Moving to expand its reach across the disaster-recovery (DR) space all the way up to the top end of the midmarket, Carbonite has acquired EVault from Seagate for $14 million.
The acquisition is complementary for Carbonite in that its existing offerings are focused on consumers and small businesses, said David Raissipour, senior vice president of engineering and products for Carbonite. In contrast, EVault has created a portfolio of offerings aimed at organizations that have 100 to 500 users that span everything from backup and recovery to virtual services that enable organizations in the event of a disaster to spin up a secondary copy of their applications in a matter of minutes.
Raissipour noted that while disaster recovery has been growing at a faster rate than IT budgets on average for several years now, the rate at which disaster recovery is being consumed is now twice that of offerings that run on premise.
He attributes that growth to both increased reliance on IT to drive business processes that need to be continuously available as well as the general increase in security attacks that can cripple a modern business. The end result, Raissipour said, is increased awareness and actual consumption of data-protection products and services.
At this juncture at least, Carbonite doesn’t have any ambitions in the enterprise IT space, he said. Instead, Carbonite, which in the last year has invested heavily in building a channel, will now focus on the small- and midsize-business (SMB) market that tends to grow more rapidly.
Naturally, that level of growth is also starting to drive a wave of merger and acquisition activity. In many instances, a vendor may find it simpler to grow by acquisition than spend years developing products to enter an established market. Regardless of the motivation, acquisitions mean the disaster recovery category as a whole is subject to sudden changes that solution providers need to take into account as they expand their line cards in a category that is growing too fast for them to ignore.
Michael Vizard has been covering IT issues in the enterprise for more than 25 years as an editor and columnist for publications such as InfoWorld, eWEEK, Baseline, CRN, ComputerWorld and Digital Review.