Unitrends Acquires PHD Virtual To Widen Its Backup and Recovery Footprint
Looking to fill key gaps in both the technology it offers and its addressable market of backup and recovery solutions, Unitrends Monday said it is acquiring PHD Virtual.
Unitrends itself was acquired earlier this year by the private equity firm Insight Venture Partners, which also counts PHD Virtual as one of its holdings. By combining the two companies, Unitrends can target smaller companies and offer solutions for environments that are purely virtualized, a limitation of its appliance-based solutions.
PHD Virtual competes with the likes of Veeam and Acronis and sells to organizations with less than 100 employees with average deal sizes of about $3,000. Unitrends enterprise backup appliances are aimed at enterprises with 100 to 500 employees with deal sizes above $20,000. Unitrends competes against Symantec's Backup Exec, CommVault and Barracuda, said Mike Coney, Unitrends' CEO.
"We saw a real fit with PHD Virtual," Coney said. "Their customers are mostly virtual. Where they lose deals is with requests for physical appliances and where we lose deals is when there's a heavy concentration of virtualized environments." Coney noted that PHD Virtual also recently acquired Reliable DR, which brings the company into the disaster recovery-as-a-service market.
Coney is no stranger to the backup and recovery market. He was on the original BackUp Exec team at Veritas before Symantec acquired the company in 2005. So is an IPO in the works for Unitrends at some point? Coney said that's very likely. "Insight has a track record of bringing their companies public," he said. "You have to think that's part of the exit strategy."
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 12/17/2013 at 3:30 PM