More Cloud Backup M&A: Carbonite Buys MailStore

Carbonite’s acquisition of MailStore provides another indicator that the cloud backup market has reached a point of saturation, and shores up predictions that more, similar deals will continue to emerge over the coming months.

On Dec. 15, Carbonite said it is buying Germany-based MailStore for its heft in cloud email archiving for SMBs. The announcement comes on the heels of Datto’s Dec. 11 purchase of Backupify. Together, the transactions add to the string of purchases that’s taken place throughout 2014 and point to ramped-up activity occurring in 2015: Look for more companies to sell or fail over the coming year as competition for cloud backup business results in an excess number of players.

In terms of Monday’s news, Boston-based Carbonite told the Securities and Exchange Commission that it is buying all of MailStore’s equity interests for about $20 million. Carbonite’s thinking is that email archiving complements data backup because it lets companies keep permanent records of every message, whether for regulatory and compliance reasons or to protect against unauthorized deletion. To that point, Carbonite will integrate MailStore’s full-text search and indexing tools into its own portfolio, which will help SMBs to better manage, understand and use their data.

MailStore also bolsters Carbonite’s expansion strategy because its technology complies with privacy regulations in the United States, Germany and the UK. Corporate presence in Europe hands Carbonite more geography in which to sell cloud data backup with email archiving services – through channel partners, not just direct sales teams. For the channel in specific, MailStore presents more platforms partners may offer to their SMB customers for business continuity and productivity, Carbonite said.

The Carbonite-MailStore transaction is expected to close before the end of the year. Whether it will serve as the final cloud backup M&A heading into 2015, however, remains unknown, and even unlikely.