Which de-dupe company is going to buy Arkeia Software as the official announcement will be made next Monday? At SNW in Frankfurt, we asked the question to several vendors. On the booth of de-dupe firm Exagrid Systems, one representative told us that its company was not in discussion to be acquired by Arkeia. Which other one could it be? He answers:” Maybe Asigra”. Indeed, that’s a good bet as we knew two information concerning the acquired company: it was not really a start-up and it has already several thousands of customers.

Formerly DS Data Storage and based in Toronto, Canada, Asigra, Inc. was a pioneer in de-dupe with a product developed in 1993 and recently achieves milestone of 100,000 locations under protection on its Hybrid Cloud Backup platform. For Arkeia, it will be an interesting acquisition as Asigra has not only its own de-dupe technology but is also a cloud backup expert. Launched this year, its v9 architecture is WAN-optimized and built around copying up data from remote locations to a centralized data repository by leveraging a public and/or private cloud. The agentless software includes integrated security, encryption, compliance, de-dupe, CDP, etc.

Privately-held Asigra, which means 'assurance', was founded in 1986 by CEO David Farajun to develop an OS for programmable logic controllers (PLCs). He had a catastrophic data loss experience when a hard drive failed and wanting to ensure that this would never happen to him again. Its first product was a prototype multi-tenant backup and recovery solution, appearing in 1986.

The company employs 51 people with a median age of 38 years.