Microsoft Acquires Disaster Recovery Service InMage

Paul Balo, July 16, 2014

Microsoft today announced that it has acquired InMage, a business continuity service that helps enterprises migrate their data between public and private clouds, replicate their on-premise assets in the cloud and recover their data in case things go awry. The financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed.

Microsoft is clearly interested in making Azure more interesting to enterprise customers. The company says this acquisition will help it provide hybrid cloud business continuity solutions for any customer IT environment, “be it Windows or Linux, physical or virtualized on Hyper-V, VMware or others.”

Specifically, however, the company’s corporate vice president for cloud and enterprise marketing Takeshi Numoto argues that this acquisition will help make Azure “the ideal destination for disaster recovery for virtually every enterprise server in the world.” With that, he also manages to get a little dig in at VMware, because in his view, this will also help VMware’s customers “explore their options to permanently migrate their applications to the cloud, this will also provide a great onramp.”

InMage’s existing Scout service will be integrated into the Azure Site Recovery service and InMage will enable data migration to Azure with Scout. Existing customers will be able to continue using the service, but going forward, new customers will acquire access to Scout through Azure’s Site Recovery service. It’s unclear what exactly will happen to InMage’s other offerings, including its InMage-4000 appliance, but according to a message on InMage’s site, all of the current products will continue to work as before.

San Jose-based InMage, which was founded in 2001, had previously raised at least $36 million in venture capital from firms like Hummer Winblad, Amidzad Partners and Intel Capital.

Microsoft has often said that it believes enterprises are mostly interested in hybrid-cloud solutions and InMage’s technology fits right into this strategy.

source: Frederic Lardinois /TechCrunch