Data backup and recovery specialist Carbonite is beefing up its small and midsize business (SMB) proposition with the acquisition of MailStore, which is known for its email archiving capabilities, including full-text search and indexing capabilities.
Archiving and storage has become a crucial part of company operations as more and more mission-critical communications and applications move to the cloud. But email is still the No. 1 information generator, which presents a challenge for SMBs looking to keep a complete history of their business data and ensure data integrity.
Also, email archiving is a natural complement to backup and recovery solutions, and many businesses are looking for both to ensure continuity of their data and meet compliance requirements, including HIPAA (USA), Data Protection Act 1998 (U.K.) and GDPdU (Germany).
Taken together, the ability to easily search-and-index content within mails is crucial for these companies, which often don’t have the in-house resources to build their own system or devote labor to archiving and retrieval tasks.
Carbonite will integrate MailStore's product lineup into its portfolio of continuity solutions for SMBs. "MailStore is a great fit for Carbonite, as both companies are committed to providing SMBs with powerful yet simple data protection solutions," said Mohamad Ali, CEO at Carbonite.
MailStore’s flagship solution is MailStore Server, which it says is used by more than 22,000 businesses, including public and educational institutions. It creates 1:1 copies of messages from most major email systems, including cloud email such as Office 365 and Gmail, as well as Exchange, PST files and all IMAP and POP3-compatible email servers. In 2014, MailStore released a Service Provider Edition that enables channel partners to run the software on their own infrastructure and adapt it to their clients' business requirements.
"Companies buy email archiving solutions to make a permanent record of every incoming and outgoing email for regulatory and compliance reasons, to protect against accidental or malicious deletion, and to make the valuable data that flows through email available to users for future access," added Ali. "MailStore's fast search technology and easy-to-use interface allows users to search and find important information without the need for IT assistance. We look forward to bringing this technology to more businesses so they are able to derive value from archived information."
The acquisition is subject to customary closing conditions and is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2014. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.