Seagate acquires Evault

Seagate acquired Evault last month, in a surprise move.

EVault is a remote office backup solution, going after the same market that the EMC/Avamar product is going for.  The question is why Seagate decided to get back into the market.  The reader may remember that they sold Backup Exec to Veritas many years ago.  Now they're getting back into the software market again.

Any ideas, anyone?

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
  • Hi Curtis
    I work for EVault and I did wonder this myself at the time – however it didn’t take long for it to fall into place.
    EVault are a true disk to disk backup company and Seagate are the worlds largest disc drive manufacturer – and we all know which way backups are going!
    I know lots of people claim to be the biggest in any given market but EVault believes that with 20,000 customers, 17,000 servers with 7PB of data protected they are the largest provider of online backup in the world today.
    SaaS seemes to be a pretty hot topic right now and none more mature than backup – so if anyone wants to try and challenge Seagates dominant position then they will probably need to be a disc drive vendor or their cost of sale will be a lot higher.
    Just as people may remember Seagate selling Backup Exec to VERITAS they may also remember that they also owned a very profitable tape drive business a few years ago that they were also sensible enough to sell when it was worth something – one of the benefits of knowing how much a disc drive will cost in 5 years time? maybe – shrewd? most certainly.

    Adrian