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Metalogix Buys Idera's SharePoint Business

• By Jeffrey Schwartz
• October 28, 2013

Two months after acquiring Axceler's SharePoint tools business, major Microsoft ISV Metalogix last week said it has acquired Idera's SharePoint arm for an undisclosed amount.

The move is aimed at bolstering Metalogix's backup and recovery software for SharePoint administrators with Idera's monitoring and diagnostic tools.

Metalogix CEO Steve Murphy has had his sights on Idera's tools business for two years, he said in an interview. He said he convinced Idera to sell, letting the company use the proceeds for Idera's more lucrative SQL Server tools business.

Though terms of the deal were not disclosed, it doesn't seem that Metalogix intends to expand into offering SQL Server tools. Rather, Murphy's key objective was to challenge AvePoint for leadership in the SharePoint administration market.

"We were looking for a more robust backup play to compete against AvePoint and provide much more robust end-to-end infrastructure management for SharePoint," Murphy said, adding that Idera's diagnostic tools for SharePoint fills a key gap in its offering. "We believe [that] from an infrastructure management perspective, this puts us on par or ahead of our competitors."

For its part, AvePoint does not appear to see Metalogix's move as a threat.

"It is necessary to provide customers with an integrated, comprehensive enterprise solution that can meet all of their collaboration needs, which AvePoint has done since we first opened our doors in 2001," said AvePoint Founder and Co-CEO Tianyi (TJ) Jiang in an e-mail. "While we have seen other vendors try to achieve this by attempting to grow and scale -- be it through acquisition or through internal development -- AvePoint continues to utilize our deep resources, 1,400-plus employees globally, to create the integrated enterprise-grade product experience our customers demand in order to collaborate with confidence with their technology investments."

The acquisition of Idera's SharePoint tools business gives Metalogix a customer base of 13,500, according to Murphy, and a more robust partner network and overall "operational maturity."

"This is a big changing-of-the-guard in the marketplace," he said.

The SharePoint Diagnostic Manager tool Metalogix is acquiring from Idera lets IT monitor the content and server performance of a SharePoint farm, provides custom alerting on pages, and controls servers from its own dashboard or the SharePoint user interface, according to a description of the tool. It also offers historical trending and forecasting, and the tool does not require IT to deploy agents on server farms.

In addition to SharePoint Diagnostic Manager, Metalogix is acquiring SharePoint Audit Manager, SharePoint Audit, SharePoint Backup, SharePoint Performance Monitor and SharePoint Admin Toolset, according to a FAQ on Idera's Web site. Though these are all now Metalogix products, the transition will take several months. For now, Idera is providing technical support.