HDS - Quietly - Acquires Cofio

Strategic Advisory Services International, LLC (SASI) announced that Cofio Software, Inc. has been acquired by Hitachi Data Systems Corp.

SASI served as exclusive financial advisor to Cofio.

Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

SASI drove the entire deal process from initial introductions to HDS through critical deal points in the purchase agreement. Keys to success included understanding Cofio’s core technology and value proposition, where it fits within the market and HDS, and managing the M&A process with a subsidiary of a large multinational corporation.

"John made our first introductions to HDS and then guided us through the process…helping us make critical deal decisions along the way. I would highly recommend SASI for M&A work in the storage hardware and software segments, and also in general technology sectors," said Tony Cerqueira, CEO of Cofio.

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Founded in 2006, Cofio is the creator of AIMstor software to govern, protect and optimize unstructured data. It's a replacement alternative to legacy backup and recovery infrastructures, in competition with products like Replicator (EMC), Backup Exec (Symantec), Simpana (CommVault), Double-Take (Vision Solutions) and others.

The company is headquartered in San Diego, CA, with offices in the US, Asia and Europe.

That's bad news for CommVault as HDS is one of its larger OEM.

Some of Cofio's partners include Hifn, Nox (in Japan) and Wisdata Systems

The start-up got $2 million in financial funding.

Neither HDS nor Cofio published a press release concerning the acquisition.

Here is what Sean Mosr wrote on HDS blog:

"Data protection is straining under the weight of big data. Exploding data volumes, stringent restore requirements, and shrinking OPEX and CAPEX budgets all mean that traditional data protection solutions aren’t cutting it any more. IT teams are relying on disparate tools for operational recovery, disaster recovery, long term archive, performance, migration, hardware refresh, etc. And each of these use cases involves capturing a copy of the data, yet there is no integration, sharing or reuse. The result is multiple, redundant, and often poorly tracked copies, leading to increased management overhead and excess use of key resources.

"Hitachi Data Systems wants to address these challenges head on, so I am excited to announce that we have acquired Cofio, a privately held company with a successful unified data protection solution. Its flagship product, AIMstor, is an innovative and intuitive solution for protecting customer data globally.

"The Cofio acquisition is part of a longer term data protection vision that goes beyond the existing 'backup' paradigm. We envision a comprehensive solution that integrates backup, archive and storage platform-based replication technologies. To realize this vision, we will be integrating Cofio technology with the high performance of storage-based data protection to meet our customers’ current and future needs. Over time, we plan to offer a centralized data instance management solution that promises significant infrastructure, storage, and management cost and efficiency savings by consolidating, reducing and better managing and tracking data copies.

"We are excited to welcome the Cofio employees to HDS and to work with them to continue to evolve our data protection portfolio. We also look forward to supporting existing Cofio customers through the integration. "

HDS – Quietly – Acquires Cofio

Said financial advisor Strategic Advisory Services International

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