Commvault acquires Hedvig

Commvault, leader in data protection, just made a big splash with the announcement of the acquisition of Hedvig. It's a surprise for the market as both companies seem to have their own trajectory pretty independent I mean.

Hedvig was one of the storage industry gem we identified several years ago and we met the team already in June 2015, 4 years ago, with The IT Press Tour. Hedvig develops a Software-Defined Storage aka SDS with the property to be multi-protocol i.e not limited to block, file or object interface.

On the other hand, Hedvig had difficulties to really confirm its technology leadership with real market penetration suffering from long sales cycle, new comers, open source and lack of visibility. It turns out that the final decision was to find an exit and Commvault seems to be a good combination.

We're still surprised that HPE didn't jump into that deal as Hedvig had investment from HPE and board presence and the company belongs to the HPE Pathfinder investment body. The other motivation is that storage software is so weak at HPE that we still wonder why it didn't work especially as the transaction was pretty small, just $225M, a real bargain representing just a 4.3 multiple and confirming Hedvig's struggle period.