In the last couple of weeks, I've talked about the file synchronization market. Products and companies like FolderShare, Dropbox, Syncplicity, and Sharpcast.
In a timely moment, BeInSync has been acquired by Phoenix Technologies for $25M. TechCrunch covers it well.
BeInSync looks to be most similar to Sharpcast's SugarSync product in terms of functionality. Sharpcast has support for Mobile devices, while BeInSync does not. BeInSync may only work on Windows (no Mac) in fact. BeInSync charges $39.95 for 50GB of storage per year, while SugarSync charges $199.99 for 60GB of storage per year. BeInSync certainly has the more attractive price!
I must admit that I don't fully get why Phoenix Technologies was interested, except that Woody Hobbs, current President/CEO and previous President/CEO of IntelliSync, clearly knows what he's looking for.
And, the $25M price tag can't be sitting well with the Sharpcast folks, since they've already taken down $16.5M in VC money. Sharpcast would need a significantly higher exit for an acquisition to make financial sense.
I used to work for a Fortune 100 company and one of the biggest neglected areas for file synchronization was for publication of web files. Sure you can find a solution for two computers but the solutions that were non existent was going from one multihomed, load balanced server to thousands of servers around the globe. To my knowledge this hasn't changed.
ReplyDeleteAs for your question why Phoenix Technologies was interested in this purchase...
I would have to take a guess and say that there's something under the hood of BeInSync's products or something that is coming out in the coming months/years that they were interested in. Either that or they are trying to cut out any competition.