I’m pleased to announce that Microsoft has acquired InMage, an innovator in the emerging area of cloud-based business continuity.

Our customers tell us that business continuity – the ability to backup, replicate and quickly recover data and applications in case of a system failure – is incredibly important. After all, revenue, supply chains, customer loyalty, employee productivity and more are on the line. It’s also very complicated and expensive to do. CIOs consistently rank business continuity as a top priority, but often don’t have the budgets or time to do it right.

As the productivity and platform company for the mobile-first, cloud-first world, Microsoft is committed to solving this challenge for customers. This acquisition will accelerate our strategy to provide hybrid cloud business continuity solutions for any customer IT environment, be it Windows or Linux, physical or virtualized on Hyper-V, VMware or others. This will make Azure the ideal destination for disaster recovery for virtually every enterprise server in the world. As VMware customers explore their options to permanently migrate their applications to the cloud, this will also provide a great onramp.

In January, Forrester Research identified the company as an enabling technology that plays a key role in delivery for top Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service providers HP and Sungard.* In May, the company won a Penton Media Best of TechEd award. Most importantly, customers across a variety of industries, including financial services, healthcare and government, rely on InMage technology to keep their organizations up and running. An IT manager at MCR Safety, a leading manufacturer of personal protective equipment, put it simply: “The technology is like a high-performance DVR to protect our entire IT infrastructure and business.”

With the completion of this acquisition, we are now working to integrate the InMage Scout technology into our Azure Site Recovery service in order to give customers a simple, cost-effective way to ensure business continuity with the power and scale of the Azure global cloud. The company already announced its plan to enable data migration to Azure with Scout. Existing customers can continue to use the InMage products and services they trust and, moving forward, customers will acquire Scout through Azure Site Recovery. We will also continue to work with InMage service provider partners, as well as new partners, to give our mutual customers a range of solution options.

As Laura DuBois, Research Vice President for IDC, said, “This is a great move to meet important customer needs with the cloud as a target for disaster recovery. InMage has distinguished itself in a poorly understood and underserved market.” 

Enterprise customers are looking for the best, most valuable ways to take advantage of the cloud. Business continuity is often a great place to start, which is why we are very focused on delivering strong solutions in this area for our customers. It is a key element of our continued effort to deliver a consistent hybrid platform and a broad range of services that connect customer, partner and Microsoft clouds.

*The Forrester Wave™: Disaster-Recovery-As-A-Service Providers, Q1 2014, Forrester Research, Inc., January 17, 2014

This was big at the time.