Western Digital's subsidiary HGST recently purchased its supplier of flash storage hardware and software, Virident, for USD685 million in cash. In a September 12 interview HGST's new Senior Vice President and Virident's CEO Mike Gustafson expressed his excitement to continue leading Virident's "very high growth trajectory."

Speaking to Forbes contributor Peter Cohan, he said,  "Since February we have added 90 people - bringing our total to under 200; I thought we would grow by a factor of two to four in 2013 and we have roughly doubled in the first nine months; our revenue is up 200% on a year-to-year basis." Gustafson earlier said to Cohan in Frebruary that Seagate's confidence in Virident's growth led the former to sign "an OEM deal between the two companies that will let customers buy Virident's product through Seagate's channels." Seagate bought a USD40 million stake in flash storage hardware and software supplier.

Market research firm IDC was more conservative. IDC saw that the market for Peripheral Component Interconnect Express cards (PCIe) would be growing at 31% annually from USD1.1 billion this year to USD2.4 billion in 2016. Virident makes the high-speed data cards.