EMC Sells Cloud Sync And Share Product Syncplicity To Private Equity Firm
Ron Miller / TechCrunch :
Context & Ripple Effects
This sale is one early move in what became a year of portfolio surgery at EMC: within months the company would spin out Virtustream as a jointly owned company with VMware and seriously weigh a buyout by its own subsidiary VMware. Shedding Syncplicity — an enterprise sync-and-share line that never fit the core storage business — reads as the first trim in that sequence.
The buyer matters as much as the seller: private equity, not a strategic acquirer, took the product. That same dynamic shows up elsewhere in the coverage, from SnapLogic raising a $40M round led by European PE firm Vitruvian Partners to later PE-adjacent deals around cloud tooling, signaling that buyout firms had become the default landing spot for enterprise SaaS assets big vendors no longer wanted.
First-order effects
- Syncplicity's enterprise customers now sit on a roadmap controlled by a buyout firm rather than EMC, whose attention shifts fully to storage infrastructure.
- EMC exits the crowded file sync-and-share market outright, converting a subscale SaaS line into cash during a period when its own ownership structure was under active review.
Second-order effects
- Rivals in enterprise content collaboration lose EMC as a bundled competitor inside storage deals, while EMC concentrates its sales motion on infrastructure where it faces players like IBM — which was simultaneously buying Cleversafe to push hybrid cloud storage.
- PE firms gain proof that large-vendor castoffs can be acquired cheaply and run for cash, encouraging more such bids as incumbents keep pruning.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the structural endpoint is a two-tier enterprise software market: strategics consolidating around core infrastructure platforms while private equity accumulates the non-core applications, running them independently of vendor roadmap politics.
The trend: Legacy storage giants are selling non-core cloud software lines to private equity as they concentrate capital on hybrid-cloud infrastructure and larger corporate restructuring.