SMART Global Holdings moves to enter the embedded computing market

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SMART Global Holdings has announced two acquisitions as it looks to enter the embedded computing market: Artesyn Embedded Computing, the embedded computing business of Artesyn Embedded Technologies, and Inforce Computing.

“These acquisitions represent another milestone in SMART Global’s strategy to drive growth and earnings through synergistic M&A,” said Ajay Shah, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of SMART Global Holdings.

“These will become part of the SMART Specialty Computing business as the products and customers added are complementary to our existing business, expand SMART’s target market opportunity and enable the company to cross-sell its existing products to new customers.”

Artesyn Embedded Computing is a private company based in Arizona. The company is a provider of embedded computing solutions based on open standards such as ATCA, VMEbus, PCI Express and computer-on-module, and has a large portfolio of long-life-cycle products, strong supplier partnerships and long-standing customer relationships.

“Artesyn EC will strengthen our product offerings and high-reliability technologies in embedded computing requirements,” explained Mr. Shah, “We are also excited to have Artesyn EC's experienced engineering, sales and marketing teams join SMART Global.”

As part of the SMART Specialty Compute and Storage Solutions (SCSS) line of business it will serve a broad range of OEM customers in the defence, industrial IoT (IIoT), edge computing, and communications space.

Artesyn Embedded Computing will become SMART Embedded Computing.

The deal values Artesyn EC at $80 million.

SMART Global Holdings also announced that it has acquired Inforce Computing, a privately held provider of modular embedded computing and IoT solutions targeting applications in medical imaging, video conferencing, AR/VR computing, IIoT, commercial drones and robotics.

Based in California, the company is a fast-growing developer of high-performance production-ready ARM ISA-based embedded computing platforms for IoT applications. Enhanced by key partnerships with companies such as Qualcomm and Marvell, Inforce designs and manufactures Snapdragon and Marvell processor-based system-on-modules (SOMs), single board computers (SBCs), and development kits.

“Joining SMART is a strong next step in the progression of Inforce,” said Jagat Acharya, Chief Executive Officer of Inforce.

“By joining SMART, we will be able to scale up and serve our OEM customers’ high-volume needs through SMART’s global reach and to accelerate our investments in sales, marketing, engineering and new product development.”

SMART has agreed to acquire Inforce for a total of $12 million. Inforce will also become a part of SCSS.