Roundup: NetApp, Riverbed, Savvis

Here’s a roundup of some of some of this week’s headlines from the data center and hosting industry:

NetApp to acquire Bycast. NetApp (NTAP) announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Bycast, Inc. a privately held company from British Columbia, Canada. Bycast develops object-based storage software designed to manage petabyte-scale, globally distributed repositories of images, video and records for enterprises and service providers. With this acquisition NetApp will be able to enter new key verticals such as digital media, Web 2.0, healthcare, and cloud service providers. "The addition of Bycast's products enables NetApp to offer our enterprise customers and service provider partners a complementary solution that enables them to efficiently build and manage a very large-scale global repository of data central to many IT-as-a-service offerings," said Manish Goel, executive vice president, product operations at NetApp.  Additionally, NetApp will make Bycast's Vancouver headquarters a technology center for existing Bycast products and future product development. The acquisition is expected to close in May.

Riverbed named leader on Gartner report. Riverbed (RVBD) announced that Gartner has identified Riverbed in its recently announced report "Market Share: Application Acceleration Equipment, Worldwide, 4Q09 and 2009" as the worldwide market share leader for WOC (WAN Optimization Controller) Advanced Platform.  Riverbed achieved this status by capturing 34.5% of the market. In addition to a wealth of product and service offerings Riverbed recently unveiled its cloud direction with the announcement of the upcoming virtual Steelhead for the cloud solution.

Savvis selected by Nippon Airways. Savvis (SVVS) announced it has signed a contract to provide managed services for 70 of All Nippon Airways corporate web sites. The three year contract covers 90 domains and will provide managed hosting services as well as managed security services. The globally-available services will be managed from Savvis' Tokyo data center, which was recently expanded by approximately 3,700 square feet.  Choosing Savvis has enabled our IT team to move away from the day-to-day operation and management of IT infrastructure and enable our IT team to focus on other core business initiatives including ANA Sky Web," said Masahiro Tsukji, Assistant Manager of Tehnology and Architecture, Information Technology Services of All Nippon Airways.