The U.K.-based company puts itself on the world map in digital storage by acquiring Iron Mountain's digital archiving, e-discovery and online backup businesses for $380 million in cash.
Iron Mountain has committed to refocusing itself on its 60-year-old
core business, storage and protection of physical media and other property, and is getting
out of the digital storage business.
U.K.-based Autonomy, a fast-growing, multifaceted IT company, reported
May 16 that it will acquire Iron Mountain's digital archiving,
e-discovery and online backup business for $380 million in cash.
The move propels Autonomy, which mostly has been known within the business
and legal communities for its widely deployed and respected analytics
and e-discovery systems, into the mix as one of the world's top 10 data
protection providers.
Fifteen-year-old Autonomy, founded as a result of research and
development at Cambridge University, said it expects the deal to
increase its revenue by about $135 million per year.
Boston-based Iron Mountain, well known for its information management
services and heavily secured under- and above-ground vaults that house
everything from government and enterprise cold-storage documents to
Hollywood movies, artworks and personal valuables, will be turning over
digital files and data of about 6,000 customers to Autonomy. IMD has
about 6PB (petabytes) of data currently under its management.
As a result of the transaction, Autonomy will continue to support Iron Mountain's existing customers with
IM's Connected backup service, which it said will be offered to existing Autonomy customers.
IMD 'Retired' Its Public Storage Business in April
Only five weeks ago, Iron Mountain Digital, which got into the cloud
storage race late in 2009, told eWEEK that it was "retiring"
its commodity-type public storage services, Virtual File Store and
Archive Service Platform. That left it with the archiving, e-discovery
and custom backup businesses that Autonomy has purchased.
IMD said in April that had been planning to phase completely out of the
basic online storage business by 2013, which made it the first major
player in cloud storage to pull out of the sector. That phase-out
happened sooner than expected, thanks to Autonomy.
Iron Mountain entered the digital storage business in 2001 as a natural
extension of its services, but said that the digital business has faced
a number of challenges, leading to a strategic review and decision to
sell the unit.
Autonomy has been quietly gathering the pieces it needs to become a
big-time digital content handler. In 2005 Autonomy acquired Verity, one
of its main competitors, for approximately $500 million.
In July 2007 it acquired Zantaz, an email archiving and litigation support company, for $375 million.
It bought Web content management provider Interwoven,
a niche provider of enterprise content management software, for $775
million in 2009. In June 2010, the company acquired the information governance
business of CA Technologies; terms of that sale were not disclosed.
Autonomy, with a market cap of $7 billion, is the second-largest pure
software company in Europe (behind Germany's SAP) and has offices
worldwide. Its customers include T-Mobile, Exxon, Toyota, Nestle,
McGraw-Hill, General Motors, Federal Express, Sony, Kaiser Permanente,
the U.S. Department of Defense, and a number of other Fortune 1000
enterprises.
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Chris Preimesberger was named Editor-in-Chief of Features & Analysis at eWEEK in November 2011. Previously he served eWEEK as Senior Writer, covering a range of IT sectors that include data center systems, cloud computing, storage, virtualization, green IT, e-discovery and IT governance. His blog, Storage Station, is considered a go-to information source. Chris won a national Folio Award for magazine writing in November 2011 for a cover story on Salesforce.com and CEO-founder Marc Benioff, and he has served as a judge for the SIIA Codie Awards since 2005. In previous IT journalism, Chris was a founding editor of both IT Manager's Journal and DevX.com and was managing editor of Software Development magazine. His diverse resume also includes: sportswriter for the Los Angeles Daily News, covering NCAA and NBA basketball, television critic for the Palo Alto Times Tribune, and Sports Information Director at Stanford University. He has served as a correspondent for The Associated Press, covering Stanford and NCAA tournament basketball, since 1983. He has covered a number of major events, including the 1984 Democratic National Convention, a Presidential press conference at the White House in 1993, the Emmy Awards (three times), two Rose Bowls, the Fiesta Bowl, several NCAA men's and women's basketball tournaments, a Formula One Grand Prix auto race, a heavyweight boxing championship bout (Ali vs. Spinks, 1978), and the 1985 Super Bowl. A 1975 graduate of Pepperdine University in Malibu, Calif., Chris has won more than a dozen regional and national awards for his work. He and his wife, Rebecca, have four children and reside in Redwood City, Calif.Follow on Twitter: editingwhiz
