Atempo, European Leader in Data Protection in Number of Customers

Founded in 1991 under the name Quadratec, the company changed its name to Atempo in 2001 during Forum Stockage event in Paris, France.

After several company iterations as an independent entity, and we should say lives with 6 years under the control of ASG since 2011, the company started a new era in 2017 under Atempo Wooxo group umbrella. The company is led by Luc d’Urso who acts as the French ambassador of data governance at the European level.

It has made several acquisitions, 2 before ASG with Lighthouse Global Technologies and Storactive. With Lighthouse, Atempo strengthened its email archiving capabilities. Storactive was the editor of Live Backup that morphed into Lina under the Atempo umbrella. It also acquired another French backup vendor in 2017, Synerway.

In term of funding, the company has received a total of approximately $48 million:

• in 2019 round of €8 million led by IdVector and a pool of banks: LCL, HSBC, SG and BPI.
• in 2007 series B $22 million with Intel Capital, Ridgewood Capital and Steelpoint Capital Partners
• in 2006 series A $7.7 million from Vision Capital
• in 2003 $6.2 million as the venture round

The image below illustrates the multiple lives of Atempo.

From an installed base perspective, Atempo is an European leader in data protection with 2,000+ clients. The mission of the company goes beyond backup with migration, archiving, move and HSM capabilities.

As Veeam got acquired by Insight Partners early this year for $5 billion, we don’t consider the software company as European even with an HQ in Switzerland. If we have to include Veeam, it is the largest in that category with almost 400,000 clients.

This data management approach targets any companys – big corporation, enterprise or SMB – wherever data reside – data center, ROBO. Revenue grew as well and the company is aggressively in a recruitment mode.

Atempo markets 3 independent product lines:

• Tina as the server, enterprise and infrastructure data protection solution,
• Lina for end-users machines, and
• Miria for large unstructured data environments with backup, archiving, move and migration.

The first product, historically named Time Navigator but known as Tina, is a reference for several decades for enterprise data protection. It solves several pains end-users face everyday with fast growing volume of data and the digitalization of the economy relying on file servers, databases running on bare metal or virtual machines.

Last developments show a new UI, common to Lina and Miria. This release now protects OpenStack VMs in an agent-less mode, Office 365, adds backup to cloud with S3 before coupling soon its de-dupe engine and D2D2C.

Tina will receive the support of Nutanix AVH, Huawei FusionCompute and KVM.

Atempo adds enterprise SaaS applications starting with Salesforce and prepares to add others soon.

With a real market pressure in that category, Atempo is looking to embed partner technology and we hope they won’t choose a toy for Salesforce.

Important to notice is that Nutanix signed an OEM deal with HYCU.

We expect the company to jump rapidly in container and Kubernetes data protection like Veeam did with Kasten acquisition, Pure Storage with Portworx or even DataCore with its investment and partnership with MayaData.

Lina is recognized as a reference in workstations, desktop and laptop aka endpoints data protection. It operates continuous data protection aka CDP, encryption and source de-dupe with flexible deployment model like on-premise Lina server. The product can protect dozens of thousands of machines illustrated by the City of Paris who adopted the solution to protect 10,000+ machines. It is aligned with MSPs’ requirements and the product is listed on the OVHcloud marketplace. Bills starts at €8/50GB/month (without VAT).

Miria, in the past known as ADA for Atempo Digital Archive, has proven for several years its fast and flexible data movers technology. Adopted by several large digital studios, it was extended to provide 4 key functions at scale for unstructured data: backup, archive, move and migrate.

Lustre is supported since June and the team has added and improved several features:

• FastScan with the capability to scale data movers as needed to master transfer time by increasing parallelized jobs.
• True Image Recovery to stay aligned with original state.
• Improved object storage and cloud support with S3 for migration with any combination such local to cloud, cloud to local or cloud to cloud. AWS is supported and Azure and GCP are planned for 1Q21. Swift will be added but we don’t really understand if this is a joke or not but Atempo receives probably some requests to support some OpenStack environments.
• Miria Backup and Archive object storage to tape.
• In 2021, we should see an analytics module with technologies coming from Nextino, the AI lab of Atempo, DR for large environments and new HSM capabilities without any stubs but symlinks approach.

Miria for Migration is also the choice of DDN as DataFlow, Qumulo, Nutanix and Huawei.