Microsoft Acquires Disaster Recovery Service InMage

Microsoft announced the acquisition of InMage, a service that supports business continuity. InMage aids companies in migrating their content across public and private clouds, protects on-premise properties in the cloud, and facilitates readily retrievable data when necessary. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

The merging of Microsoft and InMage is consistent with Microsoft’s goal to boost Azure’s appeal to corporate entities. The claim is that this combination will allow Microsoft to provide a hybrid cloud business continuity solution that can accommodate any IT environment regardless of the running operating systems, whether it’s Windows or Linux, or the platform, either physical or virtualised.

Takeshi Numoto, who functions as Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President for Cloud and Enterprise Marketing, accentuates that this merger would evolve Azure into an ideal site for disaster recovery for almost all enterprise servers worldwide. He also mentions the possibility of persuading VMware’s clients to consider permanently shifting their applications to the cloud. This transition could be a phenomenal springboard to new cloud-based opportunities.

InMage’s existing Scout service will be integrated with Azure Site Recovery service, and they will support uploading data onto Azure via Scout. For future clients, their access to Scout would only be enabled via Azure’s Site Recovery service. There is some ambiguity regarding the future of InMage’s different products, such as the InMage-4000 appliance. However, on InMage’s site, it has been assured that all present products will be operational as per usual.

InMage, launched in San Jose back in 2001, managed to raise about $36 million in venture capital from corporations such as Hummer Winblad, Amidzad Partners, and Intel Capital.

In conclusion, Microsoft firmly believes in the potential of hybrid-cloud solutions to capture the interest of most enterprises. The available technology from InMage perfectly complements this strategy.

Source: Frederic Lardinois /TechCrunch

This article was updated in 2025 to reflect current trends and insights.