Published on searchdisasterrecovery.techtarget.com. Read the full article here.
There is a trend of cloud storage vendors trying to become as comprehensive as they can by folding data management and protection capabilities into their platforms, said Krista Macomber, a senior analyst at Evaluator Group. HPE adding Zerto to its GreenLake product line makes a lot of sense, as it stands to gain more than just DR, she added. Zerto’s technology lets customers move data among different virtualized environments and clouds, providing a high degree of data mobility.
Between increased ransomware and natural disasters, protecting data and restoring it quickly has become much more important nowadays, Macomber said. Unlike HPE’s other data protection partners, Zerto started as DR and expanded to backup instead of vice versa, so minimizing recovery time and recovery point objectives was its purpose from the start. With more than a decade to refine its product, Zerto essentially saves HPE all that development time with this deal.
“Zerto has had time to develop its technology, and HPE capitalized on the opportunity,” Macomber said.
The company had an inconsistent 2020, laying off 200 employees in March and securing a $53 million funding round just three months later. Furthermore, a former Zerto employee, who requested anonymity, said that in the past six months, they and at least two others left the company for a competitor, citing lack of confidence in Zerto’s core product to remain relevant in an increasingly cloud-native and containerized world.
Zerto was hitting a growth plateau that it couldn’t overcome on its own, and HPE’s larger distribution network represents a chance to fix that, said Dave Raffo, another analyst at Evaluator Group. The acquisition is therefore mutually beneficial, as HPE gets market-tested technology for its GreenLake portfolio and Zerto likely avoided having to get another funding round to continue to scale.
“From HPE’s perspective, Zerto’s technology was sound — they just needed a little help with growth,” Raffo said.
