Catalogic Software is selling its most important business to IBM, to concentrate resources on what is seen as a bigger opportunity in the cloud. The company announced that IBM will purchase its ECX copy data management business for an undisclosed amount. Catalogic will now turn its focus on CloudCasa, a cloud-native data protection service.
Spun off from Syncsort in 2013, Catalogic developed software-defined copy management, which helps organizations streamline storage use by cutting out unnecessary copies. ECX leverages the native snapshotting abilities of the storage system it is installed on, to automate image management and cut costs.
Changing times
ECX is used on-premises, which makes the sales environment more challenging since most things are happening in the cloud now. Catalogic has also seen competition growing from storage makers who have copy data management included as a free add-on.
Sathya Sankaran, Catalogic’s Chief Operating Officer, said that the market was training itself to deliver snapshots for free alongside the storage, making copy data management a tougher sell because the competition was offering it for free to boost hardware sales. IBM will likely use the software the same way.
CloudCasa
About half of Catalogic employees will join IBM. This transaction liberates the company from a business that was in decline while offering a breath of fresh air to CloudCasa, which the COO described as a cloud-native platform used to back up to the cloud and built for cloud workloads.
He said that the transaction with IBM makes the company completely debt-free and produces working capital that will inject money into CloudCasa for several years.
CloudCasa will be offered as-a-service and will focus on DevOps teams working with Kubernetes, the container orchestrator, to run apps unchanged in multiple environments.
16 hours ago
