MBO for Plasmon Becoming U.S. Company

Newly formed Plasmon Holding LLC has completed a management buyout and organisational restructuring of assets from Plasmon PLC, a trusted source of data archiving systems for over 20 years. The transaction is intended to capitalise and reposition Plasmon over the long term to achieve its strategic objectives as a leader in the rapidly growing enterprise archiving solutions market.

Plasmon Holdings LLC is a new privately-held US-based Delaware Corporation backed by a US private equity firm. The new holding company has acquired Plasmon Inc. in the US and specific assets owned by UK-based Plasmon PLC in order to aggressively pursue new technology and go-to-market strategies and maximise Plasmon market share in the long-term data storage market. The new company will maintain the use of the Plasmon brand identity and is committed to globally addressing the current and future needs of all Plasmon’s worldwide customers and partners.

“This transaction is the evolution of the strategic process that we began earlier this year. Plasmon has exceptional intellectual property and an unmatched value proposition with which to address the rapidly growing need for archiving as a core layer of the IT infrastructure,” said Steven Murphy, CEO of the new company. “We are reaching beyond our traditional role as the deep archive ‘component’ of widely used content management applications to provide complete archive turnkey solutions. Our newly announced focus on ‘3-2-1 Archive Best Practices’ for accessible and secure long-term data storage provides exactly what the enterprise IT market is looking for: at least 3 single instance data copies, on 2 types of media, 1 of which is removable, long-lived and powered down. With this approach, our customers simultaneously meet all their business needs for historical and fixed content data, including rapid access, very long-term secure retention, and disaster recovery, all in an economical solution,” said Murphy.

“It is remarkable that a deal of this significance in the storage market was brought to fruition during this tight financial environment” said Brian Babineau, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. “However, our research suggests that the need for long-term corporate data storage will drive customers to archive over 100 exabytes of data over the next three years, so it may not be remarkable. Plasmon offers a unique integration of magnetic disk, long-term optical media and archival management software to address this challenge.”

Under the restructuring, Plasmon Inc, formerly a US-based subsidiary to the UK company, will become the worldwide headquarters. The ‘new’ Plasmon will offer its market leading archiving solutions and services in all global territories. The company plans to use its new organisation and financing to enhance its core Archive Appliance solution and leverage its recently announced relationships with NetApp, IBM-FileNet, and a range of market-leading content management ISV’s.

Plasmon Inc is headquartered in Colorado Springs, Colorado with offices globally.

Comments

Plasmon is apparently keeping sales and support office in Melbourn, Hertsforshire, UK, and in Broomfield, CO. The price of the acquisition of Plasmon by the new U.S.-based Plasmon Holdings LLC was not revealed, but we suspect it was for a bargain.

Here is a letter of Plasmon's President and CEO, just following the MBO.

To our Valued Customers, Partners, and Suppliers:

We are delighted to announce Plasmon Inc. has successfully completed the private equity management buyout and public to private company restructuring process that we began in September. Today, an asset purchase agreement was concluded between Plasmon Holdings LLC, a new privately-held US-based Delaware Corporation, and Plasmon Plc in administration, the former UK-based parent of Plasmon and its subsidiaries, the local entities with whom you have conducted business. The terms of the transaction are not disclosed, but we can confirm that under the agreement, Plasmon Holdings LLC. has acquired Plasmon Plc’s USA, Italian, Belgium and Asian subsidiaries as well as specific assets, including key intellectual property and worldwide customer contracts to support the new company’s strategy of making its core Archive Appliance solution the market leader in long term data storage.

Plasmon Inc, with its new structure and US-based funding, will be able to offer its market leading archive solutions and services under the trusted Plasmon archiving brand in all current locations. The new organization will also allow us to accelerate progress on our technology roadmaps. This will greatly benefit the reach of our patented Ultra Density Optical (UDO) disk media and the active archive management software that integrates both RAID and long-term optical media into a single long term data archive solution to reduce the risk, cost and power consumption of primary disk media.

As we emerge from this transaction, Plasmon Inc. expects to be positioned to aggressively pursue our strategic vision as a leader in the rapidly growing enterprise data archiving market. The result of this transaction will allow the new company to grow faster and profitably and will protect and enhance the investment by Plasmon global customers, partners, and strategic suppliers in this technology.

On a strategic level, Plasmon sees increasing demand for long term data storage driven by IT optimization and compliance requirements. We believe we are now poised to address the growing enterprise archiving market opportunity. Our newly announced '3-2-1 Archive Architecture' for accessible and secure long-term data storage provides exactly what the enterprise market is looking for: at least 3 single instance data copies, on 2 types of media, 1 of which is removable, long-lived and powered down. This model ensures that IT organizations can simultaneously meet all their business needs for historical and fixed content data, including rapid access, very long-term secure retention, and disaster recovery. The rapid growth in Plasmon solution sales from the last two quarters leads us to believe that the market also sees the value in this proposition.