Insight Venture Partners Strong in Data Protection

Spanning Cloud Apps, LLC, and CEO Jeff Erramouspe, invites us to think about this as we discovered the financial entity, Insight Venture Partners (IVP), behind its return to the private world.

Back a few years, Spanning was an innovative leader in SaaS backup space protecting cloud data in the cloud. The company, born in 2010, developed several supports especially Salesforce and got acquired by EMC in October 2014, later EMC got acquired by Dell after raising $9 million in financial funding. And things got tough as business trajectories were a bit divergent with Dell EMC sales reps. With goals to sell hardware and especially data protection devices and others who wish to penetrate market with a pure SaaS model, the day to day life showed real difficulties.

And finally an exit was chosen with IVP who acquired Spanning in April 2017 from Dell EMC, the Texan company staying a strategic partner. At that time, we can consider that Spanning is back as an independent company and it’s interesting to see that Spanning Cloud Apps is a LLC as the legal structure. And Spanning continues to expand the application coverage with now Microsoft Office365 and Google G-Suite.

As of today, IVP has several investments in the data protection segment and also in security. Let’s see the data protection list:

Companies	Partners	Comments
Acronis	Michael Triplett	Competitor of Unitrends
N2W Software	Michael Triplett and Philip Vorobeychik	AWS backup
OwnBackup	Nicolas Wittenborn	Competitor of Spanning
Spanning Cloud Apps	Michael Triplett and Philip Vorobeychik	Competitor of OwnBackup
Unitrends	Michael Triplett and Philip Vorobeychik	Competitor of Acronis
Veeam	Michael Triplett and Philip Vorobeychik	In VM data protection

And even in the past Quest (before Dell acquisition) and Syncsort (at the time of BackupXpress).

This list of data protection companies invites us to think about a strategy to build something and to merge some products with others to build a bigger company. Let’s imagine some of these products in the Veeam catalog? Or an integration of Acronis with OwnBackup and Spanning? Or a merge between Acronis and Unitrends… multiple combinations are possible but there is a real reason behind that.