Dell to sell its Mozy cloud backup division to Carbonite in $145M deal
Dell Technologies Inc. is offloading another of the divisions that it absorbed through the $67 billion acquisition of EMC Corp. in 2016.
Carbonite Inc., a publicly traded provider of cloud backup services, revealed on Tuesday that it has reached a deal with the data center giant to acquire the latter’s Mozy data protection group for $145.8 million. The figure represents a major jump over the $76 million that EMC paid to acquire the business back in 2007.
The price tag reflects the gains that Mozy has made since then in the backup market. Its data protection services are today used by more than 10,000 organizations to safeguard the data of some 6 million people. Under EMC and later Dell, Mozy has also put together an extensive feature set that should help bolster Carbonite’s value proposition. The company also announced Tuesday that it posted a net loss of 14 cents a share on a 16 percent rise in revenue, to $239.5 million, in 2017.
Mozy enables administrators to have data from employee devices and servers automatically backed up to the cloud at predetermined intervals. They can specify exactly which of the records on a given system should be copied, as well as take measures to secure the information. Mozy provides the ability to protect data with one of several built-in encryption options or using a company’s own cryptography keys.
Alongside the security tools, the platform also provides advanced controls for managing logistical details such as the amount of bandwidth allocated to backup processes. This can come handy in remote offices and other environments where there’s a limited amount of network resources to go around.
Carbonite expects to wrap up the acquisition by the end of the quarter. The company will finance the all-cash deal with the help of a recently secured $120 million revolving credit facility.
If Carbonite’s previous acquisitions are any indication, the Mozy product family will be renamed and brought under its brand in the foreseeable future. The company previously bought an endpoint backup specialist called Datacastle Corp. in August for an undisclosed sum.
Dell has been keeping busy as well. The data center giant offloaded Spanning Cloud Apps LLC to Insight Venture Partners on the same month as Carbonite’s Datacastle buyout and, seven months earlier, sold its Enterprise Content Division to OpenText Corp. in a $1.62 billion deal. Like Mozy, both the groups came over as part of the merger with EMC.
Another major development earlier came this month when Dell confirmed that it’s exploring the possibility of a merger with visualization subsidiary VMware Inc. or a return to the public stock market. Such a move could help pay off more of the $50 billion in debt that the company took on to finance the acquisition of EMC.
Image: Dell
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