Carbonite To Be Acquired by OpenText for $1.4B
carbonite.com
carbonite.com
I expect any consumer facing options to vaporize or be generally unsupported. OpenText is all about that enterprise/government software stuff. (I worked on a project where we were competing with IBM - to give some context)
Synergy's eventual heat death was, I'd hypothesize, greatly accelerated due to its preponderance in merger announcements and consulting decks in the 80s, 90s, and 2000s.
Would be nice to use it again without caveats. Maybe one day.
The fact that we’re in a people-heavy and asset-light industry means that these synergies are often people-related doesn’t make the use of the term improper or a euphemism any more than any other industry common term.
I guess technically if you combine two companies and accomplish the same thing but more cheaply due to overlap the company is therefore "greater" but you see where the meaning is already watered down from its original intent. This is elimination of redundancy, not synergy.
"This merger will result in a big ROI due to redundancy that can be eliminated" is the proper way to say it. Not "This merger will realize a number of synergies". Hence the euphemism comment.
I would characterize that as removing redundancy. Synergy has a different definition altogether.
> the interaction of elements that when combined produce a total effect that is greater than the sum of the individual elements, contributions, etc.
When an intended effect of a for-profit company is profit and a combination of two companies becomes more profitable (has a greater total intended effect) as a result of the combination, how is that altogether different?
The acquire-and-cut-to-the-bone strategy is a good way to juice short-term numbers, but it's bad in the long term in that you destroy the drivers of long-term growth. All the execs get their bonuses and get to cash out their options at a high value, it's bad for everybody else in the long term: customers, employees, investors.
The theoretical justification for post-merger cuts has also been declining for some time. Improved computation and communication have made it much easier to outsource non-critical functions, so merged companies will have a lot redundancy today. E.g., in a merger 20 years ago, maybe two merged tech companies could consolidate data centers and get rid of a bunch of ops staff. Now maybe they get a slight improvement on their AWS bill and they can lose a few execs, but it's not nearly the same.
And let's not forget the diseconomies of scale. Everybody here should already know that small companies can innovate much more quickly than large ones. And mergers have their own costs; I consulted for a while for a company that grew mainly through mergers, and you cannot imagine the number of meetings that existed just to bridge fault lines between different legacy software, different teams, different offices. It was a mess.
I keep hearing this and it is from a widely misunderstood study. It did not find that half of all mergers destroyed value, instead, it found that only half of mergers created value. The proportion of mergers that destroyed value was much smaller (about 20% iirc). Unfortunately, most people did not bother looking beyond the headline and extrapolated incorrectly.
For products used by big enterprises its pretty amazing how long a product can go without meaningful updates and still have companies paying for maintenance. I've seen it a few times now, the engineering/testing is basically cut to one developer who's job is basically to fix bugs and nothing else. For many enterprises this is a pretty decent model. In many cases they don't need or want new features, and the IT guys are very happy if they just get a point release once or twice a year that is a 100% drop in replacement with some bugs fixed.
For a large conglomerate that can sell new licenses as part of a bundle deal, its a good plan to, the customer base grows at about the same rate as people drop the products. The result is just a constant cash flow with basically no overhead.
I don't want whatever dark patterns and bonus features ( https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20061101-03/?p=29... ) marketing came up with this year. I want the basic functionality you had at 1.0, with all the bugfixes since.
At that point, it is absolutely the best thing to get rid of everyone and just keep selling the product you have. Too often a company tries to hold on to long, adding new features that don't actually improve anything.
I wish more companies were willing to admit when they reached that point.
But, yes your right at some point you have to admit your product is mature, and cut the engineering effort on that product, hopefully before you start driving customers away.
Gen. Maximus: "Would you, Quintus? Would I?"
- Gladiator, 2000
They're both to me agglomeration of barely integrated, confusing products that require a small army to maintain.
The legacy cms... Interwoven, Vignette, Teamsite. Seems like Open Text acquired them all! What a mess!
That's profitable because enterprise sales are so glacial.
So, if you have the money, it's better to wait until somebody else finishes the slog and gets the contract, and then you can just buy that company to get the enterprise customer.
When I was at Oracle this was a well known business plan, if Oracle acquired it a bunch of guys who knew the market/problem well would get together, seek funding and start a competitor aimed at the existing customer base. People couldnt be happier to get out of working with Oracle so it worked well for a long time.
More recently larger companies have learned to leave their acquisitions alone. Just look at LinkedIn as a great example.
On one hand, they had to handle a new management and culture of a global company, which is completely different compared to the smaller scale they worked in before.
On the other hand, each team knew, that they had to prove to management, that their product was superior compared to the others. Any attempt to integrate those products with each other or learn from them was futile, because you could not simply remove competitive behavior among those teams.
The best decision in my life was leaving this nightmare. I never heard of the products again.
Never had an issue with the original vendors but OpenText made the decision to not renew easier.
About 2 weeks after training I found myself wondering what they'd do in the face of everyone and their mother offering "free storage" which while completely different than secure backup sounds like the same thing to the layperson. Towards the end of my year there most of my calls (yeah I was customer support on the consumer level) were from seniors who didn't know how it worked but were told they needed to have it. It was an interesting if frustrating job.
You can look on Glass Door for various stories or check the papers in Maine for how they billed themselves as creating jobs even after they outsourced the consumer biz to Jamaica. That I saw coming but didn't acknowledge out of fear of losing my job. Oh well. They still canned me a week before Christmas.
This sale doesn't surprise me nor does the idea that OpenText will gut then sell it. Sour grapes and all they had to know this was where they'd end up sooner or later.
Whatevs. I used Crashplan now.
Do you pay for their business plan?
They killed their consumer plans a while back and told me to go to Carbonite. I was a bit bummed by that as I liked CrashPlan's client.
I went to Backblaze instead, not a fan of their backup client though.
Personally, I use Arq Backup and Backblaze B2 (their “real” cloud storage). Arq is a one-time paid app that does differential encrypted backups to your choice of local storage or cloud provider.
Keeping 1TB of backups cost me around $5 per month, and the files won’t disappear on me if my computer stops working for a month.
Also, Arq is “one time buy” just for one version apparently.
BackBlaze has a stable client (even though it lives in system extensions) that uses fewer resources, as opposed to the buggy POS that is CrashPlan. IIRC CP client is Java, BB is native.
BackBlaze's restore is far more robust (I got timeouts trying to restore large files from CP) and more intuitive.
Yes, BB Java app was (is?) indeed a POS.
I ended up switching to iDrive, which has a 5TB limit, but which also allows for unlimited clients within that 5TB.
A much more detailed version, including interactions with other prospective acquirers: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1340127/000119312519... - find for "Background of the Offer"
Who's still left in the home backup solution ring? Besides iCloud/Google Drive/Dropbox, I count...Backblaze? And that's it?
I made a backup of all of my stuff onto a 4TB external and left it at my parent's house last Christmas, but that's probably not what they meant by off-site. :)
https://www.synology.com/en-global/knowledgebase/DSM/help/Cl...
I don't have to pay for the software. If you stick with the Synology OS it comes with they have a package manager with things like various media servers, Cloud Station, a download client, etc. You can also just shell into it and install your own stuff.
You can get NAS disk stations with more capacity (more drive bays), but this was all I needed.
Personally I have a 2U Dell R520 I run FreeNAS on which cost me as much as one of synology’s systems with a lot more capability. But I also have a 24U rack in my office and use it to provide storage for my hypervisors in addition to Plex, general SMB shares, etc. so I have use cases that are a little more complicated than even the average HN user from their home network.
How've you found FreeNas recently? Or are you still running the FreeNas 9?
I've got 2x 8 bay NAS now (onsite and offsite) for my data. One at home and another at a friends for DR.
Running ProxMox for the hypervisor w/ ZFS and running either native Docker images or LVM's on ProxMox for all of my services. I went down the route of using ProxMox because I want to be able to build my on k8's cluster on my own hardware.
Now if you've not got much experience with ZFS, it's very easy to get your head around but you need to get your head around the basics.
The documentation in the link below is enough to get you started on ProxMox. The documentation below is some of the best I've ever read.
https://forum.level1techs.com/t/how-to-create-a-nas-using-zf...
If you want to go down the route of something a bit more off the shelf for your OS. I wouldn't use anything else but UnRaid. It's got cheap licensing but it's so fucking easy to use and has an awesome UI.
And there's https://www.arqbackup.com/arqcloudbackup/ if you don't want to have to manage that yourself, a more direct competitor to Backblaze.
https://www.duplicati.com/ is a solid FOSS option as well though I've found it to be a much less polished experience than Arq.
I left because Google's rate limiting makes them really slow.
Also they mix together all errors including permission errors and "the file is being accessed by another program" so every run will have a few hundred errors (in fact, if I got zero errors that always a sign that the backup hadn't run correctly).
If you are a unix user and/or reasonably technical, I think rsync.net would be the best choice.
You get an empty ZFS filesystem, possibly with snapshots enabled, that you can do whatever you like with (provided "whatever you like" is something that runs over SSH...).
Pointing borg/rclone/restic/git-annex/etc. to rsync.net works exactly the way you'd think it would.
SpiderOak is another venture in the commercial space.
It’s not perfect given the lack of snapshot functionality of both the local devices and the server, and technically we’re vulnerable to corruption if we get something like a database or Git repo at exactly the wrong time, but in practice we run the important jobs at the end of a day when we’re not doing anything else anyway so it’s very unlikely to cause a problem in our situation.
Nice thing is it can actually store disk images, so when your disk decides to die, like my OCZ SSD did, you can be back up and running within 30 minutes or less.
Windows only though.
Would like to be able to use some filebased solution ala Crashplan, but haven't found anything that has similar features.
Carbonite failed to port any of my Mozy backup settings. They were backing up the useless "\Users" folder, not the important stuff which I had configured in Mozy.
Instead of notifying me from the "mozy.com" domain, they notified me from a carbonite.com email domain, which was not whitelisted and therefore never reached me.
Ostie de Tabarnak!
I didn't end up following through but the stock has been solid and increased a fair amount and here they are selling for a billion dollars. So... goes to show what I know.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/14/consolidation-in-the-cloud...
We are looking for a reputable backup provider who can provide a solid product at the lowest price, striking a good balance between cost and features.
Our priorities are price, ability to encrypt the data, and setting up private network peering.
Any recommendations?
Our staff is comprised of smart system admins and developers who are well versed with Linux. No pretty UI's needed on our end.
Thanks in advance!
Gleb (founder @ Backblaze) Gleb.budman at Backblaze
Support about every storage backend you can think of.
"Our staff is comprised of smart system admins and developers who are well versed with Linux. No pretty UI's needed on our end."
Please email info@rsync.net. It sounds like a good match. I would be very happy to discuss how our product (an actual ZFS filesystem that you control) could be deployed for you.
[1] rsync.net
I guess with the likes of box onedrive and google drive the market may shift in the coming years...
Context and disclosure: I run Jungle Disk [1] which is in the endpoint data protection (and storage) market for small business. We see a lot of CrashPlan (the Code42 product) and Backblaze [2]. The market has a ton of competitors [3] overall. Further up market we see Barracuda, Druva and CommVault (along with a whole other set of competition which integrates in with cloud providers.
[1] - https://www.jungledisk.com [2] - https://www.backblaze.com [3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_online_backup_se...
I hope it will be useful and interesting to point out that rsync.net, built on the ZFS filesystem, allows customers to create arbitrary snapshot schedules that are live and browseable.
Thousands of our customers do exactly what you just described when they set up day/week/month/quarter/year snapshots and then browse right in with any old SFTP client[1] and retrieve arbitrary files and directories (or VM images, whatever) as they existed on those dates.
These ZFS snapshots are immutable (read only) and immune to attacks like ransomware or a rogue employee.
This also doesn't address data stored on cloud storage, full endpoint unstructured user data backup is a messy one. While large companies use policy management to force data off of laptops or non-protected cloud systems almost every employee I interact with at normal small business has critical files on their PC.
Never heard of OpenText. It's a Canadian enterprise information management (EIM) company. Apparently the largest software company in Canada.
X-Ways and Magnet are rightfully decimating EnCase’s traditional use in forensics.
https://www.opentext.com/about/history/1991-1994-the-pre-web...
OpenText also acquired, arguably, their biggest competitor Documentum [1] from EMC in 2017.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_content_management#... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Documentum
We have some of the largest enterprise software repos around. And we have some of the strongest enterprise relationships around with top tier companies in the world. Anyone who says otherwise has no idea what their talking about.
The big shops have managed to find the optimal way to influence decision makers enough to overcome the damage done to the customer as a whole.
... but I bet they can spell they're.