Microsoft Acquires Hybrid Cloud Company and Best of TechEd Winner, InMage

Just a day after Satya Nadella alerted Microsoft employees and press through his July 10 missive about changes through acquisitions, the company has announced a new purchase.

Today Microsoft is announcing the acquisition of InMage, a company with services that provide for better and more real-time data management in a Hybrid Cloud scenario.

InMage currently offers two software products, Scout and ScoutCloud, and both provide backup and replication services. ScoutCloud, obviously, is the piece that works within a public-hosted datacenter, while Scout can be utilized on-premises. But, more interesting, is that InMage also offers an all-in-one Hybrid Cloud appliance, the InMage-4000.

In Satya's email, multiple times he highlighted Microsoft's intent to provide FIRST-party hardware. And, while the acquisition of InMage advances this promise, Microsoft has already been making significant strides in this area with the recent announcement of the StoreSimple 8000 series, the acquisition of the Lumia brand, and the purported successful release of the Surface Pro 3. Mary Jo Foley also recently wrote a piece covering rumored Private Cloud devices, built on Azure that should release sometime this fall.

So, as much as Microsoft is "all-in" for the Cloud, it seems the company is "all-in" for hardware and devices.

Microsoft will be working to integrate the InMage Scout technology into Azure Site Recovery (ASR) once the acquisition is complete. Scout is vendor agnostic, meaning that will work for Windows, Linux, Hyper-V, VMware, and others.

You might also find interesting (I do), that in Microsoft's acquisition announcement today, the company highlighted InMage's success at TechEd 2014 in winning a Best of TechEd award in the Backup and Recovery category. It excites me to know that our judging process is so good that our selections are being viewed in such high regard. I also take it as a personal reward since I was the judge for this category and spent time with the InMage representatives to learn about the valuable, innovative products. I guess this shows another valuable reason why companies will want to participate in the sub-event that has been running for over 10 years. Best of TechEd is a coveted award.