Prominent data protection vendors Arcserve and StorageCraft, which deliver their respective solutions only through channel partners, have agreed to merge. The companies announced the deal Wednesday, though they have not disclosed terms. Pending regulatory approvals, look for the deal to close next month.

The combined company is poised to become a more competitive player in the backup and disaster recovery (BDR) market. Arcserve and StorageCraft’s respective BDR offerings are complimentary, as each company’s portfolio is different and designed for different customer segments.

Partners and customers know StorageCraft best for appliances and data protection software for small and midsize businesses (SMBs). Its primary customers are in the U.S., with much of its growth coming from managed service providers (MSPs).

Arcserve designed its backup and disaster recovery platform for midsize companies and enterprises. The vast majority of Arcserve’s sales have been in Asia and Europe. Approximately one-quarter of Arcserve’s sales are in North America. But Arcserve predicts its North American business will rise 28% this year.

Extending Platform and Market Reach

Merging with StorageCraft will extend both companies’ geographic reach and provide a stronger combined platform, Arcserve CEO Tom Signorello said.

Arcserve’s Tom Signorello

“After these two businesses come together, you will find a broader set of use cases that the combined entity will solve,” he said.

Phil Goodwin, research director for IDC’s cloud data management protection practice, agreed.

“This has the potential for both of them to broaden their appeal to a wider market of organizations in terms of size,” he said.

While Signorello described the deal as a merger of equals, the combined company will take on the Arcserve name. CEO Signorello will lead the consolidated company. StorageCraft president Douglas Brockett will continue to oversee that business, which will be known as StorageCraft, an Arcserve Company.

Both executives, who together discussed the deal with Channel Futures, said they will evaluate potential rebranding options later this year.

“You could very well see a rebranding of the entire entity in three to four quarters,” Signorello said. “We wanted to get out of the gate fast, given the complimentary nature of our businesses, and wanted to be thoughtful around branding.”

Maintaining Channel Continuity

For now, both Arcserve and StorageCraft will retain their respective logos to ensure channel partners don’t experience disruption, Signorello said.

“We have different channels, different partners and we want to be mindful of that,” he said.

Signorello emphasized that the consolidated Arcserve will continue to provide its offerings only through the channel.

“We will continue to be 100% channel-focused,” he said. “You will not find us having a direct sales motion. I spent a couple years prior to this role running OnX Enterprise Solutions, a sizable VAR-LAR-MSP Toronto. I understand what it takes to motivate the channel. And Doug and I are 100% committed to making that happen.”

While some partners carry both vendors’ portfolios, the companies designed and priced them for different types of customers. Among those who are currently both Arcserve and StorageCraft partners is …

…Paragon Micro. Its director of sales, Jeff Richards, told Channel Futures that he sees promise in the combination of the two companies.

Paragon Micro’s Jeff Richards

“This gives us an opportunity to promote their solutions in a more contiguous fashion across our entire customer base,” Richards said.

Extending UDP for Managed and Cloud Services

Arcserve designed its core BDR platform, Unified Data Protection (UDP), to scale hybrid environments to provide business continuity. Besides enterprises, UDP is for MSPs and cloud providers because it extends over long distances and connects multiple sites. UDP supports various workloads including Amazon EC2, Microsoft Azure, Office 365 and various SaaS on-premises server and VM environments.

Last year’s release of UDP 7.0 brought an extended set of cloud and on-premises environments it can protect. But UDP has lacked two key components that would make it suitable for MSPs and cloud service providers. One is support for multitenancy, which Arcserve will address with its new console, planned for release this spring. Signorello noted that Arcserve’s Cloud Direct solution, for direct-to-cloud backups gained from its acquisition of Zetta, is multitenant.

“The only piece that we were building out was the back office and the billing and the infrastructure that is required for this,” Signorello said. “And the integration with StorageCraft will just speed that up a lot by having that already built out based upon how far ahead StorageCraft is with that.”

DRaaS and BaaS

StorageCraft’s Brockett noted its ability to offer first-party appliances that allow MSPs to offer disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) and backup as a service (BaaS).

StorageCraft’s Douglas Brockett

“We’re really looking to have a breadth of offerings that encompasses and goes beyond what the competition does out there just in terms of scaling channel partner business models,” Brockett said.

Arcserve’s alliance with Sophos last year could eventually extend its ransomware protection to StorageCraft.

“Combining data protection with data security has become a key direction in the marketplace,” IDC’s Goodwin said.

Besides enabling UDP to give StorageCraft the ability to scale, StorageCraft brings key technology to Arcserve.

“The underlying architecture of the StorageCraft products is object-based,” Goodwin said. “The object-based architecture expands the way data can be protected and recovered, to make it more granular and easier to manage.”