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Borg, borg, borg: Another one bites the dust as Microsoft assimilates Avere

Fancy go-faster filer tech destined for Azure

Avere Systems and its go-faster filer frontend FXT tech is to be gobbled by Microsoft.

Avere was founded in 2008 by president and CEO Ron Bianchini and CTO Michael Kazar. It has had five rounds of funding with a total of $97m invested. Bianchini previously sold Spinnaker to NetApp for $300m in 2003.

Now Avere has agreed to be bought by Microsoft. For how much and in cash or stock or a mix? No one is saying, but a deal has been inked.

Let's suppose it's a 3X multiple on the total funds invested – that would be around $300m. A 5X multiple would be $500m.

Jason Zander, a corporate VP for Azure, has blogged about the deal.

He described Avere as a leading provider of high-performance NFS and SMB file-based storage for Linux and Windows clients running in cloud, hybrid and on-premises environments. The blog is mostly corporate motherhood and apple pie stuff about the need for the cloud to support high-performance workloads.

Zander said: "By bringing together Avere's storage expertise with the power of Microsoft's cloud, customers will benefit from industry-leading innovations that enable the largest, most complex high-performance workloads to run in Microsoft Azure."

Bianchini has written about it too and explains that "Microsoft has made significant investments to provide its customers with the most flexible, secure and scalable storage solutions in the marketplace and has made Azure the natural home for enterprise applications. This shared focus on large Enterprise applications makes Microsoft a great fit for Avere.

"Our shared vision is to continue our focus on all of Avere's use cases – in the datacenter, in the cloud and in hybrid cloud storage and cloud bursting environments. Tighter integration with Azure will result in a much more seamless experience for our customers."

When the deal closes the Avere team will join Microsoft out of Pittsburgh.

+Comment

Microsoft is getting itself unique technology that would have equally fitted in with either Amazon or Google's enterprise business customer ambitions. In fact Mountain View is an Avere investor.

Avere has steered its tech well into the cloud, providing on-ramps and software that can run in the public cloud and provide virtual FXT frontends to in-cloud file stores. It's a good buy by Redmond and a nice belated Christmas present for Avere stock holders. ®

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