Cloud Security, Data Security

Data protection companies Arcserve and StorageCraft to merge

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A pre-pandemic photo of the Arcserve team. (Arcserve)

Two data protection companies, Arcserve and StorageCraft, announced today they are merging into a single company.

Arcserve and StorageCraft both sell a range of data management and protection services, including data backup, disaster recovery and business continuity, cloud and on-premise email archiving and ransomware protection services. The companies will continue to invest in and support their existing solutions, though StorageCraft will now be branded as “An Arcserve Company” and operate under the leadership of Arcserve CEO Tom Signorello and StorageCraft president Douglas Brockett.

They expect to finalize the deal in the coming weeks following regulatory approval.

In an interview, Signorello said discussions about the merger began last year in the spring, at the height of the coronavirus pandemic. The companies are hoping that by combining their respective product suites, they can offer a unified solution for data workloads in data centers, the cloud, software-as-a-service applications, and at the edge. They’re also looking to expand Arcserve’s ransomware protection offerings to StorageCraft users.

He said StorageCraft’s partner network of roughly 5,000 managed service providers will facilitate the development of a range of new products and subscription offerings that would have taken Arcserve “years to build” on its own.

“The fact that we can leverage their [managed service provider] ecosystem and their back office from a billing and ERP perspective, it’s just a very natural fit,” said Signorello.

Brockett said StorageCraft’s bread and butter has long been backup and recovery of physical and virtual machines, while expanding into disaster recovery as a service and pushing data backups into the cloud. Going forward, the companies will look to expand their cloud-centric computing platforms and management consoles to allow customers to manage “fleets of servers from a single interface across all our products” so that they don’t have to switch from their preferred longterm data management provider.

“Our  goal – because we have such large installed bases of folks with year and years of data backup with our products -- is to not force people into any change,” said Brockett. “We’re going to continue to support all the products going forward.”

According to Dun and Bradstreet, Arcserve pulled down $103 million in sales last year, while StorageCraft brought in $37 million. Signorello said as a private company Arcserve doesn’t publicly release revenue data but disputed those numbers, saying they had experienced multiple years of solid growth and claimed Dun and Bradstreet’s numbers were undercounting their latest revenues by at least 50%.

Neither company has a dominant share of the data protection market, where they will still compete with major players like Veeam, Acronis and Veritas but the move will allow them to combine their intellectual property and pool research and development budgets. For now, Arcserve will stay headquartered in Eden Prairie, Minnesota while Storagecraft remains in Draper, Utah, but they are exploring the possibility of a joint headquarters at some point in the future.

It could also help both companies expand their geographic and customer footprint. Signorello said their largest customer base is in Japan and the Asia Pacific, followed by Europe, the Middle East and Africa, with just a quarter of their customers hailing from the North American market. Meanwhile, Brockett said more than 80% of StorageCraft’s customers are based in the U.S. and Arcserve’s presence in Japan and the Asia Pacific was an attractive feature of the deal. While Arcserve focuses on mid-market and enterprise level businesses, StorageCraft largely focuses on small and medium sized businesses.

“The combination of Arcserve and StorageCraft is very intriguing because it combines complimentary hardware and software platforms,” said IDC research director Phil Goodwin in a statement. “Arcserve’s data protection and data security portfolio, when combined with StorageCraft’s object-based data protection appliance platform, opens up solution possibilities beyond data protection and recovery.”

They might not be done, as Signorello said the data protection market is “ripe” for further consolidation in the future. The sheer volume of data that powers the global economy is staggering and only expected to rise in the near future. Last year, the IDC estimated the total volume of data stored worldwide last year exceeded 6.8 zettabytes, an increase 16.6% from 2019, and continue growing to 8.9 zettabytes by 2024. Meanwhile, Research and Markets forecasts that the global cloud storage market alone will grow from $50 billion in 2020 to $137 billion by 2025, citing growing enterprise data requirements and the need to provide “ubiquitous access” to data and files for remote workers.

“This is not the final chapter from an inorganic growth perspective. I think it’s the beginning; the health of our combined organizations puts us in a really good position to capture all that,” he said.

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Derek B. Johnson

Derek is a senior editor and reporter at SC Media, where he has spent the past three years providing award-winning coverage of cybersecurity news across the public and private sectors. Prior to that, he was a senior reporter covering cybersecurity policy at Federal Computer Week. Derek has a bachelor’s degree in print journalism from Hofstra University in New York and a master’s degree in public policy from George Mason University in Virginia.