This article is more than 1 year old

IT management software crowd Kaseya buys cloudy data protection crew Spanning

Private equity holdings shuffle

Kaseya has bought in-cloud backup supplier Spanning as Insight Venture Partners, which owns the latter and has a controlling stake in the former, shuffles its holdings pack.

This is just four months after Kaseya was merged with another Insight-owned business, data protection vendor Unitrends.

Kaseya was founded in Silicon Valley in 2000 with seed round funding. There was a private equity round in 2013 and it raised €38m last year, including €19m it snaffled from the state-backed Ireland Strategic Investment Fund. We don't know the total funding raised.

CEO Fred Voccola joined in 2015, having been general manager for Yodle's brand network division. He had been SVP for worldwide sales and operations at Identify Software from 2000. Identify was bought by BMC Software in 2006 and Voccola stayed there until 2009. He's not a storage guy.

Kaseya sells IT management products to MSPs and on-premises IT shops, typically medium-sized companies.

Spanning started in 2010 developing backup services that ran in the public cloud to protect applications and their data. It was acquired by EMC in 2014, which was then acquired by Dell in 2016.

Judged surplus to requirements by Dell, Spanning Cloud Apps was flogged to Insight Venture Partners in 2017.

Kaseya bought Atlanta-based RapidFire Tools and its suite of IT assessment, internal threat detection and compliance products on 5 September. These are also sold to MSPs as well as enterprises. Financial terms were not revealed.

We're told Spanning has more than 10,000 active MSP and enterprise customers worldwide, 50 per cent year-over-year growth, and in 2017, the company backed up more than 110 billion items. Like Unitrends and RapidFire, it will operate as an independent, Kaseya-owned business unit.

Its main product will be Kaseya Office 365 Backup powered by Spanning, and it offers both backup and disaster recovery. "Kaseya stands alone as the most complete Office 365 backup solution available in the market – hands down," Voccola claimed.

MSPs can use it to protect their own Office 365 operations and those of their customers. There will be cross-selling opportunities between the Spanning, Unitrends and RapidFire products, and Kaseya could grow its revenues substantially in the next few years. ®

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like