Iron Mountain buys archiving vendor Mimosa

Information management giant Iron Mountain said on Monday it has acquired content archiving vendor Mimosa Systems for US$112 million.

Mimosa's on-premises NearPoint platform is known for its ability to archive Microsoft Exchange email, SharePoint data and unstructured files. It will work alongside Iron Mountain's array of SaaS (software as a service) archiving offerings.

With Mimosa's technology, Iron Mountain can offer customers a hybrid archiving model that allows them to keep some data in-house, while off-loading other information to the cloud.

Iron Mountain plans to retain Mimosa's employees. Its CEO, T.M. Ravi, will become chief marketing officer in Iron Mountain's digital division. Iron Mountain will also gain some 1,000 enterprise customers.

One analyst called the acquisition a "smart, aggressive move".

Mimosa is known for content archiving, but its platform can help with backup and recovery, Enterprise Strategy Group analyst Brian Babineau wrote in a blog post Monday. "As an example, NearPoint captures and tracks all events that occur within SharePoint, enabling item level recovery of SharePoint sites, lists, and list items."

The platform includes e-discovery capabilities as well.

Iron Mountain will need to rationalise its product portfolio, however, as it now has three email archiving products, Babineau added.

As a startup, Mimosa focused on Microsoft technologies because of their large addressable market, but it is conceivable Iron Mountain will invest more money into NearPoint in order to support other applications, such as IBM's Lotus Notes, he wrote.

The Mimosa acquisition, which had been rumoured for some weeks, followed Iron Mountain's 2007 purchase of e-discovery vendor Stratify for $158 million.

Iron Mountain's shares were up $0.06 to $24.21 in early trading on Monday.