News
Iron Mountain Acquires Mimosa
Off-premises backup company gets e-mail, SharePoint archiving in deal.
- By Jeffrey Schwartz
- April 01, 2010
Iron Mountain Inc., best known for providing off-premises backup of enterprise data, in February acquired e-mail and SharePoint archiving solutions provider Mimosa Systems Inc. for $112 million. The deal gives Iron Mountain an alternative offering for enterprise customers not comfortable with (or, due to various compliance issues, prohibited from) storing data in public cloud-based services.
Mimosa is the provider of premises-based e-mail and file-based content-archival solutions called NearPoint. By acquiring Mimosa, Iron Mountain can offer premises-based solutions it has not been able to offer before.
"It's an acknowledgement that enterprises and larger midmarket companies are reluctant to do a lot of information management in the cloud," said Ramana Venkata, president of Iron Mountain Digital, the technology division of Iron Mountain.
Despite its rapid growth, Mimosa has faced stiff competition from much larger players with deep pockets, such as Symantec Corp. and EMC Corp.
"This combination lets us leapfrog these other vendors," said T.M. Ravi, Mimosa's president and CEO, who is joining Iron Mountain as chief marketing officer. "Now we have some very strong information management assets that are on-premises. If you look at the future of information management, archiving, e-discovery, data protection, compliance supervision, as well as other value-added services, Iron Mountain has a distinct advantage over Autonomy, EMC and other vendors out there."
"It's an acknowledgement that enterprises and larger midmarket companies are reluctant to do a lot of information management in the cloud."
Ramana Venkata, President, Iron Mountain Digital
Venkata added that there is no overlap in the technology between the two companies' offerings. Iron Mountain has no plans to drop any of Mimosa's products.
The company will bring together its disparate partner and channel programs, as well. "We're going to enhance and increase the training that we do, both sales and product training and co-marketing efforts in terms of driving leads," Venkata explained.
Indeed, enterprises have struggled to integrate applications that bring together different elements of e-discovery, said Forrester Research Inc. analyst Brian Hill in a blog post. "If Iron Mountain successfully incorporates the Mimosa product set into its portfolio, the vendor has good potential to address enterprise legal risk mitigation headaches," Hill noted. "This is a considerable effort, however, and success is certainly not assured."
About the Author
Jeffrey Schwartz is editor of Redmond magazine and also covers cloud computing for Virtualization Review's Cloud Report. In addition, he writes the Channeling the Cloud column for Redmond Channel Partner. Follow him on Twitter @JeffreySchwartz.