How other companies have handled past acquisitions might provide some insight into how these company mergers and their products will fare long term.

Two good examples are EMC's purchases of Data General and VMware. The Data General line of midrange storage products became EMC's Clariion line of midrange disk arrays and they are now considered the standard in midrange arrays by many enterprise shops. Similarly, you can't read a magazine that doesn't include some mention of VMware and which appears destined for success.

However, users understand the inherent value proposition of these products. While the EMC name gives users a sense of security, users also recognize they don't need buy EMC's entire product portfolio to realize them.

Buying VMWare does not mean you need to purchase a Clariion CX-3 array or vice versa. Integration of these products with other EMC product lines remains largely restricted to the PowerPoint slides on the laptops of EMC sales reps.

So do these latest acquisitions by IBM, HDS and NetApp meet these criteria? From a technology perspective, absolutely. Both Softek's Transparent Data Migration Facility (TDMF) and Topio's Data Protection Suite (TDPS) provide heterogeneous replication services at the host and network levels respectively, while Archivas provides unalterable digital archiving that can use any vendor's storage on the back end.