NetApp, Novell, and Greylock Top List of Boston-San Francisco Tech Tidbits

What do Boston and the San Francisco Bay Area have in common today? Certainly not the weather. Tech news is a different story, though. We spotted a trio of headlines involving firms with a strong presence in both regions:

—Sunnyvale, CA-based storage and data management firm NetApp (NASDAQ: [[ticker:NTAP]]) announced it is buying Akorri Networks of Littleton, MA, in an all-cash transaction expected to close in NetApp’s fourth fiscal quarter. The firm did not reveal how much it paid for Akorri, which provides analytical software for data management in shared IT environments.

—Greylock Partners, a venture firm with offices in Cambridge, MA, and Menlo Park, CA, announced it is adding Frank Slootman as a partner at the firm. Slootman was previously CEO of Data Domain, a Santa Clara, CA-based data storage company acquired by EMC (NYSE: [[ticker:EMC]]) in 2009. He’ll work with entrepreneurs and will invest in data infrastructure deals for the firm, particularly in the virtualization, networking, storage, cloud, and enterprise application sectors, according to the announcement.

—There are conflicting reports on CPTN Holdings—a consortium of Microsoft, Oracle, Apple, and EMC—that formed to buy intellectual property from Waltham, MA-based networking management software maker Novell (NASDAQ: [[ticker:NOVL]]) for $450 million, alongside Seattle-based Attachmate’s $2.2 billion cash acquisition of the firm in November. (Attachmate is owned by a private investor group with a strong San Francisco presence.) PCWorld reported yesterday that a filing to form the CPTN consortium was withdrawn late last year, but a statement Microsoft sent to InformationWeek and other media outlets said the deal is still moving along. Open source software advocates are concerned that CPTN will gain patents that include open source software elements that could shut out competitors.

Author: Erin Kutz

Erin Kutz has a background in covering business, politics and general news. She holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Boston University. Erin previously worked in the Boston bureau of Reuters, where she wrote articles on the investment management and mutual fund industries. While in college, she researched for USA Today reporter Jayne O’Donnell’s book, Gen Buy: How Tweens, Teens and Twenty-Somethings Are Revolutionizing Retail. She also spent a semester in Washington, DC, reporting Capitol Hill stories as a correspondent for two Connecticut newspapers and interning in the Money section of USA Today, where she assisted with coverage on the retail and small business beats. Erin got her first taste of reporting at Boston University’s independent student newspaper, as a city section reporter and fact checker and editor of the paper’s weekly business section.