Iron Mountain Acquires Data Archiver Mimosa Systems

Iron Mountain announced Feb. 22 that it has augmented the scope of its products and services by acquiring data management software maker Mimosa Systems for $112 million in cash.

The deal provides Iron Mountain with an integrated archive for e-mail, SharePoint data and files for large and midrange enterprises, the company said.

Seven-year-old Mimosa Systems also brings Iron Mountain something else it has lacked: an on-premises option for customers that want to upgrade their data archives but are reluctant to move all their data to the cloud.

"Iron Mountain customers can use Mimosa for as long as they like before moving their data to our existing cloud-based archives-if they so choose-at some later date," Ramana Venkata, president of Iron Mountain Digital, IronMountain's technology arm, told eWEEK. "It makes Iron Mountain a truly location-agnostic provider of information management services."

Mimosa has more than 1,000 enterprise customers. In 2007, Mimosa's NearPoint became the first product dedicated to e-mail archiving and legal discovery for handheld wireless devices. NearPoint provides immediate mailbox and message recovery, disaster recovery, e-mail archiving, and self-service search and access in one package.

"This platform expansion enables 'any time, anywhere' access to archived e-mail from any platform," Mimosa Systems CEO T.M. Ravi, who will move to Iron Mountain Digital as its chief marketing officer, told eWEEK.

Users access their Mimosa archives from within native and third-party mail and Internet browsers. Mimosa e-mail archive access is supported from the Internet Explorer, Safari, Firefox, Opera and Entourage browsers and on Mozilla Thunderbird e-mail clients, Ravi said.

"We acquired Mimosa for basically three reasons: Their product technology is second to none, they have a lot of business momentum and they have a great development team," Venkata told eWEEK.

"We believe it offers the best archiving technology on the market. By combining Mimosa's on-premises archive with our cloud-based technologies, Iron Mountain can now store, recover and discover digital content wherever it resides. This is a great example of the type of technology acquisition that fits well within our long-term growth strategy."

Mimosa NearPoint features, as listed by the company, include:

Quick Search: Users can securely search and access their historical and deleted content for keywords and phrases found in email headers, bodies and attachments.

Extended Message Access: Mimosa NearPoint extended and migrated email-migrated as old and large email content off Exchange and onto the lower-cost NearPoint archive-is now accessible by users from a variety of platforms.

Mobile Legal Discovery: Mimosa enables corporate security officers and legal counsel on mobile devices and heterogeneous desktops to search and access archived messages across mailboxes, to support legal discovery from anywhere.

Deleted Item Restores: NearPoint allows users of mobile messaging devices to restore messages found by searching their e-mail archive, back to their "inbox."

NearPoint fills a missing piece in the lineup of content archiving, data protection and recovery, and e-discovery solutions from Iron Mountain Digital. Customers wanting to archive e-mail can now choose either NearPoint for on-site archiving or Iron Mountain's Total Email Management Suite for archiving e-mail in the cloud, Venkata said.

Additionally, regulated-industry customers can use Iron Mountain's Digital Record Center for Compliant Messaging for e-mail that must meet SEC regulations and supervision, the company said.

"This deal strengthens Iron Mountain's position in the market as a comprehensive provider of information management solutions. Its customers now have greater flexibility to store and manage their information on-site or in the cloud, where it makes sense for their budget and business," said Arun Taneja, founder and consulting analyst of the Taneja Group.

Pricing for Mimosa NearPoint starts at $9,995 for 100 mailboxes. For environments with over 2,000 mailboxes, pricing is $40 per mailbox.