Arcserve has acquired Zetta, a midmarket DRaaS (disaster recovery as a service) specialist that can activate a customer in the cloud within minutes. The move could allow Arcserve to broaden its footprint to reach more types of IT service providers -- especially in the midmarket.
Zetta's technology sounds solid, but the company has struggled to find its niche in recent years. Our content team has tracked multiple Zetta executive leaders and channel leaders since around 2010, when the company raised $11.5 million in its second round of funding. The challenge: Zetta was a bit early to the pure cloud storage market, and the company's partner program never quite gained critical mass with MSPs. The company did win 2,500 customers and most recent Zetta CEO Mike Grossman was committed to an MSP strategy. But ChannelE2E believes the company ran out of time (and perhaps funding) before it could reach critical mass.
Arcserve's Plan
For Arcserve, Zetta appears to be a solid technology play that rounds out the company's business continuity capabilities.
Arcserve plans to phase out the Zetta brand, replacing it with Arcserve UDP Cloud Direct. Until now, using Arcserve’s backup solution to move data to the cloud was a two-step process, relying on an on-premise backup before data could be stored remotely.
This latest iteration brings direct-to-cloud DRaaS and BaaS options to the table, ideal for smaller companies or branches where on-premise hardware may be unrealistic, the company says.
The new tech is also a boon for users who need to move large volumes of data over networks, companies that can’t tolerate downtime, and partners looking to adopt managed cloud offerings. Arcserve says that, by converging direct-to-cloud and hybrid cloud techs into one solution, “IT teams can now implement on-premises, hybrid cloud and direct to cloud from a single pane of glass.”
It sounds promising but multiple backup companies are working on similar strategies. Carbonite, for instance, has acquired failover, business continuity and midmarket appliances that link to cloud services. And pure-play growth companies like Datto and Veeam are rounding out their backup portfolios in multiple ways.
Disaster Avoidance
Along with the acquisition news, Arcserve announced a disaster avoidance platform which it says will give customers the ability to avoid disasters, rather than recovering data after a disaster has occurred, helping SMBs compete at the enterprise level.
To that end, Arcserve says it will soon offer a solution with near-zero data loss RPO (recovery point objective) and near-instant RTO (recovery time objective), with prices aimed at midsize organizations. Arcserve says it’s already building out this solution by combining its replication and high availability engine with its new cloud-first DRaaS offerings and data center IP.
Arcserve is owned by Los Angeles-based private equity firm Marlin Equity Partners, which acquired the business from CA Technologies in 2014.
Additional insights from Joe Panettieri.
