'Tis the Season for Cloud Consolidation: Carbonite Acquires MailStore

Cloud storage and backup provider Carbonite is acquiring German-based MailStore, provider of email archiving solutions. The acquisition adds business capabilities to Carbonite's tool chest and gives it footing in Germany. The acquisition price was close to $20 million. The deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter of this year.

Email archiving is used to keep a history of business data. It is a big requirement for many businesses, which use it for regulatory and compliance reasons, as well as a precautionary measure to prevent malicious deletion. It is is a natural extension to backup and recovery.

MailStore will further Carbonite’s appeal with the small to medium business segment. Its robust search and indexing capabilities will be integrated into Carbonite’s product portfolio.

The cloud storage world continues to undergo consolidation. In the most recent example Datto acquired Backupify.

Consolidation is occurring between companies with strong niches as a quick way to add features, expand potential customer base, and acquire into a country or a regional market.

Competitors Mozy, Dropbox, SugarSync, Box all offer backup in some form or another and have been increasing business focus. Potential threats also come in the form of giants like Amazon and its recent Zocalo consumer-friendly storage.

MailStore was founded in 2006. Its roots in Germany mean it is already GDPdU ready (Germany-specific principles of data access and auditing of digital documents) which appeals to data and privacy-sensitive German businesses.

Its flagship product MailStore Server creates copies of all emails in a central email archive. Search and indexing capabilities provide full text search of email and attachments. MailStore works with Office 365, Gmail and Microsoft Exchange, as well as PST files and all IMAP and POP3-compatible email servers.

The company counts 22,000 business, public and educational customers for MailStore Server. Carbonite has 75,000 small business customers.

Earlier this year, MailStore released a Service Provider Edition that enables service providers to offer email archiving to its customers. This will enhance Carbonite’s offerings to channel partners.

“MailStore is a great fit for Carbonite, as both companies are committed to providing SMBs with powerful yet simple data protection solutions,” Carbonite CEO Mohamad Ali said in the release.