InMage Systems

About InMage Systems

InMage Systems was a software company focused on disaster recovery and business continuity, acquired by Microsoft in July 2014. The company was founded in 2001 as SV Systems by Kumar Malavalli, Dr. Murali Rajagopal, Sam Inala, and Rajeev Atluri. Malavalli, a co-founder of networking giant Brocade Communications, brought extensive experience in storage and networking technology to the venture.

InMage developed a flagship product line called Scout, which provided continuous data protection (CDP) for backup, replication, and disaster recovery. The technology was designed to work across diverse and heterogeneous IT environments, supporting physical servers, various virtualization platforms like VMware, Hyper-V, and Xen, and multiple operating systems including Windows, Linux, and UNIX. Scout captured data changes in real-time, allowing for near-zero data loss and enabling rapid failover to local or remote sites. This addressed a critical market need for a unified solution that could protect an entire IT infrastructure, eliminating the complexity and cost of using multiple products for different systems.

The company's business model targeted enterprise clients and Managed Service Providers (MSPs), with OEM relationships with strategic vendors like Hitachi Data Systems. Before its acquisition, InMage had raised approximately $41.5M - $44.3M in funding from investors including Intel Capital and Hummer Winblad Venture Partners. The acquisition by Microsoft was a strategic move to bolster its Azure cloud platform. InMage's technology was integrated into the Microsoft Azure Site Recovery service, enhancing its capabilities to provide hybrid cloud business continuity and making Azure a more competitive destination for disaster recovery and data migration, particularly for VMware customers.