Insight Venture Partners is more than an investment shop; it is increasingly becoming a huge IT service provider.
A while back, Insight bought a controlling interest in Kaseya and installed its own team to run it. This week comes news that the venture firm is doing much the same with backup firm Unitrends. Here Insight invested a “major” amount, an amount that gives Insight greater control over Unitrends’ future. In fact, the language used by Insight makes it seem more like a buyout than an investment.
Unlike the Kaseya deal, Unitrends’ leadership is intact.
“Unitrends is in a stronger than ever position to transform the way data protection is delivered,” said Mike Coney, president and CEO of Unitrends. “The principles that the Unitrends brand is built on – our business-friendly model, product development and go-to market strategies, and laser-like focus on customer support – will remain unchanged. This foundation, combined with our partnership with Insight Venture Partners and its expertise in the software and technology industries, will enable us to accelerate our growth through the expansion of our existing offerings.”
Unitrends, the partners argue, is on a roll, and has grown for each of its last 19 quarters.
Unitrends Fights Pricing Battle
The backup market that Insight is so interested in is undergoing a bit of a price war. Asigra drew its sword when it announced that instead of focusing most costs on backing up data, almost all the cost would be incurred only when recovering.
Unitrends quickly countered with a new Service Provider Partner program.
Unitrends didn’t match Asigra’s approach, but did announce a fresh economic approach. This new program “equips hosting, managed services and cloud providers with the agile infrastructure needed to simply and cost-effectively offer onsite and offsite backup and disaster recovery services to their customers,” a spokesperson said.
IMS Recovery Services is a Unitrend’s MSP that likes what it sees. “Because Unitrends’ backup and disaster recovery solutions protect data across physical, virtual and cloud infrastructure, we are able to deploy and scale in a variety of environments and meet our customers’ needs regardless of their data center setup,” said Devon Wilson, president at IMS Recovery Services, one of Unitrends’ MSP providers specializing in Credit Union backup and disaster recovery services. “Unitrends packs enterprise-class capabilities – from backup and disaster recovery to archiving and replication – into a single solution, which lowers our management overhead and enables us to simplify data protection for our customers. Unitrends enables IMS to be even more flexible in how we interact and protect customers and their data.”
Edited by
Rory J. Thompson
