Seagate Technology is moving into online backup with the $185 million acquisition of EVault.
EVault will become part of the Seagate Services group, which includes data recovery, online backup/recovery and archiving for small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs).
“Today’s announcement highlights a strategic next step into services, which is a natural extension of Seagate’s core business and will leverage our brand leadership and channel expertise to deliver solutions to the SMB market,” Seagate CEO Bill Watkins said in a statement.
Founded in 1997, Emeryville, Calif.-based EVault boasts more than 8,500 customers and 250 employees. Customers of the profitable private firm include financial, healthcare and legal organizations.
Seagate has spent the last few years expanding beyond its core hard drive business into storage solutions, said Watkins. “Our objective for Seagate Services is to become a leading provider of services to manage and protect our customers’ digital content throughout its lifecycle,” he said.
The acquisition is the third for Seagate in the services area. Last year, the company picked up Mirra, which offers networked digital content protection products for the home and small business markets, and Action Front, a professional in-lab data recovery company.
Seagate Services is taking aim at the 74 million SMBs around the globe that struggle with the problem of data protection.
The division will offer data recovery for corrupted or inaccessible storage devices, regardless of media format or brand, and online backup, archival and recovery services for designated user and application data.
The online backup market “is currently fragmented and Seagate can bring scale and leadership through its brand loyalty, resources and channel expertise,” said Seagate spokesman Forrest Monroy. “This is a natural extension to our core business and provides us with valuable technology and talent that Seagate can scale to serve an emerging storage market need. EVault has the best technology, product breadth and people addressing the remote backup market today.”
The acquisition is expected to close early next year.