In a bold effort to seize a leadership position in the data protection market, Axcient Inc. and eFolder Inc. have agreed to join forces as a single company.
The newly combined business will have an expansive solution portfolio ranging from Denver-based eFolder’s file sync and share and BDR solutions for SMBs to Mountain View, Calif.-based Axcient’s disaster recovery-as-a-service offerings for mid-market businesses. It will also boast nearly 4,000 partners—including more than 90 percent of the 100 largest MSPs in North America—and support some 50,000 end user customers running 400,000 endpoints.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
“This merger is an exciting development in the business continuity industry,” said Axcient founder and former CEO Justin Moore in a press statement. “Axcient joining forces with eFolder creates the most complete platform for protecting data and ensuring the availability of IT systems. MSPs and mid-market customers now have a single vendor they can trust to ensure employees always have access to the applications and information they need when they need it in today’s high-velocity business climate.”
Moore will serve the post-merger company as chief strategy officer. That, as it happens, is the title former ConnectWise president and COO Matt Nachtrab assumed at eFolder in February before becoming its CEO last week. He will be the new, larger company’s CEO as well.
“I’m extremely excited to be leading this next chapter for Axcient and eFolder, and continuing to lean upon our core values to provide the best offerings for both MSPs and their clients,” said Nachtrab in the press release. “This merger enables us to deliver a far more complete suite of solutions to businesses as they face today’s biggest IT challenges—protecting against the ever-increasing number of threats to data and infrastructure.”
eFolder co-founder Kevin Hoffman, who became that vendor’s full-time CTO last week after serving in both that capacity and as CEO, will be the new entity’s CTO too.
“I look forward to building upon and bringing together Axcient’s and eFolder’s industry-leading technologies,” said Hoffman in the news release. “MSPs today are often forced to partner with multiple vendors to serve their clients of varying sizes. Our goal is to provide a single integrated cloud-managed solution that cost-effectively scales down to provide resiliency for single-server SMBs, while effortlessly scaling up meeting the needs of mid-market companies with 100s or 1000s of virtual machines.”
Word of the eFolder hook-up arrives amid a building wave of M&A activity in the data protection market aimed at offering wider product catalogs to broader customer bases. Just over two weeks ago, for example, Arcserve LLC announced its acquisition of direct-to-cloud BDR vendor Zetta Inc. in a bid to deliver fully-integrated, end-to-end “disaster avoidance” solutions to mid-market companies.
In December 2015, meanwhile, BDR vendor Carbonite Inc. took a step past its roots in the consumer and “very small business” space into the mid-market by purchasing the EVault division of Seagate Technology. More recently, it bought high-availability and data migration specialist Double-Take Software from Irvine, Calif.-based Vision Solutions Inc.
eFolder, for its part, acquired BDR vendor Replibit LLC in June of last year. That was the same month in which Axcient launched Fusion, a new solution designed to help businesses boost efficiency and save money by consolidating siloed non-production workloads in areas ranging from backup, to archiving, testing, and development, among others.
