SiliconBeat

NetApp asked its shareholders to approve a proposal to allow a “one-time option exchange” for its employees at a special meeting held April 21. The measure was approved, according to a filing May 5 that detailed the terms of the exchange program. What wasn’t known until today was just how close the company came to losing that vote.

In its annual 10-K filing with the SEC Wednesday, the Sunnyvale supplier of data storage systems and services revealed the vote totals. The number of shares voted in favor Read the rest of this entry »

NetApp, the Sunnyvale network storage company that reported its second straight quarterly sales drop Wednesday and its first net loss since 2002, is set to buy itself some growth with the announcement that it has reached a deal to acquire Data Domain, a Santa Clara maker of data-duplication storage appliances used for backing up, archiving and disaster recovery of data.

The deal, which involves an as-yet unspecified combination of cash and stock, reportedly values Data Domain at Read the rest of this entry »

Network storage equipment maker NetApp will pay the U.S. government $128 million in a settlement reached through the Department of Justice, according to a regulatory filing. The settlement was reached on behalf of the General Services Administrations and related to an investigation into NetApp’s compliance with price reduction clauses in some of its contracts with the GSA between August 1997 and February 2005. NetApp previously recorded the charge during its fiscal 2009 third quarter in anticipation of the settlement.

Last year the company received a subpoena from Read the rest of this entry »

Intel grabbed headlines today announcing its first-ever option exchange program that helped balance its implementation of an across-the-board salary freeze. But joining Intel today in announcing a plan to reprice employee stock option plan was NetApp, the Sunnyvale provider of network storage appliances, which is asking its shareholders to vote on a plan to reprice options with exercise prices of $22 or higher.

In its argument in favor of the measure, NetApp’s board said that Read the rest of this entry »

NetApp, the Sunnyvale maker of network storage equipment, canceled its upcoming user conference — NetApp Accelerate — scheduled for February “in response to customer feedback about increasing restrictions on corporate travel,” according to a release Monday afternoon.

“We had more customer interest in NetApp Accelerate than we anticipated,” said Elisa  Steele, senior vice president, Corporate Marketing, at NetApp. “But those same customers told us their travel budgets were being cut and it was difficult to commit to attending in today’s climate of economic uncertainty. For those reasons, we decided to cancel this year’s program.”

People who had already registered Read the rest of this entry »

Employees at NetApp got a for-your-eyes-only memo Tuesday afternoon after the close of market that the company asked them not to forward to anyone. We found it as an attachment to an SEC filing.

The memo told informed employees that NetApp was announcing its plans to raise more than $1 billion in cash through the offering of convertible notes, according to the filing. “I am sure many of you are asking why we would do that if we have more than $1B in cash on hand today,” says the memo, though who the “I” is is not clear. Read the rest of this entry »

NetApp, the company formerly known as Network Appliance, is hoping some of the green connected to a Guiness record-breaking stunt in Austria rubs off. The company put out a release today about a special exhibition that took place in Voralberg, a state in western Austria at which participants “21 bicycle stations to produce over 12.9 megawatt hours of energy… enough to power more than 12,000 average American homes for an entire year.” (Why Austrians would want to power American homes wasn’t made clear.) Read the rest of this entry »

Network Appliance, the Sunnyvale maker of network storage tools, says it will now be known by its former nickname, NetApp. It says it’s even changing its name legally, although they were still known to the SEC by its original name the last time we checked Monday morning.

In a press release, the company says the “new brand identity” — undertaken after “extensive market research and testing” — “crystallizes the company’s promise to the market and unifies the look of and the experience everyone has with NetApp.”

Read the rest of this entry »

If your stock has dropped by almost half this year, and your profits just dropped by 37 percent in the most recent quarter, you probably have three options for dealing with this situation.

A. Sell the company and go sit on a beach.

B. Buy another company with your piles of cash and make your earnings so complicated for years to come that no knows how well you’re really doing.

C. Buy back a mind boggling amount of stock.

According to an 8-K filed on Wednesday, Network Appliance, the Sunnyvale digital storage company, has selected option C. The company said it would buy back $1 billion worth of stock, in addition to the $200 million authorization it still has left.

Now, let’s do some math. The company’s stock closed Wednesday at $24.16 per share, giving it a market cap of $8.78 billion. That would essentially allow the company to buy back about 13.7 percent of its stock.