News

Carbonite Snags EVault from Seagate To Boost Enterprise Portfolio

• By Jeffrey Schwartz
• December 16, 2015

Backup services provider Carbonite on Wednesday announced its plan to acquire Seagate-owned EVault, which offers Backup as a Service using the Microsoft Azure cloud, for $14 million.

EVault, which offers higher-end backup services with an on-premises appliance for mid-sized organizations, uses Microsoft's public cloud to store data and claims one-hour failover. It was founded in 1997 and acquired by disk-drive vendor Seagate in 2006.

Carbonite's acquisition of EVault is expected to close next quarter, giving Carbonite the ability to target larger enterprises and provide data protection from VMware-based virtual infrastructures.

On an investor call with analysts to announce the deal, Carbonite President and CEO Mohamad Ali said EVault has 5,000 customers and its services are offered by 500 managed service providers (MSPs). By acquiring EVault, Carbonite will compete with Barracuda Networks, CommVault and Datto, though there are a considerable number of players targeting small enterprises, including Acronis, Arcserve, Asigra, Nasuni, Unitrends and Veeam.

"EVault brings probably one of the most sophisticated cloud failover capabilities available in the market," Ali said on the call. "EVault is able to provide one-hour SLA failover. EVault can spin up that server in its cloud, and your business is up and running again off of that server. A lot of companies to talk about some of the capabilities. EVault probably has the most mature and capable version of it out there. Immediately we're able to expand what we can do, what we can offer, what size of customers we can service. I think competitively we're in a really great position."

Both Carbonite and EVault offer their services through MSPs and channel partners, including key large account resellers (LARs) such as CDW, Ali said. "It's an even larger relationship making us important to CDW," he said in response to an analyst question about the acquisition's impact on CDW. "The same exists at some of the other larger partners. This is a really great thing for the partner community, as well."

The EVault Backup Services for Azure allows customers to combine their cloud licenses under one enterprise agreement and provide protection for Linux-, Unix- and Windows-based application servers, as well as Hyper-V and VMware ESXi VMs. The EVault service offers front-end data deduplication and uses the company's block-level processing to ensure only new and changed blocks of data are transmitted.

Whether Carbonite will retain EVault's relationship with Azure remains to be seem. David Raissipour, Carbonite's senior vice president of engineering and products, said, "Carbonite already has highly efficient and scalable cloud infrastructure so the Azure platform wasn't a key component of the acquisition."