IT, acquisitions, Storage

DDUP Rejects EMC, Suit Filed

Wade Roush 6/16/09

The board of directors at Santa Clara, CA-based Data Domain (NASDAQ: DDUP) yesterday recommended that shareholders reject a $1.8 billion, $30-per-share cash tender offer from Hopkinton, MA-based EMC (NYSE: EMC). The board of the data deduplication software company stuck to its earlier decision to pursue a merger with Sunnyvale, CA-based NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP), which is also offering $30 per share in cash and stock but whose offer is valued at $1.9 billion overall. Meanwhile, two law firms said yesterday that they filed a class-action shareholder lawsuit against Data Domain in Delaware on June 12; the firms, Bernstein Litowitz Berger & Grossmann LLP of New York, NY, and Grant & Eisenhofer, P.A., of Wilmington, DE, said in a press release that the board members at Data Domain are “breaching their fiduciary duties to their shareholders by refusing to negotiate with a potential acquirer, EMC Corporation…and for agreeing to sell Data Domain to NetApp without taking any steps to maximize the price paid to Data Domain’s shareholders.”

Wade Roush is Xconomy's chief correspondent. You can e-mail him at wroush@xconomy.com, call him at (617) 252-7323, or follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/wroush.