Dell buys backup software company AppAssure to boost its storage, software portfolios

Dell this morning announced that it has acquired AppAssure, a company that offers backup and replication software for virtual, physical and cloud infrastructures.

Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, but Dell says the purchase will enhance its storage and software portfolios. In fact, this is Dell’s first software acquisition since the formation of its software group, the company points out.

Dell says it plans to keep AppAssure’s roughly 230 employees.

AppAssure’s technology delivers reliable application recovery from customers’ servers to their datacenter and cloud environments, offering backup and recovery software for VMware, Hyper-V and XenServer as well as physical servers.

AppAssure claims its solutions are used by more than 6,000 customers in over 50 countries.

Here’s what Dell plans to do next:

Dell will extend the benefit of AppAssure across our enterprise solutions and services portfolio.

Initially, it will be a software-only solution, and then over time we will offer additional data protection solutions tightly integrated in our Fluid Data architecture as we’ve done with our other acquired IP, including EqualLogic, Compellent and the Fluid File System. Customers will be able to manage data end-to-end, not in silos of servers and storage, or islands of sites.

Founded in 2006, AppAssure was backed by VC firm Bain Capital Ventures as its lead institutional investor, although the part of the company not owned by investor is entirely employee-owned.

The company was co-founded by Naj Husain (CEO / Chairman), Todd Fredric (COO) and Dan Kyler (Chief Architect); all three are WQuinn veterans and former Symantec/Veritas executives.