Last week witnessed the latest round of storage management acquisitions as EMC Corporation announced that it had signed a definitive agreement to acquire Avamar Technologies Inc. The deal, an all-cash transaction, will cost EMC approximately $165 million and is expected to close within thirty days.

Avamar, which was founded in 1999, is a rapidly growing organization that currently boasts around 100 employees with offices around the U.S. and in London. Avamar's core offering is the Axion software that assists organizations in their Data Protection efforts. Key to this software is patented data de-duplication technology that helps reduce, often significantly, the size of backup operations. Avamar Axion software is used to reduce the size of backup data at source before it is transferred across the network. Axion's data de-duplication and global single-instance technologies can often reduce required network bandwidth and backup storage by a factor of 50 to 300 times. In addition the company also offers Axion Replicator software that supplies encrypted and asynchronous replication of heterogeneous data stored in an Axion Server to another Axion Server, usually deployed in an off-site location for disaster recovery purposes. At the formal close of the deal Avamar will be integrated into EMC's Storage Product Operations (SPO) group and current Avamar CEO Ed Walsh will report directly to Mark Sorenson of EMC's SVP Information Management Group.

This acquisition is entirely logical as the addition of the Avamar technology to EMC's expanding portfolio will allow the company to further strengthen its drive to encourage organizations to make disk rather than tape the primary backup medium for many, if not all, business-critical usage. In addition, the data de-duplication software should help EMC's customers to extend data protection capabilities over WANs, an important consideration for organizations that are widely distributed. Indeed, this capability makes a sound offering for managed service providers to take to the huge SMB market where many potential customers still today struggle to effectively protect much key business information.

We believe that if EMC can put together a carefully designed managed services offering, there exists great potential to take backup and recovery to many organizations in the Mid- and SMB markets in the Software as a Service format. This is an area of interest to many of the major storage management vendors and one that we expect to become very lively over the course of the next year; to us SaaS generally has great potential to attract many customers across all areas of IT service. The introduction, or perhaps more correctly re-introduction, of backup and protection offerings is today far more credible than those of the recent past as they can now utilize recently developed technologies such as data de-duplication and WAN acceleration.

EMC has a major opportunity here but it will need to market the Avamar technologies as part of its broad storage management offerings. However, it must educate potential customers and prospective partners on its wide range of solutions. The acquisition of Avamar makes sense but there are many vendors battling in this space. The software solutions of EMC are growing all the time; all the company needs to do now is position and market them as effectively as it has traditionally done for its hardware platforms.