Quest Buys San Diego’s BakBone, Novatel Acquires Enfora, West Wireless Health Institute Develops its First Prototype, & More San Diego BizTech News

It was a week of deals for San Diego’s technology companies, with some tales of new product developments thrown in for extra measure. Our briefing begins here.

—Novatel Wireless (NASDAQ: [[ticker:NVTL]]), the San Diego provider of wireless mobile devices, said it is buying machine-to-machine specialist Enfora of suburban Dallas. Avondale Partners analyst John F. Bright said Novatel had been looking to make a M2M purchase for some time. “We believe the M2M space has attractive characteristics, including longer design cycles and less competition than the market for PC adapters,” Bright wrote in a research note.

—BakBone Software, a San Diego-based data backup and storage management company, has agreed to be acquired by Aliso Viejo, CA-based Quest Software for $55 million, including debt payments. Preferred shareholders stand to receive $23.2 million in the sale. BakBone reported $61.8 million in revenue for its fiscal year ended in March, up from $56 million the prior year.

—San Diego-based Nirvanix, founded in 1998 as Streamload, raised an additional $10 million in venture capital from its existing investors Intel Capital, Mission Ventures, Valhalla Partners, and Windward Ventures. Nirvanix also named former QLogic executive Scott Genereux as CEO.

—Redlands, CA-based ESRI, the world’s largest developer of geographic information system (GIS) software, has added a personal place history app to its free offerings available online at the Apple iStore. I talked with ESRI’s Bill Davenhall. The app represents the fulfillment of a vision that Davenhall described at TEDMED 2009, which is that a patient’s place history is just as important in assessing human health risks as genetics and lifestyle.

—The non-profit West Wireless Health Institute revealed that its first engineering prototype is a a wireless fetal and maternal monitoring device. Dr. Mohit Kaushal, who is the institute’s chief strategy officer and an executive vice president of business development, has agreed to describe the device at the Xconomy Forum on Health IT—The Consumer Payoff that begins at 5:30 p.m. at the Johnson & Johnson Pharmaceutical R&D Center this Wednesday, November 17. Online registration is here.

Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.