Microsoft acquires InMage business continuity vendor

Microsoft has acquired InMage, a business continuity vendor, for an undisclosed sum, in a bid to enhance its Azure cloud backup and recovery technology.

InMage's software captures data changes continuously in real time to help enterprises immediately recover data to local systems or fail over to remote sites.

The software giant plans to integrate the company's flagship Scout product, available both on appliances and also on cloud platform, with the Azure Site Recovery service.

Azure Site Recovery, formerly called Hyper-V Recovery Manager, was launched last month and was designed as a cloud-based alternative to enterprises building and maintaining their own remote sites for disaster recovery.

In a blog post Microsoft corporate vice president Takeshi Numoto said the acquisition would help  make Azure the best disaster recovery site for all types of IT environments, including Windows and Linux, physical and virtualised, and Hyper-V and VMware.

Customers in future would buy Scout through Azure Site Recovery, though existing InMage customers may continue to use the company's products, according to Numoto. Microsoft would continue working with InMage's current service-provider partners.

Privately-owned InMage, which hs been around for about 10 years, is based in San Jose, California. Its technology is used in disaster recovery services offered by partners including Hewlett-Packard and Sungard.

With the acquisition, Microsoft gets to sit its Azure-friendly data-protection gear inside customers' server warehouses, according to commentators.

Microsoft's latest acquisition comes only days after it told its partners that it was preparing to sell StorSimple storage gear that came pre-loaded with software built for its Azure cloud.

"We have always been focused on providing innovative on-premises and cloud-based business continuity solutions to our customers and partners. Now, as part of the Microsoft family, we have the amazing opportunity to accelerate our innovation and provide even greater value with cloud-connected solutions based on Microsoft Azure," InMage wrote on its website.

According to InMage, it was working to add its tech into the Azure Site Recovery service. "Our Scout product already works with Azure today for data migration and we are looking forward to bringing more business continuity capabilities into Azure as we move forward," the statement on the site explained.