Hopkinton

Firing the latest salvo in a bidding brawl, data storage company EMC Corp. boosted its offer for Data Domain which has already accepted a lower bid from NetApp Inc.

EMC's new offer of $33.50 a share in cash, announced Monday, is $3.50 per share above its previous offer and values Data Domain Inc. at $2.1 billion.

Santa Clara, Calif.-based Data Domain has already accepted a sweetened bid of $30 a share in cash and stock from NetApp, which said Monday its board would examine in options.

Microsoft has tapped RSA, the security division of Hopkinton, Mass.-based EMC, to help protect its enterprise customers from sensitive information leaks.

The companies announced a collaboration where RSA's Data Loss Prevention (DLP) technology will be used in Microsoft's Rights Management technology found in Windows Server 2008, which helps guard digital information from unauthorized users and security threats from both inside and outside a firewall.

VMware Inc. abruptly replaced co-founder Diane Greene as chief executive Tuesday and lowered its sales outlook, triggering alarms that pounded the business software maker's shares to their lowest depths since the company's lucrative public offering 11 months ago.

Former Microsoft Corp. executive Paul Maritz took over as VMware's new leader. In the past few months, Maritz had been running a division of VMware's controlling shareholder, data storage specialist EMC Corp.

Data storage provider EMC Corp. said Tuesday it would acquire Iomega Corp. for $213 million (EU135.7 million), expanding EMC's offerings targeting small businesses and consumers.

The price is a 20 percent increase over EMC's initial bid of $178 million (EU113.4 million), or $3.25 per share. Iomega, a San Diego-based storage company best known for the Zip drive, had rejected that offer earlier this year, calling it inferior to a proposed all-stock transaction that Iomega had reached in December with a stockholder.