StorCentric Continues Acquisition Path with Retrospect, Vexata Buys

StorCentric has made its fourth acquisition in less than 11 months, announcing the purchase of NVMe flash storage vendor Vexata Tuesday, just one week after acquiring backup software vendor Retrospect.

The two moves come as StorCentric, a technology holding company, which acquired storage vendors Drobo and Nexsan last August, continues to expand its reach in the technology marketplace.

The Vexata acquisition rounds out the offerings for StorCentric, giving the company scalable NVMe high performance flash storage systems to add to the prosumer and SMB NAS storage products available from Drobo, the unified storage from Nexsan and the data backup offerings from Retrospect.  

Mihir Shah, StorCentric’s CEO, told Channel Futures that about 90% of StorCentric’s combined business is done through the channel. StorCentric formed in 2018 when it acquired Drobo and Nexsan.

StorCentric’s Mihir Shah

StorCentric offers bundling opportunities for the channel due to its varied product mix, he said. The company will initially bundle Retrospect software with Drobo storage, which is already being done by partners.

“We will sell devices in the future – in a few months from now – that integrate Retrospect in the Drobo devices to make it easier to set them up and do backup,” said Shah. “We looked at what the market and customers wanted.”

The addition of the Vexata enterprise-grade NVMe flash product line will bring wider capabilities for StorCentric’s customers which were previously not available from the company, he added.

Surya Varanasi, CTO and co-founder of Vexata, said his company’s acquisition will allow it to leverage the channel community of more than 1,000 partners that work with StorCentric’s Nexsan division. Those channel connections will help provide additional transformative technology and customer support to address the most mission-critical use cases, said Varanasi.

Under the Retrospect acquisition, Retrospect will operate as an independent, wholly owned StorCentric subsidiary. Retrospect says its backup and recovery software is used by more than 500,000 customers in some 100 countries.

Jeff Kato, an IT analyst with Taneja Group, told Channel Futures it’s interesting that StorCentric chose the path of becoming a holding company for several fairly well-known, yet smaller storage and backup companies. The companies have a reasonably sized installed base, giving the holding company the ability to give its customers the confidence and stability to assure them that the products will not go away soon, he said.

“In addition, StorCentric can add scale with shared support, engineering, financial stability and some centralized marketing,” said Kato. “StorCentric is not done with their acquisitions, so they can continue to build out the portfolio.”

For channel partners, these arrangements will likely help them better serve their customers, he explained.

“It will reduce the complexity of relationships and channel partners can work with just one company instead of four, but still offer all four product lines,” Kato said.

That will also allow channel partners to be trained on four product lines at once and will likely allow them to get easier support and ongoing financial backing from the four companies within StorCentric, Kato said.

For customers, few changes in sales and support are likely from all four companies because StorCentric is keeping them separated by brand, said Kato.