CrashPlan Acquires Parablu For M365 Data Protection Tech

‘[Parablu] really broadens our product offerings. Now we can back up the M365 suite. Parablu also brings to us a very solid development organization. They're based in India, and the executives from the company have 40-plus years of experience in the storage market itself,’ says CrashPlan CEO John Becker.

Data protection technology developer CrashPlan Tuesday said it has expanded its Microsoft application protection capabilities with the acquisition of Parablu, which focuses on protecting Microsoft 365 data.

CrashPlan, which in 2022 was spun out of Code42 via an acquisition of the company by Mill Point Capital, started out as primarily to develop technology to protect endpoint devices, with a heavy direct sales focus, said John Becker, CEO of the Minneapolis, Minn.-based company.

“We started out really just on the endpoint, and we're trying to grow that business into a broader business and protect more than just files and folders on endpoints, and that's one of the key reasons that we made this recent acquisition,” Becker told CRN.

Code42 in July was acquired by Mimecast. After the CrashPlan spinout, Code42 focused on data security.

Parablu focuses on Microsoft 365 and provides endpoint and server technologies, Becker said.

“That really broadens our product offerings,” he said. “Now we can back up the M365 suite. Parablu also brings to us a very solid development organization. They're based in India, and the executives from the company have 40-plus years of experience in the storage market itself.”

Parablu was founded five or six years ago by executives who came out of companies like Druva and Commvault, and financially is at the break-even point, Becker said. It has a small presence in the U.S., but has been selling mainly to channel partners based in Asia and the Middle East, he said.

Parablu’s international market an important part of CrashPlan’s future growth strategy, Becker said.

“Obviously, it starts with technology, and then it's about go-to-market and distribution, which is super important,” he said. “We were primarily a U.S.-based organization, but we did have maybe 20 percent of our revenue coming from Europe. We think there's a lot of opportunities to expand internationally, which becomes a big push to do a channel. There are much larger organizations out there like Rubrik and Commvault. We hope to compete aggressively against them. They're going in a slightly different direction. They focus much more on the larger enterprises, the larger server market, and we're coming from the bottom, the endpoint market, and moving our way up.”

Now that the acquisition is closed, CrashPlan plans to start the integration process by selling the Parablu offerings to its customer base, Becker said.

“We have a lot of customers that think they have true backup with Microsoft OneDrive or Google Drive,” he said. “We're going back into our existing customer base, and then over time we will integrate the products so that we have one code base and multiple destinations. A lot of the CrashPlan products back data up to our own infrastructure in our own data centers. With Parablu, we've got the ability to go after Azure. We’re getting a strong partnership with Microsoft through Parablu. That gives us the ability to work with a lot of the MSPs that focus on Microsoft shops. So that's really the basic plan itself. We want to get to one code base and then extend that code base beyond M365. The closest thing on the roadmap right now is Google Workspace, but there’s others.”

Becker declined to disclose the terms of the Parablu acquisition.

CrashPlan has been profitable from the day it was spun out of Code42 via the Mill Point Capital acquisition, and funded the acquisition from its own cash flow, Becker said.

Parablu is CrashPlan’s first acquisition, but there will likely be others, Becker said.

“We have very ambitious plans to grow, and we're going to do it two ways,” he said. “We're going to continue to develop our own sets of products and leverage our existing development capabilities. Parablu brings us another 40 folks that are joining the team. And then we're going to also look outside. There’s always a build or buy decision. When we looked at building the products that Parablu had, we felt it was going to take too long, and even longer to bring them to market. So that's why we made the acquisition.”

Becker admitted that CrashPlan is one of a host of data protection technology developers, but said his company differentiates itself by providing a cost-effective offering.

“We have our own infrastructure,” he said. “If you look at the market itself, a lot of the players have moved away from their own infrastructure to Azure or they've moved to AWS, which is highly expensive. To date, one of our key components was the affordability and reliability of our product. A lot of our business is ripping backup providers out of businesses who are dissatisfied and replacing the business.”

Because CrashPlan has its own storage cloud, it is profitable, Becker said.

“We're in control of our own destiny,” he said. “A lot of the players are not profitable. We believe that we can leverage our install base and broaden our product portfolio.”

Over 20 percent of CrashPlan’s business comes from indirect channels, and that number continues to rise, and will do so even faster with the Parablu acquisition, Becker said.

“I think we're going to be more and more going after channel partners because we're not going to be able to build a direct sales force,” he said. “Our focus really was, number one, stand the company up right after the acquisition to make sure that we could do the things we said we're going to do, and then develop that wash-rinse-repeat cycle so that we can help the channel deliver solutions to their customers.”