Scoop! Veritas has bought HubStor, a Canadian backup and archive vendor, gaining itself a SaaS-based data protection development team. Terms are undisclosed.
Ontario-based HubStor was founded in 2015 by CEO Geoff Bourgeois and CTO Gregg Campbell, and its 21 employees have developed a unified backup and archive to the cloud as-a-service. The service supports Azure file and Blob storage, Box, Google Drive and VMware vSphere.
The entirely bootstrapped company is customer-funded through recurring – and growing – subscription revenues. Bourgeois told us: “HubStor proved it could build a SaaS product. Veritas will take it to the next level.”
Simon Jelley, general manager for Veritas Backup Exec, EndPoint Protection and SaaS Protection, told us: “It’s a great union and it’s about how we bring our enterprise-data services to the cloud.”
Hubstor’s team will work in Jelley’s organisation inside Veritas. Bourgeois said: “HubStor was a highly profitable business with a substantial software platform and very strong customer adoption. We did not need to sell. Veritas made it compelling and we felt it was a strong win for our customers, and that Veritas would do an amazing job realizing the full potential of what we built in the years ahead.” We can expect integration efforts between Veritas software and Hubstor’s technology.
Was this an acqui-hire? Bourgeois says not. Yes, Veritas is acquiring the team but the acqui-hire term is generally used to refer to buying a a technology company primarily for its people and not its technology or products; not the case here.
Veritas is a veteran data protection business that faces the prospect of customers migrating to cloud-based rivals such as Clumio, Commvault Metallic, Druva, Cohesity and Rubrik.
A Druva executive who declined to be named because he was not authorised to speak to the press said Veritas’s purchase of Hubstor “is yet another validation of the popularity of the DPaaS (data protection-as-a-service) market, as well as how hard it is to get started in it.”
Bourgeois has stints at Iron Mountain, Mimosa and Autonomy on his CV, after which he joined startups ExchangeSavvy and Acaveo as a board member and CTO respectively. Campbell was also a board member at ExchangeSavvy and Chief Architect at Acaveo. He also spent time at Mimosa, Iron Mountain and Autonomy.
