Not yet a month after rolling the growth ambition dice with the $8.8m merger with parts of the HP Enterprise business UK legacy software firm Micro Focus (MCRO) is back on the M&A trail, albeit in a smaller way. A much smaller way.
The company is bolting on GWAVA, the Canadian enterprise data archiving specialist that was once called Beginfinite. Set-up in 2002, GWAVA helps businesses archive electronic data from email, texts, and social media, all into one place through its Retain suite.
GWAVA also produces compliance solutions for Micro Focus' Groupwise product, and will most likely be integrated into a number of the group’s existing suites, including File Management and Collaboration.
It's a small deal, so tiny that Micro Focus has not disclosed the purchase price, nor even issued a stock market announcement. But it does demonstrate the enormity of the data opportunity for Micro Focus, and others.
Interestingly, we as a global population are generating an enormous mountain of data every day - think tweets, texts, emails, cloud calls, word documents, spreadsheets, smartphone apps, audio/visual preferences, internet searches, you get the picture.
According to recent statistics, we're churning out 2.5 quintillion bytes of new data every day, or to put that into a semi-meaningful figure, that's 2.5 followed by 17 zeros, 2.5 exabytes worth.
2,500,000,000,000,000,000 = 2.5 quintillion
This data storage graphic may help put that into some sort of context, as might the long one at the end of this article, courtesy of Voucherland.
Creating all of this data is one thing, managing it so that it remains at least semi-useful is an altogether different challenge. Then there's destroying it once it has served its useful life, an emerging business opportunity - think AIM-listed Blancco Technology (BLTG:AIM), as an example.
