Symantec Makes Cloud Backup Play Amid Evolving Storage Market

July 16th, 2012 by Trefis Team
SYMC: Symantec Corp logo
SYMC
Symantec Corp

Symantec (NASDAQ:SYMC), the maker of Norton anti-virus software has joined Backupify’s $9 million Series C funding round by investing in the cloud backup company. Backupify is a startup providing backup, search and restore solutions for online services like Google Applications, Salesforce, Facebook and Twitter. The third round of funding included funding from existing investors such as Avalon Ventures, General Catalyst and Lowercase Capital and a new investor Symantec. Symantec’s investment is touted as a strategic investment and described relationship as “new and young.” The financial details of Symantecs investment was not revealed. [1]

Check out our complete analysis of Symantec

Backupify has ~5,000 paying business customers and its Google Apps Backup service is at the core of its offerings. It charges by the seat making it affordable to small business and costs as little as $3/month/seat. Backupify currently hosts around 350 TB of data. The company launches its Salesforce.com backup service out of beta next month and this is likely to be a bigger business opportunity than Google Apps.

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Opportunity for Symantec

Storage software is the biggest division of Symantec and this investment into Backupify is most likely to benefit this division of Symantec. Another possible outcome of this strategic investment is that Symantec may offer anti-virus solutions deployed on the cloud to scan the backups when they are uploaded to or downloaded from Backupify’s systems.  The storage market is evolving and currently the trend is towards offering Storage-as-a-Service and this is the space Backupify operates in. Storage Software constitutes ~40% of its current Trefis price estimate.

We have a $22.42 Trefis price estimate for Symantec, which is about ~65% above the current market price.

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Notes:
  1. Symantec Gives Cloud Backup A Boost, Goes In On Backupify’s $9 Million Series C, www.techcrunch.com, July 11, 2012 [↩]