Arcserve acquisition plans heating up

Arcserve is on the hunt to buy more companies.

The data protection and recovery company already has made two acquisitions since becoming independent from CA Technologies in 2014. It bought cloud provider Zetta last summer, giving it a larger cloud footprint and disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) offering. That followed the Arcserve acquisition of email archiving specialist FastArchiver in April for on premises or public cloud long-term data retention.

Both Zetta and FastArchiver target the midmarket. New CEO Tom Signorello is planning the next Arcserve acquisition, with possible targets ranging from analytics to information management to data management or even security.

“We will be looking at targets again in the coming quarters,” Signorello said. “We are actively working with our owners on what the next logical bolt-on. The opportunities are broad, so I don’t want to be specific.”

Signorello took over as CEO in early October, after Arcserve’s first CEO Mike Crest left to head IT services firm Optanix.

Arcserve has returned as an independent vendor at a time the data protection market is evolving into another area, the overall data management space. Companies such as Veritas Technologies and Commvault Systems are building these over-arching data management platforms that do data indexing, search, analytics, copy data management, governance, security and data mobility.

Arcserve acquisition integrations expand cloud footprint

Signorello said that the integration with Zetta is “well underway.”  The latest Arcserve acquisition gave it cloud data centers in the West Coast and New Jersey, and Arcserve plans to open one in the United Kingdom. The Arcserve acquisition also broadens its relationship with cloud providers Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.

Arcserve already had a relationship with AWS before the Zetta buy. The Arcserve UDP appliance allows customers to use the AWS cloud as a remote disaster recovery site. They can replicate recovery points to a local Windows-based Recovery Point Server (RPS) in the AWS cloud and launch an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and copy full recovery points to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).

Zetta also gave Arcserve a direct-to-cloud offering but the company also is investing more in the hybrid cloud approach.

“There are going to be enhancements in the hybrid area in the next couple of quarters,” Signorello said. “Our clients need it.  They need the flexibility. All the managed services providers (MSPs) and VARs are moving in that direction.”

Before joining Arcserve, Signorello was CEO of OnX Enterprise Solutions and held vice president positions at Diebold and Unisys.