Arcserve and StorageCraft merger aims for ‘single pane of glass’

Arcserve and StorageCraft have announced a decision to merge in a move that looks like the bringing together of two players with a diverse range of backup and storage products and services that span small and medium-sized enterprise (SME)customers.

The merged company will be known as StorageCraft: An Arcserve company.

Executives from the two companies said creating a “single pane of glass” to allow customers to manage products from both sides of the marriage was the only concrete plan in terms of offspring of the merger. This possibly reflects two portfolios that share quite a lot of similarities, but which are also quite diverse.

Arcserve majors on backup appliances in its 9000 and X Series hardware and backup software in its backup and UDP product lines. It also offers replication and disaster recovery functionality, cloud backup for Office 365, live migration and partners with Sophos for security, with the cloud as a key area of interest.

Arcserve is more targeted at the mid-market and lower end of enterprise customers than StorageCraft, which is more SME-focused with additional plays into managed service providers (MSPs).

Arcserve appliances are scale-up, but can scale to the lower petabytes end of things.

StorageCraft offers OneXafe scale-out storage, ShadowXafe data protection, cloud disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) and Microsoft Office 365 and G-Suite backup. StorageCraft’s products have a more service provider focus to them, with monthly billing and multi-tenancy functionality available.

Executives were tight-lipped about planned for the merged company, except to reassure customers.

StorageCraft CEO Doug Brockett said: “We have no intent of ending support for any product we have. We are looking to get a single pane of glass to manage both products.”

Brockett downplayed any idea that bringing the two companies portfolios together would result in duplication. “StorageCraft is very optimised around MSPs – for example, monthly billing information and multi-tenancy – and those are very powerful functionality and make the solution fit into a particular market,” he said.

According to Arcserve CEO Tom Signorello, the two companies fit well together in a number of commercial ways too. He said that while Arcserve is strong in the JPAC and EMEA regions, StorageCraft is heavily biased towards North America. He also talked about the MSP/not-MSP focuses of the two companies and the size of companies in the companies’ customer bases.

The merger is expected to complete in “two to four weeks”, said Signorello.