Double-Take Tucks In Tiny emBoot

CDP vendor Double-Take bought Canadian iSCSI specialist emBoot for $9.6 million last night, in an effort to boost its storage story.

EmBoot, which competes with Citrix, offers network boot software that lets users boot from IP SAN using standard Ethernet NICs. The deal follows Double-Takes December acquisition of CDP specialist TimeSpring.

”Using an iSCSI-compliant storage solution, Double-Take customers will now be able to create bootable images of their production workloads,” said Dean Goodermote, the Double-Take CEO, during the vendor’s second quarter earnings call last night.

The exec explained that emBoot also offers a centralized management console to assign the workloads to available physical or virtual machines. “IT professionals will be able to quickly create an IP SAN in minutes using commodity server and disk they already have."

Double-Take also discussed its pricing strategy for the emBoot software during last night’s call, explaining that the network boot technology could open the door for the vendor’s own technology.”As you know, we’re host-based versus storage-based -- now we can be both,” explained Goodermote, in response to an analyst’s question, adding that Double-Take will sell three core emBoot technologies. “The management console we will probably sell in the $4,000 range; a server target agent around the $400 range; then there’s a desktop agent around $100.”

The CEO explained that Toronto-based emBoot continues Double-Take’s strategy of acquiring small vendors such as TimeSpring.

”As we have discussed previously, we look to make small, technical tuck-in acquisitions,” he explained. “The ideal company is one that has excellent engineering talent with product that is not yet widely distributed.”

With just five employees, including CEO and founder George Kostiuk, emBoot was generating revenues of less than $500,000 a year, according to Craig Huke, the Double-Take CFO.

"All of them will become employees of Double-Take Canada,” he explained. “As part of the acquisition, we have put into place a retention bonus plan in an effort to keep key developers with Double-Take."The CDP specialist explained that it will also be ramping up its broader storage strategy during the coming months.

”We’re doing things that will move us more into the storage area,” said Goodermote, in response to an analyst’s question, explaining that the vendor is on the lookout for partners. “We’re doing stuff in Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM) that will be out soon that will allow you to put certain types of data in one place, and certain types of data in another, and enable more rapid recovery.”

Despite the emBoot deal and the HSM activity, the CEO nonetheless downplayed Double-Take’s storage aspirations.

”We’re not declaring war on the storage companies with this acquisition,” he said.

Double-Take’s second-quarter revenues were $24.4 million, a 21.9 percent hike on the same period last year, although the vendor suffered weaker than expected license sales in Europe, according to execs on last night's call.Have a comment on this story? Please click "Discuss" below. If you'd like to contact Byte and Switch's editors directly, send us a message.