Netapp acquires the start-up Spot to reduce the cloud bill

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After Talon and CloudJumper, storage solutions provider Netapp completes a third acquisition in less than three months. Acquired for an amount that would approach $ 450 million, the young Israeli startup Spot has designed an AI-based solution to monitor the availability and pricing of supplier cloud overcapacity to allow companies to benefit from it at a good price.

Spot CEO Amiram Shachar (

The bulimia of acquisitions continues for Netapp, now valued at nearly $ 10 billion. After getting its hands in March 2020 on Talon, specializing in storage in cache mode, then a month later on CloudJumper to strengthen its position in RDS, VDI and Windows Virtual Desktop solutions, the Californian giant of the storage sets its sights. The amount of the repurchase has not been officially indicated but, according to an anonymous source interviewed by Calcalist, this transaction, which must be finalized before the end of the year, would amount to 450 million dollars.

Founded in 2015 by Amiram Shachar, its CEO, this young Israeli startup has designed a machine learning-based solution to monitor and predict the availability and pricing of excess cloud capacities from suppliers (AWS, Google, Microsoft, etc.). The goal ? Enable businesses to best manage, provision and orchestrate their cloud resources while benefiting from the best possible prices. Spot counts among its customers Qualcomm, Samsung, Sony, Unilever, Ticketmaster, etc. By taking over this start-up, Netapp is accelerating its transformation from a “simple” storage solution provider to the cloud data services market (notably via its Cloud Volumes ONTAP and Storage solutions available in GCP and Azure environments) with higher added value and where margins are higher.

Accelerate the transformation to cloud data services

“In today’s public clouds, speed is the next step. However, wastage in public clouds caused by inactive and over-provisioned resources is a significant and growing problem for customers, slowing adoption of public cloud, ”said Anthony Lye, senior vice president and general manager public cloud services from NetApp in a statement. “The combination of Netapp’s leading block, file and object shared storage platform and Spot’s compute platform will provide a leading solution for continuous cost optimization for all workloads, both cloud native. and inherited. “.

This is not the first acquisition by an Israeli company for Netapp which had already sketched Cognigo (data protection and compliance) in 2019, Plexistor (NVDIMM persistent memory to supplement flash in storage environments) in 2017 and, before, Topio and Onaros in 2010. Spot, which has managed to raise 52 million dollars since its creation, has 150 employees spread across Tel Aviv, London and San Francisco.