Barracuda to bring Yosemite Backup to the cloud |
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By Beth Pariseau, Senior News Writer
28 Jan 2009 | SearchDataBackup.com |
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As part of its expansion into the data backup and storage space, email security and archiving vendor Barracuda Networks Inc. disclosed Tuesday that it has snapped up Yosemite Technologies for an undisclosed amount.
Barracuda vice president of product management Stephen Pao said Barracuda will continue to sell Yosemite Backup and Yosemite FileKeeper data protection software, as well as integrate the IP into a cloud backup service.
Barracuda launched the Barracuda Backup Service when it acquired BitLeap LLC in November. The service combined Barracuda's onsite local backup appliance with offsite backup services to BitLeap's data center.
Yosemite's technology will add more advanced backup features, including application agents for granular backups of Microsoft Exchange, SQL and Windows file systems, to the offering, Pao said. "We acquired Yosemite for their core technologies, which we will bundle along with the Barracuda Backup Service," he said.
The synergies between an email security company and a data backup company might otherwise not be apparent, but Pao added that Yosemite and Barracuda also have a similar focus on midmarket customers from 250 to 500 employees.
Yosemite CEO George Symons won't join Barracuda but the R&D team will stay on and Barracuda will retain Yosemite's OEM and reseller partners, including Dell Inc. and Tandberg Data.
Symons said that with its OEM deals in place, Yosemite was not in financial trouble but needed to become part of a bigger company to grow to its next stage of development. "We didn't have the growth to get to the next level," he said.
Symons joined Yosemite as CEO in 2006 after serving for several years as an executive with EMC Corp., and before that was CTO of backup software vendor Legato. He said he has not yet decided where he'll go next.
Taneja Group founder and consulting analyst Arun Taneja says venture capitalist firms are looking to unload the smaller companies in their portfolio because of the current economic climate. "Some of them are not acting like VCs but more like bankers," Taneja said. "Whether or not this is exactly what happened with Yosemite, I don't know, but big companies are looking at really good bargains [on smaller companies] right now."
Taneja said there will probably be "a bunch of activity" in the storage market this year as the economic downturn continues.
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