Carbonite became one of Seattle’s latest arrivals with its acquisition of Datacastle earlier this year, and it’s evaluating expansion plans as it eyes the amount of cloud computing talent in the region.
Carbonite acquired Datacastle for an undisclosed amount in August, adding the Seattle startup’s Smith Tower office and its Datacastle Red security and backup software to its portfolio. Twenty employees joined Carbonite as a result of the acquisition, said Norman Guadagno, senior vice president of marketing for the company.
“The team there was very knowledgeable about the cloud infrastructure that is provided by Microsoft and Amazon Web Services,” said Guadagno, a Seattle-area resident who now plans to split time between the company’s new office and Carbonite’s Boston headquarters instead of working from home on the West Coast.
It’s the latest example of the Seattle region attracting engineering centers and cloud companies, tapping into a talent base created through the presence of Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and other cloud technology companies.
The company offers backup and recovery services that help protect sensitive data on laptops left behind in airplane seat pockets, and it also allows businesses to back up server data either over the cloud or through a hybrid installation at their data centers. The second part was also Datacastle’s specialty, and its Datacastle Red product has been renamed as Carbonite Endpoint Backup.
Carbonite will likely expand its Pacific Northwest presence across different departments: it definitely plans to tap into the Seattle area’s engineering talent pool, but also is interested in sales and marketing talent as well as people who have experience striking partnership deals with the Big Two cloud companies, Guadagno said. Carbonite offers its own cloud for customers looking to back up personal or corporate PCs and laptops, but it is also a customer of both AWS and Azure, he said.
Now more than 1,000 people work for Carbonite, which went public in 2011 and has enjoyed a steady rise in its stock price over the last year or so while acquiring smaller companies like Datacastle and Double-Take Software. More than 70 percent of Carbonite’s revenue comes from corporate customers, Guadagno said.
