Carbonite Inc., the company behind a consumer cloud backup solution, has just raised $20 million in fourth round venture capital. This is the second big consumer-oriented managed service investment we’ve spotted this week — reinforcing the fact that commodity players could potentially gain some ground in the SMB space. Here’s why.
Carbonite, which does have a reseller program, is currently only aimed at backing up files at the individual user level on Windows and Mac machines. There’s no shortage of competition in that space: Backblaze and personal favorite Dropbox, for example.
Now, the question: Will Carbonite stick to its lower-end focus or will the company gradually push into more sophisticated business settings? We don’t have any firm answers at the moment but there’s no doubting the consumerization of managed services — from Carbonite to iYogi.
Still, fundraising may the biggest news to come out of Carbonite in months. In fact…one might almost say it’s been too quiet. So we have to be careful not to hype consumer player moves . Are they really here to stay? (Apparently yes — since Carbonite is planning a potential IPO in a year or so.) But will they compete with SaaS storage providers that already serve the MSP market (folks like Asigra, Intronis, StorageGuardian, VaultLogix, Vembu … and soon CA ArcServe for MSPs)? We’ll be watching.
Additional reporting and analysis by Joe Panettieri.
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Posted In: Managed Storage Services | Software as a Service and Hardware as a Service
Tags: Backblaze | Carbonite | Dropbox | iYogi | Managed Storage Service
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