Like the company’s main public cloud backup version for enterprises, the private cloud offering of InSync includes automatic backup of customer documents, secure file sharing, data loss prevention, remote wipe and other features. It’s been in beta for four or five months, said Jaspreet Singh, a co-founder and the company’s CEO.

Druva software incorporates a de-duplication feature that can save precious real estate in cloud storage. To illustrate, a file — a Druva customer’s spreadsheet of potential sales leads, let’s say — might already be stored in the customer’s cloud. If that’s the case, and one employee modifies a few cells on a smartphone, the Druva software’s de-duplication function on the smartphone will detect it and only update the parts of the document in the cloud that have been changed. The company makes claim to 90 percent bandwidth and storage savings with the de-duplication element.

After signing up with Druva, one unnamed customer dropped its storage from 13 or 14 petabytes on average to 1.5 petabytes, Singh said.

Why start offering a private-cloud option? It’s a matter of appealing to businesses that want the advantages of having so much data on premise for security and financial reasons but want the flexibility of the cloud, Singh said. The company plans to add more features for the private cloud version of InSync in the coming months.

Druva, which has offices in Sunnyvale, Calif., London and Pune, India, faces competition from the Connected software from Autonomy, which Hewlett-Packard acquired in 2011, and Symantec’s Backup Exec 2012. Dropbox and Box also play in the space.

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The analysts at TechAlpha agree, and in a new research note for GigaOM Pro, they take a look at the strategic rationale behind the offers made by both EMC and NetApp, why Data Domain is open to an acquisition, why other potential buyers are unlikely to emerge, and dig into what the deal reveals about the state of the storage business today. They’ve also tapped their contacts to provide the customer perspective on what the Data Domain acquisition — and further consolidation in the industry — would mean for them.

Get the full research note here (subscription required).

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