Storage giant EMC has acquired backup company Data Domain for a massive $2.1 BACK in 2009, after winning in a bidding contest against competitor NetApp with an offer $200 million higher than the latter’s. Overall, the merger has worked out okay, according a recent interview with BJ Jenkins, the current head of the integrated unit.

“For EMC, it’s been a core competency for us to acquire companies and help them grow,” Jenkins said. “I think at the time of acquisition there was a lot of talk about ‘East Coast vs. West Coast’ culture and how would those two mesh? Were these products going to work together and grow, or were they going to cannibalize each other? Our experience has been that the growth has been great.”

Jenkins provided a few figures to help demonstrate his point. The main highlight is that Data Domain’s revenue ballooned from $1 billion to $2 billion between 2010 and 2011; a very big increase, especially when compared with the $485 million annual revenue the company reported prior to the EMC takeover.

There have also been some internal improvements, at least from an operational standpoint. Data Domain’s original number of 900 employees was doubled right after the deal upon integration with EMC’s backup business, and today that number has grown to 3,000. The very least this indicates a strong commitment by the storage giant to continue and invest in what, in retrospective, is turning out to be an increasingly profitable decision.

EMC is fleshing out its on-premise storage equipment and software as new trends such as big data disrupt the market. At the same time, cloud providers are doing the same in the remote datacenter. A more recent acquisition was that of Sharepoint 911, a Sharepoint services provider, by cloud host Rackspace.