Merger news
CenturyLink grabbed Cognilytics
After 4 years of partnering with C-Link (Savvis) for DR-as-a-service, CenturyLink decided to acquire DataGardens. DG also white-labels its DRaaS to BCM and others. DG's CEO, Geoff Hayward, blogged about it here.
There were 3 other transactions in the cloud data storage and backup space. That sector was in some need of consolidation since the last two years saw some big failures. Interesting to note that these transactions involve companies with a specific target market. They wrote a bestseller.
eFolder acquired Cloudfinder [slide deck]. eFolder was founded in 2002 as a folder syncing service, sold primarily via channel partners. "Cloudfinder products provide backup, instant full-text search, restoration and reporting for business-to-business (B2B) cloud services, including Office 365, Google Apps and Salesforce." That is its differentiation. (You have to have one - or a lot of customers.)
"Cloudfinder is the only company that provides a unified backup and instant full-text search of cloud data across differing cloud services. From one user interface, businesses can backup, search, restore and get a data overview across multiple cloud services." [press release]
EMC bought Spanning and 2 other companies to add to its cloud portfolio, according to this press release. "Spanning is a leading provider of subscription-based backup and recovery for "born in the cloud" applications and data. Spanning solutions prevent business interruption due to data loss in Google Apps and Salesforce.com (a solution for Microsoft Office 365 will be available in the first half of 2015)." Lots of jockeying to add backup and data protection to what seems to be the big 3 business cloud services - Google Apps, Salesforce and Office365.
Carbonite will acquire MailStore for about $20 million. This acquisition provides Carbonite two things: (1) global expansion assitsance; and (2) email archiving and indexing solutions. This is a like adding fries to a hot dog for Carbonite (being the hot dog). Backup is generic, but the actual data to backup spans many areas - services, desktops, laptops, mobile devices, email servers, cloud apps, etc. I haven't heard of one service that handles it all.
According to CP Online, "Datto on Dec. 11 may have ignited that trend with the acquisition of Massachusetts-based Backupify." Like Carbonite, Datto is a hybrid backup and disaster recovery platform. Backupify is claiming that this will create the first total protection platform. A reminder from them that "data protection plans must be as fluid as the information flowing in and out of the companies that rely on them. As more critical data continues to move to the cloud, companies will demand more diversity as they decide which workloads to protect and where."
"With more than 2 million business customers and nearly 4 petabytes of data under management, Backupify is the largest automated data protection solution for the most popular online services including Salesforce, Google Apps, Smartsheet, Facebook, Twitter and more." It's unique advantage being the SaaS data protection - and its size.
