Carbonite’s chief evangelist takes with ChannelBuzz about the Double-Take deal, the integration plans, and what it will all mean for both Carbonite and Double-Take partners.
Norman Guadagno, chief evangelist at Carbonite
Security vendor Carbonite has made another significant move to grow its business, acquiring Double-Take Software from Vision Solutions, a company backed by Clearlake Capital Group. The acquisition closed yesterday. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Carbonite is still probably best known as a consumer brand, but that image is rather dated, as the majority of their business is now SMB and mid-market.
“Last year, close to 60 per cent of our business was commercial,” said Norman Guadagno, chief evangelist at Carbonite. “Most of it is SMB, although it goes from very small business to the mid-market. The consumer market is flat to declining, while our SMB market continues to grow, and all the investments we are making now are on the SMB side of the business.”
The Double-Take deal, like the 2015 eVault acquisition which preceded it, will also push Carbonite higher in the market.
“We will now go a little higher into the enterprise space with the Double-Take acquisition,” Guadagno said. “Acquiring eVault greatly strengthened us in the mid-market. eVault also developed our relations with a new type of channel partner. Before, we had been working with very small partners catering to small businesses and selling at low price point. eVault brought us about 200 larger partners. Double-Take has over 500 partners, and more than 80 per cent of their business was partner led.”
Guadagno said that at first glance, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of overlap between the Double-Take and eVault channels, but that’s something that will be determined when they talk to the new partners over the next few months.
What is evident today, Guadagno said, is that Double-Take’s technology will be a major asset for Carbonite.
“It’s a natural fit for us, which lets us extend our portfolio to meet the needs of our customers,” he said. “They are strong is the upper midmarket and lower to mid enterprise, although the difference between mid-market and lower enterprise is often semantic. We believe it will be a right fit with the solutions we have now and that it will expand our TAM [Total Addressable Market].”
The highlight of Double-Take’s technology is High Availability [HA] functionality, together with a migration tool that facilitates anywhere to everywhere replication.
“The key element here is that all our midmarket customers have different use case scenarios, and that with this HA, we can build out the specific data protection solution they want.” Guadagno said.
“We saw that they have great technology,” he added. “We think we can amplify their market penetration because we have a very strong market presence, and a very well known brand. We have the heft they weren’t able to get. Having scale and a broad portfolio of solutions gives you more market momentum. In addition, when they were part of Vision, they belonged to a company where what they did wasn’t the core business. With us it is, so it was a really sweet fit.”
The deal came about in part because of Carbonite’s connections with Clearlake Capital, the venture company that owns Vision.
“We had made it clear that it was our intent to continue to grow, both organically and through M&As, and it was no secret we were looking for the right things to complement us,” Guadagno said. “Vision is owned by Clearlake Capital. We have a long-standing relationship with Clearlake. Our M&A team had ongoing discussions with Clearlake, and it became evident that Double-Take was a good fit for Carbonite, while it would also let Vision focus on their core business.”
While it’s still early days and key details about how the products will be integrated have not yet been determined, some things are known.
“Double-Take will become a product line, like Carbonite and eVault, and like them will be managed and sold through a centralized sales and marketing organization,” Guadagno said. “That will provide real upsell and cross sell opportunities. It’s only Day Two, however, and we have just begun the process of integration.”
While the separate brands remain, based on the eVault integration, some technology cross-pollination can be expected.
“With eVault, we found ways to take the best of what Carbonite offers – simplicity and ease of use – and combined it with their technology,” Guadagno indicated “Our E2 hybrid backup appliance introduced late last year combined the eVault technology with Carbonite’s ease of use. We made the eVault agents simpler, and made deployment simpler. We don’t know yet what we will do here with Double-Take, but we will develop a road map over the next few quarters.”
The plan is to integrate the Double-Take channel as quickly as possible.
“We are looking at moving as rapidly as we can to take advantage of our strong channel marketing team,” Guadagno said. “We are very adept after doing the eVault integration at moving down this path. In 60 days, we will have a robust plan we can share.”
Carbonite does not currently require product certification from partners, so legacy Carbonite partners will likely be able to sell Double-Take solutions and vice-versa, although this has not definitely been determined.
“We want to make it easy for partners to sell things appropriate for the customers they serve, but we also want to check out the Double-Take side before we figure out what to do here,” Guadagno said.
