Dell Inc. today announced it has acquired AppAssure, a global leader in complete application protection for virtual, physical and cloud infrastructures. The acquisition of AppAssure, the nation's fastest-growing backup software technology company, further extends Dell's comprehensive storage and software strategy.

Dell has taken significant steps over the past three years to expand its storage portfolio to offer customers a complete range of world-class storage products and solutions. AppAssure's leading backup solutions enhance Dell's existing storage capabilities by providing customers confidence that their applications and data are fully protected.

Dell provides customers with solutions that help manage the growing complexity in IT and the rapid explosion in data. Today, Dell offers a full portfolio of Storage Area Network and Network Attached Storage solutions, based on its Fluid Data architecture, and is complementing these offerings with security, data compression and backup and restore capabilities. Dell simplifies technology to make storage products more accessible to businesses of all sizes.

AppAssure Leadership

AppAssure recently reported 194 percent revenue growth year-over-year in 20112 and 19 consecutive quarters of growth, and Inc. Magazine has ranked AppAssure as the nation's fastest-growing backup and replication software company.

AppAssure's award-winning technology delivers reliable application recovery from customers' servers to their datacenter and their cloud. AppAssure goes beyond simply protecting data, to protecting entire applications enabling service providers and enterprises to adopt a cloud model to deliver fast, reliable and secure data protection. AppAssure delivers the industry's fastest backup and recovery of virtual servers, including VMware, Hyper-V and XenServer, as well as physical servers.

AppAssure was founded in 2006 and is headquartered in Reston, Va. Bain Capital Ventures is the lead institutional investor in AppAssure and the remainder of the company is employee-owned. Dell plans to keep AppAssure's approximately 230 employees and will continue to invest in additional engineering and sales capability to grow this business. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

Quotes

"AppAssure's unique architecture delivers innovative cloud-enabled backup and replication solutions that meet the challenges of protecting the explosive growth of data in both virtual and physical environments," said Brad Anderson, president, Enterprise Solutions Group, Dell. "At a practical level, AppAssure enables Dell customers to seamlessly move and replicate data across our existing platforms -- from an EqualLogic array in a remote office to a Compellent array at a data recovery site."

"Dell's acquisition of AppAssure is a strategic industry move given its relentless focus on providing innovative solutions to protect customers' applications and data in cloud, virtual and physical environments," said Najaf Husain, president and CEO, AppAssure. "Combining Dell's global brand, scale, reach and existing storage portfolio with our innovative technology provides customers with world-class data protection and recovery capabilities in their virtual, physical and cloud environments."

"AppAssure's speed and ease of use are great, and the continuous backup makes recovery go really smoothly," said Dave Buzzell, CIO of Sedona Group. "Our IT environment is constantly changing, and only AppAssure has been able to keep up with it. We estimate that we can keep three years of continuous backups just due to AppAssure's true global deduplication and compression technology. That's amazing."