Data management firm Commvault made a big acquisition this week.
Commvault announced a definitive agreement to acquire Hedvig, a privately-held maker of cloud-based software defined storage solutions for US$225 million, marking the company’s first major acquisition since appointing Sanjay Mirchandani as CEO and president in February.
Mirchandani described the move as a strong intersection of storage protection and data management.
“We believe joining Hedvig’s innovative software-defined storage capabilities with Commvault’s industry-leading data protection reduces fragmentation and leapfrogs other solutions in the market,” he said in a press release.
Hedvig was founded in 2012 by Avinash Lakshman, the inventor of Apache Cassandra – a free and open-source, distributed database management system – and one of the brains behind Amazon Dynamo.
Joining forces with Commvault will lead to a new standard for the unification of storage and data management, indicated Lakshman.
“We believe that the convergence of storage, multi cloud, and cloud native technologies, combined with our leadership in data management, will accelerate the movement towards modern applications built on containers and microservices,” said Lakshman.
According to IDC, 70 per cent of organizations have a container development project underway and many of them will be rolled into production within the next two years.
IDC also published a report about the acquisition after the announcement, and said the acquisition gives Commvault entry into the rapidly growing markets and differentiates it from its traditional data protection competitors. But it’s going to require a significant culture change for both sides.
“Commvault is a more than 20-year old public company in a well-established and defined market. Hedvig is a privately held start-up in a rapidly developing market that must adjust to public life. Moreover, neither sales force understands the other’s selling motions or buyer behaviors today and the two companies have few resellers or partners in common.
“Market motion matters here, as each company is selling into different buyer bases. Going forward, this may be a case where melding a unified company and finding synergies between different buying centers may be more difficult than the technical integration.”
