Commvault acquires SDS company Hedvig for $225m

Commvault has acquired Hedvig, the software defined storage (SDS) company, in order to help advance the company's strategic vision.

The final price of the agreement, which included purchase price and ongoing employee retention, was $225 million. Commvault is a provider of software for the management of data across cloud and on-premises environments and sees investment in SDS as an important step forward for the company.

According to Commvault, Gartner expects that by 2023 SDS instantiations of vendor storage OSs running in the cloud will become the dominant method of building multi cloud storage infrastructures.

This move to cloud and multi cloud environments, together with cloud native applications is driving competitive advantage for companies of all sizes, yet the acceleration of data fragmentation is negatively impacting business outcomes, Commvault states.

This rapid data growth, generated from a variety of sources stored both within on-premises environments and in the cloud will continue to create significant governance, security and management challenges, according to the company.

IDC president Crawford Del Prete says, "Multi-cloud data management is a hard problem for customers to solve, and that translates to value.

"Commvault's acquisition of Hedvig is an astute strategic move that allows Commvault to differentiate and enhance its offerings which broadens its addressable market. We believe this increases the value Commvault can bring to these increasingly complex customer problems.

Commvault CEO Sanjay Mirchandani says, "This acquisition demonstrates how Commvault is leading the way towards the intersection of storage and data management.

"We believe joining Hedvig's innovative software-defined storage capabilities with Commvault's industry-leading data protection reduces fragmentation and leapfrogs other solutions in the market," Mirchandani says.

According to Commvault, the company has been evolving its portfolio in recent years to enable customers of all sizes to protect, manage and use their data more effectively. At present, the company has 600-plus petabytes of data managed by Commvault software in the cloud.

According to Commvault, acquiring Hedvig was a strategic move as it helps to drive operational efficiency, addresses the data sovereignty problems stemming from data governance laws, and enables hybrid cloud and multi cloud capabilities natively.

Operational efficiency is achieved via complete protocol consolidation (block, file and object storage) on a single platform, Commvault states.

Hedvig CEO Avinash Lakshman says, "Being completely software based, the Hedvig platform can span multiple data centers across multiple physical geographies including disparate cloud environments.

"This may be the most comprehensive solution ever unleashed into enterprise data centers and public cloud environments," Lakshman says.

"Hedvig's technology is in its prime. It has been market tested and proven. We believe that the convergence of storage, multi cloud, and cloud native technologies, combined with our leadership in data management, will accelerate the movement towards modern applications built on containers and microservices.

"Commvault will set the bar for the unification of storage and data management for the future," says Mirchandani.

Hedvig was founded in 2012 by Lakshman, the inventor of Apache Cassandra and one of the inventors of Amazon Dynamo.

The proposed acquisition is expected to close in Commvault's fiscal third quarter, subject to certain closing conditions. The transaction is expected to be slightly dilutive to Commvaults FY20 non-GAAP EPS and accretive to FY21 non-GAAP EPS.