Atempo + Synerway + Wooxo

Now Atempo SAS, Synerway and Wooxo SA are under the umbrella of Kick Start Management SARL in La Ciotat, France, holding born in 2003 and headed by Luc D’Urso, 52 (Atempo and Wooxo group’s CEO), and Cyprien Roy, (Atempo’s COO).

D’Urso estimates that the group will reach €21 million to €22 million in revenue for 2018 and said that Atempo will hire employees.

This follow the acquisitions of entire Atempo this year from US firm ASG Technologies, that didn’t do a good job to manage its acquisition, and joining Wooxo, and more recently Synerway in bankruptcy last August after losing a big customer (Intermarché).

On the three companies, Atempo, with 4,500 customers and HQs in Courtaboeuf, is by far the biggest (see table) and the more wellknown. Born in France in 1992 under the name of Quadratec and integrated into the new group last August, it designed flagship product Time Navigator for backup and DR at the time of the Veritas NetBackup, CDP solution Live Navigator for workstations and file servers, and more recently trying to push into the digital archiving market with Atempo Digital Archive (ADA) for enterprises with big references in multimedia and the support of DDN, NetApp, Scality or Amazon S3. It has locations in France, Germany, USA, South Korea, China and Singapore. HQs is now based in Les Ulis, South of Paris with R&D in Vannes in South Brittany.

Synerway was relatively renowned in France for its backup appliances for PMEs and ROBOs manufactured in Germany but without associated cloud storage. It claims installed base of 10,000 appliances with current offering ranging from 1TB to 144TB

Based in La Ciotat, Wooxo, founded in 2010 by D’Urso, is 70% owned by Kick Start Management, the rest by French VC Naxicap Partners, and claims 8,000 end users. This firm is a small French publisher of software for security and continuity solutions including local, cloud backup (by hosting firms ASP Server/Data Dimension in La Ciotat or OVH) and DR to protect business data for small organizations. Selling 100% indirect, it has distributors like Coriolis Telecom as well as Ricoh, Toshiba and Rex Rotary in office industry, and is opening nearly two locations per year after France, North Africa, Portugal, Spain in agreement with distributors, and also Netherlands and Switzerland. Average revenue per client approaches €4,000 on four years all included, location of appliance, software, cloud out of the box and service.

Editor’s suggestion
The group has to be identified by only one brand name and Atempo will be the best one, with a clear offering aggregating competency in backup software and appliance as well as cloud backup. Also the name of Atempo Digital Archive has to be changed (into Atempo Storage Multimedia?) – Atempo’s VP marketing Hervé Collard agrees for a change – for a product not only able able to archive but also to backup and restore data.

Storage being an US sport as we often wrote, the group has a small foot there, and needs to invest to be seriously recognized in this country.

That’s the only way to have a small chance to compete with giants like Dell EMC, Commvault, IBM, Quantum, Veeam, Veritas, and plenty of others smaller ones in the world, and to return to the beautiful years of Atempo.