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Carbonite To Be Acquired by OpenText for $1.4B
- srhngpr 7y agoWhat's interesting is that Carbonite and OpenText were in the same news release [1] just a year ago about consolidation in the cloud space. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/14/consolidation-in-the-cloud-as-opentext-buys-hightail-and-carbonite-grabs-mozy-from-dell/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/14/consolidation-in-the-cloud...
- troydavis 7y agoHow the merger came together: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1002638/000119312519299057/d818333dex99a1a.htm#toc818333_13 https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1002638/000119312519... A much more detailed version, including interactions with other prospective acquirers: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1340127/000119312519299069/d839795dsc14d9.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1340127/000119312519... - find for "Background of the Offer"
- srhngpr 7y agoThis is neat! I had no idea they included the "Background of the Offer" in their SEC filings. Thanks for sharing.
- LegitShady 7y agoThe background was a 30% higher than market value unsolicited offer.
- mc32 7y agoThis leaves mostly Druva and Code42 as mainstream endpoint data protection options. I guess with the likes of box onedrive and google drive the market may shift in the coming years...
- bretpiatt 7y agoCloud storage isn't the same as endpoint data protection. While it is creating a second copy of data and has versioning it really is an online filesystem with redundancy. Storage providers have not yet put together what I would consider an auditable data protection capability where you can restore a full folder, disk volume, or complete system to a point-in-time snapshot of the data with specific retention periods (i.e. we need to keep 7-years for our ZZZ records and 4-years for the QQQ records, etc.) Context and disclosure: I run Jungle Disk [1] which is in the endpoint data protection (and storage) market for small business. We see a lot of CrashPlan (the Code42 product) and Backblaze [2]. The market has a ton of competitors [3] overall. Further up market we see Barracuda, Druva and CommVault (along with a whole other set of competition which integrates in with cloud providers. [1] - https://www.jungledisk.com https://www.jungledisk.com [2] - https://www.backblaze.com https://www.backblaze.com [3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_online_backup_services https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_online_backup_se...
- rsync 7y ago"Storage providers have not yet put together what I would consider an auditable data protection capability where you can restore a full folder, disk volume, or complete system to a point-in-time snapshot of the data with specific retention periods" I hope it will be useful and interesting to point out that rsync.net, built on the ZFS filesystem, allows customers to create arbitrary snapshot schedules that are live and browseable. Thousands of our customers do exactly what you just described when they set up day/week/month/quarter/year snapshots and then browse right in with any old SFTP client[1] and retrieve arbitrary files and directories (or VM images, whatever) as they existed on those dates. These ZFS snapshots are immutable (read only) and immune to attacks like ransomware or a rogue employee. [1] https://www.rsync.net/products/sftp.html https://www.rsync.net/products/sftp.html
- bretpiatt 7y agoFor servers (or Linux workstations) this is a great strategy. For Windows 10 / macOS endpoints you get the filesystem provided by the OS. This also doesn't address data stored on cloud storage, full endpoint unstructured user data backup is a messy one. While large companies use policy management to force data off of laptops or non-protected cloud systems almost every employee I interact with at normal small business has critical files on their PC.
- tootie 7y agoIsn't OpenText where second-rate enterprise software goes to die?
- ahnick 7y agoI thought that was Oracle?
- smitty1110 7y agoNah, that's CA.
- donarb 7y agoNo, that’s CA.
- techdevangelist 7y agoAnd Microfocus
- fl0wenol 7y agoIt's not an exclusive club.
- edward_ 7y agoAnd Infor.
- GlTChWhISKY 7y agoOT employee here .. We have some of the largest enterprise software repos around. And we have some of the strongest enterprise relationships around with top tier companies in the world. Anyone who says otherwise has no idea what their talking about.
- patch_cable 7y agoSo does Oracle. It doesn't make it good enterprise software.
- caiob 7y agoWaterloo getting more and more traction every day, I see.
- dfgdghdf 7y agoCan someone explain what these two companies do?
- laurentb 7y agocarbonite -> backup solutions, similar to Veeam. OpenText -> Enterprise Document Management system (with all the governance stuff big co's want and then some)
- mmsimanga 7y agoCan't answer fully your question but in 2015 OpenText acquired Actuate a BI and analytics company. It was of interest to me because Actuate at the time was the main contributor to BIRT[0] an Eclipse Foundation project for creating reports. IMHO the best Open Source reporting application. Anyway BIRT has been around for ages and does not seem to have been affected by acquisition. Not much happening there but it was already a mature product. [0]https://www.eclipse.org/birt/ https://www.eclipse.org/birt/
- bufferoverflow 7y agoCarbonite has been a legit backup service, at times very competitive with its pricing. Never heard of OpenText. It's a Canadian enterprise information management (EIM) company. Apparently the largest software company in Canada.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- F147H34D 7y agoOpenText also acquired Guidance Software a few years ago. They make EnCase which is one of the largest digital forensic software tools utilized for investigations.
- PenguinCoder 7y agoAnd EnCase has promptly gone to shit.
- GnarfGnarf 7y agoDarn! I just got through converting my Mozy backup to Carbonite. Carbonite failed to port any of my Mozy backup settings. They were backing up the useless "\Users" folder, not the important stuff which I had configured in Mozy. Instead of notifying me from the "mozy.com" domain, they notified me from a carbonite.com email domain, which was not whitelisted and therefore never reached me. Ostie de Tabarnak!
- bradlys 7y agoWhen I was at OpenText - there was a new acquisition email at least every quarter. I keep wondering how OpenText keeps acquiring so many companies because the value then was maybe $6 billion and now it's $11.5B (still shy of the $12bil they aimed for some years ago). Best part of working there was when I was out at a social event in SF and I overheard someone who was working for a company getting acquired by OpenText saying quite unpleasant things about OpenText and their strategy. I think she would've killed me if she knew I worked for them. I'm pretty sure OpenText was about to fire everyone and that's why she was so upset. (Strategy of the company AFAIK is to acquire lots of enterprise offerings, integrate the product with their current offering, fire everyone they can, and then sell the product with their current offering in hopes of getting bigger numbers to prop up stock price further) I expect any consumer facing options to vaporize or be generally unsupported. OpenText is all about that enterprise/government software stuff. (I worked on a project where we were competing with IBM - to give some context)
- GlTChWhISKY 7y agoThe aquire and fire strat is business as a whole. You dont need 5 people doing the job of 2 when it comes to convergence.
- mason55 7y agoThe much mocked "synergies" that come from an acquisition. I never did understand why people make fun of that term so much, it's a very simple concept.
- sailfast 7y agoWhen a word is used to the point of meaninglessness (when "expected synergies" don't exist), or when its use is really a euphemism for "we're going to fire a bunch of people" then it exposes itself to mockery. Synergy's eventual heat death was, I'd hypothesize, greatly accelerated due to its preponderance in merger announcements and consulting decks in the 80s, 90s, and 2000s. Would be nice to use it again without caveats. Maybe one day.
- AdmiralAsshat 7y agoSo, should we assume that Carbonite's home plan will eventually be kicked to the curb like Code42 did with Crashplan? Who's still left in the home backup solution ring? Besides iCloud/Google Drive/Dropbox, I count...Backblaze? And that's it?
- sombremesa 7y agoI just moved to a NAS with RAID. My data is in my own hands, Cloud Station makes it work just like Dropbox, and I don't have to worry about paying a subscription or a company going south.
- AdmiralAsshat 7y agoI'm planning to do the same, but best practices on the 3-2-1 rule say that at least one of those backups should be off-site. I made a backup of all of my stuff onto a 4TB external and left it at my parent's house last Christmas, but that's probably not what they meant by off-site. :)
- dublinben 7y agoThat's definitely a legitimate offsite backup strategy. If your data changes more often than you visit, you may want something more interactive like a Raspberry Pi connected to that external drive that you can send files to.
- sombremesa 7y agoIf you use a Dropbox like solution, some of your data is already off-site in the form of the end user machines (e.g. laptops). It's not exactly a "backup" (in that it's not a timestamped snapshot), but it does mean your data is replicated.
- Chris_Newton 7y agoBut please be careful because if you use anything based on automatic synchronisation, such as RAID or a DropBox-like service, there is also a danger that anything you accidentally delete or corrupt will then propagate. If there’s no historical version saved as part of the system, or if there is but you don’t notice the problem before it disappears, you can end up damaging your “backup” copies of your data in exactly the same way as the original if something goes wrong.
- changterhune 7y agoSo I worked for Carbonite back in 2016 for almost a year. About 2 weeks after training I found myself wondering what they'd do in the face of everyone and their mother offering "free storage" which while completely different than secure backup sounds like the same thing to the layperson. Towards the end of my year there most of my calls (yeah I was customer support on the consumer level) were from seniors who didn't know how it worked but were told they needed to have it. It was an interesting if frustrating job. You can look on Glass Door for various stories or check the papers in Maine for how they billed themselves as creating jobs even after they outsourced the consumer biz to Jamaica. That I saw coming but didn't acknowledge out of fear of losing my job. Oh well. They still canned me a week before Christmas. This sale doesn't surprise me nor does the idea that OpenText will gut then sell it. Sour grapes and all they had to know this was where they'd end up sooner or later. Whatevs. I used Crashplan now.
- duxup 7y ago>I used Crashplan now. Do you pay for their business plan? They killed their consumer plans a while back and told me to go to Carbonite. I was a bit bummed by that as I liked CrashPlan's client. I went to Backblaze instead, not a fan of their backup client though.
- changterhune 7y agoUhhh remind me to check up on my Crashplan backup. (FACEPALM)
- changterhune 7y agoI have to see which works best for Apple anyway. I think Backblaze is best for that.
- lambda_tango 7y agoBackblaze personal backup used to only keep files for 30 days from your last activity, although I see they now let you keep old files for a year, for an extra $2/month. Personally, I use Arq Backup and Backblaze B2 (their “real” cloud storage). Arq is a one-time paid app that does differential encrypted backups to your choice of local storage or cloud provider. Keeping 1TB of backups cost me around $5 per month, and the files won’t disappear on me if my computer stops working for a month. https://www.arqbackup.com/ https://www.arqbackup.com/
- uptown 7y agoI can highly recommend Arq with the cloud storage provider of your choice. I switched after Crashplan screwed with their plans and have been very happy.
- mprev 7y agoI’m also happy with Arq but do you find that it's CPU hog? It’s got to the point my laptop is unusable when Arq is doing its thing.
- uptown 7y agoHaven't noticed this. There are times where I'll pause its activity to save bandwidth, but apart from that, it's been almost entirely "set-it-and-forget-it".
- subb 7y agoWhy not Arq with their own cloud plan? What's the advantage of using their tool with another cloud storage provider?
- overcast 7y agoSomething like G Suite Business, gives me my own email domain , all their apps, unlimited data storage for $12 per user. Which if you have over 1TB worth of data, definitely worth it. It will cost you more for less features with Arq. Under 1 TB and no use for anything I said, Arq cloud definitely where it's at.
- uptown 7y agoSeems like the unlimited storage is only valid if you have more than 5 accounts. Otherwise, it's capped at 1tb. Is that your experience as-well, or are you grandfathered in another plan?
- overcast 7y agoIt used to be that 5 user limit, but from what I can tell it is no longer. https://gsuite.google.com/pricing.html https://gsuite.google.com/pricing.html
- ones_and_zeros 7y agoI interviewed at Carbonite back in 2014ish. I walked out of the interview absolutely perplexed what they do and where the leadership was. Before I even got the rejection email I started the process to give me the option to short stocks because I was sure CARB was going to go out of business in short order based on what I saw. I didn't end up following through but the stock has been solid and increased a fair amount and here they are selling for a billion dollars. So... goes to show what I know.
- JohnJamesRambo 7y agoI suspect your initial gut feeling was correct but the market is staying irrational longer than it should.
- vivid_truth 7y agoThis thread could not have come at a more perfect time, my organization is looking to back up just under 1PB of content spread across about a dozen storage nodes. We are looking for a reputable backup provider who can provide a solid product at the lowest price, striking a good balance between cost and features. Our priorities are price, ability to encrypt the data, and setting up private network peering. Any recommendations? Our staff is comprised of smart system admins and developers who are well versed with Linux. No pretty UI's needed on our end. Thanks in advance!
- jlgaddis 7y agoPerhaps consider building a couple of big ass BackBlaze-like storage nodes and doing it yourself?
- vivid_truth 7y agoThis is what we already have in place, the idea is to get the data off-site in case the DC melts down.
- fowl2 7y agoVeeam are great - they do have a lot of pretty GUIs though. Support about every storage backend you can think of.
- vivid_truth 7y ago
- dirtymirror 7y agoThey just bought Webroot earlier this year. Wonder what will become of that.