U.K.-based infrastructure specialist Autonomy Corp. has announced it has purchased several key digital assets from records management company Iron Mountain, including archiving, eDiscovery and, most notably, online backup. When the estimated $380 million deal closes, Autonomy will expand its cloud platform to a full 25 petabytes of customer data, which it says will gain the benefit of its information governance portfolio.

A little background: Back in April of 2011, it was revealed that Iron Mountain was shuttering its cloud backup storage business for lack of profitability. So it’s not much of a surprise that it chose to sell off vast aspects of its digital portfolio.

But why would Autonomy, primarily a search and discovery vendor, want to snap up a storage business? Here’s what Mike Lynch, Group CEO of Autonomy, had to say in a prepared statement:

“In 2007 we correctly predicted the merging of regulatory archiving and search, and we believe we are now seeing the next phase where the convergence of regulatory archiving, back-up and data restoration with operational processing of data in the cloud is coming to pass. This acquisition makes Autonomy the cloud platform of choice, processing and understanding 25 petabytes of customer information.”

When the deal closes within the next 45 to 60 days, Autonomy expects to migrate 6 PB of customer data from Iron Mountain to hit that 25 PB figure. And Autonomy expects to fully support the Iron Mountain customers who are coming over to its side of the fence under this arrangement.

Another interesting thing Autonomy gets in this arrangement is the Iron Mountain Connected product, which it’s apparently planning on using to offer customers the ability to store non-regulatory and non-structured data in its cloud.

Cloud storage is a busy, crowded market. Is the Autonomy Corp./Iron Mountain deal the first wave of cloud backup consolidation?

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