Mergers and acquisitions make companies stronger, and that is what happened to one of the Boston area’s technology pillars. Carbonite just got stronger. It is a data protection and cloud backup company which is acquiring San Francisco-based EVault for $14 million in cash.
The bigger change is that Carbonite is gaining 200-plus employees. It is also benefiting from plenty of business in business continuity and disaster recovery areas.
Before acquisition, Evault had a number of small and medium-sized businesses. The acquisition therefore means that Carbonite enjoys the expansion of its customer base which accounts for more than half of Carbonite’s bookings next year.
Carbonite had over 800 employees in total as at the time of the acquisition. The employee numbers and business is therefore much larger than before.
Carbonite is led by Mohamad Ali who is a veteran of Hewlett-Packard and IBM giants. He joined as CEO over the last year. Moreover, Carbonite was founded in 2005 and has been a publicly traded company since 2011. Carbonite owes its growth to a number of acquisitions and partly to its purchase of e-mail archiving firm MailStore in December 2015.
Still, EVault is a division of the data storage company Seagate Technology which has existed since the late 1970s. Furthermore, EVault section has been in operations since 1997 as a data-backup unit.
Carbonite now boasts of a competitive edge in the storage industry. It majors in personal backup, disaster-recovery-as-a-service and backup. It further has the option of engaging in bare-metal backup.
The services of Seagate’s EVault complement those of Carbonite. Seagate also sold off its Wuala cloud backup service that was under the management of Seagate subsidiary LaCie. Seagate seems to have lost interest in cloud backup services which is apparent from its evacuation plans.
Moreover, the $14 million was convincing enough to make Seagate want to do away with EVault. It is a move that investors in Carbonite are pleased with, and the company’s shares are up $0.46, or 5.07 per cent as at the time of the deal. Moreover, Carbonite says it has 1.5 million users today, a number which is heightened by EVault numbers.
Carbonite is named for the substance in which Star Wars almost-hero Han Solo is frozen. This gives this storage company its Star Wars angle. Carbonite also bought its way into a medium-sized business in cloud data protection.
The acquisition promotes the plans of Carbonite, who sell cloud backup mostly to consumers and small businesses, to move up the ladder to a larger SMBs and small enterprises. From a technology view, Carbonite was interested in acquiring the EVault’s failover capabilities which extends disaster recovery as a service.
The transitions are transformative to Carbonite who paid noticeably less for EVault cloud backup and disaster recovery than Seagate’s $185 million acquisition price in 2006. Carbonite acquired about 5,000 Seagate EVault customers, 200 employees and 500 service provider partners. It is a huge step forward for Carbonite in its plans to meet the entire data protection and business continuity needs of its market.