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Seagate Technology said Sept. 23 that it has created a new wholly owned subsidiary called i365 that will comprise its EVault, MetaLINCS, and Seagate Recovery Services companies, which previously were operating loosely under the name Seagate Services.
As of Sept. 23 these companies-each of which Seagate acquired within the last two years-will be known formally as i365, A Seagate Company. Chances are good that the new business unit simply will be referred to as “i365.”
i365 stands for “Information, 365 days a year,” the division’s new general manager, Mark Grace, said. Headquarters is in Santa Clara, Calif.
“We were looking for a good, short name-which isn’t easy to do anymore-and decided on i365, because it’s simple, tells what we do, and is a short URL,” Grace said. “This is not a spinoff, it’s a wholly owned subsidiary of Seagate.”
EVault, acquired in 2007, supplies online backup services, while MetaLINCS-also acquired in 2007-is an e-discovery hosted and managed software provider. The former ActionFront data recovery service, which was brought into the company in 2006, was morphed into the original Seagate Services.
Seagate also acquired the Open File Manager product line from St. Bernard Software, which is included in this mix.
“i365 allows us to approach the market with a more dedicated focus to midmarket companies and small and midsize businesses,” Grace said. “This [reorganization] brings together the best of what each company has to offer.”
Seagate Services apparently was ready to venture out on its own. Grace said that the division in the past two years has outperformed the general IT sector on a year-over-year revenue basis.
“We beat the market with 39 percent revenue growth and strong growth in both software and SAAS [software as a service] offerings,” Grace said. “In comparison, the data protection and recovery software industry grew at 12.6 percent [according to IT analytics company IDC], and online backup services, a subset of SAAS, grew at 38 percent [reports IDC]. Legal discovery and litigation support infrastructure sector grew at 17.6 percent.”
Grace said Seagate Services expanded its customer base to more than 22,000 and increased its employee count by 35 percent to more than 500 employees. It also has joined the exclusive Microsoft Global ISV program and has built eight high-availability SAS-70 Type III- and IV-certified data centers.
On Sept. 22, Fujitsu announced that it was creating a similar new corporate entity, Fujitsu North America Holding, to better coordinate sales and delivery of its products and services.