Jim Johnson was named CEO of San Diego’s BakBone Software in late 2004, but he has only recently been focusing his full attention on what he was hired to do: expanding the company’s business and product lines. Embarking on something of a shopping spree in May, Johnson oversaw BakBone’s purchase of the assets of Santa Clara, CA-based Asempra Technologies for more than $2 million, then followed that up with the $15.9 million buyout of Broomfield, CO-based ColdSpark.

BakBone’s expanded business strategy has been a long time coming because the company got mired in accounting issues that were finally resolved in February.

Jim Johnson

Johnson told me in a recent interview that when he was hired, BakBone was basically a single-product company that specialized in data storage management software it had acquired from AT&T’s Bell Labs. “I was brought in to try to orchestrate a broader vision, and move the company’s strategy beyond a single product,” Johnson recalled. BakBone’s longtime core product, NetVault, provides data backup and recovery within organizations that use a variety of data storage machines running Unix, Linux, Windows, and even Apple’s operating system, OS X.

Asempra’s technology expands BakBone’s product line by providing real-time data protection for Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server, and Windows file system data. “We feel that technology was a great acquisition,” Johnson says. “It’s a product that we can immediately feed back into our existing clients.” (Those clients include Volvo, AT&T, and Yahoo.) ColdSpark, meanwhile, adds what Johnson calls e-mail management and network traffic management. The ColdSpark system replaces BakBone’s previous technology with a more sophisticated system, “So we’re able to capture an e-mail message, identify and classify it based on categories that the IT administrator can set,” Johnson says. Such capabilities, which makes it easier to search for messages on a particular subject or from … Next Page »

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