Seagate, the pioneer in storage devices is buying a privately held company called Evault. Evault specializes in providing online or remote backup with disaster recovery and continuous data protection. CDP services are attaractive to small and mid size companies which cannot afford to spend on infrastructure and personal on DRP. The Asian tsunami, Sep11th and the hurricanes cycles in the US have made DRP planning critical to every business.
In 2005, Seagate bought Mirra, a provider of digital-content protection products for the home and small businesses. Seagate also has acquired Action Front, a data recovery company.“This is really planting the seeds for a market that I think is pretty exciting,” said Brian Dexheimer, a Seagate executive vice president.
Once having acquired EVault, Seagate intends to offer services in the areas of data recovery, online backup and recovery, and archiving for small and midsize businesses.
“[Small businesses] need a backup and data recovery service, and data compliance. It is not different than the kind of services SunGard offers” for larger outfits, Seagate chief executive Bill Watkins said. “[Services are] not going to replace my core, but we think it is a high-growth area.”
With companies like Salesforce offering hosted CRM solutions, Google aiming at email and office productivity solutions and Seagate offering remote backup and recovery, we can see more and more businesses getting comfortable with the SaaS paradigm. SMB’s can concentrate on their core business and operate with skeletal IT staff.
On the home user side, there are companies like Box.net, carbonite offering remote storage and backup solutions. We can add the amazon S3, rumored live drive and Gdrive to the mix. This development validates the market in remote storage and we can see more action on this front in 2007.
