Microsoft is acquiring Avere Systems, boosting its hybrid cloud storage portfolio and potentially its footprint in the media and entertainment industry.
Described as using an “innovative combination of file system and caching technologies to support the performance requirements for customers who run large-scale compute workloadsm” Avere is a 10 year old company that, in essence, mixes both public cloud and on-premises storage in addition to offering software and hardware-based services.
Jason Zander, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Azure, said: “By bringing together Avere’s storage expertise with the power of Microsoft’s cloud, customers will benefit
from industry-leading innovations that enable the largest, most complex high-performance workloads to run in Microsoft Azure. We are excited to welcome Avere to Microsoft, and look forward to the impact their technology and the team will have on Azure and the customer experience.”
Microsoft chose to focus on the media and entertainment industry use cases for Avere, highlighting that the company has worked with the likes of Sony Pictures, Imageworks, Illumination Mac Guff, and Moving Picture Company, in order to decrease production time.
Of course, Avere has also been used across life sciences, financial services, and many more, but Microsoft certainly seems keen to highlight the media industry.
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As a provider of NFS and SMB file-based storage for Linux and Windows clients running in the cloud, hybrid and on-premises, Avere could already count itself as a partner of both AWS and the Google Cloud Platform, but not of Microsoft.
Ronald Bianchini Jr., president and CEO of Avere Systems, said: “Over the years, Microsoft has made significant investments to provide its customers with the most flexible, secure and scalable storage solutions in the marketplace and has made Azure the natural home for enterprise applications. This shared focus on large Enterprise applications makes Microsoft a great fit for Avere.
“Avere and Microsoft both recognize that there are many ways for Enterprises to leverage data center resources and the cloud. Our shared vision is to continue our focus on all of Avere’s use cases – in the datacenter, in the cloud and in hybrid cloud storage and cloud bursting environments. Tighter integration with Azure will result in a much more seamless experience for our customers.”
Since Avere was founded in 2008 it had raised $86m in equity funding, some of which came from Google when it became an investor in March last year.
No financial details of the acquisition have been revealed.
