Metalogix Acquires Idera's SharePoint Tools Business

Looking to further solidify its tooling offering for SharePoint administrators, Metalogix last week said it has acquired Idera's SharePoint business. The move aims to bolster Metalogix backup and recovery software for SharePoint with Idera's monitoring and diagnostic tools, and comes two months after Metalogix acquired Axceler's SharePoint tools business.

Metalogix CEO Steve Murphy has had his sights on Idera's tools business for two years and told me he convinced them to sell, letting it use the proceeds for Idera's more-lucrative SQL Server tools business. Though terms weren't disclosed, it doesn't seem Metalogix intends to spread its wings into offering SQL Server tools. Rather Murphy's key objective is to challenge AvePoint for leadership in the SharePoint administration market.

"We were looking for a more robust backup play to compete against AvePoint and provide much more robust end-to-end infrastructure management for SharePoint," Murphy said, adding that Idera's diagnostic tools for SharePoint fills a key gap in its offering. "We believe from an infrastructure management perspective, this puts us on par or ahead of our competitors."

For its part, AvePoint doesn't see Metalogix's move as a threat. AvePoint Founder and Co-CEO Tianyi (TJ) Jiang, said in an e-mail what every rival says when a challenger comes its way: that it validates its place in the market.

"It is necessary to provide customers with an integrated, comprehensive enterprise solution that can meet all of their collaboration needs, which AvePoint has done since we first opened our doors in 2001," Jiang said. "While we have seen other vendors try to achieve this by attempting to grow and scale -- be it through acquisition or through internal development -- AvePoint continues to utilize our deep resources, 1,400-plus employees globally, to create the integrated enterprise-grade product experience our customers demand in order to collaborate with confidence with their technology investments."

The acquisition of Idera's SharePoint tools business gives Metalogix a customer base of 13,500, according to Murphy, and a more robust partner network and overall "operational maturity," he argued. "This is a big changing of the guard in the marketplace," he said.

The SharePoint Diagnostic tool Metalogix is acquiring from Idera lets IT monitor the content and server performance of a SharePoint farm, provides custom alerting on pages and controls servers from its own dashboard or the SharePoint user interface, according to a description of the tool. It also offers historical trending and forecasting and the tool does not require IT to deploy agents on server farms.

In addition to SharePoint Diagnostic Manager, Metalogix is acquiring SharePoint Audit Manager, SharePoint Audit, SharePoint Backup, SharePoint Performance Monitor and SharePoint Admin Toolset, according to a FAQ on Idera's Web site. Though these are all now Metalogix products, the transition will take several months and for now Idera is providing technical support.

Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 10/28/2013 at 1:19 PM