Microsoft has acquired InMage to improve hybrid cloud business continuity solutions and make Azure the top choice for disaster recovery for enterprise servers worldwide. The deal was announced on the official Microsoft blog. InMage offers backup and disaster recovery technology for the enterprise market and Managed Service Providers, allowing businesses to use a single solution that protects virtual, physical, UNIX and database systems, rather than having to use multiple products. Microsoft says that the concept of business continuity is rapidly becoming an important consideration in today’s business environment, especially as revenue, supply chains, customer loyalty, employee productivity and more rely on these systems to function efficiently.
Disaster recovery ain’t the sexiest area of computing. But companies don’t hesitate to throw cash at technology that can save the day in an emergency, and Microsoft wants to get in on that. So Microsoft has bought a company called InMage, which Takeshi Numoto, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of cloud and enterprise marketing, described in a blog post today as “an innovator in the emerging area of cloud-based business continuity.” From a corporate perspective, one could sort of mash it under Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella’s dictum yesterday that “at our core, Microsoft is the productivity and platform company for the mobile-first and cloud-first world.” Microsoft has lately become more willing to serve as a platform that can accept workloads from all over the place, not just Microsoft-centric applications. Microsoft has previously added support for Linux operating systems in Azure. And the other day Microsoft came out as a backer of the Google-initiated open-source Linux container manager Kubernetes. “Microsoft will help contribute code to Kubernetes to enable customers to easily manage containers that can run anywhere. This will make it easier to build multi-cloud solutions including targeting Microsoft Azure” Microsoft cloud chief Scott Guthrie said in a canned statement about the news. The InMage deal drives Microsoft down a related path. The deal will help Microsoft support lots of environments, including “Windows or Linux, physical or virtualized on Hyper-V, VMware, or others,” Numoto wrote in today’s blog post.
