Dell buys a BUNCH of software products

Dell continues its global domination plans via more acquisitions. Last year, they acquired Ocarina & Compellant.  This year they’ve acquired Wyse (they’re still in business?) and Sonicwall. 

But now they’ve entered into my world.  They have announced that they are acquiring Appassure and Quest Software.  For those of you who haven’t been following these companies, Appassure is a near-CDP backup software product with quite a bit of success.  Quest has a bunch of products, but among them is NetVault (a traditional network backup software product) and vRanger (a purpose-built backup product for virtualization).

The Appassure acquisition is a very solid one.  I have personally watched that company increase their market share daily in a very aggressive way.  The near-CDP story plays very well both when backing up physical servers and even better when backing up virtual servers.  It’s not a small deal that they can recover a server in minutes.  It’s interesting that Appassure has been doing so well, given the difficulty that other CDP and CDP-like products have had.

For those unfamiliar with Quest’s history, the two backup products they have are the result of relatively recent acquisitions.  NetVault is a general-purpose network backup product that has been around a while, but has never garnered much market share.  I know they’ve been working to bring it up to speed with other products in the space, and have definitely increased marketing activities for it compared to its previous owner, Bakbone. vRanger was the king of the mountain in virtualization backup at one point, but they seem to have been out-marketed by Veeam lately — but they’re not taking that lying down.  Just look at product manager John Maxwell’s comments on my last blog post to see that! Perhaps having Dell’s marketing budget behind these products will finally get them the attention they are looking for.

Dell’s challenge will be similar to Quest’s: integrating all of these products into a single coherent product line.  This is a challenge they already know well.


Written by W. Curtis Preston (@wcpreston), four-time O'Reilly author, and host of The Backup Wrap-up podcast. I am now the Technology Evangelist at Sullivan Strickler, which helps companies manage their legacy data

1 comment
  • Nice post, I wonder why big companies are always behind acquisitions. Take the example of google dell, yahoo, Microsoft of any other company.