Commvault To Acquire Hedvig In $225M Deal, Speeding Up Software-Defined Storage Vision

Data protection and management software developer Commvault is acquiring Hedvig, a developer of a software-defined distributed storage offering combining block, file, and object storage.

The acquisition is valued at $225 million including the purchase price and on-going employee retention.

It brings Commvault the software-defined storage technology it needs to better manage data that is becoming more fragmented over different types of media even as clients look for ways to combing their primary and secondary storage requirements in a single platform, said Don Foster, vice president of storage solutions for the Trinton Falls, N.J.-based vendor.

[Related: Commvault Hires Former Puppet Master Sanjay Mirchandani As New CEO]

"This lets us accelerate our vision of software-defined storage as we see the data management path getting more consolidated," Foster told CRN. "Customers are requesting their data protected more frequently. They're looking at how their data is protected for compliance. And they want to ensure access to where the data is protected."

Hedvig is a developer of software-defined storage for accelerating business' ability to migrate apps to the cloud. The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company's Hedvig Distributed Storage Platform combines block, file, and object storage for bare metal, hypervisor, and container environments.  

The Hedvig Distributed Storage Platform fits well with Commvault's data management platform, said Rajiv Kottomtharayil, chief product officer at Commvault.

"Both companies have policies for managing data," Kottomtharayil told CRN. "The acquisition allows us to provide a unified look at how primary and secondary data is managed."

Prior to the acquisition, Commvault had a relatively small touch on the primary storage side of the business with its Commvault Activate technology for crawling structured and unstructured data sources to gain context from data and prepare it for further data protection and governance, Foster said.

Hedvig was founded because there was no real solution for managing data using a standardized infrastructure similar to how it was done by Amazon, Google, and Microsoft Azure, said Avinash Lakshman, CEO and founder of Hedvig.

"We wanted to democratize that idea, and unleash it into the enterprise," Lakshman told CRN. "The lines between hybrid clouds and the multi-cloud world are blending because people don't want to deal with multiple providers. "We wanted to abstract the storage and let it run anywhere unmodified. With Hedvig, data can be consumed as a SAN, an Amazon S3 bucket, and so on."

Lakshman said Hedvig decided to not remain independent because customers are looking for solutions to manage increasingly complex processes.  

"They don't want multiple vendors for backup, archive, or compliance," he said. "Commvault has the best-in-class data protection, and we have the best-in-class software-defined software, including a very good backup target. So we help build a complete Commvault backup solution. This makes Commvault a natural choice for customers.

Hedvig also brings several other technologies to help Commvault spread its wings in terms of the technologies it will be able to provide customers and partners, Lakshman said.

They include infrastructure-as-a-service for virtualized environments and the ability for data to be consumed as persistent storage for containerized environments, he said.

Hedvig's investors did well. Prior to the acquisition, investment in the company totaled $52 million, including a strategic investment from Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Lakshman said.

The acquisition is currently in a 45-day regulatory review period, but is expected to close during Commvault's third fiscal quarter, which starts October 1, Foster said.