Austin—Spanning, software data backup service owned by Dell EMC, is being sold to New York-based private equity firm Insight Venture Partners. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.
The newly independent company is changing its name to Spanning Cloud Apps, according to a prepared statement. The company will continue to be based in Austin, TX. Dell EMC, which formed when Round Rock, TX-based Dell bought Hopkinton, MA-based EMC for $67 billion in late 2015, will continue to sell Spanning’s backup product.
Spanning targets small and medium-sized businesses that use one of three software-as-a-service (SaaS) products for their operations: Google Apps, Salesforce, or Office 365, according to Jeff Erramouspe. He was vice president and general manager of Spanning when it was owned by Dell EMC. Following the acquisition by Insight, Erramouspe is being named Spanning’s CEO.
Spanning offers its customers extra backup in addition to anything provided by companies like Google or Microsoft, marketing its tool as a fail-safe that would protect a user in the event of a hacker locking up or destroying documents, for example, Erramouspe told Xconomy last year. If that happens, and employees can’t access something like a business’s customer info, Spanning has that data on a separate server, so that the original can be replaced with the unfettered backup, he said.
Spanning’s growing customer base now comprises more than 7,000 organizations. Insight was interested in tapping into that potential growth, according to the prepared statement.
EMC acquired Spanning in 2014, when the backup service was then a private company and Erramouspe was the CEO. Spanning remained in Austin after, and also stayed after EMC and Dell combined to create the computing infrastructure and storage giant.
