Buying Exablox, StorageCraft Gets into 'Intelligent Business Continuity'

With an eye on the innovation that's happening among the HPE, Nutanix and Dell-EMCs of the world in converged storage, StorageCraft Technology Corp. on Thursday announced the acquisition of Exablox Corp.

"There's a lot of innovation happening in storage. What we think is there has to be a lot of innovation in the business continuity and backup and recovery side of that. What we're getting into is intelligent business continuity," said Marvin Blough, vice president of worldwide sales at StorageCraft, in a telephone interview.

StorageCraft has become focused on aggressive growth since getting a new chairman and CEO in Matt Medeiros, who arrived a year ago alongside a $187 million private equity investment in the Draper, Utah-based company. Medeiros has said he wants to take the company from the $100 million revenue range to the $500 million revenue range over the next few years.

The acquisition of Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Exablox for an undisclosed sum follows the purchase of Gillware Online Backup, a data backup company specializing in prioritizing backups. Unlike Gillware, the Exablox acquisition moves the SMB-focused StorageCraft upmarket into the midmarket space.

Exablox offers integrated hardware and software for inline deduplication, continuous data protection and disaster recovery. The company's vertical strengths include higher education, insurance and legal.

According to a StorageCraft statement describing Exablox, the company brings together "a new approach that recognizes the disappearing lines between primary and secondary storage as well as between data availability and data protection."

Although the acquisition brings StorageCraft into the hardware business, Blough said StorageCraft won't be coming into competition with its many hardware partners on SMB-focused disaster recovery and business continuity packages.

"We don't want to go compete with guys that are taking our product and combining it with their product [to make an] end-user, on-premise unit. This is going to be an intelligent solution that's aimed at midsize customers or datacenter offerings for partners. The intent is not to build a small inexpensive unit that we go compete with our partners with," Blough said.

StorageCraft has about 3,000 partners transacting each quarter, while Exablox has a few hundred, Blough said. For now, the plan is for both Exablox and StorageCraft to continue to function independently, with a product integration roadmap that the companies describe as "aggressive" to be shared later. Douglas Brockett will continue as Exablox president, reporting to Medeiros.

Posted by Scott Bekker on January 19, 2017