Zerto, a data protection and disaster recovery startup, has been acquired by Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) to gain in-house disaster and data recovery products.
The acquisition was the result of a $374 million all-cash purchase, which valued the startup twice as much as the $183 it had raised in funding since its founding in 2009. Now, Zerto will report to Tom Black, HPE’s Senior Vice President and General Manager, as it becomes part of the company’s storage business unit.
The move by HPE is an extension of its already existing Greenlake edge-to-cloud strategy, which aims to transition the company to a “cloud-native, software-defined data services business.
Antonio Neri, HPE President and CEO, referred to this transformation and the role that Zerto will have on it, by stating:
“Data is now the most critical asset. With the explosive growth of data at the edge and across hybrid environments, organizations today face significant complexity in managing and protecting their data. Zerto’s market-leading cloud data management and protection software expands HPE GreenLake cloud data services, allowing customers to protect their data and rapidly act on insights, from edge to cloud.“
With the data protection as a service market being expected to grow to a $15.3 billion industry in the next 3 years (from $15.3 billion in 2020), Zerto will prove to be a valuable addition to HPE’s business model.
Zerto CEO, Ziv Kedem, expressed his belief that the acquisition will not only benefit HPE but also result in its solutions offering “an unparalleled experience” for customers, partners, and the industry alike.
Such services have also become increasingly relevant at a time when institutions and organizations around the world are becoming targets of ransomware attacks, which has increased visibility on the importance of data protection solutions.
According to HPE’s statement, Zerto’s management team will be joining HPE in the fourth quarter of 2021, the time at which the transaction is expected to close. The tech giant also expects the disaster recovery startup to contribute more than $130 million in run-rate revenue at software gross margins.
