Seagate Expands SMB Data Services

December 29th, 2006: Seagate has announced that it is getting into the online storage market by acquiring EVault Inc. in a US$185 million deal.

According to Seagate, the purchase will expand its service offerings and enable it to focus on online backup, recovery and archiving for small to medium sized businesses (SMBs).

“Today's announcement highlights a strategic next step into services, which is a natural extension of Seagate's core business and will leverage our brand leadership and channel expertise to deliver solutions to the SMB market,” said Seagate CEO Bill Watkins. “Over the past three years, Seagate has been executing a strategy designed to broaden its customer base and increase growth opportunities by expanding beyond its core hard disc drive business into the broader storage solutions category.”

EVault is the most recent acquisition for Seagate Services, and the third recently. In 2005 Seagate purchased Mirra, Inc., a leading provider of networked digital content protection products for the home and SMB markets, and Action Front, an in-lab data recovery company.

Seagate sees small business services as being underserved, and claims analyst are reporting that there are currently over 74 million small-medium businesses worldwide with the common IT challenge of improving data availability and recovery.

With the acquisition of EVault, Seagate says it will now be able to provide:

• Data recovery through professional in-lab and on-site retrieval of content for corrupted or inaccessible storage devices.
• Online backup, archival, and recovery services for designated user and application data and targeted at SMBs.

Seagate expects to close the deal in the third quarter of 2007.

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