Boston-based Iron Mountain, the data management and protection company, said today it is selling its online backup and recovery, digital archiving, and eDiscovery businesses to San Francisco- and Cambridge, U.K.-based Autonomy for $380 million in cash. The deal is expected to close within 45 to 60 days.

Iron Mountain (NYSE: IRM), founded in 1951, is a stalwart of the Boston-area data storage ecosystem. The company lost money in 2010 (it was profitable in 2009), despite revenues of more than $3 billion. Last month, former CEO Bob Brennan resigned and was replaced by Richard Reese, the company’s chairman (and former CEO from 1981 to 2008).

Autonomy (LSE: AU.L) is a growing business software firm that is increasingly focused on helping companies manage stacks of e-mails, phone calls, and documents in the Internet cloud. The firm, which was founded in the U.K. and also has a Boston office, posted revenues of $870 million in 2010 and has been profitable.

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Do we really need another tech company with “cloud” in its name?

Apparently the answer is yes. But Waltham, MA-based CloudLock offers lessons far beyond the merits of its name. The company, formerly known as Aprigo, has officially changed its product focus as well as its moniker. All told, this is an interesting snapshot of a young tech startup navigating the turbulent field of data storage and security while making some tough decisions about its future.

Last July, CloudLock announced that its “Aprigo Ninja” software for managing Google Docs was available online in the Google Apps Marketplace. The product was aimed at business customers in a wide range of fields including education, government, manufacturing, retail, finance, insurance, and high-tech. What the company discovered from that move was the sheer number of businesses using the Internet cloud as their primary platform for computing—and how fast that market was growing. So CloudLock decided to drop its on-premise, subscription-based software and sell only a cloud-based version.

“It’s about building the right business model,” says Gil Zimmermann, CloudLock’s co-founder and CEO. “There’s a better market opportunity around cloud data protection.”

That sounds obvious enough. But the decision meant losing plenty of on-premise software customers—the company says that product had been selling well—and going through some changeover in employees. “This is what makes a true pivot difficult. It’s having to walk away from something good to pursue something great,” says Zimmermann, a veteran of EMC (NYSE: EMC), the Hopkinton, MA-based data storage giant.

CloudLock built its cloud-based software to run on Google App Engine (Google’s cloud computing platform). It currently works with Google Docs, but it’s slated also to work with Microsoft Office 365, the cloud-based version of Office, by late 2011. CloudLock has dozens of paying customers, with hundreds in the pipeline, says Zimmermann.

Some fundamental things haven’t changed. CloudLock’s focus is still on helping organizations identify, monitor, visualize, and protect exposed data, change security permissions, migrate data, and perform other kinds of gnarly (but business-critical) IT functions. CloudLock previously raised $3 million in Series A financing from Cedar Fund back in 2008. The company currently has 14 employees.

Asked to summarize the lessons he has learned so far, Zimmermann says, “It’s not easy to let go of something you’re doing that is working. It’s scary when something comes up that could be better. But be open-minded and try it out. See what works, and when it does work, double down in a way that can make sure it’s real.”

Another telling lesson: “Differentiate between ‘everyone wants to talk about it,’ and ‘are they willing to buy a product?’”

Lastly (and perhaps most importantly), he says, “When you’re pivoting, not everybody is going to be happy about it.”

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Marlborough, MA-based Sepaton, a provider of disk-based data protection services for enterprise customers, announced today that it has promoted Mike Thompson from the role of executive vice president of worldwide sales and marketing to the position of CEO. He replaces Mike Worhach, who will stay on as vice chairman of the Sepaton board of directors. Thompson previously held executive roles at Maynard, MA-based Stratus Technologies and Marlboro, MA-based Egenera.

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Here’s an interesting snapshot of a Boston-area public tech company getting bought by a West Coast firm. In May, we reported that Southborough, MA-based Double-Take Software was being acquired by Vision Solutions, based in Irvine, CA, in a deal worth $242 million. Today, Vision is announcing that the acquisition has officially closed.

Double-Take (NASDAQ: DBTK) makes software for data protection and recovery, primarily for Microsoft Windows computer systems and Intel-based servers. Vision Solutions makes software for data availability and data management, mainly for IBM-based systems. That means they keep everything from websites and online services to video-gaming systems running smoothly in remote data centers. The merger means Vision Solutions can position itself as a dominant vendor for two of the biggest players in the IT world.

“This changes our business significantly,” says Alan Arnold, executive vice president and chief technology officer of Vision Solutions. “For us, it’s huge.”

Arnold adds that Vision Solutions has been looking to make an acquisition like this for several years. Vision has almost 800 employees and more than $100 million in annual revenue. Meanwhile, Double-Take is a roughly $85 million company that went public in late 2006.

Vision is owned by private equity firm Thoma Bravo. So it will be taking Double-Take private again, and has filed paperwork to de-list the company from the NASDAQ, Arnold says.

The future of the Double-Take office in Southborough is uncertain. Vision Solutions already has an office in Waltham, which has about 20 employees, while Double-Take actually has only a handful of employees in the Boston area. Most of its R&D staff and developers are based in Indiana and New Jersey.

Of course, integrating a company after any merger is tricky (I got some tips from IBM here). In the case of Double-Take and Vision Solutions, it sounds like a natural fit from a technology perspective. Both companies have long lineages and a strong focus on engineering and customers. The question is whether the merged company could be greater than the sum of its parts—and whether Vision Solutions could become a dominant player in the fields of data availability, protection, and management.

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We saw a mix of headlines on early funding rounds, business plan competitions, and acquisitions from startups in the software, mobile hardware, Internet, energy, and biotech sectors.

—Cambridge, MA-based Sand 9, a maker of tiny timer and frequency control technology for wireless devices, said it secured a $12 million Series B financing, led by new investor Commonwealth Capital Ventures. The company, developing a resonator that could make devices such as GPS units, mobile phones, and wireless routers smaller and more integrated, previously raised an $8 million round that included backing from Flybridge Capital Partners, General Catalyst Partners, and Khosla Ventures.

—General Compression, a Newton, MA-based maker of compressor systems for storing wind energy, brought its Series A financing total to $20.9 million, with an additional $3 million from the Northwater Intellectual Property Fund. The earlier part of the Series A round included investments from Duke Energy and U.S. Renewables Group.

—C-Crete nabbed $100,000 as the winner of MIT’s $100K Entrepreneurship Competition. The team, led by MIT civil engineering PhD candidate Rouzbeh Shahsavari, is developing a nanoengineered form of concrete that emits less carbon dioxide in the production process, and is cheaper and stronger than the traditional form of the building material. C-Crete lost earlier in the week in MIT’s Clean Energy Prize, where Stanford University team C3Nano took home $200,000 for its work in photovoltaic solar panels.

—-Cambridge-based LocaModa, which makes place-based social media software, raised $150,000 of a planned $1.5 million offering of equity, debts, and rights, an SEC filing revealed. The company had previously … Next Page »

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Double-Take Software (NASDAQ: DBTK), a Southborough, MA-based maker of software for data protection and recovery, announced it will be acquired by Vision Solutions, an Irvine, CA-headquartered portfolio company of private equity firm Thoma Bravo. The deal has a net value of about $242 million and puts Double-Take common stock at $10.55 a share, a 21 percent premium over its closing share price of $8.71 on April 9, which was the last business day before the company’s board announced its interest in acquisition options. It’s expected to close in third quarter 2010, pending shareholder approval and other customary closing conditions. We wrote about Double-Take a few years back when it announced pricing for its planned public offering, and when it acquired data-protection software maker TimeSpring, for $8.3 million in cash.

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Gregory Bialecki is Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick’s Secretary of Housing and Economic Development, and leads an ungainly collection of agencies charged with everything from promoting affordable housing in Massachusetts to attracting international business investment to the state. Here at Xconomy, we cross paths with Bialecki quite a bit, since he’s also responsible for many of the state’s initiatives to support high-tech innovation and greater collaboration between business, academia, and government.

I interviewed Bialecki at length last week, and in Part One of our conversation, published yesterday, I asked him how his work as an attorney specializing in real estate development and land-use permitting related to his current business-development role for the state. We also talked about the roles state government can play in promoting innovation. Bialecki said the Patrick Administration has spent much of the past two years simply helping players in various technology sectors to recognize that when it comes to working with business, state government can play a supportive rather than an adversarial role.

In particular, we were talking as Part One closed about the state’s obligation to help business by improving the quality of science, technology, engineering, and math education for young people. In this second half of the interview, I pressed him for more examples of things state government can do to accelerate innovation. And we went on to talk about the need for more funding to move ideas from the lab bench to early-stage commercialization, the debate over non-compete agreements in employment contracts, and the Administration’s progress drafting new business regulations on protecting consumer data.

Xconomy: I think it’s pretty easy for everyone to agree on the importance of science and engineering education. But what are some of the other parts of this innovation agenda—things that maybe are not so easy to agree on?

Secretary Bialecki: There are other aspects of the innovation ecosystem, if you will, where I think we can play a partnering role. When it comes to thinking up great ideas, Massachusetts is fantastic. But when it comes to converting those good ideas into commercial products and services, we need to do a better job. The way to do that is a collaboration between business and academia and government to look systematically at the ways we do that. In other words, what great ideas are behind the university walls right now that aren’t coming out? When I describe the state government [as] having a partnering role, in many cases it’s as simple as being a convenor or facilitator. So, for example, the Governor, who is very interested in innovation, has the capacity to say to all of the public and private universities, “Can we get together and compare notes and talk about how we are commercializing our ideas? Who has the best practices and are there things we can learn from each other? Are there things the state can do to make public universities better at it?”

That’s one of the things we are focused on—learning from universities and businesses the ways we can make these connections better and literally get good ideas out of the lab and into … Next Page »

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Following on a $9 million financing of its domestic receivables in late November, San Diego’s Overland Storage said today it had reached a similar two-year deal to finance up to $5 million of the data protection company’s foreign accounts receivables. In a statement, Overland’s new CEO, Eric Kelly, said, “We believe that together these two financing arrangements will allow us to continue our recovery and execute our strategy.”

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EMC (NYSE: EMC), the Hopkinton, MA-based IT storage company, announced a new partnership between Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) and EMC security division RSA to improve data security for the companies’ customers across networks and data centers. The partnership will combine RSA’s and Redmond, WA-based Microsoft’s resources and technologies to, among other things, integrate RSA data-protection software with Windows Server 2008. Financial terms of the deal were not given.

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I thought it was unusual when San Diego’s Overland Storage said Friday it had closed on a $9 million receivable financing agreement. All it means is that a finance company has agreed to lend Overland immediate cash for its customers’ IOUs—like one of those “payday loan” outfits.

So I arranged to talk with Vern LoForti, who was named as Overland’s CEO in 2007 after a two-year turnaround effort derailed. Amid the broader economic downturn, there’s little doubt that Overland Storage could be a harbinger of the painful effects the credit crisis is having on IT technology companies.

“It’s been difficult,” LoForti told me. “We’ve restructured once. We brought our expenses way down. But then we got caught in the buzz saw of this downturn.”

Overland’s available cash was down to $5.4 million at the end of September, and the company said at that time it needed about $10 million to fund its operations at current levels through next September.

Trying to raise money in what may be the nation’s worst-ever credit crisis proved exceptionally difficult, which LoForti says is what led Overland to finance its domestic accounts receivables.

“We think this is a short-term solution, rather than long-term, because it is very expensive,” LoForti says. “So, difficult times, and still a ways to go.”

But LoForti says Overland Storage is far from alone in seeking such unconventional sources of short-term credit. The finance companies he met before closing Overland’s deal told him they have been overwhelmed by requests from other companies.

I’ve known LoForti for a long time. We know a lot of the same people. He was named as Overland’s CFO in 1995, about the time I moved to the business desk at The San Diego Union-Tribune, and he played a key role in Overland’s IPO in 1997. We’ve had many discussions as the tech bubble popped and as much of the IT market bypassed the tape-based data backup and archiving machines that gave the company its start in 1981.

Overland still manufacturers tape libraries and autoloaders, along with network-attached storage servers, and fibre channel storage devices. But the company set out in a new direction in October by forming a strategic alliance with Mobotix Vision Systems, which makes high-resolution camera networks that provide Internet-based video surveillance systems equipped with data archiving capabilities.

The new strategy is intriguing, but Overland still needs cash and it must overcome a variety of problems.

The company’s last financial statement, for the three months that ended Sept. 30, lays out three years’ of recurring losses, negative cash flows and other woes that “raise substantial doubt about our ability to continue as a going concern.”

The company, which has about 350 employees worldwide, also says it has to get the price of its common stock to $1 a share (or higher) for 10 consecutive business days before March 30 to maintain its listing on NASDAQ. I’ll bet a lot of those notices have been going around.

Overland’s share price was unchanged yesterday at 34 cents a share. It traded as high as $1.91 earlier this year.

The company still has other options. Management put forward a proposal for a reverse stock split for shareholders to consider at the company’s annual meeting set for Tuesday at Overland’s corporate headquarters. That could increase its share price. The company could put itself up for sale. With a market value of less than $5 million, Overland’s board also could take the company private.

Asked about that, LoForti says, “I would say the board is considering various solutions.”

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San Diego’s Arkeia Software, a data protection software developer, has named two executives, including former Gateway executive Bill Evans as CEO. Evans was previously CEO of Parascale, a cloud storage startup and senior vice president of Gateway’s international business unit. The company also named Frederic Renard as vice president of marketing.

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It’s been a busy week for data-protection companies around here. Two days after Decho was formed out of Seattle-based Pi and Utah-based Mozy, information security firm Datacastle of Seattle has announced a $5.3 million Series A financing round. The investment was led by the Australian venture firm CM Capital Investments. No other investors were disclosed.

The new venture investment comes with a reshuffling of Datacastle’s leadership and management team. Alex Knight, formerly of Edge Labs and Arch Venture Partners, will become Datacastle’s chairman of the board. Gary Sumner, Datacastle’s founding CEO, will step aside to become chief technology officer. And Ronald Faith, formerly of the mobile services and commerce companies Clonefone and Qpass, joins the company as chief executive.

Datacastle was founded in 2005 and raised a seed-stage round in July 2007. Its data-protection software, which is aimed at personal computers in businesses, does online backup, encryption, and reduction of storage space needed for files.

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