The US$1.1B takeover bid announced last week by storage solutions heavyweight SanDisk (SNDK.O) for Utah-based Fusion-io (FIO.N) has many suggesting this signals SanDisk’s ambitions to dominate the enterprise segment of the storage market. For a company that posted revenue of just over US$6B last year, this is a big deal. The financial markets responded favourably to the news, but time will tell if the technology acquired helps SanDisk reach their goal.

SanDisk currently owns a significant market presence in the consumer space with a broad array of flash memory and solid-state drive (SSD) products. The addition of Fusion-io, who lists customers such as Apple, Facebook, HP, and IBM, suggests that grabbing more of the enterprise market is a key component to their growth strategy. While this may be a shrewd business move, will the IP that SanDisk acquires from Fusion-io help expand SanDisk’s enterprise market presence?

A comparison of patent portfolios for the two companies suggests this to be the case. SanDisk has a broad patent portfolio of about 3500 US grants and applications covering semiconductor fabrication, packaging, circuit design, and memory systems. This is not surprising. The founders of SanDisk were pioneers in nonvolatile memory (NVM) technology. How does Fusion-io fit in? We see their IP clustered in an area dominated by memory systems patents covering data handling, encoding, error correction, cache, controllers, and host interfacing (about 160 US grants and applications highlighted in the landscape below).