IBM’s acquisition of Arsenal Digital Solutions is the latest transaction driven by the growing concern among businesses of all sizes that they have to do more to protect their electronic files in order to safeguard against natural disasters and satisfy escalating regulations.

What makes this trend even more interesting is that it has brought greater attention to the fundamental advantages of using a “hosted”, managed service to respond to these business concerns. This has made a widening array of storage, e-discovery and other managed service providers (MSPs) very attractive acquisition targets for an expanding assortment of potential buyers.

Here are a few of the acquisitions which preceeded IBM’s announcement,

Seagate $185 million purchase of EVault
EMC’s $76 million acquisition of Berkeley Data Systems Inc.’s Mozy storage service
Autonomy’s $375 million acquisition of email archiving service provider Zantaz Inc.
A series of acquisitions by Iron Mountain, including … Read More »

Over the past week, three Massachusetts-based companies have announced important developments which can serve as measuring-sticks for the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and managed services markets.

On October 31, Iron Mountain announced its intention to acquire Stratify, a leading provider of electronic discovery services for the legal industry and Fortune 500 legal departments. This announcement came on the heels of the Iron Mountain’s recent analyst briefing focused on its growing digital services business. THINKstrategies views these digital services as part of the broader managed services sector.

Iron Mountain has become a major player in the traditional physical records management in part because of its aggressive acquisition efforts. It has also established a solid foothold in the digital services market as a result of previous acquisitions of Connected and LiveVault. The addition of Stratify gives Iron Mountain a stronger eDiscovery capability to respond to escalating … Read More »