Contact: Brenon Daly
A ravenous eater, Barracuda Networks has now gobbled up four companies in the past 14 months. (And that doesn’t even count the privately held security company’s unsolicited bid in May for publicly traded Sourcefire, the Snort vendor.) Barracuda’s latest bite is backup and recovery company Yosemite Technologies. The company will be lumped in with the technology Barracuda picked up in November 2008 when it bought another backup vendor, BitLeap.
As we have chronicled, Yosemite evolved from a tape-based backup vendor to a disk-based one, and then added technology for continuous data protection for notebooks and laptops with the acquisition of early-stage FileKeeper. We understand that Yosemite, under the leadership of storage veteran George Symons, had been investing heavily in commercializing the technology. However, we suspect that fully realizing the value of the FileKeeper technology would have likely required another round of funding, which is tough to come by these days.
Instead, Yosemite opted for a sale to Barracuda. Terms weren’t disclosed, but a Barracuda insider once characterized the company’s approach to M&A to us this way: ‘We don’t mind picking through the boneyard.’ Barracuda has already built a powerful distribution channel to SMBs, so it just wants more products to push through that. With data protection covered, where might Barracuda look next? Our bet is that it is still interested in WAN traffic optimization (WTO). As we have noted, Barracuda CFO David Faugno knows the market well, having served as the top numbers guy at WTO vendor Actona Technologies before its sale to Cisco.
Barracuda’s deals
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Source: The 451 M&A KnowledgeBase