Arcserve Acquires Zetta, Looks To Be Comprehensive Cloud Data Protection Vendor

Data protection software developer Arcserve this month acquired Zetta, a developer of cloud-first disaster recovery technology.

Minneapolis-based Arcserve, which became an independent company after its 2014 spin-out from CA Technologies, sees Zetta as a way to access industry-leading cloud technology and innovation, said Arcserve CEO Mike Crest.

"Arcserve has strong on-premises capabilities and a strong data protection portfolio," Crest told CRN. "But we want the technology that will complete the customer experience. Zetta is 100 percent in the cloud, has multitenant capabilities, and is delivered as a service."

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Prior to the acquisition, Arcserve had been doing well, Crest said. The company has over 7,500 channel partners worldwide who account for between 98 percent and 99 percent of the company's total revenue, he said. Arcserve also is seeing 16 percent year-over-year growth in worldwide new bookings, he said.

Arcserve already has a presence in the cloud with its Arcserve Unified Data Protection (UDP) appliances that protect on-premises and cloud applications and data and offers redundancy to the cloud, Crest said. That part of the business has seen 28 percent year-over-year new bookings growth worldwide.

Zetta brings cloud-based data protection to another level, with a return to operations time of under five minutes, Crest said. "No one else comes close to offering an on-prem experience in the cloud," he said. "Zetta was born in the cloud, and designed for network performance with light agents and easy deployments."

Zetta brings Arcserve's channel partners an opportunity to scale their business that they did not have before, Crest said. "We're now giving customers direct-to-cloud data protection," he said. "We're providing a choice of direct-to-cloud, hybrid cloud or on-premises."

Christophe Bertrand, vice president of product marketing at Arcserve, said that, with Zetta, Arcserve will have two primary offerings for partners.

The first is backup-as-a-service, Bertrand told CRN. "This is direct-to-cloud," he said. "There's no equipment or storage gateway needed on the primary side, and it's very easy to use."

The second is disaster recovery-as-a-service, Bertrand said. "This takes customers to the next level," he said. "It lets them spin up a full-image virtual machine of a server or an app within minutes. Once they push the button to activate the service, there's no human intervention needed to get back online. It's very easy to run the virtual machines in the cloud."

Arcserve in the next 12 months plans to combine the Arcserve UDP and the Zetta technology to bring disaster avoidance solutions to partners dealing with midsize-business customers, Bertrand said.

"We will provide push-button ease of use for IT generalists, and make it easy to deploy by business users," he said. "We will provide a quick recovery time of under 1 minute with a minimum loss of data. This can only work if a company has continuous data replication technology, which we have. It will also be comprehensive to meet a variety of customer environments."

Crest said there is little channel overlap between Arcserve and Zetta, as Zetta primarily worked directly with customers or via MSPs. Arcserve will honor direct customers' existing agreements, and will transfer such customers to channel partners on a case-by-case basis.

"But the opportunity for channel partners is well beyond the 2,500 or so customers on the Zetta platform," he said. "Our intent is for all net-new revenue to go through the channel."

Arcserve and Zetta declined to discuss financial details of the deal. However, Crest did say that Zetta brings a robust recurring revenue business to Arcserve.

Jeff Whitehead, Zetta's founder and chief technology officer and now the new Arcserve chief technology officer, told CRN that Zetta's sale to Arcserve brings the Zetta platform a lot of scale. "We're good at direct-to-cloud," he said. "But it would have been difficult for us to take on new areas of the market."

Zetta will significantly enhance the cloud-based backup capabilities of Arcserve and help expand the company's hybrid recovery options, said Todd O’Bert, president and CEO of Productive, a Minneapolis-based solution provider and MSP and Arcserve channel partner.

"Customers are increasingly using hybrid environments with data both on-prem and in the cloud," O'Bert told CRN. "Our customers are all talking hybrid, and trying to decide when their data will be hybrid."

Arcserve has a nice portfolio, with a strong Arcserve UDP appliance line and strong features like its Assured Recovery high-availability offering that lets customers know that their data can be recovered without going off-line to test it, O'Bert said.

With Zetta, Arcserve will have a better connection to public clouds like Microsoft Azure, he said. "The Arcserve appliance had a relationship with Azure," he said. "But it seems like Zetta will make it a more integrated offering. With Arcserve, you can use Azure, but it's not as integrated. Yes, you can do it, but Zetta is much better."