Sanjay Mirchandani (Commvault)
Commvault has acquired software-defined storage (SDS) specialist Hedvig in a US$225 million transaction designed to enhance enterprise data management offerings.
Terms of the deal will see the vendor take control of a company housing expertise in storage, multi-cloud and data management, in addition to back-up, containers and micro-services capabilities.
The US-based business was founded in 2012 by Avinash Lakshman, the inventor of Apache Cassandra and one of the inventors of Amazon Dynamo.
“This acquisition demonstrates how Commvault is leading the way towards the intersection of storage and data management,” said Sanjay Mirchandani, CEO, Commvault. “We believe joining Hedvig’s innovative software-defined storage capabilities with Commvault’s industry-leading data protection reduces fragmentation and leapfrogs other solutions in the market.”
Mirchandani said the acquisition is expected to close in Commvault’s fiscal third quarter, "subject to certain closing conditions".
“Hedvig’s technology is in its prime,” he added. “It has been market tested and proven. We believe that the convergence of storage, multi cloud, and cloud native technologies, combined with our leadership in data management, will accelerate the movement towards modern applications built on containers and micro-services.”
According to Mirchandani - appointed to the role in February - Commvault has evolved its portfolio to help customers “protect, manage and use” data more effectively, demonstrated by the 600-plus petabytes of data managed by the vendor’s software in the cloud today.
“Being completely software based, the Hedvig platform can span multiple data centres across multiple physical geographies including disparate cloud environments,” said Lakshman, speaking as CEO of Hedvig. “This may be the most comprehensive solution ever unleashed into enterprise data centres and public cloud environments.”
According to Gartner, by 2023, SDS "instantiations" of vendor storage operating systems running in the cloud will become the “dominant method” of building multi-cloud storage infrastructures.
“Multi-cloud data management is a hard problem for customers to solve, and that translates to value,” added Crawford Del Prete, president, IDC. “Commvault’s acquisition of Hedvig is an astute strategic move that allows Commvault to differentiate and enhance its offerings - which broadens its addressable market. We believe this increases the value Commvault can bring to these increasingly complex customer problems.”
