Dell Buys Start-Up AppAssure

Dell Inc. has acquired AppAssure Software, Inc., in complete application protection for virtual, physical and cloud infrastructures.

The acquisition of AppAssure, a fast-growing backup software technology company, further extends Dell’s storage and software strategy.

Dell has taken significant steps over the past three years to expand its storage portfolio to offer customers a complete range of storage products and solutions. AppAssure’s backup solutions enhance Dell’s existing storage capabilities by providing customers confidence that their applications and data are protected.

Dell provides customers with solutions that help manage the growing complexity in IT and the rapid explosion in data. Today, Dell offers a portfolio of SAN and NAS solutions, based on its Fluid Data architecture, and is complementing these offerings with security, data compression and backup and restore capabilities.

"AppAssure’s unique architecture delivers innovative cloud-enabled backup and replication solutions that meet the challenges of protecting the explosive growth of data in both virtual and physical environments," said Brad Anderson, president, Enterprise Solutions Group, Dell. "At a practical level, AppAssure enables Dell customers to seamlessly move and replicate data across our existing platforms – from an EqualLogic array in a remote office to a Compellent array at a data recovery site."

"Dell’s acquisition of AppAssure is a strategic industry move given its relentless focus on providing innovative solutions to protect customers’ applications and data in cloud, virtual and physical environments," said Najaf Husain, president and CEO, AppAssure. "Combining Dell’s global brand, scale, reach and existing storage portfolio with our innovative technology provides customers with world-class data protection and recovery capabilities in their virtual, physical and cloud environments."

"AppAssure’s speed and ease of use are great, and the continuous backup makes recovery go really smoothly," said Dave Buzzell, CIO of Sedona Group. "Our IT environment is constantly changing, and only AppAssure has been able to keep up with it. We estimate that we can keep three years of continuous backups just due to AppAssure’s true global deduplication and compression technology. That’s amazing."

Comments

Dell was not a serious player in backup software, mainly relying on external sources like CommVault, Symantec, Double-Take (Vision Solutions), and formerly EMC.

AppAssure has already proved to have an excellent software. Testing reports by OpenBench Labs - published by AppAssure - indicate that its product is 5X faster than Acronis and 7X faster than Symantec Backup Exec 2010 R2.

Located in Reston, VA with European HQs in London, England, AppAssure was founded in 2006 by several former Veritas Software and Symantec executives and got $6 million in a first round of financial funding from Bain Capital Venures in 2008. The remainder of the company is employee-owned.

It recorded revenues of $6.8 million in 2010, according to Inc. Magazine that ranked AppAssure as the nation's fastest-growing backup and replication software company. This month the company, with 230 people, stated it has 6,000 customers (look at some of them) and registered in 4Q11 its 19th consecutive record quarter of growth and 194% revenues growth in 2011 compared to 2010, which means sales of around $20 million last year.

Terms of the transaction were not disclosed but a company like that can be valued in the $100 million range. For sure, it would be much more expansive for Dell to buy CommVault with current $2.3 billion market cap.

AppAssure delivers a server, data and application backup, archive and replication solution for physical and virtual servers including VMware, Hyper-V and XenServer, with recovery from customers' servers to their datacenter and cloud.

Darren Thomas, VP and GM of Dell Storage, commented the acquisition:" Unlike traditional solutions AppAssure is application aware, with built-in intelligence both about the data and the application. It is integrated with storage solutions like snapshots that can quickly capture changed data as frequently as virtual environments need, dedupe and compress this incremental snapshot, and recover it quickly for any slice of time. This granular intelligence allows users to restore an entire application or a single file – like a mailbox, or even that important email you accidentally deleted - in minutes."

"AppAssure's ability to protect entire applications enables service providers and enterprises to adopt a 'cloud model' to deliver fast, reliable and secure data protection," he said. "Existing customers will see an immediate benefit day one, for example, by being able to backup an EqualLogic array to a Compellent solution and recover it from anywhere."

"Initially, it will be a software-only solution, and then over time we will offer additional data protection solutions tightly integrated in our Fluid Data architecture. (...) Customers will be able to manage data end-to-end, not in silos of servers and storage, or islands of sites," he added.

This marks Dell's 12th acquisition in storage since 1999, its 11th in the last five years, and the first software acquisition since the formation of its software group.

Year

Acquisition

Price*

Activity
of acquired company

1999

ConvergeNet

340

In heterogeneous
environment SANs

2007

Silverback
Technologies

Software to monitor
computers, storage,
security and networks

2007