Well, this is one of the stranger cloud M&A announcements that have come across my desk: A late-December announcement from Nine Technology indicated it was awarded a patent for its MSP-friendly Powered By Nine cloud backup solution — and the Powered By Nine intellectual property was simultaneously purchased by Imation Corp. for an undisclosed sum. But Nine Technology said it will continue to offer Powered By Nine-based storage solutions to its channel partners.
If I’m reading the official release correctly, Nine Technology itself becomes the cloud service provider offering Imation-owned Powered By Nine storage solutions on its own infrastructure. MSPs will still deal with Nine Technology, and customer data won’t be moved or even touched. All that changed is the ownership of the platform itself in an abstract, but real and financially binding way. On that note, Imation didn’t say how much it paid for the technology.
“Imation’s acquisition of the intellectual property and other assets will strengthen our efforts to develop Powered By Nine into the strongest data backup and recovery solution available. I want to thank the many channel partners who have supported Nine Technology and assure them that their businesses and their customers will continue to enjoy the benefits of working with our team,” Tom Gelson, founder and former CEO of Nine Technology said in a prepared statement.
You may have noticed the “former” in Gelson’s title: As part of this deal, he and CTO Alex Stoev have joined Imation to guide the development of Powered By Nine. Nine’s Gene Fay has ascended to the title of president, and will handle day-to-day operations, including channel partnerships.
Oh, and for the curious, the patent in question was for Powered By Nine’s apparently unique ”merger of two-stage, block-level deduplication and encryption,” according to the press release. We’ll keep watching Nine and Imation after this completely different kind of deal, so stay tuned.
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