The band is getting together again at Veeam – to a point. The Swiss-based backup software provider has announced the acquisition of N2WS, a company specialising in Amazon Web Services (AWS) backup and disaster recovery, on whose board sits Veeam co-founder and former CEO Ratmir Timashev.
The deal, for $42.5 million (£30.8m), will see N2WS remain as a standalone company, with the firm being branded as ‘A Veeam Company’ going forward.
Founded in 2012, N2WS offers a cloud-native backup tool built specifically for AWS. The company’s partnership with the IaaS leader includes being distributed as an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) in the AWS Marketplace, while the company’s customers include Cisco, Coca-Cola, Harvard University and Oracle. The company received two rounds of funding in 2017 – a non-equity assistance in January and a venture round in May – with the total raised undisclosed on both occasions.
Writing in the company’s official blog, Peter McKay, Veeam CEO, said the acquisition would help position the company ‘for continued hyper-growth’ in its cloud business. “Veeam saw the potential in N2WS early on, and during the short period of time N2WS has proven itself as a leader in the backup and recovery market for AWS,” McKay wrote. “We saw great potential, not only with the company, but also the AWS market, such that a full acquisition of the company made sense strategically.
“This deal is a major plus for our family,” McKay added. “The acquisition strengthens our technology prowess even further, and allows the two teams to work closely together, benefitting from each other’s expertise.”
In its own blog post announcing the deal, N2WS said its plans for the coming year include product UI and UX updates and support for hybrid workloads.
Last week Veeam posted its financial results with $827 million in total bookings revenue for 2017. The company said it was ‘well-poised’ to become a billion-dollar software company by the end of 2018, adding it had secured more $500,000-plus deals in 2017 than in the previous six years combined.