Dell said Friday it has purchased backup software vendor AppAssure, in the first of an expected run of acquisitions following Dell’s appointment of former CA CEO John Swainson as head of a new software division.

Analysts have predicted that Swainson, a veteran IBM executive and former CEO of CA Technologies, will build out Dell’s software portfolio with a focus on system management and cloud services, and the AppAssure deal seems to fit that profile.

AppAssure’s technology provides backup and recovery across virtual, physical and cloud environments. It includes support for both VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V virtualization, and also has products aimed at Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint, SQL Server and Windows desktops.

“At a practical level, AppAssure enables Dell customers to seamlessly move and replicate data across our existing platforms — from an EqualLogic array in a remote office to a Compellent array at a data recovery site,” Dell Enterprise Solutions Group President Brad Anderson said in a statement.

AppAssure, which is based in Reston, Virginia, has about 230 employees, who will be retained, according to Dell. It competes with companies such as Axcient and Veeam.

Source:http://www.cio.in/news/dell-buys-appassure-software-backup-231772012

Dell has made another key storage-related acquisition with AppAssure, which provides backup in VM, physical and cloud environments.
For Dell it’s the ninth such acquisition in the last five years, beginning with EqualLogic in 2007, and including Exanet’s scalable file system, Ocarina’s dedupe technology and Scalent’s virtualization management software in 2010, and Compellent’s enterprise storage and Force10’s data center networking in 2011. Dell had been rumoured to be in the market for a cutting-edge data protection technology vendor of its own for some time, but speculation had concentrated on Dell’s OEM partner, CommVault.

“Today we acquired AppAssure to help Dell customers modernize their data protection strategies and keep up with the pace of their organization,” said Darren Thomas, VP and GM of Dell Storage, in his blog entry. “The acquisition helps Dell take another big step in our enterprise solutions strategy and deliver our Fluid Data architecture that automatically and intelligently protects and optimizes data protection and recovery.”

The objective here is to further build out Dell’s storage infrastructure offering with its own technology — now including data protection — into its own converged infrastructure offering.

AppAssure, founded in 2006, goes beyond simply protecting data to protecting entire applications.

“Unlike traditional solutions AppAssure is application aware, with built-in intelligence both about the data and the application,” Thomas said. “It is integrated with storage solutions like snapshots that can quickly capture changed data as frequently as virtual environments need, dedupe and compress this incremental snapshot, and recover it quickly for any slice of time. This granular intelligence allows users to restore an entire application or a single file — like a mailbox, or even that important email you accidentally deleted — in minutes.”

Dell has been somewhat closed-mouthed about the acquisition. Thomas’s blog entry indicates, however, that it will initially be offered as a software only solution, and then will be integrated over time into the broader fluid data architecture.

“Dell will extend the benefit of AppAssure across our enterprise solutions and services portfolio.” Thomas said. “Initially, it will be a software-only solution, and then over time we will offer additional data protection solutions tightly integrated in our Fluid Data architecture as we’ve done with our other acquired IP, including EqualLogic, Compellent and the Fluid File System. Customers will be able to manage data end-to-end, not in silos of servers and storage, or islands of sites.”

So what becomes of Dell’s OEM relationship with Commvault  and its other relationship in this area with Symantec? Jason Buffington of the Enterprise Strategy Group, who is bullish on the deal and called AppAssure a ‘hidden gem,’ wrote in his blog post he expects those relationships to continue.

“Of course, Dell will still resell software from and deliver backup appliances that are powered by CommVault and Symantec for the foreseeable future,” Buffington said. “For those software vendors, Dell’s channel is a powerful and profitable thing that anyone that has worked to become part of will not walk away from. And for Dell, disk-based protection drives both server hardware and disk consumption (along with OEM software revenue).”

Moreover, Buffington said that while Appsure offers solid technology, it isn’t a universal solution.

“There are data protection/management capabilities found in both CommVault and Symantec that are not in AppAssure — some of which may eventually be there, and others that don’t fit AppAssure’s core and won’t be there, and that is okay too. But I wouldn’t be surprised to see an AppAssure-powered appliance someday.”

AppAssure is headquartered in Reston, Va. Bain Capital Ventures (yes  THAT Bain Capital) is the lead institutional investor in AppAssure and the remainder of the company is employee-owned. Dell said plans to keep AppAssure’s approximately 230 employees and will continue to invest in additional engineering and sales capability to grow this business. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed. This is the first software acquisition since Dell’s Software Group was formed under ex-CA CEO John Swainson at the beginning of February.

Source:http://www.echannelline.com/usa/story.cfm?item=27549

Dell on Thursday said it is forming a Software Group, which will bring together disparate products under one roof as the company tries to sharpen its end-to-end enterprise offerings.

The software unit will be led by John Swainson, who will assume the title of President of Software Group. He was previously senior advisor at Silver Lake, an equity firm, but also served as CEO and CA from 2005 through 2009.

The Software Group offerings will spread across all products and services, CEO Michael Dell said in a statement. Dell is primarily known for its PCs, servers, networking and storage products and also has a services unit, but the creation of a software group will help better server customer needs, the company said.

Dell has been increasingly intertwining software technologies with hardware as it moves beyond just servers to deliver more end-to-end enterprise offerings. Dell in July last year started offering a system with hardware, software and services for organizations to instantly deploy IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) operations based on the OpenStack cloud software.

Dell is also deploying software elements from recent acquisitions, including Boomi’s cloud, RNA Networks’ memory virtualization, Compellent’s deduplication technologies and Force10’s FTOS operating system into servers and appliances. The company has a small internal staff of software developers that are writing applications for PowerEdge servers and Kace management appliances, but the company in the past has said it does not look at itself as a software vendor.

Source:http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/249209/dell_forms_software_group_names_former_ca_ceo_as_head.html