Jumping on the SharePoint Bullet Train
In news this morning, Metalogix has announced its purchase of Idera’s SharePoint business, including their market-leading backup and monitoring products: SharePoint Backup and SharePoint Diagnostic Manager, continuing the company’s rapid growth and expansion in the mature but still growing SharePoint space. Coming on the heels of the Axceler acquisition only 55 days ago, I’m sure this news has caught many in the industry by surprise – but given what I know about this management team and the opportunity in front of us, its no surprise at all.
Metalogix is, arguably, the largest SharePoint ISV on the planet (measured by number of category-leading products, revenue, customers) – and the company certainly has momentum on its side. What is happening here, you ask? So nice of you to ask! Metalogix recognizes an expanding opportunity in the content infrastructure management space, and is strengthening its portfolio in support of a still-growing SharePoint base, including deployments within on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments.
As the evangelist for Metalogix, I have an interesting position in which I try to remain somewhat neutral within the industry so that I can provide a well-rounded perspective to customers and partners, as well as to help my product and engineering teams develop and execute on our SharePoint strategy. For some time now I have been interested in building or OEM’ing a backup and restore solution, as customer feedback has been that Microsoft’s native capabilities (in SharePoint or via SQL backups) just don’t provide the granularity and flexibility that they want, and the ISV community needs more options. At one point I even reached out to contacts inside Idera to inquire about a possible partnership, with trusted partners telling me that their solution was the most robust and powerful of the backup and restore solutions on the market. My feedback was strong while at Axceler (just ask my former management team), and Day 1 at Metalogix I made my thoughts on the topic known. Not only did the management team agree with me, but a strategy was already underway. Always a confidence-builder when you and your leadership team are operating on the same wavelength.
With this acquisition, Metalogix adds additional best-of-breed solutions to our portfolio. And when Idera’s Backup platform is integrated with our market-leading StoragePoint platform, customers will be able to backup and restore terabytes of content in minutes.
You can read the entire press release here. You can also read our FAQs, or register for a webinar taking place on November 7th, to be led by Metalogix CEO Steven Murphy, that will outline acquisition details and our roadmap. I’ve already been receiving phone calls and emails from people around the world, asking for details on the acquisition, asking what this means for the competitive landscape, and what it means to me personally.
Re: the acquisition: As shown with the Axceler acquisition, my management and marketing team will very quickly roll out details of our plans over the next couple days, so I’ll point you toward the FAQs and webinar for those details.
Re: the competitive landscape, this news is further proof that there is tremendous opportunity within the SharePoint space. We now offer unprecedented capability to our customers. You’ll hear some FUD from a few voices in the community, as always, but we’re going to continue to focus on building the best SharePoint solutions on the market, integrating and optimizing where it makes sense, with recognized category-leaders in ContentMatrix for migration, ControlPoint for governance and administration, StoragePoint for storage optimization, Replicator for content replication, and now Idera’s Backup and Diagnostic Manager platforms. Every software vendor claims “best-of-breed,” but Metalogix actually delivers with the recognized leaders in every category.
Re: what it means to me personally, at heart I am an entrepreneur and capitalist, so the news is fantastic. We are the fastest-growing SharePoint ISV, and we’re not done making headlines. I’ve always been a strategist, and have strong opinions on what it will take to not just succeed, but excel in the SharePoint space, and I am genuinely excited about the direction of Metalogix.
Many people are already asking: what’s next for Metalogix? What I can tell you is that we’re continuing to focus on delivering the best products and best customer service in the market. We’re working very closely with our partners and with Microsoft to continue to serve our global customer base, and to support expansion into mobile, social, and cloud infrastructure.
As always, feel free to reach out to me directly – and keep watching this space for more news!
