Iron Mountain Snaps Up E-mail Archiving Vendor Mimosa

Boston-based Iron Mountain on Monday said it has acquired Santa Clara, Calif.-based Mimosa for about $112 million in cash, giving it the ability to archive and manage data onsite inside the customer's firewall and remotely in the cloud.

As a result, Iron Mountain said it becomes a one-stop shop for data capture, archiving and management across the enterprise, with the ability to capture and manage enterprise information from edge-of-the-network devices company repositories including e-mail stores, SharePoint servers and file systems.

Prior to the acquisition of Mimosa, Iron Mountain and its Iron Mountain Digital technology arm offered information management services for data protection and recovery, archiving, eDiscovery, and intellectual property management via a hosted services model, said Ramana Venkata, president of Iron Mountain Digital.

What it lacked was the ability to do so at the customer premises, said T. M. Ravi, the new chief marketing officer for Iron Mountain Digital who served as the president and CEO of Mimosa prior to the acquisition.

"Iron Mountain Digital has had a wide range of management solutions around archiving, eDiscovery, and backup, particularly around the cloud," Ravi said. "It was looking for an on-premises offering to compliment its cloud offerings. So now customers have a choice of working in the cloud or on-site."

With the acquisition, Mimosa brings Iron Mountain its NearPoint enterprise archiving platform with applications for retention and disposition, eDiscovery, compliance supervision, classification, recovery, and end-user search.

It supports data generated by Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint, and file systems with such capabilities as e-discovery, content monitoring, advanced retrieval and classification, PST management, and disaster recovery.

With the acquisition, customers wanting to archive e-mail can work with either NearPoint for onsite archiving or Iron Mountain's Total Email Management Suite for archiving e-mail in the cloud.

NearPoint also offers an eDiscovery solution for finding content and applying legal holds across e-mail, file, and SharePoint data which works with two Iron Mountain solutions, said Venkata.

For hosted solutions, NearPoint can feed data to Iron Mountain's cloud solution, Stratify Legal Discovery Service. For on-premises solutions, it will feed data into Iron Mountain's Stratify eVantage solution, he said.

"Mimosa provides the information management and collection, and Stratify provides the information processing, review, analysis, and production," Ravi said.

The two companies' product lines work together from the start, Venkata said. "Right on day one, given how these products work together, we can immediately bring joint solutions to market," he said.

Iron Mountain has gone through major changes over the past few years as it moved from its beginnings as a records storage provider to becoming a full-line provider of data archiving and management services.

The company's most significant change happened in 2005, when Iron Mountain acquired LiveVault, giving it the ability to provide online data storage backup and recovery.

Iron Mountain acquired Stratify in 2007. Prior to the acquisition, Venkata was Stratify's CEO and founder.

Mimosa has been a fast-growing company, Venkata said. It has over 1,000 customers, of which over 320 were added in 2009.

Iron Mountain has a very good channel base, Venkata said, although he was unable to provide details about what part of revenue comes from channel partners.

Over 60 percent of Mimosa's revenue comes from solution providers who will now have access to the resources of the larger company, Ravi said.

"Our partners now will have expanded co-marketing, expanded training, and, over time, an expanded product offering," he said.

Rick Whiting contributed to this article.