AmeriVault Expands Online Storage Business With Capitalbackup Acquisition

AmeriVault, a provider of remote backup and archiving services, acquired Albany, N.Y.-based Capitalbackup in order to grow its business, said Bud Stoddard, president, CEO and founder of the Waltham, Mass.-based company.

This is the first acquisition, but not the last, for AmeriVault, said Stoddard. "It's not from lack of effort," he said. "In the online backup space, there are not a lot of companies that have traction. Hopefully we'll acquire two more companies in 2006."

AmeriVault saw its 2005 revenue grow about 27 percent over the year before, and expects that kind of organic growth for the next five years at least, Stoddard said. "Six years ago, people thought I was crazy," he said. "People said, I'll never send my data over the Internet, or over IP. We had to do a lot of missionary work."

The acquisition of Capitalbackup brings AmeriVault an additional 200 online backup customers, giving the company an active customer base of about 700 companies, said Stoddard. "Those are customers we service on a routine basis, all of whom did business with us in the last 24 hours," he said.

Most of AmeriVault's customers are companies with between 40 and 500 employees, although the company also works with smaller and larger businesses as well. Stoddard said many of them are financial, law, and CPA firms. "But our business is horizontal," he said. "Every business has mission-critical data."

While the majority of AmeriVault's remote backup services are offered direct to business customers, the company does work with a number of regional solution providers that resell its services, said Stoddard.

AmeriVault has its own EMC storage systems in three hosted data centers, and is gaining a footprint in a fourth data center with the acquisition of Capitalbackup. Both companies used software from Emeryville, Calif.-based EVault to run their on-line backup services, a fact which Stoddard said greatly simplifies the integration of the two. In addition, their business models are nearly identical. "Capitalbackup is a miniaturized version of AmeriVault," he said.

In addition to those four data centers, all in the Massachusetts and New York areas, AmeriVault is in the process of opening a fifth data center in the Midwest for disaster recovery purposes, said Stoddard.

Financial details of the deal were not disclosed.