Carbonite integrating Mozy backup, ending free edition support
Carbonite will end support for the free edition of Mozy’s consumer product on Monday. The cloud data protection heavyweight would like to convert remaining Mozy customers onto its own infrastructure but as of now continues to support Mozy’s other editions.
Carbonite acquired Mozy, one of its oldest cloud backup competitors, in March 2018 from a Dell Technologies subsidiary for $145.8 million.
Carbonite has told MozyHome Free customers that when that support ends on April 15, customer backups will be deleted, according to Norman Guadagno, Carbonite’s senior vice president of marketing. Those Mozy backup customers must restore files before April 15.
The MozyHome Free account provided up to 2 GB of data storage. Carbonite does not have a free version of its data protection suite, but does offer consumer protection.
Mozy backup included three major paid products: MozyEnterprise for enterprises, MozyPro for smaller businesses and MozyHome for consumers. The end of support for MozyHome Free does not affect paying MozyHome subscribers. Carbonite will also continue to support existing MozyEnterprise and MozyPro customers. As a result of the acquisition, Mozy customers are technically Carbonite customers.
“Paying Mozy subscribers can continue to use Mozy to back up their endpoints and servers and Carbonite continues to offer an upgrade path to equivalent Carbonite offerings,” Guadagno wrote in an email.
Carbonite’s ongoing goal is to upgrade Mozy backup customers to the “more modern, powerful Carbonite Data Protection Platform,” Guadagno wrote.
“Ultimately, everything that was once branded Mozy will be branded Carbonite.”
Carbonite expects most legacy Mozy customers to upgrade to Carbonite infrastructure.
Carbonite continues evolution
Both Carbonite and Mozy originally focused on selling to consumers and later shifted to a business focus, while still offering a consumer product.
The Mozy backup acquisition was largely a play to add customers. At the time of the acquisition, Mozy had about 100,000 consumer customers and 35,000 business subscribers.
Carbonite has upgraded about half of Mozy consumer customers to Carbonite’s infrastructure, according to Guadagno.
“[We] are pleased with our upgrade pace,” he wrote.
About 70% of Mozy employees are now part of Carbonite, Guadagno said.
Boston-based Carbonite has been building a data protection portfolio that includes backup, disaster recovery, high availability and migration tools. It has been busy with acquisitions in recent years, including a blockbuster to buy Webroot cybersecurity for $618.5 million, which closed in March.
Carbonite has made several acquisitions in recent years.
Carbonite has been integrating technology from its acquisitions, CEO Mohamad Ali said on Carbonite’s earnings call last year around the time of the Mozy backup acquisition.
“Our integration plan is to similarly take the best of Mozy, and Mozy has some very interesting pieces of technology that can make that platform even stronger,” Ali said.
Guadagno said this week that although the Mozy technology itself has not been integrated into the Carbonite data protection platform, Carbonite has identified many features and other innovations from Mozy and added them to the product roadmap. He could not elaborate on roadmap specifics.
Ali noted last year that Mozy was the first company he wanted to acquire when he started as CEO four years ago.
“As we leverage the much, much more efficient Carbonite cloud infrastructure and effectively migrate the Mozy infrastructure onto our infrastructure, we expect to drive tremendous profitability and that’s something we’ve done before,” Ali said at the time.