Last week we learned that Carbonite is acquiring yet another disaster recovery company, Mozy. While other acquisitions that Carbonite has made, like Evault and Doubletake, helped them round out their technology portfolio, what does Mozy give them? Carbonite and Mozy have long been competitors in the small business/home office backup market so at first, it appears that Carbonite just acquired its biggest competitor. I have no special insights as to what Carbonite plans with Mozy but I do have some speculations.
What to Expect?
While acquisitions typically work out in the long term, there are always issues in the short term, most notably for customers of the company getting acquired. What’s going to happen for all the Mozy customers if Carbonite plans to switch them over to Carbonite? Will customers be happy being forced to use new software? Carbonite has already quietly raised their prices for many of their products so how will that compare to what Mozy customers are currently paying for a similar service?
One of the products (most likely Mozy) will be positioned for medium to large enterprises while Carbonite will be positioned for the consumer, home office, and small business.
If you don’t think users will get switched from one platform to another, think about how difficult it is for a company to have 2 products targeting the same customer personas. My guess is that one of the products (most likely Mozy) will be positioned for medium to large enterprises while Carbonite will be positioned for the consumer, home office, and small business. This is apparent in looking at the current positioning on each website, Mozy highlights solutions for the enterprise while Carbonite highlights solutions for consumers and small business. By splitting the products to focus on different markets it makes it much easier for them to differentiate who to sell what product to. This is where current Mozy (or Carbonite) consumer customers get hung out to dry.
Finally, there’s the question of data transfer. Carbonite and Mozy are unique platforms and each has its own cloud storage (and data centers or co-locations). If a switch happens, how will the backed up data from one platform make it to the other platform? Will they migrate the data for customers or simply say they have to start new on the new platform and use some type of utility to access their old data if they need to? It’s not clear how compatible the different data formats stored in the proprietary clouds really are.
MSP360 has your back!
If you’re a current Carbonite or Mozy customer who is concerned about what the future holds, we welcome you to take a look at MSP360 software for desktop backup. We also offer a number of great features for server backup if you’re a small business looking to protect your data. MSP360 doesn’t force you to a single, proprietary cloud, we offer choice (over 50 different cloud storage platforms supported).
- Backup to Amazon S3, Google, Azure or other cloud storage of your choice
- Image-based and file-level backup
- Encryption and compression
