Takeover Target Carbonite Acquiring MailStore for $19.8M

[Updated paragraph with more details, 11:10am] A new week, a new deal involving Carbonite. The Boston-based cloud backup company says it’s acquiring German e-mail archiving firm MailStore Software for 15.95 million euros, or about $19.8 million, in cash. The deal is expected to close this month and will add 20 employees to Carbonite, whose total headcount will be about 550.

Carbonite (NASDAQ: [[ticker:CARB]]) was the target of an unsolicited buyout offer from J2 Global, worth roughly $400 million, earlier this month. The company said it would evaluate the offer. Meanwhile, in early December, Carbonite also announced a new CEO, Mohamad Ali, who succeeds co-founder and longtime chief David Friend.

Ali, a veteran of IBM and HP, says in a statement that MailStore shares Carbonite’s focus on small and medium-size businesses, and that “Carbonite will integrate MailStore’s robust full-text search and indexing capabilities into our product portfolio.”

If Carbonite’s leadership team is thinking about selling—to J2 Global or anyone else—perhaps the new acquisition will raise its asking price. Or perhaps the news is a signal that Carbonite wants to remain independent.

MailStore is based in Viersen, Germany, and was founded in 2006, about a year after Carbonite’s birth. Both companies play in the hotly contested sector of online data backup and recovery.

Author: Gregory T. Huang

Greg is a veteran journalist who has covered a wide range of science, technology, and business. As former editor in chief, he overaw daily news, features, and events across Xconomy's national network. Before joining Xconomy, he was a features editor at New Scientist magazine, where he edited and wrote articles on physics, technology, and neuroscience. Previously he was senior writer at Technology Review, where he reported on emerging technologies, R&D, and advances in computing, robotics, and applied physics. His writing has also appeared in Wired, Nature, and The Atlantic Monthly’s website. He was named a New York Times professional fellow in 2003. Greg is the co-author of Guanxi (Simon & Schuster, 2006), about Microsoft in China and the global competition for talent and technology. Before becoming a journalist, he did research at MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Lab. He has published 20 papers in scientific journals and conferences and spoken on innovation at Adobe, Amazon, eBay, Google, HP, Microsoft, Yahoo, and other organizations. He has a Master’s and Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT, and a B.S. in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.