EMC will announce next week that it has acquired Berkeley Data Systems, an American Fork, Utah-based online provider of inexpensive online storage space.
EMC and Berkeley Data Systems’ officials refused to comment on the pending acquisition, which was first reported by TechCrunch. But sources familiar with the terms of the deal said EMC will pay $76 million to acquire the 50-employee firm. The source told InternetNews.com both companies are still working out the details and plan to make an official announcement early next week.
Berkeley Data Systems’ main draw is MozyHome Unlimited Backup, which offers unlimited backup and an unlimited number of data restores for $4.95 a month. MozyHome Free lets customers store up to 2GB of digital files, photos and videos on the company’s secure, multi-petabyte server for free. And it’s MozyPro offering comes with a license fee of $3.95 a month per machine installed plus 50 cents per GB each month.
More than 300,000 customers, including General Electric, have signed up for the subscription service since it launched in April 2006.
This addition will give EMC the product portfolio to compete with the likes of AmeriVault, Iron Mountain, CommVault, Comcast, AT&T and Verizon in the blossoming online storage market.
In May, EMC showed off its latest batch of backup storage products, including a new virtual tape library (VTL) ; new versions of its data de-duplication, replication and backup software; and its new bare-metal recovery capabilities.
EMC officials at the time said the new VTL is the industry’s biggest and fastest open systems VTL, packing up to 1.8 petabytes in a single appliance with a computation rate of more than 11 terabytes per hour.
Market researcher and consulting firm IDC in September said the surprising and relatively sudden surge in online backup demand has prevented it from breaking out the exact size of this market from the estimated $2.68 billion companies spent last year for data protection and recovery services.
EMC shares, which closed at $19.03 on Friday, were at $20.82 in Tuesday afternoon trading, a 9 percent improvement since the rumored acquisition was first reported.