SanDisk acquired SMART; and now Toshiba is taking over OCZ's assets. With two weeks of 2013 left, there's still time for one more: Avago, a company which supplies a variety of semiconductors, is acquiring LSI for $6.6 billion in cash.
Avago may not be a familiar name to most of you but there is a good chance that you own a device with an Avago chip in it. The iPhone 5 along with multiple other Apple devices uses an LTE duplexer module and power amplifier from Avago but these are chips that don't usually get much attention. In terms of the storage industry, Avago's focus is on the enterprise side and they make Fibre Channel transceivers and Fiber Optics for instance.
For Avago, the motive behind the acquisition is LSI's IP and know-how. With LSI's product portfolio Avago will be able to expand their offerings in the storage industry and move to a more vertically integrated business model. As for LSI, I've heard that part of the motivation was shareholders' dissatisfaction with the company and especially its growth opportunities. Avago opens plenty of doors since they have expertise in multiple fields of semiconductors, which may be useful in the future as the storage industry becomes more and more complex.
I'll be speaking with LSI tomorrow to find out more about the deal but I'm guessing LSI will, at least in the near future, continue to operate normally.
Source: LSI Press Release
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bigi - Monday, December 16, 2013 - link
LSI purchased 3ware not long ago.iwod - Monday, December 16, 2013 - link
I really like LSI. Sad to see them go.dew111 - Tuesday, December 17, 2013 - link
This just blew my mind. I work at Agilent Technologies, across the street from LSI. Avago spun out from us, and now is buying the guys across the street. Small world.boe_d - Friday, March 13, 2015 - link
Why are the Avago / LSI RAID 16i and 24i controllers so obsolete? They haven't released a 16i or 24i raid controller in AGES. They need a 16i and 24i 12Gb/S PCIe 3.0 RAID controller with 2GB of cache. Ideally it would have an optional 2 card width model with SIGNIFICANT heat radiators. Avago has a HBA 16i unit but that isn't the same as a RAID controller.Their 9260 and 9280 do not have nearly enough cache or bandwidth for modern, fast drives. Other RAID manufacturers have modern 16i units - I hate to switch to another manufacturer as I've used LSI in my servers for many years but if they have given up on the LSI line it is time to move on.